San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Shinnecock Hills brings tradition back to major
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Such is the stature of century-old Shinnecock Hills that it seems everyone can’t wait for the U.S. Open.
“Shinnecock looks epic,” Russell Knox said after he qualified.
Phil Mickelson has been critical at times for how the USGA prepares a golf course for what it calls the ultimate test. He was runner-up at Shinnecock Hills in 2004, when only three players broke par on the weekend, none on Sunday. Asked if it was unfair, Mickelson said that day, “I played some of the best golf of my life and still couldn’t shoot par. So you tell me.”
He has been back to the Long Island course twice in recent weeks and was raving about it.
“I think it’s the greatest setup I’ve ever seen in a U.S. Open,” he said.
No one is more excited about a return to Shinnecock Hills than the USGA, which has tradition on its side for the 118th U.S. Open championship.
Twice in the previous three years, the U.S. Open went to golf courses barely a decade old — Chambers Bay in the Pacific Northwest and Erin Hills in the heart of Wisconsin’s pastureland — that featured wide fairways and the wrong kind of weather.
It reached a point
where Jack Nicklaus, whose name is on the gold medal awarded the winner, feared the U.S. Open was losing its identity. For him, that identity was narrow fairways, thick rough and hard, fast greens.
“Take me with a grain of salt,” Nicklaus said. “You’re partial to what you grew up with. All the (four) Opens I won were set up that way.”
Shinnecock should at least look like a traditional U.S. Open, even if it will be different from the last time it was there in 2004. For starters, the course has added 10 new tees that have lengthened it by 450 yards. Most of the additional tees have been moved back at angles, instead of straight back, to try to restore the shot values that architect William Flynn had in mind.
The fairways were widened in a renovation project just over five years ago. Then in a response to the swing-for-the-fences style that wide-open Erin Hills allowed, the USGA had 200,000 square feet of turf removed from the sides of the fairways and replaced it with fescue.
“The U.S. Open really is, we consider, golf ’s ultimate test and accuracy needed to play a bigger role in that,” said Mike Davis, the USGA’s chief executive.