I thought the exam at this year's U.S. Open was deeply disappointing. Frankly, I have felt this way for the last few years as the USGA has made a fearful transition away from presenting the players with the "the toughest test in golf" and moved towards being "the second-toughest test in the month of June."
The USGA's Chief Championships Officer (John Bodenhamer) admitted there has been a change in their approach during a GolfChannel interview after the first round this year. He was asked, point-blank, if there was a conscious decision by the USGA after Shinnecock Hills in 2018 to not push the golf course too far to the brink in advance of the US Open. He confirmed that there had been. This unwillingness to take on risk in the presentation of the golf course has led to a dilution in the sternness of the challenges they are willing to present.
The fairway corridors at this year's U.S. Open were simply far too wide. There are a lot of ways you can present a great finishing hole to the players in the U.S. Open, but I don't think a four-par with a 57-yard wide fairway was one of them. If the last hole is designed to be a tough par hole, you should have to successfully navigate two exacting shots to make the two-putt four you need to win (think Shinnecock, Oakmont, Winged Foot) coming into the house. There was nothing exacting about the tee shot up the last this week.
The third hole was a joke and was absolutely torn apart by the players this year. There was negligible to zero strategy on the tee shot (basically everyone could carry the barranca on the left and most of them with less than driver) and, with the absurdly wide fairway, the closest thing the hole presented to a challenge was avoiding the divot farm that had built up in the fairway by the end of the week.
The USGA was in a catch-22 situation on the first hole, as the downhill hole was too short by modern standards to play as a five-par hole but the fairway bunkers were too short to play the hole as a four-par. Players who hit the fairway were frequently rewarded with middle irons into the green (I think Rory hit a 8/9 iron on Saturday) and the only players that I saw lay up were those who missed the fairway off the tee. There was no "momentous decision" as to whether or not to go for the green from the fairway. The problem was, if the USGA tried to set the hole up as a four-par, the fairway bunkers that were critical to the strategy of the hole off the tee would no longer be in play from the forward tee.
Fairway bunker placement was a problem off the eighth tee as well. Depending on how far back the tees were placed, the two fairway bunkers to the left of the eighth fairway were a maximum of about 235-240 yards to cover. Accordingly, rather than players being punished for cheating left off the tee and away from the barranca, those players were actually rewarded with frequent bounces out of the rough and down the hill to the same location where correctly played drives finished. Those safety pulls should have been penalized with a difficult fairway bunker shot played over the barranca to the lay up area. Instead, they often yielded the same result as an excellent drive.
I would add that fairway bunker placement was similarly an issue on the seventeenth. I don't have access to ShotLink, but I didn't see a single televised shot from the left side fairway bunker at the penultimate hole all week. I am sure I might have missed one, but that bunker was over 360 yards to reach it and, with the grading of the fairway down the left side, was near impossible to reach from the back tee employed during the championship. Accordingly, the challenge of trying to fit the tee shot into a relatively narrow (compared to other holes) corridor between the fairway bunker and the barranca was lost.
I took umbrage with some of the hole location choices as well. In some instances, the most difficult hole location on a given green was eschewed entirely. For example, the hole was never cut all the way in the left corner of the first green nor was it ever cut all the way in the back left corner of the final green. At the fifteenth, the hole was located in the lower bowl(s) on three of the four days and more challenging hole positions on the high-left side or just over the knob in the middle of the left side were left unused.
More frequently, however, the most difficult hole location was cheated a few steps away from the edge. On Sunday, there was room to move the pin on the second, sixth, eighth, seventeenth and eighteenth closer to the edges of the greens. On Saturday, the same could be said for the hole locations at two, six, seven and twelve. There are numerous examples of this from Thursday and Friday as well. More aggressive decisions in selecting the hole locations would have created more of a challenge both for the approach shot itself as well as missed short-side approaches.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but the tee positions on the two monster one-shot holes (7 and 11) on Thursday seem to me to be obvious mistakes. These are supposed to be two of the harder holes on the golf course and the USGA knew going into the morning that the greens were going to be dramatically softer than they had expected. There was no compelling reason to cut the players a break here and these holes should have played to their full yardage on all four days of championship play.
A lot of this is small, nit-picky kind of stuff. However, when you add up these little decisions here and there in both the course design as well as the championship setup, the aggregated result is a test that was devoid of the kind of teeth that I have come to expect out of what is billed as the "toughest test in golf."
The big three majors (the Masters and the two Opens) each have their own unique character. The Masters is rich with the history and tradition that has accumulated over playing the exciting second nine at ANGC year after year. The Open Championship is all about the elements and the quirks of playing the links. The character of the United States Open Championship was that it was the most brutal examination in professional golf.
I hope the recent trend of the risk-averse USGA begins to reverse as we approach upcoming championships at Pinehurst, Oakmont, Shinnecock, Pebble and Winged Foot. I fear that, without a return to its roots, the character of America's national championship will continue to slip away.