Photo credit: USGA/Fred Vuich
Taken from the USGA Press Conference on Tuesday, May 27 at the site of this year’s U.S. Women’s Open. The conference has been edited by ACES Editor Dennis Miller
BETH MAJOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 80th U.S. Women’s Open Championship presented by Ally here at Erin Hills. We’re thrilled to be here for this championship, thrilled for all of you for covering this championship, what we think is the Signature Event in women’s golf, and are very excited to present a wonderful test and a wonderful experience for the golfers, the community, the volunteers, everyone who’s involved.
Today I have with me all the way to the far site, CEO of the USGA, Mike Whan, and Shannon Rouillard, senior director of championships, also known, and you’ll no doubt here this, as Chip. I’m going to toss it over to Mike for a few comments.
MIKE WHAN: Thank you all for coming. I wanted to say thank you all in the media for being here and getting this message out to the folks who follow you.
Ten years ago, some would question the robustness of golf because we had lost about five million people in the game from the decade before. If you jump forward to today, the numbers don’t lie. There’s virtually no doubt about the future of this game.
We’re up 38 percent, 47 million people playing the game; on-course has gone up every year over the last six years; 545 million rounds played, which 55 percent bigger than just five years ago.
What’s really cool about the game right now is after all that growth, there’s 24 million people saying they want to start the game now, and of that 24 million people, over 40 percent of Black and Hispanic.
What an amazing thing for our game. As a guy who spent a lot of his career in the game, I never thought I’d be able to say, and we’re saying it right now.
Maybe here importantly, women leading the way in the game today — again, something I didn’t think I could say in 2009 when I took the LPGA job.
A third of this game is now made up of women. One third of the people who play the game in America are women, and really 60 percent of the growth we’ve all experienced since COVID has been driven by women.
That gets us to a pretty amazing time in the game right now.
We’re obviously here to talk about the 80th U.S. Women’s Open, and as I said at media day for some of you that were there, please don’t miss the 80 in 80th, because 80 is one of the things that makes this championship so special.
The LPGA is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year; the LET is celebrating its 47th year; the NCAA Division I championships are celebrating their 43rd.
When somebody says what makes the U.S. Women’s Open so unique, first is legacy. It’s just been here. It’s the longest running professional women’s championship.
Second is the venues. It’s places like this. And you think about a place like Erin Hills. Where do we go from here? Riviera where we’ll play before the Olympics. We’ll go from there to Inverness where you saw a pretty amazing Solheim Cup. From there we will play Oakmont, which you will all be at hopefully in a couple of weeks.
And then after that we’ll go back-to-back again in Pinehurst. So bringing this championship to great venues is one of the things that makes it a great championship.
Purse, $12 million; $2.4 winner’s check. If you, missed the cut this week, you’ll still receive $10,000. As I have said every year, we really believe that getting into this field is making the cut.
There was over 1900, do I have that right? Over 1900 participants tried to make it into one of these 156 tee times.
If you think about firsts, we like to kind of bring firsts. First to get to a $3 million purse, $5 million purse, $10 million purse, $12 million purse.
Now we need walk-up music for you, but I want to make sure you understand who you are talking to when you’re talking to Shannon “Chip” Rouillard.
She played in a U.S. Women’s Open, so she’s stood on that first tee that felt that pain. She is, and this is where the music should come in, back-to-back New Jersey Senior Amateur champion. Back-to-back New Jersey Senior Amateur champion, which means we really don’t work you that hard.
Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy some time with Chip.
SHANNON ROUILLARD: Thank you, Mike. Oh, boy, okay. The USGA was founded to govern the game and conduct USGA championships. We take great pride in where we conduct our championships. We go to the cathedrals of the game. America’s greatest venues because players have told us that it’s important where they win their U.S. Open.
Openness, you can earn your way into a USGA championship. I happen to have played in eight USGA championships now, including a Women’s Open, as Mike referenced, and I qualified for every single one of them.
Presenting a tough but fair test of golf. We strive to get every club dirty for the players here this week. Birdies will be made but par is a good score, but we will look to stick with the true intent of the architecture.
Player focus. We take great pride and continue to work very hard in cultivating relationships with players. We ask for their feedback on a regular basis. We explain our decisions and hope to earn their respect.
Past champions are a priority to us and the player experience is paramount.
As Mike also mentioned, we have a long-standing relationship with Erin Hills that goes back to before Erin Hills even opened for business. They’ve hosted four USGA championships thus far and are hosting five more events for the next 20 years.
Erin Hills’ leadership Andy Ziegler and the entire leadership team has made an incredible commitment to the Women’s Open this week. The last time this golf course was open was last October, which is exactly the same commitment they made leading into the U.S. Open.
Erin Hills is about strategic decision making. It’s also about the generous fairways that are out there. Players will have the opportunity to — it’ll be important for them to utilize the playing angles that are out there, given a particular day’s hole location. Tees and greens are perched up on dunes so the players are going to experience a lot of uneven lies and blind and semi-blind shots into greens and even off the tee.
Over a third of the holes have an essential bunker in front of the putting green, and sometimes it’s a really long bunker that’s going to force the players to play the aerial game. In addition, it’s going to play with their depth perception, given there’s no trees out there to provide that depth perception for them.
The greens surround architecture will allow the players the opportunity to funnel the ball towards the hole, but also repel the ball further away from the hole, which is going to force them to think about their club selection; am I going to putt this? Am I going to chip this? Am I going to use a hybrid? How am I going to get the ball close from this really tight lie?
Obviously, it’s a very tough walk. This is a big golf course, and it’s going to test the players’ mentally and physically.
- What do you think is the charm of this place, not just the course but the location, and what do you hope viewers watching this on TV get from it?
MIKE WHAN: Yeah, I’ve said this many times so apologize for the potential eye roll but this is Field of Dreams for golf. You’re driving out here and you kind of keep driving and you go, maybe I missed it.
Then you take the left into this property, and it’s if you build it. It just feels — my parents are from Iowa so it reminds me of the Iowa drive and then you pull in. It’s just majestic.
I remember the first time I played it. I played with Andy the first time a couple years ago, and I remember saying, it’s kind of one of those places I wish I would have designed. I mean, I wouldn’t have done this well, but like it’s amazing what kind of vision they must have had, and to bring it to this level, it’s a special place.
I think you’re going to have a lot of people frozen after they hit, because this place is about where your ball ends up, not where it starts. You just find yourself after a lot of shots hitting it and still talking to it, because it’s not about where it lands, it’s about where it’s going to finish its run.
I think that’s going to create some real anxiety, especially if there’s wind. I’ve played it in some tough wind, too. It just changes the vibe out here.
- For both of you, you mentioned a third of the golfers are women. How and when do you get to 40 percent, 45 percent, more?
MIKE WHAN: That’s a great question. Sorry, Chip, but this one gets me excited. I remember when I took my job at the LPGA commissioner, January of 2010, my first question in the press conference was how do you feel about the future of women’s golf.
I remember thinking, as soon as I get off this press conference I am going to go look and see where junior golf is, because maybe junior golf is great and I could have just said it, but I didn’t know.
About 85 percent of the game was male and about 85 percent of the junior game was male. So there wasn’t any reason to believe in the future.
But today I don’t know what the number is. I want to say 37 percent of junior golf is female versus 15 percent not too long ago. 39 percent last year are people who played the game for the first time were women.
Haven’t said that in 100 years.
I always used to say, you don’t have to believe me about the future of the game. The future of the game is happening. You just go look and see what it is. With this many people wanting to play, with the people wanting to play this diverse, Hispanic, female, African-American, just — there’s a wave coming in our game that’s already here, so you don’t have to wonder if it’s going to get here.
I think if women’s golf was a stock, you’d buy it because it’s what’s driving our game forward. I’m not saying that because we’re sitting here at the U.S. Women’s Open or because I’m a former LPGA commissioner. I’m telling you that’s just factual. If the NGF were sitting up here and you asked him why is the game taking off, the first comment they would give you is women in the game.
The first thing they would say about the future is the future of the game looks more female than it’s ever looked in 100 years. That’s an exciting time.
I’ve said this many times. People say, why do you think there are more viewers or there’s more fans? I would say, just sit tight. That’s like the people that two years ago said to me, why are TV ratings down in the men’s game?
I’m like, stop looking at a week or a month or a tournament. People are playing this game at a level never before, and that will turn into viewership, and it is.
And the same thing is going to happen in the women’s game. You fall in love with this game and you want to watch the best women in the game, and that’s what’s going to happen., this is going to be a natural pickup.