MANHEIM TOWNSHIP – Lancaster Country Club president Ted
Bloom admits he was in uncharted territory a decade ago after the William Flynn
gem was awarded the 2015 U.S. Women’s Open by the United States Golf
Association.
“We had no idea what to expect,” Bloom told a media
gathering Tuesday morning at Lancaster Country Club during which the USGA
announced that the U.S. Women’s Open will return to the course in 2024. “But we
learned very quickly how much the region was going to embrace the challenge.
“Within a few weeks we had 2,500 volunteers with another 400
on a waiting list. In a couple of months we had $2.6 million in corporate
support pledged.”
Maybe some at the USGA shared the doubts that Bloom and his
crew at Lancaster had. It is certainly not a major market, although if you add
in the nearby cities of York and Harrisburg and the proximity of the tremendous
golfing community that is Philadelphia and its environs, you have no shortage
of sports-mad people willing to be a part of a major championship.
Those doubts were probably not shared by Mike Davis, the
USGA executive director. Davis is a Chambersburg native and he is well aware of
the can-do attitude that central Pennsylvania brings to any sporting endeavor. He
was right, of course, although even he might have been a little surprised at
what a rousing success it was.
Whomever the weather chairmen were – probably some of
Lancaster’s past officers over its century-plus of existence who helped make the
Flynn design a hidden gem – got the job done. A U.S. Women’s Open record
135,000 fans roamed the Lancaster layout for four days.
In Gee Chun, the then 20-year-old South Korean, chased down
her countrywoman Amy Yang with a stunning burst of three straight birdies at
15, 16 and 17 to capture her first major championship by a shot over Yang.
The players loved the golf course and, probably moreso, the
atmosphere. The fans loved the tournament and the players. Fox Sports loved the
drama and the golf course in the radiant green of a central Pennsylvania summer
positively shimmered on the TV screen. The community embraced the event and the
players felt that embrace.
The USGA couldn’t wait to come back. And Lancaster Country
Club and the city of Lancaster couldn’t wait to have the U.S. Women’s Open come
back.
That much was evident in the brief remarks from Bloom and
Mike Butz, the USGA’s senior managing director, Tuesday.
“We can’t tell you how thrilled we are to bring the U.S.
Women’s Open back to Lancaster Country Club,” Butz said. “Those of us from this
area who remember the Lady Keystone Open at Hershey years ago knew central
Pennsylvania would be supportive.
“But we couldn’t have expected one of the most successful
championships we’ve ever had. The support of the fans, crowds we had never seen
at a Women’s Open, the incredible support of the Lancaster community.”
Lancaster’s Bloom was pretty proud, too, of a couple of
other outcomes from the 2015 Women’s Open.
“There was $1.6 million in merchandise sold,” Bloom said.
“And when the USGA got back the results from those who responded to a customer
satisfaction survey, we had the highest score of any USGA event ever.”
The USGA likes to hold its events in Pennsylvania. When the Women’s Open returns to Lancaster in 2024 it will be the 91st
USGA event to be staged in the Keystone State, more than any other state.
The year following the 2015 Women’s Open at Lancaster saw a
foursome of USGA events in Pennsylvania with the U.S. Open making one of its
regular stops at venerable Oakmont Country Club in suburban Pittsburgh, the
U.S. Women’s Amateur being staged at another Flynn gem at Rolling Green Golf
Club in Springfield, Delaware County, the U.S. Mid-Amateur something of a
coming-out party for spectacular Stonewall where East Nantmeal Township meets
Warwick Township in Chester County, and the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur being held
at The Kahkwa Club in Erie.
I live-blogged at Rolling Green – I had covered a lot of
golf for the local paper there, the Delaware
County Daily Times, before getting pink-slipped in early 2016 – and did the
rare combination of looper and blogger at Stonewall and both events were pulled
off flawlessly.
Between now and 2024, the USGA will stage the 2020 U.S.
Amateur Four-Ball Championship at the Philadelphia Cricket Club’s Militia Hill
and Wissahickon Courses, the 2022 Curtis Cup Match at my favorite golf course
in the world, the historic East Course at Merion Golf Club, and the 2022 U.S.
Senior Open at Saucon Valley Country Club in Bethlehem for the third time.
Next year’s U.S. Women’s Open will be held at The Country
Club of Charleston in South Carolina, in 2020 it will be at Champions Golf Club
in Houston, in 2021 it will be at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, in 2022 it
will be at the Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in North Carolina and the
Pebble Beach Golf Links on northern California’s spectacular Monterey Peninsula
will do the honors in 2023 before it returns to Lancaster in 2024.
And Lancaster proved in 2015 that it belongs in that roll call
of great American golf courses.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in my final year at
the Daily Times in 2015. I couldn’t
fit the entire U.S. Women’s Open into my schedule, but I did get here the day
before the championship started and there was an unmistakable buzz. It’s not always
something you can quantify, but you could tell this was a happening.
I used the opportunity to write a state-of-women’s-golf
column and I found it, particularly at Lancaster that week, to be in pretty
good shape. Women’s golf remains somewhat under the radar in this country. But
the people who run the sport had started to figure out that women’s golf is a
pretty big deal in a lot of the rest of the world and have successfully branded
it as such.
The people in the Lancaster area understood that they were
putting on an event with an international audience that week in July of 2015
and treated it as such.
You can argue that The Open Championship or the Masters
rival the U.S. Open for supremacy in the men’s game – be forewarned: Don’t make
that argument with anybody from the USGA – but the U.S. Women’s Open is the
biggest event in women’s golf.
And in 2024, for the second time in less than 10 years, it’s
going to be held at Lancaster Country Club.
“I sat down at my computer late at night in October and did
some Googling,” Bloom, the Lancaster president, said. “I was trying see how
many clubs had hosted two major championships, men’s, women’s, whatever. I came
up with about 40 clubs in the whole country.
“We wanted Lancaster Country Club to be known as a USGA club
and now we are. And Lancaster is now a USGA city.”
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