Sports

4 Things to Highlight from 2017 U.S. Open

Brooks Koepka was Sunday's biggest winner after he earned the 2017 U.S. Open title at Erin Hills in Erin, Wisconsin. 

However, if we look back to this Open carefully, we can learn the following 4 things from this year’s second major event:

1. As a major venue, Erin Hills works good, even better than Whistling Straits.

It is closer to Milwaukee and Chicago; the Hurdzan-Fry-Whitten design features more standout holes; The golf players seldom complained about anything. Besides, even if it was tough to walk and it took a while to get to Erin Hills, the Wisconsin fans were still enthusiastic to embrace the massively-scaled property.

2. Before awarding tournaments to modern venues, the USGA should have more significant events, since they will wait like 10 years before they visit an untested and newish design.

The USGA needed a week where it was about the players while the sadists didn’t get their annual fill of wrecks, even if it meant producing a record-tying winning score and the lowest-ever round in terms of par. The setup of The Erin Hills has error on the conservative side out of concern for wind and firm conditions accentuating its many big design features.

Even though Chambers Bay and Erin Hills each hosted U.S. Amateurs, match play golf isn’t enough to inspect a course. The setup was not perfect, but hindsight suggests Mike Davis and Jeff Hall would have done a few things differently with another tournament here under their belts.

3. There were tips when one played on Erin Hills.

The field averaged 302.2 yards off the tee and Cameron Champ led the field with a whopping 334.4 average. Fourteen players averaged more than 315 yards for the week, we can see that when given the opportunity to hit a lot of drivers for most of the round, today’s players can hit the ball to impossible distances. Through the first two rounds, 116 players in the field averaged more than 300 yards off the tee. As a result, the maximum 8,348 yardage wouldn’t have been too silly.

4. The Amateur game had a good performance.

Champ’s 334.4 driving average and powerful swing was a surprising 32 yards above the field average. Low amateur Scottie Scheffler (69-74-71-73-287, T-27) and Cameron Champ (70-69-73-76-288, T-31) have undoubtedly edged onto the top-secret Walker Cup watch list. Fourteen amateurs were qualified for Erin Hills and two turned out to make the cut.