William Flynn on the Ball and Course Length

Joe Valentine and William Flynn

Growing up in Philly, I was a Flynn fan before anybody started talking about him. And, having worked at Merion for Richie Valentine whose father, Joe Valentine, was Flynn's construction foreman and successor as Superintendent upon Flynn's departure, I heard all of the Flynn stories along with some pretty good Dick Wilson stories. But, what I wanted to document in this post, was just how forward thinking Flynn was.

Here are his thoughts from 1927 on the ball and length of holes and golf courses.

Again the question of the ball has a great bearing on what type a certain length hole will be. Time was, and not so many years ago, when a hole 400 yards long on average ground was a good two-shot hole for the star players; now, the same hole is perhaps a drive and spade for the better class golfers.

In view of this the architect of today plans his full two-shot holes from 440 to 500 yards, depending on the character of the land and if the distance to be obtained with the ball continues to increase it will be necessary to increase the length of all holes on golf courses accordingly if the same standards of play are to be maintained.

All architects will be a lot more comfortable when the powers that be in golf finally solve the ball problem. A great deal of experi- mentation is now going on and it is to be hoped that before long a solution will be found to control the distance of the elusive pill.

If, as in the past, the distance to be gotten with the ball continues to increase, it will be necessary to go to 7,500 and even 8,000 yard courses and more yards mean more acres to buy, more course to con- struct, more fairway to maintain and more money for the golfer to fork out. 

Merion, The Open and The Superintendent's Psychological Warfare

Merion, the USGA's Mike Davis and Matt Shaffer (Merion's Super Super) have intimidated the best players in the world. Maybe, intimidated is too strong a word, perhaps we should say challenged the best players in the world... no I'll stick with intimidated. The level of intimidation is probably inadvertent but it appears to be affecting the players or maybe the players just realize that it's Merion and the Open. The golf course as set up by the USGA with narrow fairways, long rough and some good length added on already long Par 4s and Par 3s has apparently confounded the players not just overtly with conditioning but with the subtleties of the design. When any golfer has doubt or indecision in their minds while hitting a shot, it usually does not bode well for them.

But before that, Matt Shaffer put a kind of doubt into their minds that they have rarely if ever had. Matt talked about how Merion's greens have grain in them. He wasn't mentioning this as a problem simply a fact; his members, mostly all "real" golfers are used to the additional challenge of grain. Now, I'm not talking about the drivel that we hear every week from Johnny Miller, who doesn't understand grass or grain, I'm talking about real grain with areas of grass blades laying down in one direction and right next to them, areas with grain running other directions. Matt likes grain; it's naturally what bentgrass likes to do.

Then, Matt went even further, he talked about all of the different grasses in the roughs at Merion and how the player will have to adjust to the 8 or 10 different grasses in the roughs. Usually, for a Championship or tournament, Superintendents and Clubs try to create a uniform rough. So in other words, most of the time the grass is adjusted to the players' desires instead of what Merion and the USGA have done...let the players figure it out or possibly not.

So now, the best golfers in the world are thinking about a golf course that embraces grainy greens and roughs that have all kinds of different grasses offering all of these different lies. It's enough to send the guys to their sports psychologists with panic attacks. I think that Wilson, Flynn and the Valentines are looking down from the heavens with smiles on their faces.

Memories of the 1981 US Open:

In 1980, we rebuilt several championship tees on East Course. Richie Valentine manipulated the slope of these tees. He believed that the greatest golfers in the world should be able to figure out the slope of a tee and adjust their shot accordingly. An example of what we did was the 15th Championship tee, which we put a 1% grade on from the right side to the left side, creating a hook lie on a hole that you probably want to hit a fade on since there is OB very close to the landing areas on the left side. The member tee was sloped 1% from the left side to the right side creating a fade lie to help the member stay in bounds.

Merion...Rain Rain Go Away, Come Back Again Some Other Day (or Week preferably)

Rain continues to plague The Open at Merion. The golf course is special and continues to hold up to the best golfers in the world despite being softened by the heavy rains. This really does reinforce what many of us that love Merion thought, the design of the golf course is wonderful and will once again identify the best golfer in the world. 

And Merion absolutely requires the golfer to show their shot making skill, course management, and mental toughness. There will be adversity and the ability of the golfer to face adversity intelligently is critical to success. Trouble abounds and there is OB everywhere. I suspect that there has never been a course that held a Major Championship that had more holes with out of bounds in play. The winner of this event may well be the golfer that saves a bogey from becoming a double or triple.

Not surprisingly, Matt Shaffer (Merion's Chief Grass Grower) and his staff have done a spectacular job of readying the golf course through these very trying conditions. Hey Mother Nature, enough already. If it ever stops raining the course will dry quickly, it drains very well and Matt will get those greens nice and firm. Maybe some day the USGA will allow tarping of the greens. We cover baseball infields, football fields, and soccer fields, why not greens on the golf course? If they had tarped the greens at Merion, what would the scores have been like today?

Some more trivia:

In 1981, after the Open, I moved into the 3rd floor of the clubhouse where they had some employee housing. And while we had our own bathroom, we also had direct access to the 3rd floor of the locker room. Many of you have heard of the marvelous showers at Merion and I can assure you that I used them often and that they are second only to the golf course at Merion.

On Thursday of the 1981 Open, I got a call from Richie Valentine to meet him at the small putting green, the one next to the golf shop. Upon arriving there, Richie introduced me to George Fazio, George put his glasses on and looked me up and down, shook my hand and turned around and walked away. Richie just shook his head and laughed. Years, later, when I told Tom Fazio about the introduction, he just roared.

The flagpole at Merion is one more reminder that Merion is a golf club. The pole was positioned to be an aiming point from both the 10th and 18th tee shots.

Missing the Open, Rollers, Dune Grass

Wednesday is my favorite day to be at the Open. The  contestants are finalizing their strategies and as they practice you can see how they're thinking about playing. They practice the shots that they think they will have and are fine tuning things. I've always found that very interesting.

Merion is a golf course that you have to think your way around. So I think that the players that do well will be, obviously the ones staying out of the rough but ultimately, the ones that have the best course management. A certain type of mental toughness will be required of the players to handle repeated decisions on each tee of what club to hit to those narrow landing areas.

In 1981, Richie Valentine had me pick up 18 rollers from the Merion Cricket Club. The rollers were 4 feet wide and were not real heavy and were never used on the course. But they were placed at the players' exit at each green. Richie Valentine, Merion's Superintendent, wanted to "get into the player's heads." So every time a player walked off a green they had to pass by or almost step over a green's roller.

The Dune Grass in the bunkers at Merion that was refreshed prior to the 1981 US Open came from Atlantic City Country Club. Doug Fraser, Leo Fraser's* son, brought it up to Merion for us to fill in some thin spots in the bunkers. Valentine would pick the locations to plant the grass clumps by gathering up some small stones and sticks and throwing them up in the air. Wherever they landed we planted clumps. It was as random and as natural as you could get.

Thought of the day: Keep an eye out for the third hole. This may be one of the finest uphill par 3s in the world.

Unfortunately, I'm not at the Open on my favorite day because Dick Zokol and I are working on the renovation at the Presidio Golf Course.

The 10th hole at Presidio Golf Course

* Leo Fraser was the owner of Atlantic City Country Club and presided over the PGA when the organization split into the PGA Tour and the PGA of America.

The 1981 US Open at Merion with a Chevy Nova driving on the Greens

If I told you that a car spun out on a green and drove across another before the start of the 3rd round of a US Open, would you be surprised? Would you be even more surprised to hear that at Merion during the 1981 US Open, that a car spun out on the 2nd green then drove backwards on the 2nd fairway, drove between the 2nd and 5th tees onto the 10th fairway across the 10th green through the bunker across the 2nd tee and turned onto Ardmore Avenue never to be seen again? The truth is indeed stranger than fiction. It happened.

Each morning as I drove to the club to prepare for the Championship, I would sneak through security on my way to the golf course maintenance building taking a different route each morning. I wasn't doing this just to irritate the security staff but to make a point that their perimeter and access control were lacking. Ardmore Avenue runs through the golf course and Golf House Road runs along part of the "Back Five."

On Saturday morning, as I was driving through a heavy rain for the third round of the Championship, I noticed that there was no guard at the gate that goes to the 2nd green from Ardmore Avenue and that the chain was down. When I got to the maintenance building, my thoughts went towards that morning's preparations as Richie Valentine and I adjusted the morning's plans for the staff to deal with the rainfall and I really didn't think about the gate at number 2 until as I was making my rounds checking on the staff twenty minutes later.

Wanted for Criminal Trespassing, 1981 US Open

By that time a Chevy Nova had driven onto the course, spun out on the back of the 2nd green, went down the 2nd fairway onto the 10th fairway, across the 10th green through the bunker across the 2nd tee and turned onto Ardmore Avenue. The driver didn't know how lucky he was because he was being chased by Dominic (Loco) Crespo. And if Dominic had caught him, he would have had a tough time of it. By the way, Dominic's brother Miguel Crespo still works at Merion these 32 years later.

The car had spun out on the back of the 2nd green and skimmed the turf off of the green in a half donut within a few feet of Saturdays pin position. Being the ever energetic Assistant Superintendent, I asked Richie if I should topdress the spot. Richie told me to just spread some green's clippings over it after it was mowed and that we'd move the pin to the front. And that was it.

Another Richie Valentine story. Do you notice anything different about this plaque? No, well take a close look at the ROBERT TYRE JONES, JR. section. Now do you notice that it's raised? What name do you think might have originally been on the plaque? How about Robert Trent Jones?

Richie told me the story about how the club had this plaque made and took him out to the 11th tee to see it mounted on the rock. Richie said "The plaques beautiful but that's not his name." Thus the raised portion of the plaque.

Memories of the Last OPEN at Merion

( courtesy of Matt Shaffer, Photo by Dave McDonald)

As a tribute to Merion Golf Club, I will reflect on my memories of the behind the scenes events that happened far from the television and press coverage during the 1981 U.S. Open. In 1980 and 1981, I was the Assistant Superintendent at Merion. Please keep in mind that these are my memories and they may be slightly flawed based on a misspent youth and adult career in the golf business. All of this from the only man west of the Susquehanna River that can make a wicker.

Let me start with a fun one, that every golfer has an opinion about, pin placements. Even in those days, Merion's resistance to scoring was being questioned. With that in mind, it came down to how firm and fast the greens were, how tough the pin placements were, and how tough the rough was. Fairway widths were little changed for the Open with the widths ranging from 26 to 32 yards wide in the landing areas. So, to us on the golf course maintenance side of things, with our fearless leader Richie Valentine (Merion's 3rd Superintendent who took over from his father who had taken over from Flynn) at the helm, we thought that we were the last defense of protecting the course and club from an assault. We considered it a personal affront that some player, no matter how great, would tarnish the reputation of Merion.

Well, the course's defenses were compromised by the weather with heavy rain falling on Monday softening the greens and I remember very clearly Richie Valentine's diatribe about how easy the pin placements had been on both Thursday and Friday, which had led to low scores. Richie was not bashful and could elucidate with the best of them and he had done so at the club's US Open committee meeting (held in a motor coach in the parking lot) on Friday afternoon. The General Chairman, Bill Kent,  ran military like rap up sessions at the end of each day. At the end of the meeting he asked if anyone else had anything to add. Much to the chagrin of the Mr. Kent, Richie Valentine said "When are you going to tell the USGA to set some tough pin placements because if you don't then I'll set them myself." At that point the committee erupted in cheers and one of the women, I think it was Mrs. Bone, said "Why, you tell him Richie, we have tougher pin placements for the ladies member guest" and her comments were accurate. Merion's members were more apt to complain about a banal course setup than an interesting, tough setup; they knew golf, still do for that matter.

The setup that Richie was complaining about was being dictated by one of golf's all time great characters, P.J. Boatwright, Jr. of the USGA. I remember being on the 17th green on Saturday morning with Billy Buchanon (USGA Championship Agronomist) measuring green speeds with Richie Valentine watching us when P.J. walked onto the green puffing his pipe and said to Richie "I understand that you think that the pin placements have been too easy" to which Richie responded "You're damn right P.J." With that P.J. puffed on his pipe and said "I think you'll find them a bit more to your liking today." and we did.

More to come:

A Chevy Nova drives across two greens on Saturday morning of the Open
How fast did 17 green get?
David Graham and his Wicker