Brooks Koepka may have been the one who raised the championship trophy at the 118th U.S. Open on Sunday afternoon, but Shinnecock Hills Golf Club course superintendent Jon Jennings also was celebrating a win that day.Speaking on Monday, the day after Koepka won the tournament with a score of 1-over-par, Jennings said the experience of hosting the major championship was a success—despite talk from some players, golf writers and broadcasters that the setup, particularly on Saturday, was too harsh.Jennings was not ruffled by those criticisms, taking it in stride while expressing his pride in the work that was done and the way the course presented itself to spectators who were there and watched on television.“The conditions obviously played tough, and the wind was the whole factor with it,” he said while sitting in his office at the maintenance shed at the club on Monday morning. “Identifying how that changes the course from the morning to the afternoon is just something that, if you play here on a regular basis, you become accustomed to the changes that occur.“It really varies depending on what’s happening with the wind,” Jennings continued. “The wind was strong on Thursday, and on Friday, there was a little less. On Saturday, it was windier than they originally forecasted, and so I believe that caused the players a little bit of trouble as they went along. [Sunday] was just the normal June wind out of the southwest.”By Monday morning, the world’s best players had all left, and the buzzing of fans rising and cheering for shots made—or collectively groaning at shots missed—had been replaced by the whir and hum of forklifts and other machinery dismantling the massive infrastructure that had been built for the championship.Still, golf was being played in the midst of that, with a few groups of players sparsely dotting the landscape.The club was set to officially open for business again on Wednesday, and Jennings said it would only take a few weeks to get it back in working order. For the course to fully return to “normalcy,” more work is still required, but Jennings estimated that in three years the evidence of this year’s championship will be fully erased—and then, three years after that, preparations for the 2026 U.S. Open will begin.At this year’s Open, the fifth hosted by the club, scores were high on Saturday, and some players expressed their discontent with the course’s setup—particularly a few pin placements that became notably menacing due to drier than anticipated conditions. There were faint echoes of the disastrous Sunday finish when the Open was last at Shinnecock in 2004, when dried-out greens needed to be watered during play.Jennings said he didn’t sweat it.“From a turf health perspective, I wasn’t concerned at all,” he said. “We monitored areas throughout the day, and we felt completely comfortable with how the golf course presented itself.”As the course superintendent, Jennings is not responsible for pin placements, which is strictly the purview of the USGA. But he said that, while there can occasionally be disagreements, the relationship between his staff and the USGA is positive and productive.“The relationship the club has with the USGA is so good at this point, it’s really a team effort,” he said. “We discuss items, go back and forth, and we may not always agree, but we go out with a plan and implement it.“It’s always hard to tell how a hole is going to play until the players start using it,” he continued. “I set hole locations all the time, and there might be a discussion after an event where we’re saying, that one might have been too close. So I’ve done the exact same thing.”Mike Davis, the executive director of the USGA, did issue a statement saying that, in hindsight, some of Saturday’s pin placements were a bit too harsh. But Jennings defended the work of the USGA by explaining that course setup, and setting hole locations in particular, is challenging, and that the way players feel about it can vary.“The course didn’t get away from anybody,” he said, when asked about comments from some players who expressed their displeasure with Saturday’s setup. “When you hear that, you need to look at how somebody played that day. A lot of commentary is predicated on how they did on the golf course. So you have to take it with a grain of salt.”Sunday’s setup was kinder, and the scores reflected that. But Jennings said he and his staff did not deviate from a typical preparation plan to overcompensate in any way for the harshness of Saturday. He used the analogy of a runner to describe the changes over the weekend.“If you run and you didn’t drink enough water during the race, you become dehydrated—and on Saturday, it became a little bit dehydrated,” he said. “After the race, you drink a little more water, and then you’re back to normal.”Many of the pros said they felt the setup was tough but fair, providing a counterpoint to the opinions of other players.Jennings pointed out what many people have said about Shinnecock in praise of a course that has a unique ability to test the world’s best golfers.“The big mystery to players, from what I saw during the week, was that instead of laying up and having a ball roll up, they were going for the green and playing target golf—kind of like what they are accustomed to—and this course doesn’t lend itself to that,” he said. “This course is kind of a throwback in how you need to play and approach the game. You need to think it through.”The work of getting the course ready for those players was clearly thought through, and Jennings said that perhaps the biggest surprise takeaway for him was just how smoothly it went.“I’ve worked a lot of events, and I’ve been more stressed at other events than this one,” he said. “We had such a good group of volunteers. People cared about what they were doing and were on point all the time. I was always waiting for some bump in the road or something to go awry, but it didn’t happen. With all that equipment, and with people going out who didn’t know the course, and you’re sleep deprived—we didn’t have any incidents at all.”
Cailin Riley on Jun 19, 2018