Teams Come and Go, but This Place Stays the Course

So we’ve lost the Rams and Raiders. So what? We’ll live.

Look at it this way: We’ve had Olympics, World Series, Super Bowls, Final Fours, heavyweight title fights here. Bowl games started here.

And, we’ve had a U.S. Open and two PGAs.

Now, how many communities do you know of off-hand that have had two Olympic Games, nine World Series, seven Super Bowls--including the first one--a U.S. Open and two PGAs?

Next month, for the fourth time in our history, we get a “major” golf tournament. The PGA will be played at Riviera for the second time in a little more than a decade.

All golf, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts. There are the regular weekly tour events, there are the international events--the Ryder Cup, the World Cup--and there are the majors.

In golf, majors are like title fights. Everything else is kind of like the undercard. You measure success in golf by majors won. If you don’t win a major, your career is considered incomplete. Tennis players have to win Wimbledon, the U.S., Australian or French Open. Horses have to win the Kentucky Derby or another Triple Crown race. Auto racers have to win at Indy or Daytona Beach. Ballplayers need a World Series.

And a golfer has to come up with the British or U.S. Open, or the Masters or PGA to be taken seriously. You don’t go into the history books if you’ve won only three tournaments unless two of them were majors, as two of Andy North’s were. He won the U.S. Open twice. If you win only one PGA Tour event in your career--as Orville Moody did--better make it a major, as he did at the 1969 U.S. Open.

The designation major was hard-earned. A weekly tour event could come to be a lollipop in which all you needed were a driver, an eight-iron and a putter. For a major, you need the whole bag.

Majors are staged on courses that are adversaries, not accomplices.

The U.S. Amateur was considered a major in the days Bobby Jones played it. It has faded in importance. The British Amateur has become invisible.

The presence of the U.S. and British Opens and PGA are self-explanatory. The inclusion of the Masters is less evident. It is played on a gorgeous course at a time of the year when there is little else going on. But for years it was contested by a field that leaned heavily to amateurs--the entire Walker Cup teams, for example, were eligible. Not surprisingly, it was won by the same golfers year after year. Jack Nicklaus won six times, for example, and Arnold Palmer four. And in one three-year period, either Ben Hogan or Sam Snead won it.

It has become a happy hunting ground for the foreign players of late. They have won eight of the last 15.

The British Open was first played in 1860, the U.S. Open in 1895. The PGA started in 1916. The Masters didn’t begin till 1934. Heck, they had steel clubs by then.

The PGA was always the most valuable to the player. Victory gave the winner a lifetime exemption into any tournament. It did away with the dreaded Monday morning qualifying or the gut-wrenching 144-hole Q-school qualifying.

The PGA was match play in its early years, head-to-head, hole-by-hole competition in which medal score was secondary. But that format could not survive television. The cameras would come on just as one player would be closing out another, 8-up with six holes to play.

Match play finals also brought to the viewing public--looking in vain for Palmer-Nicklaus or Hogan-Snead--such stirring matchups as Walter Burkemo vs. Felice Torza or Chandler Harper vs. Henry Williams Jr. Hardly Dempsey-Firpo. And those matchups didn’t sell many Cadillacs.

Riviera Country Club is a shrine of golf. It is the only course in Southern California to have had a U.S. Open, in 1948. And the week of Aug. 6, it will become the only Southern California course to have served as host to two PGAs.

There is not a drop of water on it. There are no trick configurations. You can shoot a 62 on it. Fred Couples did in 1990. You can also shoot an 84 on it. Lanny Wadkins did in 1975.

You can make it as unplayable as the Himalayas if you let the elephant grass grow. But who wants a whole bunch of 76s?

Riviera does what a course is supposed to do. It makes the golfer think, makes him take the “A” game out, lets him know he has been in a fight, runs the ribbon clerks out. The course doesn’t need artificial water holes or two-tiered greens. There isn’t a dogleg on it.

The greatest players in the game have won here--Hogan, Snead, Byron Nelson, Lloyd Mangrum, Johnny Miller, Tom Watson.

When Hogan won the U.S. Open at Riviera in 1948, after having won the L.A. Open there in 1947 and 1948, it became known as “Hogan’s Alley.” It was there he made his comeback in 1950 after a near-death bus accident--and almost won again, losing in a playoff to Snead.

Whose alley is Riviera now? Corey Pavin won the 1994 and 1995 L.A. Opens here. If he wins the 1995 PGA, does it become “Corey’s Corner?” “Pavin’s Patch?” Maybe it will fall victim to a shark attack and Greg Norman can win his first American major.

Whatever happens will be golf’s gain. The lure of Los Angeles is safe, the lore of Riviera is alive and well.

It won’t pick up and move to St. Louis. It’s here to stay, a hallowed, permanent part of Southern California’s sports terrain.

And if someone should come up to a guy sitting on a shooting stick and consulting a PGA pairing sheet on one of its fairways and say, “Isn’t it too bad about the Raiders?” the golf fan will look up and say, “The who?”