Eye on Golf

First things first.

It isn’t about the Riviera Country Club track itself, or the course’s worthy tournament tradition. There’s an indisputable aura about the place, no question.

“Riviera has had an invitation in for the U.S. Open for years,” said Mike Davis, the senior director of rules and competitions for the U.S. Golf Association, which runs the event. “We love the golf course itself, we want to move the tournament around, and we haven’t been there in 60 years.

“The challenge of Riviera is how to put on a U.S. Open logistically with the footprint they have there.”

Sorry to stomp on the club’s Southern California dream, but for Riviera to host a U.S. Open in 2018 or thereafter, it’s going to either require a squadron of helicopters to parachute fans and players onto the property, a massive earthquake to clear out the hillside neighbors, or something akin to turning Sunset Boulevard into another freeway.

Despite assertions Monday in the Los Angeles Times that the course is a workable venue, nothing has changed since it last hosted an Open in 1948, when Ben Hogan limped his way to victory. In fact, the course has become even more claustrophobic as the National Open has grown even larger.

Riviera is a U.S. Open course crammed into a U.S. Amateur locale. The newspaper said there were USGA members on the grounds last week, evaluating the site, as the PGA Tour’s Northern Trust Open was staged, although Davis said the group's core staffers were at the annual USGA meeting in Pinehurst.

“If there were people there, boy, I’m totally unaware of it,” Davis said.

They would have been somewhat obvious – the event, plagued by wet weather and the Super Bowl, drew around 40,000 for the week. The blue jackets would likely have been noticed.

The newspaper made the case that in a reversal of recent venue selections, the USGA chose cozy Merion as the Open site in 2013, claiming the Philly-area course is as cramped as Riviera and still earned a bid. Not necessarily so, says Davis. Haverford College adjoins the Merion property and will be used for tents and other crucial infrastructure. A second golf course one mile away will serve as the practice area.

Unless you enjoy whacking balls into not-so-distant nets, Riviera doesn’t even have a decent driving range. Pros would conceivably have to warm up in Will Rogers State Park, the nearest property without a million-dollar house sitting atop it. Riviera is positioned among some of the priciest real estate in California, down in a bowl, with one or two narrow access roads that meander through cramped, residential neighborhoods.

Picking Riviera would amount to staging a “boutique-type U.S. Open,” Davis said. That his polite way of saying, “we would barely make a dime,” because ticket sales would be limited because of access and traffic flow issues. The course barely has room for spectators, much less corporate tents, concessions, bathrooms and media.

USGA officials were at Riviera last year for a site visit – Davis said several national locales were eyeballed -- and came away with the same singular thought their predecessors had.

“I think we said, ‘We could make it work, but it would be a very, very small U.S. Open,’” he recalled.

Just like the Riviera odds -- small to nil. Good luck pitching that idea to the USGA executive board, especially as the Open circus continues to grow. Ditto the organization’s appetites.

“And as you probably know, the U.S. Open is what pays for everything we do at the USGA,” Davis said. “Going to Merion is neat, and we’re looking forward to it, but it’s not something we can do very often.”
 
Davis saw last week’s paltry weeklong crowd estimate for the tour event at Riviera, which didn’t draw mind-blowing galleries when it hosted the 1995 PGA Championship, another major.
 
“I saw that figure and thought, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Davis said. “Even if we limited tickets sales to 25,000, between the media, the marshals, the volunteers, concessions workers and all, we’d get that many [40,000] in a day.”

For longtime golf fans in Los Angeles hoping that Riviera might someday get another nod, these are the same hurdles that have been trotted out for decades.

A Riviera official told the Times that the club's younger members, perhaps somewhat unaware of the club's considerable geographic handicaps, are willing to do whatever it takes to land an Open bid.

Here's a suggestion: Pool a few hundred million and buy L.A. Country Club, which has two courses, more room and a course that's just as highly regarded, and stage it there.