This year’s U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, one of the country’s finest municipal golf facilities, located in the tony enclave of La Jolla, California, returns to the site of one of Tiger Woods’s most memorable major triumphs when he beat Rocco Mediate on one leg in a Monday playoff.
This will be the third year that John Bodenhamer is charged with the course setup. Bodenhamer, 60, joined the United States Golf Association in June 2011 and oversees the USGA’s Open championships in his role as senior managing director or championships. He took time to speak to Golfweek about this year’s national championship before heading to San Diego to see how the pros handled the South Course during the Farmers Insurance Open.
Golfweek: What made Torrey Pines an appealing venue for the USGA to return to?
John Bodenhamer: History is something you can’t buy; you can only earn it. Torrey has it because of what happened in 2008. That never goes away. That was one of the greatest championships in the history of the game. That putt Tiger made lives in the minds of so many. That makes us very proud to come back and be able to tell that story again.
As a U.S. Open venue, it’s Southern California, the weather is so ideal if we can avoid the fog. Torrey is a big footprint. We can have a big celebration of the game. We can get in front of a lot of folks. It allows us to provide a traditional U.S. Open that is the ultimate examination.
What are the most significant changes that have been made to Torrey Pines in preparation for this U.S. Open?
JB: Nothing significant. If memory serves me right, it will play 42 yards longer. We’ve got three new tees. One of them is on No. 10 that will play 449 yards; it played 415 before. There’s another new tee on No. 15 that will play 510, which is 35 yards longer and a new tee on 17 that will play the same yardage but it’s down on the left near the barranca and it’s a new angle, which we really like. It’s a long golf course. It’s 7,680 yards. We won’t play it that long on any day of the U.S. Open. Depending on the weather and the wind, it will play anywhere from 7,200-7,400 yards.
What the city did to bring in Rees Jones and his partner Greg Muirhead to renovate, restore the golf course, give it a facelift, is magnificent not only for the U.S. Open but for the Farmers and to enhance that asset for the city of San Diego is a nice thing to do.
It included everything from drainage to irrigation systems to maintenance roads and paths. On the golf course itself, bunkering not just around the putting greens but in the fairways. They restored all the putting green collars. They had gotten tired and needed to be upgraded. They brought back some of the closely mown areas on Nos. 7, 9 and 15, which will be nice. It won’t be a whole lot different, more of a facelift, but it will provide us what we want to do at a U.S. Open and make a premium on driving.
Q: How do you do that?
JB: The fairways will be narrow. We’re coming out to check on what the Tour does, but I expect the fairway widths will be similar. The difference is January versus June and the weather patterns are much different, the length of the day, temperature and wind patterns are all different. We’ll have a lot more kikuyu in June. They overseeded last fall and so you’ll see a lot more bent and rye and so in the spring the kikuyu will take form again. We’ll probably have a bit longer rough.
Q: What will be the height of the rough you will be looking for?
JB: With kikuyu, 4-plus inches is our starting point. Kikuyu is pretty tough. It could be 3-3 ½. We were planning to come out last summer after the U.S. Open for the California State Amateur to see what the kikuyu was like but we couldn’t because of the pandemic. If it is as dense as we saw this spring, we’ll be in that range. At Winged Foot, we were between 4½-5½, but with kikuyu that’s too much.
Q: Have you considered making the rough longer from, say, 300-plus yards versus shorter distances?
JB: No. It’s very difficult from a maintenance standpoint. You’d have to change mower heights and that’s untenable for the maintenance staff. It would add hours and hours to their job. We have talked about it and there could be ways to do it robotically in the future, but what we do is we have graduated rough. No. 6, which will play as a par 4 in the U.S. Open at 515 yards, will have graduated rough. If you drive it just off the fairway there may be a swath of rough 2½-3 inches where players can hit 5-, 6-, 7-iron out. Frankly, we don’t want them pitching out all the time. We want them to try to knock the ball on the green. We think there will be more birdies but also more double bogeys. On holes like No. 2, you probably won’t see any graduated rough at all. It just depends on the width of it and how much you’ll see.
Going into Pebble (in 2019) we changed our philosophy and we have less graduated rough and want to put more of a premium on driving accuracy and less emphasis on green speeds to allow us to use a few more hole locations. It’s something I feel strongly about. We want it to be about driving the ball in the fairway. That’s something we want to achieve. It’s a strategic choice. We want to slow the greens down a little bit and use more of the hole locations and restore the importance of driving it in the fairway.
Q: What was the thinking behind that change of philosophy, including to slow the greens?
JB: Well, first of all, let me just say that 12.9-13.4 (on the Stimpmeter) isn’t slow. But it really came about from talking to players. We talked to a lot of our past champions, myself, Jason Gore on our staff and Jeff Hall. We want to create something special and very challenging so when a player wins he feels like he did something special but that is also fair and we don’t want green speeds to get away from us, especially if the wind kicks up. With certain hole locations, if the wind kicks up, it can be a problem.
There’s a quote that I think about from Geoff Ogilvy after he won at Winged Foot (in 2006). He was asked after he shot 67 one round, did you enjoy shooting that score on a U.S. Open golf course and he paused and he said, “I don’t think I necessarily enjoyed or had fun doing what I did today, but shooting 67 on a U.S. Open golf course I really feel like I achieved something. It was meaningful. I achieved something special.”
That’s the essence of what we’re trying to achieve. The goal is to drive it in the fairway most of the time and navigate your ball below the hole on the putting greens to have an adequate chance to score. When you miss a putting green there is a penalty for that. We think we can achieve that in the high 12s and low 13s using certain hole locations. I don’t want to call it an old-fashioned U.S. Open but that’s kind of what it is. That’s what we’ve always done and that’s what we endeavor to do.
Q: What can you learn this week from watching the pros play? How will you study the course?
JB: We’ll watch particular holes and we’ll be in touch with the PGA Tour staff and get their thoughts on setup and thinking on some of the new tees at 10 and 15. We’ll look at the width of the fairways, hole locations they are using, compare the wind patterns in January to what we expect in June. We’ll really be watching holes like 6, like 9 with the new collection areas around the green, we’ll definitely be watching the new tee on 10, and I’m assuming they’ll use the new tee on 17 and how players play that. Those are what I’ve circled so far.
We’ll have Jason Gore out there talking to players. We’ll be asking them questions about the golf course as much as we’re asking the Tour staff. What was your target from the new lower tee on 17? Why didn’t you hit driver and chose to lay up short of that bunker on 10? What did you think of the new putting complex on 4 and the new bunker in front of the green? Because they’ll tell us that a fairway needed to be a little wider and it will inform our decisions. We’ll talk to the caddies too. At Pebble Beach, we brought Casey Boyns out. He’s been a caddie there 35 years and he gave us the hole location at 18. There’s a little ridge that we did not see and he did, and we’ll be getting the intel from not just players but Tour officials and those who just know the course well.
Q: If we get good weather and it plays fast and firm, what do you expect the winning score to be?
JB: I knew you were going to go there (laughs). Curtis Strange (1988 and ’89 U.S Open champion) said something that really resonated with me. He said, today’s players are bigger, stronger, more athletic, better coached, better fitted with better equipment, with better course management. He said I really wonder when a player doesn’t shoot under par at a U.S. Open what happened – was it the weather or something with setup? We don’t want 20 under or 20 over to win. I guarantee you that I don’t focus on a score. It’s a metric. We look at it. But I would say a few under par, something like that. You look at what Bryson (DeChambeau) did, 6 under lapping the field (at Winged Foot in September). That was an impressive performance what he did. Everyone else was even or over par. Winged Foot is brutal. It’s a tough test no matter when you play it. From the back tees at Torrey with the length it has and get a little bit of wind from off that ocean, it’s tough, but these players are so good today that I think a few under par is going to win.
One other thing I’ll say to you, and this is genuine, let me come back to scoring – I meant what I said and I wouldn’t change it – but what I’m really trying to say – and it was demonstrated at Pebble and Winged Foot to a small extent but really Pebble – is we do go in with a game plan. We’ll look for firm and fast conditions but not overly so, especially in the fairways. We don’t want them too fast so they stop hitting driver. We want them to hit driver. The greens will be firm, the rough will be up, the greens will be fast and we want a little wind off the ocean. That’s what our plan will be. We’ll modify based on the weather patterns.
I’ll tell you what we don’t do: If we don’t get the wind and it rains and it’s wet, we won’t force hole locations into places that are unfair and we won’t move tees back away from the game plan to get length we didn’t plan on. We didn’t do it at Pebble and we just don’t do that. We’ll just let Torrey Pines be Torrey Pines and we’re not going to play for a score. If it’s 12 under because we didn’t get the weather and it rained and we didn’t get the wind then it will be, and we’ll be fine with that.
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