Switching dates from June to September won’t be the only big change at this year’s U.S. Open brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The USGA is canceling local and final qualifying, the infamously arduous process by which half the field makes it into the championship. Instead, the 120th U.S. Open contested Sept. 17-20 at Winged Foot in New York will feature an all-exempt field.
“This is a decision that was exceptionally difficult. The openness of our championships is our DNA—10,000 people following their dream,” said John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s senior managing director of championships. “It was not on the table at the beginning. We felt confident we could conduct qualifying for everything.”
The original schedule called for 108 local qualifying and 12 final qualifying tournaments, the latter conducted in eight states, Japan, England and Canada. “Rescheduling that into the fall just wasn’t possible,” according to Bodenhamer. “The biggest consideration has been the need to test players, caddies and essential workers inside the so-called bubble. We looked at every single scenario before we decided to cancel anything.”
Qualifying isn’t the only USGA event falling victim to the reality of a public health emergency: the governing body is also cancelling another four of its amateur championships, in addition to the six events that have already been iced. That leaves just four of the planned 14 championships to be contested in 2020. Those are the USGA’s four oldest and most important tournaments: the U.S. Open at Winged Foot; the 75th U.S. Women’s Open, which was moved to December 10-13 at Champions Golf Club in Houston; the 120th U.S. Women’s Amateur, scheduled for August 3-9 at Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Md.; and the 120th U.S. Amateur, which takes place August 10-16 at Bandon Dunes in Oregon.
Both Amateur championships remain in their original calendar slots and the USGA believes they will take place as scheduled provided CDC and government guidelines make it feasible.
The four events now being pulled from the schedule were scheduled for August and September: the Mid-Amateur, the Women’s Mid-Amateur, the Senior Amateur and the Senior Women’s Amateur. They join six others that have already been canceled: the Amateur Four-Ball, the Women’s Amateur Four-Ball, the Senior Open, the Senior Women’s Open, and both Junior championships. Bodenhamer described the cancellations as “heartbreaking.”
“We went into this trying to do everything we could to crown every champion that we could,” he said.
The schedule changes are driven by a number of factors, not least health and safety concerns for the Allied Golf Associations that shoulder much of the on-the-ground burden for USGA events. Many of those associations face financial pressure and wildly varying state and local government restrictions that make logistics near impossible. Also, some qualifying venues have been forced to close and the need to make up lost revenue makes hosting qualifying impossible.
Nor could the USGA’s championship team adequately function amid the pandemic. “The USGA is headquartered in New Jersey, the second most hard-hit state in the country with a higher mortality rate than the global average,” said Craig Annis, the chief brand officer. “Our ability to effectively put on all 14 championships with qualifiers when we can’t be physically together, can’t fly, and in some instances would need to quarantine for 14 days before being able to operate in some states, is severely limited.”
The new COVID-19 reality will be apparent even at the championships that are staged, especially at Winged Foot. The customary number of volunteers at a U.S. Open—between 5,500 and 6,000—will be cut to around 200. “Most of the volunteers at our qualifying and championships are of an age demographic that is at high risk,” Bodenhamer explained.
The targeted number of people permitted to be on-site each day at the Open will be around 2,000. With a typical complement of fans, that number would usually be around 40,000.
“We know with the U.S. Open it’s going to be significantly scaled back. We are trying to get our numbers as low as possible to get the necessary approvals to play,” Bodenhamer said. “Whatever we’re permitted to do by governments, we will build on that.”
The cancellation of Open qualifying will be keenly felt among golf fans. It’s from those final qualifying tournaments that Cinderella stories emerge. In the last quarter-century, three eventual Open champions first made their way into the field via qualifying: Steve Jones in 1996, Michael Campbell in 2005 and Lucas Glover in 2009. Last year 9,125 competitors entered qualifying for the Open, with more than 35,000 entering all USGA individual competitions.
The USGA recently unveiled a new “From Many, One” branding campaign that emphasized the pathway from qualifying to victory in its premier championship. This year’s reality is “From Not As Many, One.”
So how will the field for Winged Foot be determined? “We will endeavor to create categories of exemption that will as best as possible be reminiscent of what qualifying would produce,” Bodenhameer explained. “It won’t be perfect. It’ll look pretty close when we get to the end.”
That process will include crunching data on how many PGA Tour players usually compete in an Open, plus how many from the European and Korn Ferry tours and other global circuits. And amateurs too. “We know it’s about 15 amateurs on average over the last five years,” Bodenhamer added. “We’re going to look at that as we carve out what those exemptions are. We also have a smaller field, so that’s a consideration.”
The U.S. Open field was reduced from 156 to 144 when the move to September was announced, to accommodate the reduced daylight.
Traditionally, the top 60 players in the official world golf ranking are exempt into the Open, but don’t expect something as simple as raising that number to the top 75 or 100, Bodenhamer cautioned. “We’re going to be much more nuanced than that,” he said. “We’re going to be looking at what a U.S. Open field has looked like.”
Phil Mickelson currently stands 61st in the world ranking, and if he doesn’t climb would need a special exemption into the major in which he has finished second a record six times, including at Winged Foot in 2006. Mickelson said earlier this year that he would decline any special invitation from the USGA, though that was when he expected to have ample opportunities to play his way into the field. Bodenhamer said those special invitations will still be part of the criteria for ’20: “We do have a process we go through to look at potential special exemptions we would extend, and we anticipate doing that again this year.”
The radical calendar shake-up means the normally frenetic pace of the USGA’s championship season will now be eerily quiet. The first event contested will be U.S. Women’s Amateur on August 3-9, the same week as the rescheduled PGA Championship.
“We turned over every stone we could. We looked at every scenario. Getting to where we got was a long, difficult journey,” Bodenhamer said of the eight weeks of intense internal discussions. “It’s heartbreaking to cancel one championship, let alone 10. What we’re up against with the health and safety of those who host our championships and those who play in them, we just felt we had no choice.”