Alan Pastel
LOS ANGELES – Shahith Thigala is not used to hitting pegs from the tee, certainly not in the big leagues. But he was there on the 15th hole of the North Course at Los Angeles Country Club on Wednesday afternoon, hitting a ball skyward with a secured 60-degree angle toward a target the size of a small swimming pool in the backyard.
His swinging thoughts?
“I’m just trying not to knife it,” he said, laughing, as he rowed 78 yards from the tee to the pin. “Yeah, literally — just trying to cut it, get a little spin.”
The 15th hole is officially listed as 124 yards at this US Open, but all signs point to the USGA pushing the tees up for a round, so the hole will be playing somewhere closer to 80 yards (aka, what will be the shortest hole in the US Open history), just as it did when North Course hosted the Walker Cup in 2017.
During that event, Doug Game, who played on the American side, said of the 15th, “Half the battle was trying to decide whether to use the tee or ground it.”
The other half of the battle is more complicated: where does your ball land.
The 15th green is shaped like a boomerang that narrows as it moves from back to front. When both the tee and the flag return, the hole can play approximately 150 yards. But when the tee and flag are up, the hole is only played half that distance—but in a landing zone only seven yards deep. Short bugs will find a cavernous hideout or a rough strip. The same goes for long faults. Even the far left isn’t very good either. If players leave their tees on the wrong side of the handle that splits the green, they will be left with a treacherous position up and over a hill and down a slippery slope.
Here’s the point: yeah, it’s just an 80-yard flip but you had better execute a good flip.
“I think the key doesn’t go straight to the pin,” Tegala said. “You want to try to go over the hole and to the left.”
He paused, resized the green, then added, “I love this hole. I think it’s cool.”
Whether all players will be so infatuated, only time will tell. Birds will be plentiful, but it’s also not hard to imagine a professional shot heading from the green to the back bunker, resulting in a 5 and a frown.
Short John Ramm played in the PAC-12 Championship a decade ago. He said he remembers hitting “a great shot. His foot landed off the hole and [went] for a long time in the rough.”
He added, “You rarely have a short hole where the best players in the world think about going 20 feet to the left to use that ramp to at least get to the green, which is nice. It’s a hole that gives you a lot to think about.”
This was evident during Wednesday’s practice run. As players scrutinized the expected position of the 80-yard pin, they played shots from all directions: blasts from the forward bunker, sensitive chips from the meandering rough putt from over the hole. Sergio Garcia and Ross Fischer spent at least five minutes observing the minutiae of the green; As they walked around the surface of the installation together, they gesticulated like explorers pointing out new finds.
Training partners Xander Schaufelle and Patrick Cantlay hit several strokes from the far side of the handle all the way to the bottom pin, with both players taking very different lines. Cantlay swung his bandage to the right while Chauvel went to the left. Incredibly, looking at the banks on either side of the green, both putts made their way toward the hole.
“Fifteen is one of those holes where you can kind of do whatever you want with it,” Scotty Scheffler said earlier in the week. “It’s really a genius design in the way the green is. I love those little short shows. I think that’s the way most triple bonuses should be, just because there’s a chance for birdies and bogeys.”
According to NBC Sports’ John Wood, Ricky Fowler said he might lie down. Crazy talk? Maybe maybe not. The shaved area off the bottom of the green leaves a relatively simple slide or re-slope.
If the USGA drills the 15th over a great distance, it won’t be the shortest hole Theegala has played in the competition. That honor goes to the 15th hole at Lakeside Golf Club, just 10 miles from the LACC, where Theegala played at the 2019 Southern California Golf Association Amateur.
“Impossible shot,” Thigala said Wednesday. “Downwind, 68 yards, I thought I hit perfect—hopped once.”
It doesn’t matter. He still won that week.