There is a golf course a few hundred yards from the Playboy Mansion and across the road from the Beverly Hilton that spent most of its existence refusing to let anyone outside its membership see it. Los Angeles Country Club turned down the US Open for decades, reportedly on multiple occasions, on the simple grounds that the membership did not want the gates opened and the cameras in. When it finally relented and hosted the championship in June 2023, golf discovered what had been sitting behind those gates all along: a George Thomas design built around a dry ravine that has no real equivalent anywhere else in major championship golf.
A hole-by-hole relationship with a ditch
The feature that defines the North Course is the barranca, a steep-sided gully common to Southern California hillsides that runs dry outside the winter rains and cuts through the front nine in a shape that looks almost accidental until you realise how deliberately it has been built into the strategy. W. Herbert Fowler laid the course out in 1921 with the barranca already in play, and George Thomas reworked it significantly in 1928, using the ravine in a different way on nearly every hole it touches. At the sixth, a short par four, it guards the approach to a green set into a hillside, and players weighing a blind shot over the trees know exactly what a miss on that line finds. At the eighth, a par five, the barranca slices diagonally across the fairway from short right to far left, turning the hole into a double dogleg where reaching the green in two depends on finding a sidehill lie after threading a fade and then a draw past the ditch’s edge. By the time the ravine stops being relevant, around the turn, it has already asked seven or eight different versions of the same question: how close do you dare play to the thing that will end your hole if you misjudge it.
Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner restored the course in the 2010s, and part of that work was simply making the barranca visible again. Decades of tree planting had softened its edges and hidden its drama behind foliage; Hanse’s team cleared growth and reintroduced native scrub so the hazard reads the way Thomas intended, rugged and a little threatening rather than landscaped into something tidy. The restoration also uncovered an entire hole that golf had forgotten about.
The par three that vanished for seventy years
Before Thomas’s rework, the course had a short par three built by Fowler with a small, severely sloped green, a hole that earned its reputation at the 1925 California State Open when a Santa Ana wind made the putting surface nearly impossible to hold and the eventual winner, Macdonald Smith, could only make bogey there. When Thomas redesigned the course a few years later he removed the hole entirely and built a new par three elsewhere, and the old green was left to grow over beside what became the 17th hole. It stayed buried for the better part of a century, known mostly as a rumour among members and golf historians until research by writer Geoff Shackelford helped confirm exactly where it had been. Hanse rebuilt it as part of the restoration, and it now plays around 120 yards from a flat spot near the second tee, looping neatly with the first and 18th so a group can fit it into an afternoon round if they choose. Nobody involved seems entirely sure whether reviving a hole that had been deliberately discarded ninety years earlier was more an act of historical justice or simple curiosity about whether it still worked. By most accounts, it does.
What the 2023 US Open actually showed
The championship itself produced a finish that suited the course’s reputation for rewarding precision over power. Wyndham Clark, a player with no previous major championship pedigree to speak of, closed with a birdie at the 14th to open a three-shot cushion and then held off a closing surge from Rory McIlroy over the final four holes to win by one, finishing at 10 under for the week. Rickie Fowler supplied the week’s most talked-about number, opening with a 62 that tied the all-time US Open record for a single round before Xander Schauffele matched it in a later group, and following it with a 36-hole total that set its own scoring record before a final-round 75 dropped him to a share of fifth. The moment that lingered longest, though, had nothing to do with scores. On the 18th green, with Clark’s win confirmed and the significance of his late mother’s absence from the moment obvious to everyone watching, Fowler told him quietly that she would have been proud. It was the kind of line that needed no embellishment and got none.
A major venue the game nearly never saw
What makes LACC’s emergence as a championship course feel different from, say, a public resort venue finally getting its turn is the sense that the game had to earn its way in rather than the other way around. The club’s long resistance to hosting anything meant the North Course stayed almost entirely unknown to the golfing public until a national television audience got a look at a barranca most casual fans had never heard the word for. Three years on, it has become shorthand for a particular kind of championship test, one built on a natural hazard rather than manufactured length, on a course that spent most of a century making sure as few people as possible ever got to find that out for themselves.