WILL THE BIG HITTERS HAVE AN ADVANTAGE?
Brendan Walsh, Director of Golf at The Country Club, explains the perils of employing a bomb-and-gouge strategy at Brookline – and why players could get tripped up around the greens...
The golf course is very unique as we have a lot of native grass and deep bunkers with fescue grass around the edges. It’s a bit like Merion in that sense. There are a ton of trees out there, but it’s like a combination of a traditional parkland and a links course.
It’s not a massive property, but we have got 27 holes here. We’re actually using a composite course made up of 15 holes from our original course (Clyde & Squirrel) and three holes from our Primrose nine. Gil Hanse has enlarged some of the green complexes, but he’s also added a lot of new tee boxes. At the Ryder Cup, the 1st played 440 yards. It’s now 490. The same with the 3rd hole. The 10th hole played as a 510-yard par 5, now it’s a 500-yard par 4. So, we’ve increased our yardage by 250 yards but we’ve also taken out a par 4 which was 310 yards and put in a par 3 that is 131 yards.
The first four holes are going to be extremely challenging, just because of their length. You could see some high numbers straight out of the block.
What’s different compared to more recent US Open venues is that we have three cuts of rough. If you hit it 30 or 40 yards offline, you can easily lose the ball in the native grass because that stuff is dense. But even if you find it, you may only be able to advance it between 50 and 75 yards.
You can bomb and gouge it to an extent because there’s not a whole lot of out of bounds, but if you approach the green from the wrong angle, you can bring all sorts of trouble into play. Often it’s not about your great shots but about your misses. People were up in arms about the manner of Bryson’s win in 2020, but he missed in the right spots.
If you think back to Winged Foot in 2020, there were a lot of approaches where you could run the ball up onto the green. We have some of that here, particularly on the front nine, but on the back nine, six of the nine holes have a forced carry. It can also get quite windy here as we’re only seven miles from the water.
Keeping the ball on the fairway and missing in the right spots is going to be critical because it is a second-shot golf course. You can be a foot off the green in some places and be in five inches of rough, chipping to a hole which is 10 feet away from you. When Matt Fitzpatrick won here, guys were hitting it way past him but his short game was phenomenal.
Our smallest green is on our signature hole, the 17th, where Justin Leonard holed that putt in 1999. I’m curious to see whether some players may try to drive the 7th and 17th greens. It’s just in their range. The par-4 5th will probably play as our easiest hole as it’s only 310 yards. There are opportunities to go low, especially if the conditions are soft, but I’m expecting six under par to win.
We had a total of 12 players from the current top 100 playing in the 2013 US Amateur. Matt Fitzpatrick is our adopted son and has probably played the most of anyone here. He’s been back just about every year since he won almost a decade ago, so he’s got a leg up compared to most.
I’m hoping Tiger will make it, but having played here in the Ryder Cup, my concern is that he may want to protect himself ahead of St Andrews. The course is just as hilly as Augusta, but it is a lot more rugged and the terrain is very challenging.