Battered Riviera Still Trying to Polish Its Post-PGA Image

The 77th PGA Championship at Riviera Country Club is a year-old memory of greens the color of baked eggplant and crowds that looked more like the express checkout line at the supermarket than a major golf tournament.

It has been 12 months since Steve Elkington won his first--and only--major title with a birdie putt on the first playoff hole to defeat Colin Montgomerie, but that hasn’t been long enough for the storied Pacific Palisades layout to pull itself back together completely.

The beleaguered greens are better, but they aren’t great and they still are controversial.

And the club’s reputation has been traveling a long, complicated road to get back to where it used to be.

“Riviera and the city kind of got a bad knock,” said Dick Caruso, who was general chairman of the PGA Championship at Riviera.

Peter Pino, the club’s general manager, said Riviera’s greens are recovering nicely, and so is Riviera’s reputation.

“We thank everybody for their patience,” Pino said.

However, Riviera’s greens are far from perfect. Their root structure extends only 2 1/2-4 1/2 inches, which means they can’t be made faster without risking another collapse.

That’s basically what happened at last year’s PGA when fragile greens were cut short to produce major championship speeds. But that led to spike marks, burned out greens and a lot of complaints by the players.

“If the PGA hadn’t been so strong about the speed, it wouldn’t have been the disaster it was,” Caruso said.

No one has played Riviera in anything but soft spikes since the PGA.

“What can you do?” Caruso said. “They showed up for a couple of weeks, left town and we had to take the brunt of the criticism.”

Riviera probably will have as many as 60,000 rounds played this year and that is a lot, considering the relatively small size of the greens, which probably average only 4,500 square feet.

Riviera has brought on a greens consultant, former USGA expert Bill Bengeyfield, but hasn’t had a greens superintendent since Bill Baker resigned under fire last year.

While the greens are improving, they still concern the PGA Tour, which will stage the Nissan Open at Riviera next February. PGA Tour officials have suggested that Riviera strip and re-seed all its greens, but club officials believe that to be unnecessary.

Such a process means members would have to play temporary greens for four to five months, and that could mean lost revenue for the club.

Pino said Riviera is on the right track with its greens.

“We’ve made a dramatic improvement,” he said. “By [next] February, they’re obviously going to be a hell of a lot better than they were a year ago.”

Besides the condition of the greens at the PGA, there was also the ticket controversy, basically involving a lack of sales. Some attendance estimates for the seven days of the PGA Championship were as low as 97,000.

The PGA of America blamed the Riviera committee and the local market. The Riviera committee blamed the PGA.

Caruso, a Riviera member for 34 years, said he urged the PGA to sell individual day tickets in addition to weeklong packages in order to spur sales, but the PGA didn’t change tactics until the tournament had begun.

“We knew the season-ticket plan wouldn’t work,” Caruso said. “Los Angeles is not like going out to Valhalla, for crying out loud, where they’re golf-starved.”

This year’s PGA Championship is at Valhalla Golf Club in Lexington, Ky., beginning Thursday.

Whatever problems linger at Riviera, there still is time to get everything in order before the next major championship that’s coming--the 1998 U.S. Senior Open.

Caruso said he is eager for the event and another chance for the club.

“We want to show the golf world the real Riviera,” he said.

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James Oh from Lakeside, qualified for the U.S. Amateur, which will be Aug. 19-25 at Pumpkin Ridge outside Portland, Ore.

So what’s the big deal?

James Oh is 14.

He is the youngest person to qualify for the U.S. Amateur. At 14 years 4 months, he is one month younger than Bobby Jones in 1916. Jones won the U.S. Amateur five times, the first time when he was 22.

Oh was one of five golfers who qualified out of a field of 99 at Western Hills in Chino Hills. He didn’t think he had a chance because of his age, but he shot 70-72.

“I just didn’t want to get embarrassed,” Oh said. “I didn’t even dream I’d qualify.”

The son of Min Oh and Young Soo Oh, James will be a freshman at Lakewood High School. He began playing golf at 7.

“I love it because it’s fun,” he said. “It’s also hard.”

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Elkington will be one of 14 former PGA champions in the field at Valhalla this week.

The others are Nick Price (1992, ‘94), Paul Azinger (1993), John Daly (1991), Wayne Grady (1990), Payne Stewart (1989), Jeff Sluman (1988), Larry Nelson (1981, ‘87), Bob Tway (1986), Hubert Green (1985), Hal Sutton (1983), Jack Nicklaus (1963, ‘71, ‘73, ‘75, ‘80), John Mahaffey (1978) and Lanny Wadkins (1977).