BROOKLINE, Mass. — Given the times, there could have been no more fitting venue for the 122nd U.S. Open than The Country Club, one of American golf’s five foundational pillars, associated in perpetuity with a man who did actually grow the game despite never competing for a nickel, and all during these waning weeks of golf as we’ve known it. Appropriate too that the championship was held 10 miles from the site of the Boston Tea Party, when aggrieved merchants rose against an imperial power, though Samuel Adams didn’t require guarantees from a foreign power before signing on to his rebellion.
This Open deserves to be remembered for all the right reasons: the transcendent performance of Matt Fitzpatrick, the magnificent old architecture holding its own against modern power, the enthusiasm of fans in a sports town that had been too long deprived of a major. That’s what it will be remembered for, in time. But it might also be recalled as one of the last majors of “before times,” when the structure of the professional game still resembled what it had been for a half-century or so.
The coming days and weeks threaten a radical upheaval in golf as more players opt for money and comfort over morals and competition, as the PGA and DP World tours scramble to align schedules, purses and priorities to retain the most elite talent, and as the major championships mull their power and how it might be best deployed, if at all. Careers and legacies were shaped at The Country Club. The shape of golf going forward will be molded in nondescript conference rooms and lawyers’ offices, beginning Tuesday morning 96 miles southwest of Brookline in Hartford, Connecticut.
