U.S. Open at a new place and looking for a fresh start

Going somewhere new for the U.S. Open is starting to get old.

For so many years, everyone knew what to expect. With few exceptions, the event’s identity as the “toughest test in golf” was carved out of traditional, tree-lined courses with tight fairways and thick rough, firm and fast greens. No one ever complained about making par.

Dustin Johnson won last year at Oakmont, which hosted the U.S. Open for the ninth time. He defends his title on a course that only opened 11 years ago.

For the second time in three years, the U.S. Open is headed to a course that has never hosted a major.

The stage this year is Erin Hills, the first U.S. Open in Wisconsin. The course looks like a links with its wispy grass framing rolling fairways and shaved slopes around the greens, except that it’s nowhere the sea. Erin Hills is about 40 miles northwest of Milwaukee.

“I heard it’s long. Big course. Long walk,” Johnson said before going up on June 3 to see it for the first time. “Trees? No trees?” He wasn’t sure. About the only similarities between Erin Hills and Chambers Bay, which hosted the U.S. Open two years ago off Puget Sound in Washington state, are that both were built as public golf courses and are mostly devoid of trees.

And no one is sure what to expect, even if they’ve already been there.

Jordan Spieth played the 2011 U.S. Amateur at Erin Hills. He remembers rolling terrain and not many trees. He remembered the first hole and the 18th hole were par 5s (similar to Chambers Bay). And that was about it.

“Course knowledge is necessary, even more so there than a course like Oakmont that you’ve maybe watched on TV,” said Spieth, who won at Chambers Bay by one shot over Johnson. “Even seeing certain holes, if you just watched major championships in the past, can help you. And so when you come to a completely new venue, it requires quite a bit of work.”

Against this backdrop — pristine pastureland that dates to the Ice Age when a glacier retreated across Wisconsin — the 117th U.S. Open begins June 15 with plenty of intrigue that goes beyond the mystery of a new golf course. It will be the first U.S. Open in 25 years that doesn’t have the names Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson among the starting times. Woods is missing all the majors for the second straight year because of a fourth back surgery, which was a month before his DUI arrest in Florida. Mickelson, with a record six runner-up finishes in the only major he hasn’t won, said he plans to skip because his daughter’s high school graduation is the same day as the opening round. Johnson, who shipped the U.S. Open trophy back to the USGA a couple of weeks ago, will try to become the first player since Curtis Strange in 1989 to successfully defend his title. Strange is the only player in more than a half-century to win back-to-back, a feat that neither Woods nor Jack Nicklaus managed.