LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA | The VfE (Visitor from England) landed at Los Angeles International Airport in the middle of a hot June afternoon. At home at this time of day he’d be having a cup of tea and perhaps a slice of fruit cake at his golf club. Now he blinked as he emerged from the aeroplane that had delivered him from London’s Heathrow to LAX in 12 hours and flinched as the California sunshine bounced off the tarmac and whacked him in the face. Immigration. Customs. Luggage carousels. Queues. Cars hooting their horns. Drivers slamming the trunks of their cars. Noise, noise, noise; people, people, people. The hallmarks of travel, he thought to himself.
This was his first visit to the much-loved California city since the 2017 Walker Cup at Los Angeles Country Club. He remembered how, at that biennial ceremony of particular warmth and friendship, he and other journalists were made to feel only marginally welcome at this club – perhaps 15 of them were housed in a room that would adequately accommodate 10 and told that in walking to the course they were not allowed to pass through any of the clubhouse’s many rooms.
That year, at a cocktail party after the opening ceremony marked by a dry welcoming speech by George W. Bush, the immediate past U.S. president, the VfE overheard a university golf coach saying that he wouldn’t even consider offering a scholarship to a young golfer unless that golfer could carry the ball 275 yards through the air. Six years ago, that was startling. Now the equivalent figure would be 285, perhaps even 290 yards. Later, he recounted this story to some of his fellow golf club members, many of whom could not hit the ball 285 yards in their dreams, never mind carry it that far. Their eyes widened.
One day that week the VfE and some British friends were invited to Bel-Air Country Club for a game generously arranged by a Welshman who had left his home country to seek his fortune in the U.S., and, judging by the dues required of a member at Bel-Air, clearly had found it. He was struck by the neatness of the layout in not very promising or spacious land and how many holes unfolded up or down, and sometimes around, a barranca, a steep-sided ravine, gulley or gorge. What an attractive word barranca was. At home, such a feature would be called a ditch.
Golfers leaving the ninth green at Bel-Air have to navigate an unusual obstacle to reach the next tee. They must steer their buggies through a rocky tunnel to reach a lift from which they, their clubs and their buggies are whisked up to the 10th tee. It was cool in the tunnel, also narrow. There was little room to spare on either side of the buggy and, as a result, it wasn’t a place to break down. As he drove slowly through the tunnel, the VfE was told that the width of a golf buggy was largely determined by the width of the tunnel at Bel-Air.
Bel-Air was a very select sort of club where present and past members included Jack Nicholson, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby and Ronald Reagan. As the VfE settled down to attack a cooling beer in the clubhouse after his round, he noted that Eddie Merrins, the long-time pro at the club, was nearby, white cap and all, dispensing golfing wisdom, charm and smiles. The VfE remembered a joke he often told when he was making an after-dinner speech at golf clubs in the U.K. It centred on a U.S. golf club similarly exclusive, perhaps more so, than “At Cypress Point they had a membership drive and got rid of 50 members,” it went.
Los Angeles meant a lot to the VfE. In the early 1980s he, on a sabbatical from his newspaper in London, his wife and their two children had spent one month there crisscrossing California in a camper van with godson Christopher aboard as well.
At Bel-Air he was struck as he nearly always was at golf clubs in the U.S. by the size, comfort of the locker rooms and the accoutrements therein. The locker room where he had changed his shoes was ample, though not so large as Seminole’s nor was its ceiling as vaulted nor did it have those chairs much favoured on the decks of cruise ships in which it is almost impossible to feel discomfort nor such a distinguished list of winners of club tournaments.
But it had a formidable display of cans, creams, potions, tubes, aerosols and razors. Paper slippers were placed outside the showers as were piles of huge, white, fluffy towels. At many clubs back home, he thought to himself, there might be an old comb with some of its teeth missing, a hairbrush and a few small towels.
Los Angeles meant a lot to the VfE. In the early 1980s he, on a sabbatical from his newspaper in London, his wife and their two children had spent one month there crisscrossing California in a camper van with godson Christopher aboard as well. The headquarters for their month-long sojourn was the geodesic-domed house in Topanga Canyon, near Malibu, owned by Christopher’s father. On some balmy evenings the VfE would run up and down Topanga Canyon in training for the London marathon two months later.
In 1995 he made his first visit to Riviera Country Club, one of the other great golf courses in this city. It was here that O.J. Simpson, the former American football player who was acquitted of a double homicide and involved in an historic and spectacular car chase during the 1994 U.S. Open, had played his golf and kept his locker – 733. Here, too, that 65 members had handicaps of 5 or better and here that in August 1995 Colin Montgomerie, despite a number of searingly accurate irons and long straight drives, was edged out in that year’s PGA Championship by Steve Elkington because his putting did not match the superb quality of the rest of his play.
Over four rounds, Montgomerie hit 60 of 72 greens and 51 of 56 fairways. Elkington’s equivalent figures were 51 greens and 44 fairways. If ever the importance of putting in this maddening game was demonstrated, it was now. Montgomerie averaged 30 putts in each of his four rounds, a total of 120, whereas Elkington took 14 fewer and Ernie Els, who finished joint third, took 13 fewer.
Ben Hogan won his first U.S. Open at Riviera in 1948, 22 years after the course was first laid out. Humphrey Bogart used to watch golf at Riviera from under a tree by the side of the 12th fairway. Dean Martin played at Riviera. He once said he played golf only on days that ended in the letter y. Clark Gable and Richard Nixon both recorded holes-in-one at Riviera, and some parts of the Tarzan films were shot in a cave now covered in vines near the fourth fairway
Riviera and LACC, two of the country’s greatest tests of golf, and Bel-Air, a golf club of special charm and historical interest, add a lustre to a city that needs it less than most. This week in La La Land, a city made famous for its output of the fantastic and the impossible, LACC is about to bring most competitors in the 123rd U.S. Open to a place where reality is the chief currency.
For first- and second-round U.S. Open tee times, click HERE.