Our fundamental purpose, right here at GOLF Originals, is to deliver attention-grabbing individuals to you, expensive viewer, with out sitting our topic down in a clubhouse Windsor chair on a tartan carpet with a framed poster of the unique 1745 Guidelines of Golf on a close-by wall. With these floor guidelines in thoughts, we introduced David Feherty, golf broadcasting legend, to the Psychic Eye Bookstore in Las Vegas for our March premiere. A superb time. We toured an enormous sand pit in South Florida, a course underneath development referred to as Sandglass, with Tom Doak, the good course architect, for our April present. Enjoyable! And now, for our Might version, and proper on time for the U.S. Open I (ladies) and U.S. Open II (males), comes Mike Whan, the USGA’s CEO. My colleague Darren Riehl, the producer of this sequence, and I joined Whan at a nine-hole, mom-and-pop golf course referred to as Palm Valley, about 10 miles or so from TPC Sawgrass. Whan cherished it. He was proper at residence, chatting up the course proprietor, Chris Hord, and his random enjoying associate, a retired schoolteacher named Louise.
The space between PVGC and the Stadium Course is much higher than 10 miles, utilizing a sextant with a metaphorical bias. The weekday inexperienced payment at Palm Valley is $18. The course is 1,500 yards, all stretched out. A nasty slice may hit a horse. And Mike Whan was having an excellent time.
That’s actually the person in a nutshell, and why this present was such a pleasure to do with him. The CEO of the USGA loves enjoying golf, being on golf programs, speaking to golf individuals. Whan can just about play any course he desires, hobnob with any course proprietor he needs, play with whomever he chooses. The Palm Valley course suited him simply positive after which some. However on the coronary heart of the person is a public-course golfer who prefers a sleeve off the rack that comes with a bonus fourth ball.
Darren Riehl/GOLF Originals
Whan is an efficient golfer (he can break 80) with an athletic swing (he performed soccer in highschool and faculty). However when he push-shoved one other shot right into a murky PVGC pond, he stated, “I’ll cease on the professional store on 6 to purchase extra balls.” The USGA boss doesn’t take himself too severely! That is an impressive improvement.
Wherever he goes on this sport, Whan goes to have an excellent time. And isn’t that why we’re drawn to this sport within the first place, to have an excellent time, even by way of our distress?
On this episode, you will notice (we expect) why Whan is the perfect individual to guide the USGA on this odd time in golf, when participation numbers are at all-time highs (they’re measurable) and frustration with males’s elite skilled golf is at a peak, too. (Ask anyone.) Whan, because the LPGA commissioner, helped make the ladies’s tour extra international, with the world’s finest ladies golfers enjoying extra typically and for more cash on higher programs. Whan and his spouse, Meg, have three sons, and Whan loves enjoying golf with them. However in his skilled life, he has one eye and a part of one other on the ladies’s sport. What Meg and Mike Whan miss most about their LPGA days was the front-row seat they needed to all of the motion on the Solheim Cup.
The problems dealing with the USGA, and golf at massive, are severe. Water conservation. Land conservation. A sport that struggles with elementary questions of how far a golf ball ought to fly and the way an inherently advanced sport can simplify its guidelines. Additionally: What constitutes a spherical? And, whereas we’re at it, what constitutes a golfer? Whan is considered one of golf’s most vital figures at a time when the sport is at a crossroads.
Whan is a person of robust opinions, and sensible sufficient to know when he must hold these opinions to himself. What you’ll see here’s a chief in golf who believes in listening, in consensus, in a golf’s higher good.
It’s attainable that Louise, our pathfinder at PVGC, didn’t give us the complete danger-Will-Robinson alert to hidden water hazards. Whan registered no grievance. Why would he? He is aware of how good he has it.
Some years in the past, he and his father had been driving to Augusta Nationwide, making a flip off Washington Highway and into the membership’s well-known driveway, Magnolia Lane. Whan was a “bunker boy” as a child, raking and weeding Ohio sand traps on sizzling summer time days. His introduction to the sport. Father didn’t totally respect how far his son had come.
“Mike,” he stated, “what are you doing!?”
Mike Whan didn’t take that second, that clicking flip sign, with no consideration. We’re glad he’s the place he’s, within the sport and in our sequence.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your feedback at Michael.Bamberger@golf.com
