Something To Consider Next Time Around: Jim Nantz's Winged Foot Composite Course
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The rescheduled 2020 U.S. Open was a success despite the horror of a six-under-par winning score and the West Course not getting the treatment from NBC’s budget-conscious approach vs. what CBS has been doing of late or what Fox’s Mark Loomis and crew might have provided with a normal budget.
As the USGA and Winged Foot discuss what’s next, including “anchor site” status according to Mike Dougherty’s reporting, another well-known member offered a pre-tournament suggestion for future Opens: a composite of the West and East Courses.
At the risk of getting called before some committee of point missers, CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz offered a way to better highlight the club’s more soulful East Course while retaining the best of the West.
From his Golf Digest column that is now online:
When Winged Foot hosts the U.S. Open next time around, I’d love to see a full representation of its two courses. I’m talking a composite of the famous and familiar West Course, and the lesser known but equally (some say surpassingly) magnificent East Course. On the surface it sounds like a radical idea, but I’ve long believed that a combination of the two would result in a design that is formidable, beautiful, sensible and unique in major-championship golf.
I’ve gone through the course a few times and I think its sensational. Yes, it’s only 7,266 yards and the driving range situation is complicated, but I only see one problem no one could have imagined pre-tournament: 370-yard plus drives at what would be Nantz’s “Dream Course” finishing hole, the West’s ninth hole.
Converted back to a par-5 this year, the longer hitters recorded some epic drives and faced huge decisions between wedge or nine-iron approaches, with Dustin Johnson capping the madness by launching one 418-yards Sunday.
That’s an issue for the governing bodies.
More impressively, in Nantz’s composite course the famous 10th hole West remains the 10th, the 1st the first—it’s a very severe green you know—and the current 18th West becomes the ninth. No one will shed a tear about that.
There is one long (200 yard) walk from the proposed 12th West to the proposed 13th (which is the fantastic mid-length par-4 15th West). This very minor annoyance sets up a stretch of East Course gems that would become the composite’s 14th to 17th holes. The East’s par-3 17th, a favorite hole of many, retains its number but a newfound prominence in deciding the U.S. Open outcome.
Nantz has given the USGA something to think about for that next time the U.S. Open heads to Winged Foot.
