Lights, camera, action as golf goes to Hollywood
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN': Dustin Johnson and his caddie and brother Austin Johnson look on from the second green during a practice round at The Los Angeles Country Club on Monday. Pic: Harry How/Getty Images
Seventy-five years ago in Los Angeles, Elia Kazan’s starring Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire won the Oscar for Best Picture, beating out , and the Christmas classic at the Academy Awards. A couple months later, across town in Pacific Palisades, Ben Hogan won the first of his four US Opens at Riviera.
In the 75 intervening years, the US Open championship never returned to the second most populace city in the country. Maybe it was the traffic. Or more likely the golf clubs didn’t want to mix with the hoi polloi on their exclusive grounds. Whatever the reason, LA was out of the rotation.
This week the US Open returns for its close-up at the North Course of venerable Los Angeles Country Club. Nestled in between famous Wilshire and Sunset Boulevards at the doorstep of Beverly Hills, it is considered the second most valuable piece of undeveloped real estate in America, behind only Central Park in New York City.
Along the perimeter of the club are some impressive neighbours. The Beverly Hilton rises behind the stately white clubhouse. Century City and the downtown skyline are visible at the other end. The Playboy Mansion sits behind a hedge adjacent the 14th hole, and the late Hugh Hefner’s wild peacocks can be heard squawking from the other side. American Idol judge Lionel Richie lives in the sprawling home once owned by Cher atop the hill right of the downhill par-3 fourth hole. The gargantuan home built by late TV executive Aaron Spelling, visible through the trees on the front nine, can be yours for €140m.
LACC was originally no stranger to playing host to events. Glenna Collett Vare won the 1930 US Women’s Amateur there. The inaugural Los Angeles Open was played there in 1926 and returned four times in 1934-36 and 1940. 'Mr 59' Al Geiberger lost to Foster Bradley in the final match of the 1954 US Junior Amateur there.
Then the highly regarded George C Thomas Jnr/Herbert Fowler course went dark for more than six decades. Riviera has been the go-to venue in Tinsel Town in the interim, hosting that 1948 US Open and a pair of US PGA Championships in 1983 and 1995. It will host golf in the 2028 Olympic Games. Riviera, which plays host to an annual PGA Tour event, earned the nickname 'Hogan’s Alley' after his two-shot victory over Jimmy Demaret in the 1948 US Open marked his third win there in an 18-month span after consecutive LA Opens in 1947 and ’48. It was eight months later that Hogan and his wife were in a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus.
Hogan's 8-under-par score at Riviera set a US Open record that stood until 2000, when it was broken by Tiger Woods (12-under at Pebble Beach) before getting eclipsed again by Rory McIlroy in 2011 (16-under at Congressional).
And that was it for national championships in LA for 75 years. Haley’s Comet swings around as often. It wasn’t until architect Gil Hanse (with Jim Wagner and Geoff Shackelford) was brought in to restore the North Course’s former glory in 2010 that the idea of hosting the US Open began to percolate. LACC made a test run with the 2017 Walker Cup matches, won by the Americans 19-7.
With the LACC board finally willing to open its doors again, the USGA agreed it could present a different kind of US Open on the small footprint available. Only 22,000 daily tickets were sold out for the event, yet it still has set US Open records for corporate hospitality and the largest physical build-out in the event’s history that will create a Hollywood-style spectacle. (LACC already has agreed to host the 2032 US Women’s Open and another US Open in 2039.) It is a stately place, with no sign indicating what’s sitting there on Wilshire Blvd. Its membership roles are famously free of celebrities, letting the movie stars crowd nearby Bel-Air and the Riv instead. The property is presided over by a grand clubhouse with a dramatic Reagan Terrace — named after the former actor who became president of the United States — overlooking the courses.
“It’s a little slice of heaven in this City of Angels,” said John Bodenhamer, chief championship officer of the USGA.
It is unlike any course that’s ever hosted a modern major championship. The make-up of the 7,423-yard par-70 course is unique with five par-3s and three par-5s as well as a drivable par-4 (the 330-yard sixth). The last US Open course to have five par-3s was St Louis Country Club in 1947.
Two of the par-3s can stretch to nearly 300 yards, but the short 15th is listed as 124 yards and is likely to play as short as 85 yards during the championship.
“It’s just different, just very different,” said Jeff Hall, who will manage course setup for the USGA.
Some of it, however, will be familiar, such as ankle-deep fescue surrounding bunkers and many greens, which will run dangerously fast with daunting pin positions tucked into hidden corners. Several fairways are as wide as 50 yards but the property’s constant rolling terrain rarely offers a level lie.
LACC will provide a treat that the golf world waited 75 years to experience.
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