Qualifying for the U.S. Open
It's "open" but ... it's tough sledding in fields that often are devoid of amateurs
I’m nowhere near a good enough golfer to attempt to qualify for the U.S. Open, but it’s called that because if you are a good enough golfer, you can play in qualifying tournaments to earn a spot. I know some exceptionally good golfers, who are close to or at scratch, who have tried this and failed several times.
Part of the reason is that it’s just really, really hard. The difference between a PGA golfer and a scratch golfer is bigger than the difference between a scratch and a 15-handicap in terms of talent and scoring, etc.
The other part is … you’re often competing against professional golfers. In some cases, guys who just played in one in a PGA Tour event the day prior.
It’s important to remember that not every guy on tour automatically qualifies for this event - only the top-60 in the OWGR, plus anyone who has fallen out of that ranking but who has won the U.S. Open, Open, PGA, Masters or Players in recent years. There are lots of ways to automatically qualify, but the tournament leaves spots available for qualifiers. And that’s where this comes in.
Monday (June 6) was the final qualifying tournaments across the country, and I took a glance at some of the results. Geoff Shackleford runs through each one in his excellent Quadrilateral here. But look at the results from the Ohio qualifier:
Now, if you aren’t a certifiable golf sicko, you may not recognize any of the names here. But every single one of them aside from Sam Bennett (who is one of the top amateur golfers in the country, playing for Texas A&M) plays professional golf for a living. Almost all of them played this event in Ohio because they were competing at The Memorial tournament this past weekend. Just for fun, here’s how they did:
Lanto Griffin (T51, $29,760)
Chan Kim (T67, $25,200)
Davis Riley (T13, $221,400)
Adam Schenk (T26, $89,400)
Denny McCarthy (T5, $411,600)
Joel Dahmen (T32, $68,520)
Wyndham Clark (T37, $51,000)
Andrew Putnam (MC, $0)
Danny Lee (MC, $0)
Patrick Rodgers (MC, $0)
Imagine being a really, really good amateur golfer. You have a day job in (let’s just say) sales, so you can get out to the course enough to keep your game in good shape. You compete when you can and you decide to make a run at a lifelong dream, playing the U.S. Open. And you get through the qualifying events and then you show up at Kinsale CC in Ohio and see guys you watched make half your yearly salary last weekend while finishing with a T51 at The Memorial. And that guy is Lanto Griffin, who has earned over $7,000,000 as a pro golfer.
Or Denny McCarthy, who Google tells me looks like this and earned over $400,000 last weekend.
Sure, money isn’t related to qualifying for the U.S. Open, but if you can earn that in a single event on tour, you’re incredibly talented.
Imagine instead if you’re a college student who just decided to go back for your fifth year of eligibility instead of joining the Korn Ferry Tour (KFT), and you see guys like the above and others who have been on the PGA Tour for years. And you buckle down and make the tournament.
Baller. Way to go, Sam Bennett.
Because it’s worth stating that in addition to the guys above, there were plenty of other PGA Tour players who played and did NOT qualify. With apologies to Cameron Champ, Ryan Palmer, Chez Reavie, Luke Donald and Lucas Glover, among others, this field was absolutely packed with true talent. The legend of a “Tin Cup” making the U.S. Open are increasingly rarer, but they can happen. And whenever a true non-professional golfer can even compete, it’s worth celebrating.
An endnote to this - and a small indication of why you should subscribe to The Athletic. Joel Dahmen (pictured above) thought strongly about not even trying to qualify for the U.S. Open, recapped brilliantly here by Brendan Quinn:
“If I qualify, I’m just signing up to get my ass kicked,” he said Sunday.
Here’s the logic. Dahmen could certainly claim one of the multiple U.S. Open spots available to the field playing in Columbus. What, though, would he really be playing for?
…
“I can have two weeks at home and gear up for the summer stretch or … I can go gear up for the U.S. Open,” Dahmen said. “Well, what am I gearing up for there? When I played Winged Foot, they made the fairways so narrow that my deriving percentage is shrunk down just like everyone else’s. We all miss the fairway. The difference is the other guys are going to be 40 yards past me. So now what do I do?”
If that’s not point-blank enough for you, then there’s this …
“With me, like, I’m never going to win a major. I know that,” he continued. “Yeah, some guys have stumbled into them. But it’s got to be a proper golf course. Southern Hills was just way too much of a golf course for me. Even this place (Muirfield Village), when it plays as hard as it did today, it’s really tough for me. At one point, Beau (Hossler) was hitting a 50-degree wedge into a green and I was hitting an 8-iron. I’m comfortable with what I can and can’t do.”
Later in the article, Quinn indicates that he texted with Dahmen late Sunday night, who texted back a picture of him drinking at the bar but acknowledging he was still going to play the 36-hole qualifying the next morning at 7:00AM. And he qualified.
These guys are good.