It’s no secret that things have been tough around the Pittsburgh sports scene recently. The Penguins are bad. The Pirates are worse. And the Steelers haven’t won a playoff game since the week of President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The first one.
As a result, if you are feeling like people have been getting hyped up about next month’s U.S. Open at Oakmont early on the calendar, you are probably right.
It sure would be nice to have something to get excited about. The folks at the USGA and Oakmont are doing whatever they can to make that happen.
How exactly they pull that off once the golf begins is a little bit more of a complicated discussion. USGA managing director Jeff Hall summed up that nuance.
“We get to work closely with the team here at Oakmont to prepare and present a stage for the actors to go act. But we don’t get to write the script,” Hall said at the course Tuesday.
That’s a good way of putting it. For the Open, Oakmont is the stage. The greens, bunkers and fairways are the set pieces.
How the event is organized — how the theater looks — for the fans, media and sponsors is up to the guys like John Lynch, president of Oakmont Country Club.
“It’s the Super Bowl of golf. This is our tenth. It brings out fans like no other,” Lynch said. “We have 4,800 volunteers signed up, 1,800 on a waiting list. That kind of tells you what the people of Pittsburgh think of the Open.”
Still, Hall is right. Oakmont and the USGA can’t control which big names, if any, will be in contention throughout the tournament. They can’t control how compelling the storylines will be atop the leaderboard. They can’t control potential weather delays or even the quality of play from the golfers.
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That’s where things can get tricky when it comes to Hall’s point about presenting the stage. For as much as golf fans attend or tune into U.S. Opens to see the world’s best golfers struggle when challenged by a difficult course, they also want to see shotmaking. They want to see the ball go in the hole.
They want birdies and big crowd pops after long puts go in. They want thunderous roars when someone hits a great bunker shot within a few feet of the cup, or gets themselves out of trouble with an unlikely recovery off the fairway.
Four days of hacking, grinding and three-putting to scores way over par certainly highlights U.S. Open challenges and difficulty. It also doesn’t necessarily make for exciting television viewing or excitement around the greens.
Chief championships officer John Bodenhamer insists the USGA and Oakmont will walk that balance.
“We go to the great golf courses. We know that we set it up to be difficult. When they play well, it just means more,” Bodenhamer said this week. “It may not be enjoyable (for the players). You are going to suffer. But you are going to be happy about it, because you climbed to that mountain top.”
When things go that way, oftentimes star power atop the leaderboard will take care of itself. The best will survive, and the undeserving will fall off the pace as the weekend grinds along. You aren’t supposed to fluke your way into a U.S. Open Trophy, or just ride a hot hand for a weekend.
Especially not at Oakmont.
As Hall pointed out, eight of the nine U.S. Open champions at Oakmont have won multiple majors. Over the five Opens at Oakmont since 1973, 27 unique players tied for fifth or better. Eighteen of them had won, or went on to win a major after those top-five finishes.
“Oakmont brings out the best. You have got to play at that level,” Hall said. “You can’t pretend your way around here. The venue itself, the way it is prepared and presented, will bring the cream to the top.”
That’s something we haven’t seen much in Pittsburgh of late. If a golf course can come through in a way the local teams haven’t, so be it.
We’ll take it.