A course that’s so San Francisco
The Olympic Club’s Lake Course, site of this week’s U.S. Women’s Open, is sooo San Francisco. If golf courses were literature, the Lake Course would be beat poetry without the bongos.
The Lake Course, just across the street from the Pacific Ocean, is like the city it overlooks: old, charming, quirky, hilly, challenging, hard to read, a bit full of itself, and airconditioned. And there are certain areas you definitely want to avoid.
San Francisco is different and unique, and so is San Francisco golf, which will be on display here, in all its glory and gory. The weather, for instance.
“When you’re standing on the driving range, it’s 15 degrees cooler than when you’re over on 15 green or whatever,” said Paula Creamer, who grew up in Pleasanton. “The ball doesn’t fly as far.
“There is mist that comes in. It’s awesome to see the fog kind of roll through the trees. You don’t get that everywhere you go. That’s definitely a San Fran trait. And just the trees and the architecture and the landscaping, all of that, it’s very San Francisco.”
This ain’t Florazona golf, the wideopen, desertstyle courses that host so many LPGA tourneys. Last weekend, the women were in Las Vegas. One caddie, Ryan Hogue, who bags for Patty Tavatanakit, told me the difference between last week and this weekend is three clubs.
“Especially into a wind,” Hogue said. “The ball curves more in the wind here. It’s a beautiful golf course, a lot of history. I think everybody’s really excited about it. The girls love it. It’s what I think of when I think of San Francisco.”
This golf course is San Francisco. The hills, for instance. The goldrushers who settled San Francisco didn’t build roads that snaked carefully up the steep hills. They sent their streets and cablecar tracks straight as an arrow, halfway to the stars.
Similarly, the Lake Course designers didn’t try to bulldoze the fairways level enough to prevent seasickness. They took the direct approach. Many of the fairways tilt at difficult angles. Some fairways lean one way and the hole turns the other way. This layout could have been designed by Dr. Seuss after sniffing the air at a Grateful Dead concert.
“It’s a completely different feel,” said Stanford student Rachel Heck, who dominates women’s collegiate golf and will be playing her second Open. “It’s so interesting. When I think U.S. Open, I think hot in the middle of the summer. I don’t think bundling up to go play golf. I think that is the British Open, in my mind.
“So I think it is super interesting. It’s such a unique venue ... but it’s really cool the women do get to play here at Olympic Club.”
The Lake Course, in fact, seems best suited to women pros. In the past two men’s U.S. Opens here, nobody broke par for the tournament. If you try to overpower this course, you’re playing pinball. It requires finesse, touch, strategy, control.
Maybe the Olympic Club’s male founders didn’t want to be embarrassed, and that’s why they didn’t allow women onto these sacred acres for the club’s first 132 years (the first woman member was admitted in 1992). That’s another way this course is like San Francisco: not always as progressive as it likes to think it is.
“This course really makes you hit a few different shots off the tee,” Hogue said, “because the way the fairways slope. It makes you also really strategize on your approach shots, because there’s a lot going on around the greens, and on the greens.”
Like the city itself, this course has places you don’t want to visit, if you know what’s good for you.
Like the rough. Normally, it’s anklehigh here, but the U.S.
Open folks don’t set up their courses to accommodate the faint of heart. The rough this week is so tall and dense you almost expect it to come to life like those San Francisco panhandlers who dress like bushes and leap out to scare tourists.
Inbee Park, the secondranked player in the world, said that hitting in the rough will be an automatic bogey.
“It is phenomenal how thick it is,” said Brooke Henderson, a 10time winner on the LPGA Tour, adding, “It’s a whole different mindset. Normally, you try to chase as many birdies as you can, whereas this week, honestly, I think you’re trying to chase as many pars as you can.”
The course is beautiful, complex and dangerous. But as the famed fictional San Francisco detective Sam Spade said, “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.”