A study in contrasts

    Writing from Cherry Hills Village, Colorado
    Wednesday, September 3, 2014

    Cherry Hills Country Club has a great deal in common with a more-often-seen classic, the Augusta National Golf Club.
    Each membership prizes its history. Augusta has The Masters and all that the spring bacchanalia entails, from retelling the story of Gene Sarazen’s double eagle for the umpteenth time to biting into a pimento cheese sandwich, just to say you did.
    Cherry Hills has, among other true fables, Arnold Palmer driving the first green in the final round of the 1960 United States Open Championship, triggering the fireworks display that illuminated the greatest confluence of legendary players in a dramatic situation in the game’s history – Ben Hogan falling just short in his bid for an unprecedented fifth Open title despite hitting the first 34 greens on Open Saturday, amateur Jack Nicklaus contending until the final holes and earning Hogan’s unstinting admiration when the Hawk said, “I played with a kid today who should have won this thing by 10 shots,” and Palmer, the King, throwing down his sandwich in the locker room when Pittsburgh writer Bob Drum said when Arnold asked if he had a chance, “You blew it this morning.” Palmer stomped out to the first tee, drove the green, shot 65, and won his only U.S. Open.

The famed first hole at Cherry Hills. (c) 2014 Tim Cronin

    There is more to Cherry Hills than hosting the best Open. There are all the other championships, from Ralph Guldahl winning the Open in 1938 to Hubert Green capturing the PGA in 1985, to Phil Mickelson copping the U.S. Amateur against old high school teammate Manny Zerman in 1990, to Birdie Kim, barely heard of before or since, making birdie (of course!) from the greenside bunker on the 72nd hole to collect the 2005 U.S. Women’s Open crown and reduce Morgan Pressel to a puddle of tears.
    And there’s more. Dwight David Eisenhower, a general and president of whom you may have heard, was a member of both Augusta National and Cherry Hills. Mamie Eisenhower, his bride, was a Colorado gal. Footballer Lynn Swann is a member of Augusta National. John Elway is a recent past president of Cherry Hills.
    Like Augusta, Cherry Hills has a collection of treasures, from replica trophies signifying the championships held at the club to elegant display cases highlighting the champions and the ephemera surrounding their big weeks. Pride of place, off the hallway that leads to the locker rooms, is the Arnold Palmer Room. There, under glass from now until the sun implodes, is the driver Palmer used to make the first of those 65 strokes in the final round of the 1960 Open. Compared to the clubs of today, the clubhead is barely bigger than a child’s fist.
    The difference between the two clubs is small, but on display this week. It is found in how the two clubs handle a tournament. At Augusta, most everything is understated, genteel, the epitome of Southern hospitality. Next year’s Masters will be built on the previous eight decades of experience, and the belief that the beloved patrons need not be gouged in the food line nor beaten over the head with advertising on message boards. The green jackets know the guests will find the golf shop soon enough and open the purse willingly.
    Cherry Hills might want to run a tournament that way as well, but has no say in this week’s project beyond turning over the facility to the Western Golf Association and BMW, the German automobile firm, for a princely sum, for this week’s BMW Championship, the eighth such-titled version of that venerable rouser previously billed as the Western Open. (It is the 111th in the series, if you’re counting back to the start in 1899.)
    BMW does not believe in subtlety. It believes in beating the drum – loudly, not slowly – and creatively. Thus, rather than being able to wander between the first tee – Palmer’s tee, 346 yards distant from the green, and which will be used all four days in the tournament that commences firing on Thursday – and the 18th green, where Kim wrought her magic from the bunker, one must flit to and fro to see action on both holes, unless he or she has the magic ticket that allows a place in the second-floor pavilion behind the grandstands that even on Wednesday was occupied by all manner of magic-ticketed swells.
    This week, between corporate hospitality in the clubhouse and on the course, the WGA could bring in a record return. Rentals of particular rooms in the clubhouse for the week – food and beverage extra, of course – totaled $1,125,000 aside from the “champions club” before Bank of America ordered off the menu and rented the pro shop. Hospitality chalets went for $100,000 each, skyboxes for $60,000. If you wanted to play in Wednesday’s pro-am, that was a $12,000 tab. And sales were brisk. (Because golf-starved Denver hasn’t had the regular PGA Tour stars in town and on this course since the 1985 PGA, the prices are higher than the WGA is asking for at Conway Farms Golf Club next year, where the clubhouse is too small to utilize.)
    This, of course, fills the coffers of the WGA, and thus the treasury of the Evans Scholars Foundation, which has sent caddies to college since 1930. That’s a wonderful thing. The creativity shown in taking the old Western Open to St. Louis, Indianapolis and Denver at strong Evans Scholar clubs – George Solich, Cherry Hills’ general chairman of the tournament, is a Scholar – has resulted in huge grosses surpassing the best years of the Western at Cog Hill when it was on the Fourth of July weekend.
    Let the record show that there are a good number of seats for the public at the 18th green and the first tee. But this isn’t a country fair, as the Cog Hill Westerns were. This is a corporate-driven week that happens to be built around a golf tournament.
    The good thing is, it’s easier to move around the rest of the course, which could play as long as 7,352 yards this week, but will play much shorter given the mile-high altitude on the front lawn of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
    How much shorter? An expert on driving the ball, Rory McIlroy, put a number on it.
    “I did hit a 3-wood 370,” McIlroy said after his pro-am round in Wednesday’s 90-degree heat. “That was pretty good. But the ball is going forever. Because of my high ball flight, it’s going to go 15 percent further than it usually does. Even this morning, when it was a little cooler, it was still going a good 10 percent further.”
    Such a prospect makes the mind wander back to last year at Conway Farms Golf Club, the Lake Forest course that yielded the two lowest scores in championship history – nobody remembers Matt Kuchar’s third-round 61 because it came the day after Jim Furyk’s second-round 59 – but a scoring average just a shade under the par of 71.
    Cherry Hills’ par is 70, as was Bellerive Country Club in 2008. The scoring average there, 69.370, remains a Western record.
    And that was conducted without Rory McIlroy on the premises.
    McIlroy, of course, is the favorite to hoist the J.K. Wadley Trophy for the second time in three years. How could he not be, with an Open Championship and PGA Championship the highlights of a spectacular year. But behind the baby-faced looks – and this has been true since he really was a baby – there’s a competitor who wants to do nothing but win.
    Wednesday, he was asked about capturing the FedEx Cup, the one bauble – aside from The Masters – that has not yet fallen into his pocket, he was brutally honest.
    “I feel it’s been such a great tear on the golf course that if I wasn’t to go ahead and win the FedEx Cup, it would definitely be disappointing,” McIlroy said. “I really want to cap off this summer as best as I can. I have two more weeks to push through, and even though I am feeling a little tired. ... Not winning a couple of years ago did add that little bit of fuel to the fire and probably makes me a little bit more determined to try to win it this year.”
    And so on and so on. He’s clearly the leader of the Rat Pack of young players who have come along in the last few years, and relishes that position.
    “It’s great to see there’s younger guys winning on Tour, and it only bodes well for the future of this game,” McIlroy said. “Yeah, I’m glad I’m the leader of that pack and hopefully, I’m the leader of that pack for the next 20 years, as well.”
    Others in the 69-player field – Dustin Johnson is not here thanks to his unannounced six-month non-suspension suspension for drug use – who figure to contend are Mickelson, who can walk though the Hall of Champions and see the case with his victory commemorated, Furyk, fourth on the money list, No. 3 Bubba Watson, who may drive the first green with a 6-iron, and Jimmy Walker, who won twice before the Super Bowl and also at Pebble Beach, but couldn’t be picked out of a police lineup by anyone but his parents.
    Walker’s second on the money list. McIlroy is first. Him, you can pick out.

    – Tim Cronin