A quick note from Wednesday at the U.S. Women’s Open

Wednesdays at a golf tournament have a certain feel, a “calm before the storm” quality that is palpable, and never more so than at a USGA championship. All USGA events are special, of course, but the Men’s and Women’s Opens are the crown jewels of the championship season, and it is the 2021 U.S. Women’s Open that I have the pleasure to find myself at this week.

Pulling into the media parking lot today at San Francisco’s Olympic Club, where I have covered a U.S. Open (2012), the inaugural Men’s Four-Ball Championship (2015), and the NCGA’s California Amateur (2017), I could feel the energy in the air even before I got to the entrance gates. Then I walked past the practice green, across the street from the club’s pro shop, and saw dozens of the hopefuls—well-known and practically unknown—who will tee it up in the opening round tomorrow, grinding over their putting, getting a feel for what is, for many of them, a very different environment for golf.

Further up the way and around the curve, at the practice range, players are working on full shots, accustomizing themselves to the dense, cool air a little more than a long par-5 from the crashing Pacific surf. On the course competitors are playing their final practice rounds, learning their way around the slopes and canted, rumpled fairways of one of the most challenging championship venues they will ever play. Belying the name, there are no water hazards on the Lake Course, and only one fairway bunker—on the inside of the slight dogleg-left on hole #6. The angles, uneven lies, and demanding putting surfaces comprise the championship test here at the Olympic Club—and they have tested, and bested, the games of some of the legends of golf—Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer, just to name two.

Will local knowledge help a NorCal player on their way to a championship this week? Two past U.S. Women’s Open champions with roots in the area are in the field this week: 2010 champ Paula Creamer grew up in Pleasanton, across the bay in the warmer, drier, inland reaches of Alameda County; and Michelle Wie West, a native of Honolulu, Hawaii, who studied at Stanford University while playing on the LPGA Tour, and who now lives in San Francisco. Will her membership and frequent playing time at nearby Lake Merced Golf Club stand her in good stead at the Olympic Club this week?

I’ll be out early on Thursday morning to follow a pair of NorCal competitors who are teeing off at 7:15 a.m. and who represent two extremes of experience in the event: San José native Christina Kim, who is playing in her seventeenth U.S. Women’s Open; and Pleasanton’s Jaclyn LaHa, a rising high school junior who is playing in her first. Kim was co-medalist in her qualifying tournament at Dedham, Massachusetts’s Country Club with a 3-under 137; LaHa placed second at the Marin Country Club qualifier with a 7-under 137 (70–67).

I can hardly wait for it to begin.