Sports: How Merion Got Its Groove Back

The USGA scoped out the course, seemed pleased with the state of the reclamation effort, and came back with an offer: the 1998 Girl’s Junior, a starter rung on its event ladder, but a rung nonetheless.

Within the USGA, there was enthusiasm for the route Merion was taking, and a wistfulness for its niche in the championship pantheon. Fay was a fan, as were Davis and Butz. Locally, so were Gordon Brewer of Camden County’s famed Pine Valley club, then a powerful member of the USGA’s championship and executive committees, and Craig Ammerman, the former editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin, then rising through the ranks en route to seats on both committees as well. But as Butz and Davis cobbled together feasibility studies for staging a U.S. Open at Merion, prospects hit the rough.    

At the ’81 Open, Merion had burst at the seams with about 20,000 spectators (the average U.S. Open today attracts some 40,000 daily) and only 13 corporate tents. “As much as I loved Merion,” Butz says, “I didn’t see how it would work.” Neither did Davis. “We couldn’t even see how to do a small Open,” he stresses. “It also seemed fair to say that the golf course wasn’t there anymore for today’s championship game.”

Still, Buzz Taylor, who headed the USGA’s championship committee and was a college roommate of Merion’s former president, Lew Rawlings, asked British Open champion Nick Price to test-drive the course in 1997. “Buzz never mentioned the Open to me, but I knew,” Price recalls. His assessment? Merion was “in my Top 10 of all time, but given its length, 10 under par could easily be the winning score. I’d have no problem with that. The USGA would.” Indeed it would: The USGA wears, with some pride, its reputation for giving pro golfers their sternest test of the year. A championship that allowed for a sea of breezy scores under par would never, ever do. The lack of space for sponsor tents was an equally deadly blow. “Given what we knew,” says Fay, “and given the importance of the Open to the USGA, we couldn’t just throw our financial interests to the wind, as much as we might have liked to.”

In the fall of 1997, Butz and Davis presented their findings to the championship committee. The answer: no. And that, essentially, was that.

Except it wasn’t.

BY ALL MEASURES, the ’98 Girls Junior was a success. Buoyed, Merion entered a formal bid for the 2005 U.S. Amateur, to mark the 75th anniversary of Bobby Jones’s apotheosis. (In 1930, golf’s four majors were the U.S. Open, British Open, U.S. Amateur and British Amateur.) But by the time Mike Davis came back to play a round with Buddy Marucci, a recent appointee to Merion’s greens committee, he knew what was really going on: Merion wanted validation that it was returning its course to top-flight shape. “It’s easier to tell them their kids are ugly than that their golf course was obsolete,” sighs Davis. “My message was, ‘Listen, gang, we can’t make a U.S. Open work at Merion anymore. There’s just not enough land to stage it.’”