Sleeping giant reawakens

US OPEN/Countdown: Philip Reid visits Olympia Fields, the venue for the US Open which was lost and has been found again

Olympia Fields is not so much in Chicago as near Chicago. To get here from a downtown hotel - nice, right beside the railtrack "loop" - requires a daily train trip. Yesterday, that involved getting the 6.37 a.m. Metra Electric Train from Van Buren Station and stepping off again two minutes short of an hour later onto a platform at Olympia Fields.

The course in the unglamorous outer suburbs of south Chicago that later this week plays host to the 103rd US Open is one that was lost, and has been found again. It's a worthy choice, even if there are some doubters. When Willie Park Jnr, a two-time British Open champion designed the course in 1922, he declared it "the equal of any golf course I have ever seen. I know of none that is superior, either in beauty of natural terrain."

But it hasn't staged a US Open since 1928, when Johnny Farrell was a play-off winner over Bobby Jones, and the last major played here was the US PGA in 1961 when Jerry Barber beat Don January in a play-off. In 1997, the US Seniors Open - won by Graham Marsh, no play-off - was played here, and it was then the wheels were set in motion for the return to Olympia Fields to the mainstream of major championship golf.

For the USGA, the move to Olympia Fields is a symbolic step back in time; one that is part of its desire to reward the tradition of the game. When Park first designed the course, it was considered ahead of its time. Long before the USGA set standards for green construction, Park installed complex layered sub-strata to the putting surfaces. Layers of cinders, rotter manure, humus and sand were spread below soil and grass.

When it opened for play in 1923, the local Olympian newsletter for members warned: "To the average player, the course will appear too severe and many a shock will be in store." It was a monster then, but soon lost its bite. It has taken time to regain its ferocious reputation. Even then, it is nowhere near as fierce an animal as the Black Course at Bethpage which hosted last year's championship.

Now, to become a modern-day force, it has had to stretch itself to its very limits, grabbing extra yardage by retreating tees into every nook and cranny - up against car-parks, roadways and boundary fences - to enable it to come up to modern-day specifications. In all, the par 70 layout here has been stretched to 7,190 yards.

The work has been carried out by Mark Mungean - who was brought in by the club soon after it was awarded this year's championship in the autumn of 1997 - and to say he wasn't too impressed when he first arrived would be something of an understatement.

"When I first saw Olympia Fields, I thought it was a good country club course, but not of the calibre to host the US Open," he admitted.

Until the club was awarded the US Open, Mungean's highest profile assignment had been to restore the bunkering to the Broadmoor Golf Club in Colorado for the 1995 US Women's Open. A junior partner in a Boston architectural firm, he is also quite a contrast to Rees Jones who has renovated so many US Open courses he carries the nickname of the "Open Doctor".

While Jones was a member of the first family of American golf design - he and his brothers followed in the footsteps of their famous father Robert Trent Jones Snr - Mungean grew up in a house of non-golfers. But he was given a cut-down five-iron by his uncle when he was 12 and, three years later, won a hole-in-one competition at a local fair. The prize was membership of a golf club, and the bug was to bite.

So it was that he arrived into golf-course design with a lack of ego, and which made him perfect for Olympia Fields because the job demanded both a sense of history and a lot of respect for a beautiful old course.

"I don't like to use the word redesign, because it makes it feel like you're changing it dramatically. What I did was more like a combination of renovation and restoration, which is an aspect of renovation that is very popular now and means taking a course back to what they were when designed. I'd call it a sympathetic renovation. My goal was to end up with a style and a look that would be appropriate to what Willie Park originally designed."

His alterations, the addition of nearly 300 yards in length at a cost of $2 million, has transformed Olympia Fields. Apart from the extra yardage, the bunkers have been drastically improved - made deeper and steeper - and several greens have been renovated.

"We took a good golf course and made it better," said Tom Meeks, the director of championships for the USGA, who issued a list of changes that needed to be made when awarding it the championship.

First on the list was to lengthen the course. A layout of 6,897 yards wasn't going to cut it at this level - the par-four ninth was lengthened 51 yards and will now play to a beastly 496 yards and, at 226 yards, the par-three 17th hole wasn't considered tough enough for the USGA. It has been lengthened to 247 yards and could prove to be the toughest hole of all this week.

Yet Mungean believes they have retained the integrity of Park's original layout.

"For me, the greatest challenge is to keep the character of the course," he insisted.

Not everybody has been taken with the course, however. Alan Shipnuck wrote in Sports Illustrated, "it will be another 75 years before the US Open returns to Olympia Fields. It is the least imaginative kind of national championship venue - tough, oppressive, yet utterly unmemorable."

The course ranked only 75th in Golf magazine's list of top 100 course in the US and was placed 27th in the rankings of Golf Digest.

However, Meeks doesn't go along with those who find it unappetising. "Whoever said that doesn't know Olympia Fields, or has under-estimated the potential of Olympia Fields. It's a sleeping giant. It's so far away from downtown, it gets lost in the shuffle," claimed Meeks.

The history of Olympia Fields is an intriguing one. When the club opened the course in July 1923 (calling it Course No 4, as it was the fourth of four courses to be built between 1915 and 1923, but now known as the North Course), Olympia Fields Country Club became the largest golf complex in the world. With 72 holes over 674 acres, it featured nine holes more than Pinehurst at that time and 18 more than St Andrews.

Olympia Fields epitomised the so-called "roaring twenties". It had 1,200 members, including 200 women, and its $1.3 million clubhouse (a lot of money then) covered five and a half acres and included an 80-foot clock tower. It had a barber's shop, tailors, laundry shop and massage parlour and there was a bird and game preservation within the grounds.

But the club's scale - and dreams - diminished in the 1940s, when two courses were sold for residential development. By the 1960s, the club no longer had designs on glory. After hosting the 1961 US PGA, the membership didn't want the hassle of putting on a major and did not bid for another one for more than three decades.

The wheel has come full circle, though, and once Olympia Fields had the inclination to play host to a major again, all the stops were pulled out to bring the course up to the desired standard. And, in a US Open context, that means having players jump up and down to see out of bunkers and having them stare at a putt that should have broken in a different direction. The time has come for this sleeping giant to reawaken. The time is now.