The Fourth of July

2010 US Women’s Open
Oakmont Country Club
Oakmont, Pennsylvania

The Fourth of July

Today is Sunday, the Fourth of July, and I am onboard US Airways flight 1538 to Charlotte, North Carolina, the first leg of a trip to Pittsburgh to participate in the United States Golf Association 2010 Women’s Open Championship.

That is an amazing sentence.

What better way to spend a Fourth of July than flying across America on the way to participate in an American national championship, even if only as an arithmetical pack animal wearing a yellow apron?

About five or six years ago, I was standing near a tee box at Sahalee Country Club. The University of Washington was hosting its annual women’s tournament and I was there to watch and cheer on the Arizona State Sun Devils Women’s Golf, which was competing in the tournament. I stood chatting with Melissa McNamara Luellen, the Sun Devil head coach, and for some reason, out of my mouth popped an invitation for the team to stay at our house in Bellevue during the tournament some subsequent year.

In 2006, Coach Luellen took me up on the offer and for a week in October of that year, we had five college women, their golf equipment, their schoolwork, their laptop computers and the rest of their gear strewn around the house. Among the debris was a freshman from Bogota, Columbia, Juliana Murcia Ortiz, in her first semester at Arizona State. On the golf course, Juli (pronounced “Hooly”) was all methodical business. Around the house, Juli was an endearing comedian, a charmer with whom my stepchildren immediately fell in love, especially one evening around the kitchen table when a number of us, including Coach Luellen, tried in vain to solve a math problem involving a lot of pennies. Juli whipped out her cellphone and called her mother, Nancy, at home in Bogota, for help with the solution.

As time went by and I saw Juli at ASU fund-raising events and tournaments, it became somewhat of a friendly joke between us – I would say that if she ever qualified for the US Open, I would be her caddie. She would laugh and say OK and we would talk about how school was going, how the team was doing, and that sort of thing.

It was just a couple of weeks following a disappointing (for Sun Devils) 2010 NCAA Championship tournament when Juli came through out of the Phoenix Sectional to qualify for the 2010 US Women’s Open. It was her senior year in college, having graduated with a degree in Art (on the strength a 3.8 GPA which garnered her the Edith Munson Award as the All-American with the highest GPA). And it was likely the last possible time she would ever qualify as an amateur.

And so, here we are. Well, almost. I’m still in the air over some part of middle America. But you get my point.

The 2010 United States Women’s Open Championship

This is not the first national championship of which I will have been some part. In 2006, as many of you know, I was lucky enough to work as a spotter/scorer for NBC Sports during the 2006 US Open at Winged Foot. The testosterone-fueled version. You know, the one where Phil Mickelson, one of those other Sun Devil golfers, infamously imploded on the 72nd hole of the Championship one has to believe he most wants to win. It was Father’s Day and not the Fourth of July and the events which took place had the rather sickening sound of matter being sucked into a black hole instead of the explosive cascade of fireworks, and I had the dubious privilege of standing only a few feet away from Mickelson as it took place. I thought I knew what would happen and even contemplated doing something about it, like grabbing him as he pulled the club from the bag (Bones was not close by, as he was scouting the green) and asking him “what are you thinking?” That would’ve made for some interesting dinner conversation later in my life. “Tell me again. Why were you arrested at the US Open?”

This National Championship, I get to do something about it. As only that arithmetical pack animal I mentioned above. But…still.

One thing I have to mention. I have to wonder what the USGA instructions sheet for caddies at the men’s Open look like. For the caddies for the Women’s Open, there are three pages of instructions basically on how to behave, how to dress, a reminder that we’re not allowed in the clubhouse while wearing caddie credentials, that while the USGA will feed us, we are to eat in the caddie-assigned area. Oh, and don’t you dare walk on the practice green – unless your player has asked you to help her while she practices her putting.

Of course, that pales in comparison to the 15 pages of regulations about the grooves on the clubfaces.

Thank goodness I’m nearly bald. I wouldn’t want to have a hair out of place.

Oakmont Country Club, or “Hades on Hulton”

As we were standing near the putting green following the Monday-morning practice round, Missy Farr-Kaye, Assistant Head Coach of Women’s Golf at Arizona State, said to me, “Billy Mayfair says this is the hardest course he’s ever played.” And she looked at me with a look which said, “and that’s Billy friggin’ Mayfair who’s saying that.”

Following the 1927 US Open at Oakmont, Grantland Rice wrote that putting on the Oakmont greens was “like a marble skidding across ice.” Walter Hagen is quoted as saying, “Oakmont is a duffer’s course. It makes duffers out of all of us.” Bobby Jones, following the 1925 National Amateur, also contested at Oakmont, was perhaps more thoughtful: “I always regard Oakmont as the finishing school of golf….If you have a weakness, it will be brought to light playing there.”

And indeed, now that I have walked the course through a morning practice round, I can say without hesitation that Oakmont is as serious as a joint IRS/FBI investigation. There is no goofin’ at Oakmont. It’s serious. However, unlike some brutal courses, Oakmont seems to invite a golfer to try to solve its mysteries. I could play at Oakmont every day of every week and could never be bored there. Much as with the Old Course, I can’t imagine any way that anyone could ever grasp all of the subtleties of the greens, much less the nearly impossible task of executing approach shots which hold the greens anywhere near the pins. Every angle of approach invokes a different question. And the answers are not easy to find.

Prior to arriving in Pittsburgh, as Juli and I discussed our philosophies of golf, caddying, cheerleading a player and the rest, I mentioned to her, the Art major, that I believe that golf is a form of Art made upon the canvas of a golf course. A canvas, obviously, which has been laid out by another artist. Because the canvas is laid out by another, golf is a curious form of art; in the case of Oakmont, the canvas placed before the artist requires enormous patience and creativity. Boldness and daring, a sense of showmanship, may not be rewarded, which perhaps explains Walter Hagen’s comment. Under USGA conditions, panache may be penalized. It takes a willingness to chuckle at a poor result following a well-executed shot. A ball landed on a green may not stay there. A ball landed on the wrong part of a green might as well not be on the green at all; conversely, the same ball may, by the influence of some unseen force lying within the contours of the green, find itself so near the hole as to invite a bold birdie attempt. An attempt which is made all the while keeping in the back of one’s mind that there are no straight putts at Oakmont.
Oakmont is a visually sadistic trickster. While you will read that there are blind shots, there are obvious aiming points and the golfer is not asked, as is one at St. Andrews, to place a shot by envisioning a line to some church steeple some 15-odd kilometers in the distance, or, as at Muirfield (the one in Scotland), asked to aim towards something entirely across the nearby Firth. Instead, Oakmont delights in intimidating the player by laying nearly everything before her, but supersized, and daring her to attempt to take advantage. Oakmont then allows either an entirely different result than anticipated, or with brute force punishes an errant shot.

As William C. Fownes and Emil Loeffler said of Oakmont: “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”

[I’ll give a report on the Monday practice round a little later. Right now, it’s time to find some food! I burned beaucoup calories today. Suffice it to say, after stuffing myself in the caddie registration building at 7:00 AM, in the five hours we were on the course beginning at 8, I drank 8 12-oz. bottles of water, 4-6 12-oz bottles of Gatorade, ate two bars, two Oreo cookies and four bananas...and came off the course famished. I promptly returned to the caddie registration area and ate the offered chicken alfredo over penne pasta and a huge gob of Caesar salad.

I’m starved.]