There is a particular sensation a player gets the first time they walk onto a Riviera fairway, which is the sensation of standing on something that does not quite feel like grass. The kikuyu that has covered the fairways since the course opened in 1926 sits up under the ball in a way that bermuda and bent and rye and fescue do not. It produces a fluffy, slightly cushiony lie, the kind that makes a six-iron feel as though it has more loft than it does, and that catches the leading edge of a wedge in ways that the modern professional has had to relearn each February for the better part of a century. Riviera turns a hundred this year. The kikuyu is older than the asphalt of Sunset Boulevard. The course has been asking the same questions of professional golfers for the entire run of the Genesis Invitational and the Los Angeles Opens that preceded it, and the questions have not noticeably softened.
What follows is a look at why the George Thomas design at Riviera has aged so well, the holes that have become the course’s signatures, and why the U.S. Women’s Open coming to the property next month is a more interesting test than the venue’s reputation has prepared most people for.
The design, in two sentences
George Thomas, the Philadelphia-born aristocrat who designed Riviera with his construction partner Billy Bell in the mid-1920s, believed that golf holes should offer choices. Riviera offers more of them per round than almost any other course on the professional rota, and that is the design’s enduring quality.
That sentence reads like a generalisation, and it is one, but the reason it holds up at Riviera and not at most courses that claim it is that Thomas and Bell built the property into the existing canyon-and-bluff topography of the Pacific Palisades rather than around it. The site is a sloping shelf of land that runs gently downhill towards the ocean, broken in a half-dozen places by ravines and arroyos and the kind of dramatic elevation change that allows a single hole to climb forty feet from tee to green. The result is a layout where almost every hole has at least two playable lines from the tee, where the player who chooses the harder line earns a clearer angle into the green, and where the green itself is shaped to penalise the player who took the easier line off the tee. Strategic golf, as the design vocabulary has it, and the strategic golf at Riviera is the most committed example of the form on the modern American calendar.
The other thing that makes Riviera what it is, and the thing that the broadcast camera tends to underplay, is the difference in elevation between the tees and the greens. Several of the par-fours play significantly downhill from the tee and then back uphill to the green, which is the most awkward kind of approach shot for a tour professional because the visual cues for distance are misaligned in both directions. The first hole, in particular, plays from a tee perched on a bluff above the clubhouse to a fairway that is forty feet lower, and then back up to a green that is set into the hillside above. It is the kind of opening hole that the modern game has otherwise legislated out of existence, and it tells the player most of what they need to know about the rest of the round.
The signature holes
The hole at Riviera that everyone knows is the par-three sixth, which is the one with the bunker in the middle of the green. The hole is 199 yards from the championship tee, plays slightly uphill, and the green is shaped like a horseshoe wrapped around a small circular bunker that sits, more or less, in the centre of the putting surface. A tee shot to the back-right of the green leaves a putt that has to be played around the bunker, sometimes by a margin of fifteen feet on the line. A tee shot to the back-left leaves a putt that has to be played the other way around the same hazard. A tee shot directly behind the bunker leaves an awkward two-putt at best. The only sensible attacking line is to the front, where the green is shallow and the back-half pin positions are a long lag away.
Designers have tried to copy the sixth at Riviera off and on for ninety-nine years and have largely given up. The reason is that the bunker only works because of the way the green is shaped around it, and the green only works because of the way the slope of the ground behind it shoulders incoming shots back towards the bunker. It is the rarest kind of golf hole, which is one whose central feature looks gimmicky in a photograph and reveals itself, on the course, to be the most thoughtful piece of design on the property.
The other hole that warrants mention is the tenth, the short par-four that has become the course’s most famous test of strategy. The hole is 315 yards on a card that lists most of the par-fours at over 450, and the green is large enough that aggressive players can reasonably consider driving it. The complication is that the green is set at an angle to the fairway, with a deep front-right bunker that catches anything pulled, and the slope of the green falls away from the back left in a way that turns a long-iron tee shot into a pitching contest with the player above the hole. Bryson DeChambeau drove the green at the 2020 Genesis with a four-iron from a yardage that no one else in the field had even considered, made the eagle, and still lost the tournament by four. The tenth at Riviera does not reward power. It rewards the player who has chosen, in advance, which version of the hole they intend to play, and who hits the shot the choice required.
The eighteenth, the closing hole, is the one that the broadcast loves and the one that historians of design tend to undersell. It plays uphill, doglegs left, and finishes at a green tucked under the famous half-timbered Riviera clubhouse. The drive must carry a barranca that crosses the fairway at the corner of the dogleg, the second shot must be hit from a stance that almost always leaves the ball above the player’s feet, and the green is the kind of saddle-shaped surface where being on the wrong tier is worse than being short of the green entirely. Most years the hole produces a winning two-putt. The years when it does not are the years that the Genesis is remembered.
Why it has aged
The reason Riviera has resisted the modern game’s tendency to make older courses look small is that Thomas and Bell built the design around features that distance does not erase. The barrancas are still there. The kikuyu is still there. The greens are still small enough, and contoured enough, that a tour professional cannot simply hit a wedge to ten feet and walk off with a birdie regardless of approach angle. The course measures 7,322 yards on the championship card, which is a number that no one would call long by 2026 standards, and it has produced winning scores between ten and seventeen under for the last decade with no clear pattern of softening over time. The two players who have most successfully solved Riviera in the modern era — Adam Scott, who won at the Genesis three times in eight years, and Hideki Matsuyama, who has finished in the top eight at every Genesis he has played since 2018 — share an unfashionable feature in their games, which is the ability to shape the ball both ways with a long iron. Riviera asks for that. It does not ask for the bombing-and-wedging that has made other older courses obsolete, and the asking has been enough to keep it relevant for ninety-nine years.
The U.S. Women’s Open
The decision to bring the U.S. Women’s Open to Riviera in May 2026 has been described, by people who ought to know better, as a curious choice. The argument is that Riviera is too long for the women’s game, or too narrow, or too dependent on physical strength to favour the kind of strategic precision that the women’s tour produces. The argument is wrong, and the reason it is wrong is that almost everything that Riviera tests is independent of clubhead speed. The course rewards angles. It rewards the player who is willing to leave themselves a slightly longer second shot in exchange for a clearer line. It rewards lag putting, it rewards the ability to play the kikuyu without fear, and it rewards short-game touch around greens that punish anyone who lands above the hole.
The women’s field that arrives at Riviera in late May will, in many respects, be better suited to the course than the men’s field that has been visiting in February for the past forty years. The course will play firmer in May than it does in February, which favours the player who has thought about angles. The greens will be quicker. The kikuyu, which is at its lushest in late spring, will produce more of the awkward lies that punish the long iron and reward the wedge. Korda, Yin, Tavatanakit, Green, Thitikul: Riviera will give them a leaderboard that will not look like the one Memorial Park produced last week, and that is the point of bringing them there.
The course turns a hundred this year, and the tournament that arrives there in May will be, by some distance, the most strategically interesting major in the women’s calendar. Riviera does not need a centenary celebration. The kikuyu was here before the sponsors were, and it will be here after them. The point of the course is the choices it asks the players to make. The point of the major is the choices the broadcast will get to show us.