Inside the U.S. Open golf course that would never have any of us as a member (2024)

LOS ANGELES — There was nothing but oil fields and dirt roads around it, just a golf course seemingly built in plain sight but destined to be hidden. Soon the buildings went up and the people came in and it was surrounded. Los Angeles became a metropolis. Beverly Hills became the center of the stars. And in the middle of it all was a course nobody could enter. Few ever got to see it, entertainers included. Shielded from the public and certainly from minorities, Los Angeles Country Club sunk into the margins of golf as the greatest course the world didn’t get to know.

It was all so intentional, you see. They turned away the USGA time after time for nearly 100 years. The closest it ever came to opening these doors was a vote to host the 1986 U.S. Open, with factions pleading for this to be LACC’s public moment.

It was voted down, five votes to four.

“I find it so regrettable,” former USGA president Sandy Tatum told ESPN in 2004. “Just once I would have liked to have had the Open experience that course. It was an absolute marvelous test of golf.”

But this week, the world has come to Los Angeles Country Club. The 126-year-old course that’s potentially more private than Augusta National is hosting the U.S. Open for the first time, returning to the immaculate design by George Thomas — the genius of Los Angeles golf architecture who designed LACC, Riviera and Bel-Air — that was seemingly lost for decades as golf clubs sought after the clean, manicured look of Augusta. But that’s not what LACC is. It’s a rustic course that goes up and down through canyons and makes golfers wrestle with decisions around jagged bunkers and a rugged, dry barranca. The beauty is in the messiness, and that’s what Gil Hanse and Geoff Shackelford achieved in their 2010 restoration. Tatum died in 2017, right as the club modernized and opened its doors, never achieving that goal of seeing a U.S. Open at LACC. First it hosted the 2017 Walker Cup. Now the Open arrives right smack dab in the center of Beverly Hills with the old Playboy Mansion off the 13th green and sightlines of the city at each turn.

“My first thought was, how the heck are they going to fit anything around here,” 2021 U.S. Open winner Jon Rahm recalled, “and second of all, how are we going to get around the traffic in this place?”

It’s here now. It’s time to finally see one of the game’s great gems in the spotlight. It sure is beautiful. And it sure is complicated.

A Texas oil man named Frank Rosenberg once attempted to buy a membership at Los Angeles Country Club. He had the money. He had the background, with so many members being old money families or oil barons. But, as the story goes, Rosenberg was denied because of his last name.

He wasn’t Jewish. But his name sounded like he was.

So he tried to join Hillcrest Country Club, another Los Angeles club formed in 1920 because LACC wouldn’t allow Jewish members. The problem was he made the mistake of mentioning that he wasn’t actually Jewish. So they denied him, too.

That’s the tricky part of this place, the reality that like Augusta — and like so much of golf — much of its background is rooted in bigotry and misogyny. Bud Bradley, who won the 1954 U.S. Junior Amateur at LACC, once called it “the most exclusive gentile club in America.” It didn’t admit any Jewish members until the 1970s, and the first Black member wasn’t until 1991. Women were still required to play in dresses or skirts until roughly the turn of the century, and during one rainy women’s amateur tournament, the women golfers had to wear garbage bags over their legs to stay dry.

Exclusivity is in its blood, holding an infamously firm and long-standing refusal to admit anyone from show business. Bing Crosby bought a house off the 14th fairway with the firm assumption he’d become a member. He was sorely mistaken. Remember the famous Groucho Marx line that Woody Allen opened “Annie Hall” with: “Why would I want to belong to a club that would have me as a member?” Some recollections say that was in reference to Groucho’s rejection from LACC.

Hugh Hefner bought what became the Playboy Mansion in 1971, visible from the 13th green. Of course Hefner couldn’t get a membership, and his request to have a gate installed that would link his house to the club was rejected. Him offering the occasional appearance of a Playboy Bunny apparently didn’t help. But Hefner later built a sanctuary for exotic birds, subjecting members to squawking.

“You used to be able to see straight into the backyard,” member Biff Naylor told Sports Illustrated in 1995. “Early tee times Sunday morning were quite popular because you could look in on all of Saturday night’s partyers passed out by the pool. And occasionally there was even a scantily clad lady to be seen.”

Maybe the outlook of LACC in those days is best highlighted by a 1957 editorial in the L.A. Times by art collector and socialite Joan Winchell.

LET THEM SAY it’s narrow-minded when it restricts movie stars and makes men wear shirts on the links and ties in the dressing room.

LET THEM SAY it’s unconscionable to restrict women from the Men’s Grill.

LET THEM SAY it’s silly to take a game like golf so seriously.

IT’S OUR FAMILY heritage. It’s our city’s history.

And while the club has softened and modernized, as it’s integrated and changed its mind about hosting tournaments like the U.S. Open (it’ll host the 2032 U.S. Women’s Open and the men’s U.S. Open again in 2039), it remains a club difficult to pin down. Members are still somewhat secretive, although it could boast Ronald Reagan and Fred Couples as members, plus former USC athletic director Pat Haden and golf club designer Roger Cleveland.

They, and everyone else, still need a member login to maneuver the website.

Before they were going to open the club to the world, they had to return it to its former glory. Making changes was the clubs’ idea, so golf architect Hanse and design consultant Shackelford pitched the members on getting back to Thomas’ vision.

Shackelford said the club, like many in Southern California, had taken a lot of turf out of play to save water. It grew too many trees, as so many have. The signature barranca along the front nine had become more of a smooth grass surface, removing so much of the character and challenge. The bunkers became round and ugly. The new team pitched major changes.

“But, as it is with most courses, it was not all smooth sailing,” Shackelford said.

There was a big town hall session with members and it included plenty of pushback, but Couples and Cleveland, among others, stood up and made their case for the restoration. But then an odd, unfortunate turn of events turned out to be a stroke of luck for Hanse and Shackelford. The 2008 recession put the massive project on hold, but the team convinced the club to just let them restore the fairway bunkers. Shackelford serves as a Thomas historian — writing books about his work — and was key in redrawing the bunker lines how Thomas wanted them, and Hanse and his team went to work. The members were thrilled, and that tryout led to the club giving them carte blanche to do the full restoration two years later.

“It’s sort of like somebody doing an album and somebody coming years later and moved the song order around,” Shackelford said. “You wanna restore the way they intended it to sound and you want to restore the sequence of the songs.”

They removed trees and redesigned the greenside bunkers. They returned the barranca to its rugged form with native vegetation and wildlife. It was meant to be a tough, thinking man’s course, and that’s what it is again.

They rerouted fairways and made holes like No. 6 into something of a signature, a short, drivable par 4 in which you can’t see the green from the tee. You can go for it, but it’s unclear where it will end up. Players during Monday practice rounds took longer than usual to play the hole, trying different angles on the fairway to see the best way to lay up. It’s back to the kind of course in which it’s not just about driving it well but to the right place. Distance isn’t everything. Angles are.

But that’s the true excitement of this week’s U.S. Open. During a time when most major courses are on a constant rotation players know well, very few have ever seen LACC up close. Just like the viewers taking it in on TV. We’re all figuring it out together. What it looks like. How to play it. Where to take risks and where to be smart.

“It’s kinda exciting to be going somewhere that nobody really knows what to expect,” Shackelford said.

Because for this one week in June, the entire golf world has its eyes on Los Angeles Country Club. Let them say it’s been worth the wait.

Required reading

• Nick Taylor’s Canadian Open win delivered, but what’s next amid PGA Tour uncertainty?
• 2023 U.S. Open golf pool picks: Scottie Scheffler, Collin Morikawa and a tier-by-tier breakdown
• How the PGA Tour, LIV Golf shockingly came together to change pro golf

(Illustration: Samuel Richardson / The Athletic. Photos: iStock; Kelvin Kuo / USA Today)

Brody Miller covers golf and the LSU Tigers for The Athletic. He came to The Athletic from the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A South Jersey native, Miller graduated from Indiana University before going on to stops at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Indianapolis Star, the Clarion Ledger and NOLA.com. Follow Brody on Twitter @BrodyAMiller