Sports: How Merion Got Its Groove Back

Golf is a game of gentlemen, a game of business, a game of etiquette. But today, golf is mostly a game of money. Big money. The champion’s payout for winning the U.S. Open in 1981, when Merion last hosted the tournament, was $55,000; this past June, winner Tiger Woods cashed a tidy check for $1.35 million. But while even small pro tournaments can offer big paydays, it’s the four “majors” in golf — the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open and the PGA Championship — that offer the sport’s toughest tests, strongest fields and biggest prestige.

Given that two of the four are out of the running off the bat — the Masters has a permanent home in Augusta, Georgia, and the British is played in, well, Britain — competition to host the remaining two, especially in the glamorous Woods era, is fierce. The PGA, to be held this month in Michigan, is a fine tournament. But the U.S. Open is our national championship, golf’s version of the Super Bowl. All of which is to say, there is no way in hell that a small relic like Merion, its history in the game notwithstanding, should have had a shot at winning a slot to host it. How it came to is a story that is equal parts romantic whimsy, steely guile and dogged persistence.

IN 1989, MERION was going through some bad hair days at exactly the wrong time. The club was hosting its fifth U.S. Amateur, the non-pros’ national championship. There were bald spots on greens and fairways; the rough was patchy. The USGA wasn’t happy. “Members were embarrassed,” remembers Bill Greenwood, who eventually became chairman of the greens committee, which oversees the conditioning of the course, in April 1995. By then, he says, “What had been shabby and chic and acceptable for all of the club’s history had kind of gone over the line.”

Over the next few months, Greenwood walked the course two, three, four times a week, musing about the character of the design Hugh Wilson had conceived in 1912 — “Learning,” he says, “what Merion East was.” And what it was — still — was a golfing Vermeer. Trees were choking it; some bunkers had shrunk, while others had been gobbled up by rough. But Merion’s bones remained a work of majestic beauty. Greenwood found crisp aerial photos from the ’20s and ’30s. A decision was made: Merion would look back to chart its future.

The process would take time and money. Mercifully, Merion had both. “It was like cleaning Yankee Stadium after a ball game,” says Bill Iredale, chair of Merion’s championship committee. “One seat at a time. One row at a time.”

In the early ’90s, Iredale, Greenwood and Bill Albertini, a relatively new member of the board, drove to USGA headquarters in Far Hills, New Jersey, to lobby Mike Davis, now senior director of the Open’s Rules and Competitions Committee, and deputy executive director Mike Butz. “We wanted the USGA to see that we were making a better place,” says Greenwood. “That we weren’t stuck in the mud.” The trio wanted to be considered for a future U.S. Open. Pie in the sky, sure, but at minimum, they hoped to land any USGA event.