Welcome to The Los Angeles Country Club, whose North Course will host its first U.S. Open from June 15-18. It’s a place unfamiliar to most people, an oasis bordering Beverly Hills that was a bean and barley farm before the hands of Herbert Fowler and George Thomas shaped it into one of golf’s legendary landscapes in the 1920s.
And if the USGA’s Jeff Hall is prescient, it might provide the setting for a rollicking 123rd U.S. Open Championship.
“I almost feel bad for the standard bearers, because they could be very busy changing those numbers,” said Hall, who has been involved in U.S. Open course setup since 2006. “There are a number of holes where I think we could see two-shot swings on Saturday and Sunday.”
The North Course’s championship history includes five Los Angeles Opens, the 1930 U.S. Women’s Amateur, the 1954 U.S. Junior Amateur and the 2017 Walker Cup Match, where the winning USA side featured major champions Scottie Scheffler and Collin Morikawa as well as 2022 U.S. Open runner-up Will Zalatoris. That two-day competition gave the USGA important insights into how the best players in the world might challenge the North Course in June.
The history of The Los Angeles Country Club dates to 1897 and a rudimentary nine-hole course built not far from downtown LA. After two subsequent moves brought on by an expanding membership, the club established its current home in 1911, with a course laid out by four members. After acquiring additional land, the members enlisted Fowler to design two courses a decade later, and the Englishman delivered the North and South Courses, which were seen as a championship layout and a members’ course, respectively.
In 1927, after the first LA Open was held on the North Course, modifications to the original Fowler 1921 layout were undertaken by Thomas, a Philadelphia native and LACC member who had executed Fowler’s design as the primary engineer on the project. Though several holes play over the same ground as the Fowler design, Thomas revamped many of them and created several new holes. He was fresh off completing his own original designs for nearby Bel-Air and The Riviera Country Clubs – the former will host the 2023 U.S. Women’s Amateur, while the latter is a perennial PGA Tour site that hosted the only previous U.S. Open in Los Angeles (1948).
The par-70 course that will greet competitors in June is unusual in that it features five par 3s and three par 5s – one more of each than is typical for a U.S. Open.
“The collection of par 3s here is second to none in the country,” said Hall. They range from the downhill, 290-yard 11th hole, with its backdrop of the downtown skyline, to the devilish 15th hole, listed at 124 yards on the card, although it played as short as 78 yards during Walker Cup match play.
“There’s an ebb and flow throughout the course, with wonderful strategy, especially off the tee,” noted Hall. “It’ll be interesting to see how the best players in the world game-plan and attack the course.”
Golf architect Gil Hanse, who with his design partner Jim Wagner and golf historian Geoff Shackelford painstakingly restored the Thomas course, considers the assignment at LACC that began in 2006 the most significant of his career, which also includes restoring recent U.S. Open host sites Merion, Oakmont, Winged Foot and The Country Club.
