For the fifth time, in its 113th edition, the United States Open Championship will return to one of its most iconic and unique venues; Merion Golf Club in Pennsylvania. It’s been a total of 32 years since Australian David Graham lifted the U.S. Open trophy aloft at Merion, but America’s national championship is finally heading back to this historic old course.
Merion Golf Club has a unique and storied history in the game, with so many of golf’s greatest achievements having occurred at this venue. These moments will reverberate throughout the course during this year’s U.S. Open.
Members of Merion Cricket Club established the Golf Club in 1896, but the East Course, which is where the U.S. Open will be contested, wasn’t opened until the September of 1912. In a rather peculiar series of events, a Merion member, a Scottish immigrant called Hugh Irvine Wilson, was asked to design the new layout. However, having not designed a golf course before, Wilson travelled back to the United Kingdom, and spent a total of seven months studying courses in Scotland and England. The influence of the knowledge Wilson accumulated on this trip can be seen in what he implemented in his design of the East Course. One notable example, which Wilson revealed himself, is that the 3rd hole was based on the 15th and 17th holes of North Berwick, a famous links course in the east of Scotland. The bunkers on the course also have a seaside links look to them, and they certainly wouldn’t be out of place at Muirfield, the site of this year’s Open Championship in July.
The eventual result of the East Course was remarkable, considering that Wilson had very little room to work with. The course was built on an area of just 126 acres, which is an extremely small space for a golf course. A rather small canvas for what would become a masterpiece. This naturally provides the course with a compact and claustrophobic feel to it, which will be a common theme during the week of this year’s Championship.
The course’s geographical small stature led Jack Nicklaus, winner of the 1960 World Golf Team Amateur at Merion, to state that the East Course is "acre for acre, perhaps the best test of golf in the world."
With such a unique feel to the course, it wasn’t long before the largest events in the game came to the new Merion. The first USGA Championship to be held at the East Course was the 1916 U.S. Amateur, won by Chick Evans who labelled the bunkers as the “white faces of Merion”. More significantly, however, this represented the first national championship appearance of a 14-year-old Bobby Jones, whose great success at this course was yet to come.
It was around 1916 that the pins of the East Course were first topped with wicker baskets, rather than the customary flags. It’s unclear as to why this unique policy started, but it has remained in place ever since, and the baskets will be in play during the 2013 U.S. Open.
Eight years after Evans won, the U.S. Amateur returned, and this time it was Jones who triumphed, after crushing George Von Elm 9-and-8 to win a first of five United States Amateur Championships. Such a dominating result in the final was testament to Jones’ play that week. In the Semi Finals, he had defeated Francis Ouimet, the 1913 U.S. Open champion, by an extraordinary margin of 11-and-10. After such a devastating loss, Ouimet remarked that Jones: “Was paying no attention to what I did or where my ball went. He just kept plugging for par after par and two times out of three he was putting for birdies only eight or 10 feet away. He had a 71 in the morning round and he might just as well, with better putting luck, had a 65.”
However, it would be six years later that Bobby Jones’ finest moment at Merion would occur, as he completed what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of the game.
By the time the U.S. Amateur returned in the September of 1930, Jones had already won the British Amateur, the U.S. Open and Open Championship that year. Returning from his exploits in Britain, Jones was paraded through the streets of Atlanta to crowds of 125,000. Attention then turned towards the U.S. Amateur, where anticipation was rife to see if Jones would break the "impregnable quadrilateral”, and win all four major championships of the time in a calendar year.
Jones cruised through to the final, and faced Eugene Homans in the Championship Match. It was here, in front of a gallery amassing to over 18,000, that Jones inscribed his name into golfing immortality, as he claimed a comfortable 8-and-7 victory to achieve the historic “Grand Slam”.
Bobby Jones remains the only player to have won all four major championships in a calendar year. Seven weeks after his triumph at Merion, Jones retired from competitive golf at the age of 28, and four years later he would establish The Masters Tournament at Augusta National.
18 USGA Championships have been held at Merion Golf Club, with 16 on the East Course, but it took till 1934 for the first United States Open Championship to be contested there. In that edition, Olin Dutra claimed a one-shot win over Gene Sarazen, to win his second major. However, it would be 16 years later that Merion’s most iconic U.S. Open image would be taken.
On the second of February 1949, while driving on a foggy morning, Ben Hogan, and his wife Valerie, were involved in a head on collision with a Greyhound bus. For Hogan, it was a near fatal accident, and his injuries were so severe that doctors warned that he might never walk again.
Remarkably, Hogan not only managed to walk again, he returned to competitive golf at the 1950 Los Angeles Open.
After finishing 4th at the Masters, Hogan arrived at Merion looking to win his second U.S. Open. He found the course to his liking, and he went into the 36-hole final day just two shots off the lead. After the opening 18 holes that Saturday morning, he still found himself just two shots off the lead, held by 1946 U.S. Open champion Lloyd Mangrum. However, just 16 months removed the accident, Hogan endured excruciating pain as he struggled to walk around the East Course in the afternoon. Astonishingly, he had a chance to win in regulation play, holding a two shot lead on the 15th tee. However, he would bogey 15, and then 17, and required a par on the 18th to force a playoff.
After a perfect drive, Hogan hit a stunning one-iron to within 40-feet. (The photograph taken from behind Hogan after that shot remains one of the most iconic in golf history). He would two-putt from there to make the playoff, which he would win the following day to clinch one of the most incredible and inspirational victories in the history of the game.
However, it would be a further 21 years before Merion staged the U.S. Open again, and on this occasion it was Lee Trevino who claimed victory, after defeating Jack Nicklaus by three shots in a classic playoff. It was Trevino’s second U.S. Open victory, and, in winning a second major and defeating the greatest player in the game, it’s a win that he values highest. “That win at Merion was the most important win of my career, hands down. After that, I knew I didn’t have a lot to prove.”
Trevino would follow that win at Merion with a victory in The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, before progressing on to a career which would end with 29 PGA Tour wins, including six major championships. His victory at Merion gave Trevino the confidence to achieve what he did in the future.
In 1981, another player would win a second major at Merion. This time it was Australian David Graham, who produced a stunning final round of 67 to win by three shots from George Burns and Bill Rogers.
Graham recently reflected that winning the U.S. Open at a venue like Merion made a fantastic achievement even more special. “You know, you think about winning something like the U.S. Open, and it’s incredibly rewarding,” The 67-year-old said. “You’re never sure in your whole life if you’re good enough or if it’s meant to happen until it does. And then you add the reputation of Merion to it, and that takes it to an even higher level. It validates everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve tried to become as a golfer.”
The assembled field at the 2013 U.S. Open will once again discover that iconic reputation of Merion, and it will add extra allure to the year’s second major.
The history and tradition of Merion is there to see, but what of the challenge of the course itself? It has indeed been 32-years since a U.S. Open was held here, and there have been concerns that the East Course is “too short” to accommodate the modern professional game. However, while it is true that Merion does measure less than 7,000 yards on the scorecard, it has a very well balanced layout of holes, in terms of their distance.
There are five par fours that measure less than 400 yards on the course, with four of them coming between the 7th and 11th. For the majority of the field, these holes will be no more than a wedge approach, even if they don’t take driver off the tee. However, despite these obvious birdie opportunities, there are some long holes, with the 504-yard 18th being a prime example. The closing stretch is certainly a significant challenge, both in length and design, with USGA Executive Director Mike Davis stating, "If those aren't the hardest finishing holes in a U.S. Open. I don't know what are."
Ultimately, the difficulty of Merion will be determined by the conditions. If the weather has provided the course with some respite from rainfall, and it plays firm and fast, then it will become a fierce challenge, with players struggling to hold the ball on the fairways and greens. However, if the course is soft, as seems likely, then the challenge will be significantly reduced, and we will see a low scoring U.S. Open.
As Davis himself concedes: “If the course is soft, I'm thinking 14 under is the winning score this time around. But if it doesn't rain, and if it gets firm and fast for four straight days, then I think even par wins it."
Its luscious rough will have to be avoided, as will the threatening out of bounds that is in play on a number of the holes. But ultimately, no matter how high or low the winning score, and although it will be a referendum on the issue of distance, this will be a throwback U.S. Open. It will be a Championship that will step back in time to the days of Jones and Hogan. With its Scottish links looking bunkers, and wicker baskets in place of flags on the pins, it will be a unique and intriguing week.
Merion has earned its place as the setting for a nostalgic look back in time, and it will provide a fascinating canvas for the qualified players of this 113th United States Open to perform on. Merion will be savoured this week for what it represents and for the reputation that it has.
Sometimes the old ways are the best.