SOUTHAMPTON, New York— Shinnecock Hills, the site of the U.S. Open that started early Thursday morning, is a hard golf course. It’s hosted the national championship four times before, and the last two winning scores there were even par and 4-under.
Shinnecock Hills is already making some of the world’s best golfers look like chumps
And it’s likely going to get harder later.
Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images
It has dangerously fast, often narrow fairways surrounded by tall fescue grass on all sides, and the run of its greens punishes players who don’t hit a precise landing area and make their shots stick. The course is also subject to severe, sometimes twisting Hamptons winds, and it’s long as hell: 7,448 yards for a course that only works out to a par-70 track.
After the first two hours of play Thursday, the course was being mean. Ten players were under par, and 33 were over in the early going.
Some of the ugliest results were coming from guys you’ve never heard of, but not all of them. Jordan Spieth started his day by bogeying the par-4 10th hole and then making triple on the par-3 11th, a 157-yard uphill hole with a tough green area. On that hole, Spieth flew his tee shot into a green-side bunker to the right of the hole, wedged out to beyond the green, came up short with a pitch attempt that rolled back to him, and two-putted for his triple-bogey. Spieth was plus-4 through two holes.
The ugliest single thing that happened in the early-going: someone making a 9 on the brutal, 536-yard par-4 14th hole.
Five hundred thirty-six yards! A par-4! That’s a lot even for the best players in the world, all of whom are in this 156-man field. The world’s No. 155 player is an American named Scott Stallings. He hit his tee shot about 300 yards, but lost it into some of the tall grass just to the right of the fairway. After hacking out to 135 yards from the flagstick, Stallings hit an approach shot that skidded off the back of the green and required him to pitch back up.
The problem for Stallings is that the green slopes hard away from the green:
He needed a couple of tries just to get the ball onto the green, then batted it around like a mini-golfer for a few strokes before holing the ball on his ninth shot, a quintuple-bogey.
That‘s not to pick on Stallings. It’s to point out how challenging this course is looking.
And the morning is supposed to be the easiest part of the day.
The wind at Shinnecock has been slight in the morning, with gusts around five miles per hour. It’s supposed to get a lot windier later in the day. It also rained hard here on Wednesday, and the course will only get drier and harder to control balls on as the day gets longer. If there was a time to score well here on Thursday, it was the early morning.
That hasn’t happened. Spieth is already ejecting and facing a bit of a comeback journey to even make the cut 34 holes from now. Stallings is already pretty much out, and plenty of players seem likely to join him in the first few hours of Thursday’s round.
Before the tournament started, the USGA moved to soften and slow some of the greens here. The organization’s CEO, Mike Davis, anticipated some climate chaos on Thursday.
“We’ve also changed up some of the hole locations, just to make sure they’re in areas that can handle this kind of wind,” Davis said at a Wednesday press conference. “But I would also say that if we get some of the top winds that they’re predicting, it doesn’t matter how slow the greens are and how flat the surfaces are. You will see balls blowing, and that’s just the nature when you get up into 30-mile-per-hour plus, which we might get gusts.”
Those gusts weren’t happening in the early morning, and players were still fighting the course and losing decisively. We’re going to see a lot of high numbers.
You can stream the championship on the U.S. Open app or website.
See More:
