Jill Painter of the LA Daily News filed this column on the Northern Trust Open's ticket price debacle and talked to Jerry West about the low turnout, which didn't seem to bother the Executive Director.

"I was kind of pleased, to be honest with you," West said of this year's crowds.

This is West's first foray into golf, so he hasn't seen Riviera jumping and 10-deep galleries and the grass around the 18th green packed with people shoulder to shoulder by the time most folks have sipped their morning coffee.

I have to respectfully disagree with Painter on the price:

The Northern Trust Open should lower its ticket prices back to a manageable $35 so next year's champion has people clamoring on the outside of the ropes for a good look.

If you bought tickets online before the tournament started, you could secure them for $35. Once the tournament started, you had to pay $50 online or at the gate. Isn't golf exclusive enough?

The Northern Trust Open should encourage fans to attend, not discourage them by making it difficult to walk in the front gate. In this economy, $50 is laughable. Once fans walk in the front gate, they'll spend money at concession stands.

Actually there should have been no increase this year, so last year's $30 should have been the maximum.

Bill Dwyre mailed in an LA Times column about Riviera's U.S. Open chances.

This week's Northern Trust, with the course shrugging off more than three inches of rain and the final day played under bright skies and won by golf's poster boy for hard work, comebacks and general decency, was the perfect slide-show presentation.

There were USGA officials at the site, more watching on TV. The message was clear. This is what we can do, what it can look like, feel like, be like at Riviera.

Steve Elling read this and like most of us, knew the USGA Annual Meeting was at Pinehurst and that there was almost no chance of USGA officials paying a visit. He quotes Mike Davis extensively about Riviera's U.S. Open prospects and it sounds like it's fallen into the Merion class of boutique Open-style sites, which surprises me (I think Riviera has WAY more going for it than Merion, but I'm biased).

Despite assertions Monday in the Los Angeles Times that the course is a workable venue, nothing has changed since it last hosted an Open in 1948, when Ben Hogan limped his way to victory. In fact, the course has become even more claustrophobic as the National Open has grown even larger.

Riviera is a U.S. Open course crammed into a U.S. Amateur locale. The newspaper said there were USGA members on the grounds last week, evaluating the site, as the PGA Tour’s Northern Trust Open was staged, although Davis said the group's core staffers were at the annual USGA meeting in Pinehurst.

“If there were people there, boy, I’m totally unaware of it,” Davis said.

However he did share this regarding a recent USGA site visit:

“I think we said, ‘We could make it work, but it would be a very, very small U.S. Open,’” he recalled.

Just like the Riviera odds -- small to nil. Good luck pitching that idea to the USGA executive board, especially as the Open circus continues to grow. Ditto the organization’s appetites.

“And as you probably know, the U.S. Open is what pays for everything we do at the USGA,” Davis said. “Going to Merion is neat, and we’re looking forward to it, but it’s not something we can do very often.”
 

Davis saw last week’s paltry weeklong crowd estimate for the tour event at Riviera, which didn’t draw mind-blowing galleries when it hosted the 1995 PGA Championship, another major. 
 

“I saw that figure and thought, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Davis said. “Even if we limited tickets sales to 25,000, between the media, the marshals, the volunteers, concessions workers and all, we’d get that many [40,000] in a day.”

Actually, the U.S. Open does more in half a day than Riviera really did all of last week. But again, that's not Riviera or the fans' fault.