Our important objective, right here at GOLF Originals, is to deliver fascinating individuals to you, expensive viewer, with out sitting our topic down in a clubhouse Windsor chair on a tartan carpet with a framed poster of the unique 1745 Rules of Golf on a close-by wall. With these floor guidelines in thoughts, we introduced David Feherty, golf broadcasting legend, to the Psychic Eye Bookstore in Las Vegas for our March premiere. time. We toured an enormous sand pit in South Florida, a course underneath building known as Sandglass, with Tom Doak, the sensible course architect, for our April present. Fun! And now, for our May version, and right on time for the U.S. Open I (ladies) and U.S. Open II (males), comes Mike Whan, the USGA’s CEO. My colleague Darren Riehl, the producer of this sequence, and I joined Whan at a nine-hole, mom-and-pop golf course known as Palm Valley, about 10 miles or so from TPC Sawgrass. Whan cherished it. He was right at dwelling, chatting up the course proprietor, Chris Hord, and his random taking part in accomplice, a retired schoolteacher named Louise.
The distance between PVGC and the Stadium Course is far better than 10 miles, utilizing a sextant with a metaphorical bias. The weekday inexperienced charge at Palm Valley is $18. The course is 1,500 yards, all stretched out. A nasty slice may hit a horse. And Mike Whan was having a superb time.
That’s actually the person in a nutshell, and why this present was such a pleasure to do with him. The CEO of the USGA loves taking part in golf, being on golf programs, speaking to golf individuals. Whan can just about play any course he desires, hobnob with any course proprietor he needs, play with whomever he chooses. The Palm Valley course suited him simply positive after which some. But on the coronary heart of the person is a public-course golfer who prefers a sleeve off the rack that comes with a bonus fourth ball.
Darren Riehl/GOLF Originals
Whan is a superb golfer (he can break 80) with an athletic swing (he performed soccer in highschool and school). But when he push-shoved one other shot right into a murky PVGC pond, he mentioned, “I’ll stop at the pro shop on 6 to buy more balls.” The USGA boss doesn’t take himself too severely! This is an impressive growth.
Wherever he goes in this recreation, Whan is going to have a superb time. And isn’t that why we’re drawn to this recreation within the first place, to have a superb time, even by means of our distress?
In this episode, you will notice (we predict) why Whan is the best particular person to guide the USGA in this odd time in golf, when participation numbers are at all-time highs (they’re measurable) and frustration with males’s elite skilled golf is at a peak, too. (Ask anyone.) Whan, because the LPGA commissioner, helped make the ladies’s tour extra world, with the world’s greatest ladies golfers taking part in extra typically and for more cash on higher programs. Whan and his spouse, Meg, have three sons, and Whan loves taking part in golf with them. But in his skilled life, he has one eye and a part of one other on the ladies’s recreation. What Meg and Mike Whan miss most about their LPGA days was the front-row seat they needed to all of the motion on the Solheim Cup.
The points going through the USGA, and golf at massive, are severe. Water conservation. Land conservation. A recreation that struggles with elementary questions of how far a golf ball ought to fly and the way an inherently complex recreation can simplify its guidelines. Also: What constitutes a spherical? And, whereas we’re at it, what constitutes a golfer? Whan is certainly one of golf’s most vital figures at a time when the sport is at a crossroads.
Whan is a person of robust opinions, and good sufficient to know when he must preserve these opinions to himself. What you’ll see right here is a leader in golf who believes in listening, in consensus, in a golf’s better good.
It’s doable that Louise, our pathfinder at PVGC, didn’t give us the complete danger-Will-Robinson alert to hidden water hazards. Whan registered no criticism. Why would he? He is aware of how good he has it.
Some years in the past, he and his father have been driving to Augusta National, making a flip off Washington Road and into the membership’s well-known driveway, Magnolia Lane. Whan was a “bunker boy” as a child, raking and weeding Ohio sand traps on sizzling summer time days. His introduction to the sport. Father didn’t totally respect how far his son had come.
“Mike,” he mentioned, “what are you doing!?”
Mike Whan didn’t take that moment, that clicking flip sign, for granted. We’re glad he’s the place he is, within the recreation and in our sequence.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your feedback at Michael.Bamberger@golf.com
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