Qualifying canceled for US Open
The four events now being pulled from the schedule were scheduled for August and September: the Mid-Amateur, the Women’s Mid-Amateur, the Senior Amateur and the Senior Women’s Amateur. They join six others that have already been canceled: the Amateur Four-Ball, the Women’s Amateur FourBall, the Senior Open, the Senior Women’s Open, and both Junior championships.
Bodenhamer described the cancellations as “heartbreaking.”
The schedule changes are driven by a number of factors, not the least of which are health and safety concerns for the Allied Golf Associations that shoulder much of the on-the-ground burden for USGA events. Many of those associations face financial pressure and wildly varying state and local government restrictions that make logistics near impossible. Also, some qualifying venues have been forced to close and the need to make up lost revenue makes qualifying impossible.
Nor could the USGA’s championship team adequately function amid the pandemic. “The USGA is headquartered in New Jersey, the second most hard-hit state in the country with a higher mortality rate than the global average,” said Craig Annis, the chief brand officer. “Our ability to effectively put on all 14 championships with qualifiers when we can’t be physically together, can’t fly, and in some instances would need to quarantine for 14 days before being able to operate in some states, is severely limited.”
The new COVID-19 reality will be apparent even at the championships that are staged, especially at Winged Foot. The customary number of volunteers at a U.S. Open - between 5,500 and 6,000 will be cut to around 200. “Most of the volunteers at our qualifying and championships are of an age demographic that is at high risk,” Bodenhamer explained.
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The targeted number of people permitted to be on-site each day at the Open will be around 2,000. With a typical complement of fans, that number would usually be around 40,000.
“We know with the U.S. Open it’s going to be significantly scaled back. We are trying to get our numbers as low as possible to get the necessary approvals to play,” Bodenhamer said. “Whatever we’re permitted to do by governments, we will build on that.”
The cancellation of Open qualifying will be keenly felt among golf fans. It’s from those final qualifying tournaments that Cinderella stories emerge. In the last quarter-century, three eventual Open champions first made their way into the field via qualifying: Steve Jones in 1996, Michael Campbell in 2005 and Lucas Glover in 2009. Last year 9,125 competitors entered qualifying for the Open, with more than 35,000 entering all USGA individual competitions.
So how will the field for Winged Foot be determined? “We will endeavor to create categories of exemption that will as best as possible be reminiscent of what qualifying would produce,” Bodenhameer explained. “It won’t be perfect. It’ll look pretty close when we get to the end.”
That process will include crunching data on how many PGA Tour players usually compete in an Open, plus how many from the European and Korn Ferry tours and other global circuits. And amateurs too. “We know it’s about 15 amateurs on average over the last five years,” Bodenhamer added. “We’re going to look at that as we carve out what those exemptions are. We also have a smaller field, so that’s a
Traditionally, the top 60 players in the official world golf ranking are exempt into the Open, but don’t expect something as simple as raising that number to the top 75 or 100, Bodenhamer cautioned. “We’re going to be much more nuanced than that,” he said. “We’re going to be looking at what a U.S. Open field has looked like.”
Phil Mickelson currently stands 61st in the world ranking, and if he doesn’t climb would need a special exemption into the major in which he has finished second a record six times, including at Winged Foot in 2006. Mickelson said earlier this year that he would decline any special invitation from the USGA, though that was when he expected to have ample opportunities to play his way into the field.