An SGS Spotlight on the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage

The Shotgun Start

Fried Egg Golf

Golf, Sports

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With the U.S. Open return to Torrey Pines, and a possible end to this era of the championship going to publicly owned venues, this Spotlight episode focuses on the one that ushered in that great muni experiment. Andy and Brendan dive into the story of how David Fay got the Open to Bethpage, the Rees Jones work before 2002, and the groundskeeping overhaul that took place to host the national championship. There is also ample time devoted to the Reestoration, with not exclusively glowing words for “The Open Doctor.” Then they get into some complaints on setup, including one hole where 15 players in a row failed to carry their drives to the fairway. There are segments dedicated to the rowdy crowds and of course, the main characters -- Jeff Maggert’s wardrobe, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Sergio Garcia. This may be the week the public perception of waggling Sergio really changed, and they go over the contretemps that had him leaving an apology note in Tiger’s locker the night before they played in the final round’s final pairing. There is, of course, time dedicated to this particular run of Tiger dominance, and the impacts incoming equipment evolutions might have had on that. Thanks to the U.S. Open Victory Club (join that here) for supporting this Spotlight work and making these episodes possible.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Now the shotgun's starting golf is full of mathematics, there's a lot of a lot of setup work that we have to do in order to make a tournament work, so I'm going to demonstrate to you just exactly how we do a shotgun start here.
0:14.0	And here we go.
0:17.0	All right, all right, all right.
0:21.0	Get the man.
0:24.0	Start your engine.
0:29.0	Greetings and welcome to a special spotlight edition of the shotgun start.
0:42.0	It is early June 2021, Andy, how you do it?
0:47.0	I'm not doing great, Brad, and I just, you know, all day, I was thinking about how much I wanted to do, you know, how much I wish I had that John Feinstein book about this USL, but we're going to be spotlighting, and I just turned my head.
1:04.0	And I looked into my bookcase, and there it is.
1:08.0	No, really, I was wondering if you were going to be on the spot there to say, Brandon, and you weren't, you're looking around, you just found out you did have the book all on.
1:18.0	I didn't think I had it.
1:21.0	And I didn't venture downstairs to the dungeon to look at the book, bookcase.
1:27.0	And then I just was curious, I turned around, and all day I was like, I wish I had that there's so many tidbits in it.
1:36.0	There we go. Well, that's the little tease.
1:38.0	We are doing a spotlight here in the 2002 United States open.
1:42.0	They first opened every held that a, you know, publicly owned course, muni, state, county, city owned course at Bethpage Black.
1:52.0	As we speak, actually, Joel Beall had a nice article.
1:55.0	You do have it. You're showing us this book.
1:57.0	We're off to a rousing start. Joel Beall had an article today talking about how this Tori Pines were doing this in 2021 Tori Pines might be the last of a real kind of muni.
2:07.0	Piner's Pebble really on the, on the road, but of course, not considered true publics.
2:13.0	But so, you know, it's a little kind of tie in there, tie in certainly with Tiger and Tori.
2:19.0	Okay, this was kind of this, the start of this muni run. We had two at Tori.
	...

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