Olympic Club will keep S.F. in national golf spotlight, even without U.S. Open

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

The Olympic Club will crown another national champion Sunday. This year's U.S. Amateur winner will hoist the Havemeyer Trophy, and then San Francisco's most storied golf course will turn toward a curious future.
Marquee events are still on tap, but with a fresh twist.
Olympic's Lake Course, long associated with the U.S. Open, pivots down a fresh path in hosting the 2028 PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup five years later. The club carries the torch for San Francisco golf, a city with rich history in the game.
In some ways, this stretches beyond golf. The 125th U.S. Amateur, which wraps up a weeklong run with semifinal matches Saturday and the 36-hole title match Sunday, brought national television coverage this week – not only of the course but also featuring familiar and picturesque (if cloud-covered) shots of the city.
Malia Lyle, president of the Olympic Club, pointed to the value of this TV exposure in conversations earlier this year with Mayor Daniel Lurie.
'This is a commercial for San Francisco and the Bay Area,' Lyle said Thursday. 'It's a great opportunity to showcase not just San Francisco golf, but the city and the Bay Area in general … a chance to say we're getting back to where we were before (the pandemic). It's still beautiful.'
The biggest showcase is the U.S. Open, which Olympic has hosted five times dating to 1955. But the club shifted gears in agreeing to hold the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup, a decision driven mostly by the profitability of those events (especially the Ryder Cup).
Lyle was candid about the financial disparity, saying, 'The revenue gained from a PGA of America event helps offset some of the costs associated with USGA events. Despite it being an honor, we're not making money on the Amateur.'
Even so, the club recognizes the prestige of holding the U.S. Open, the USGA's crown jewel. The organization has named future Open venues through 2042 – that's no misprint – and one of their anchor sites is Pebble Beach, only two hours down the coast.
But Olympic Club officials remain interested in eventually climbing back into the mix, as they've expressed to the USGA in recent meetings. 'We've made it clear we would love to host a future U.S. Open,' Lyle said.
That's unlikely anytime soon, given the USGA's commitments in the years ahead. Olympic will host the U.S. Women's Amateur in 2030, and it's possible the U.S. Women's Open – held on the Lake Course for the first time in 2021 – could return later in the '30s, after the Ryder Cup.
The men's Open becomes a trickier proposition.
'There's so much great golf history here, we would always want a long-term relationship with the Olympic Club,' said John Bodenhamer, the USGA's chief championships officer. As for the U.S. Open specifically, he added, 'It's going to be a while. For a women's Open, it could be much sooner.'
This conversation unfolds as Harding Park, the well-regarded public course across Lake Merced from Olympic, has fallen off the radar for marquee tournaments. Harding hosted four PGA Tour events from 2005-20, including one won by Tiger Woods and the course's first major (Collin Morikawa captured the 2020 PGA Championship).
Harding now has no Tour events on the calendar, partly because of the complications of preparing a public track for a high-profile tournament.
That leaves the Olympic Club as San Francisco's best bet. USGA officials tend to embrace California venues, because they offer reliable weather and allow television networks to push coverage into prime time in the East (think: higher ratings).
Thursday's telecast of the Amateur went until 10 p.m. ET, and so will Sunday's coverage of the championship match.
'Our broadcast partners love being on the West Coast,' Bodenhamer said. 'If it were up to them, we'd be on the West Coast every year.'
They're here now, on a course with history at every turn. Olympic's Lake Course is where Jack Fleck stunned Ben Hogan in the 1955 U.S. Open, Billy Casper chased down Arnold Palmer in 1966 and Scott Simpson ('87), Lee Janzen ('98) and Webb Simpson (2012) also won America's national championship.
That tradition provides context for this year's Amateur. There has been much chatter about the Lake Course's thick rough, similar to what U.S. Open competitors have confronted in the past.
One photo at the Olympic Club famously shows Hogan chopping it out of crazy-tall rough alongside No. 18 in the '55 Open. USGA executive Ben Kimball figures the picture offers a relevant lesson for today's young players.
'If anybody wants to talk more about the rough,' Kimball said, 'I could send them down to the champions' bar (where the photo is displayed) and say, 'Look what Hogan had to do.''