2023 U.S. Open: Dick Shortz, the man who made it happen at LACC

During the 2016 U.S. Golf Association Annual Meeting, outgoing president Tom O’Toole Jr. was delivering his closing remarks when he declared the selection of Los Angeles Country Club as the host of the 123rd U.S. Open. It was the most significant U.S. Open announcement in decades.

The famed private club, whose North Course ties for No. 13 on Golfweek’s Best list of Classic Courses in the U.S., will become the third U.S. Open venue in Southern California (most recently at San Diego’s Torrey Pines in 2008 and 2021) when Matt Fitzpatrick returns to defend his championship, June 15-18. It also marks the return to Tinseltown for the first time since Ben Hogan won the 1948 title at neighboring Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. 

As O’Toole noted in his speech, “Pick a number, the USGA had been trying to get the U.S. Open at L.A. Country Club for 75 years. We heard (past USGA presidents) Sandy Tatum and Bill Campbell talk about it. For years it had seemed unthinkable until Dick Shortz pulled a rabbit out of his hat.” 

That would be Richard A. Shortz, a graduate of Indiana University and Harvard Law School who served in the United States Army as a second lieutenant before practicing law for more than 40 years and supporting major corporations and leading initiatives in the field of corporate governance. A junior club champion at age 15, Shortz has had a passion for golf throughout his life and joined LACC in 1988.

The club, which was established in 1897 and has two 18-hole courses – the North and the South – opened near the Beverly Hilton in 1911, spanning 320 acres and occupying half a mile of frontage on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard between Beverly Hills to the east, Century City to the south, Westwood to the west and Bel Air to the north. A 2010 restoration project led by Gil Hanse returned the club’s famed North Course, where the Open will be contested, to its design by Herbert Fowler and George C. Thomas Jr.

In the early half of the 20th century, LACC was a frequent host of top-tier events, having been the site of five L.A. Opens between 1926 and 1940. The North Course also hosted the 1930 U.S. Women’s Amateur, in which Glenna Collett Vare captured the fifth of her record six titles. In 1954, Foster Bradley Jr. defeated Al Geiberger to claim the U.S. Amateur title, and the club was on the books to stage the 1958 U.S. Amateur that eventually was played instead at The Olympic Club in San Francisco. 

For decades after, USGA staff members joked that there was a better chance of putting a man on the moon than bringing another USGA championship to tony LACC. From the days of Joe Dey to P.J. Boatwright to David Fay, the USGA coveted a return to the City of Angels and the green oasis that is L.A. Country Club. According to FORE Magazine, former LACC club president Charles Older tried to rally support for hosting the 1986 U.S. Open, but the board voted 5-4 against it. 

The U.S. Open’s absence from the second-largest market in the country for as long as it takes Halley’s Comet to orbit the Earth was a void that the USGA long wanted to fill. But the U.S. Open has become a major undertaking, and parking and transportation were among the logistical challenges to be addressed. Riviera, situated seven miles west of LACC, is the longtime home of the PGA Tour’s Genesis Invitational, which has been held there almost exclusively since 1973. Riviera also conducted the U.S. Amateur in 2017 and will host the 2026 U.S. Women’s Open as well as the 2028 Olympics men’s and women’s golf competitions. But Riviera, which ranks 18th on Golfweek’s Best list of classic courses, was deemed to not have enough land and was dropped from consideration to host a championship of the magnitude of the U.S. Open.

The conventional thinking was LACC, with downtown L.A. as the backdrop to the 11th hole and the back of the Playboy Mansion sharing a wall, had too small of a footprint to accommodate a modern Open, too. (Attendance will be capped at 22,000 fans per day, and the club’s South Course will be used to accommodate media, sponsor tents and concessions.) That is until the USGA shoehorned the 2013 Open into Merion Country Club in Ardmore, Pennsylvania.

“It showed we could go to cathedrals of the game where great players want to win their Open,” said John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s chief championships officer, who as a 24-year-old from Tacoma, Washington, competed at LACC in the 1985 Pacific Coast Amateur. “The doors were opened, and it led us down that road.”

But it takes two to tango, and that required a change of philosophy from the LACC membership, one that frankly took the USGA by surprise.

“How do you navigate something like that through membership?” O’Toole asked rhetorically. “You need an advocate and a leader, and that was Dick Shortz.”

The downhill par-3 11th hole that will play 290 yards during the 123rd U.S. Open at the Los Angeles Country Club. (Photo: John Mummert/USGA)

“Instrumental,” Bodenhamer said of Shortz’s role. “I think anyone at the club would tell you that.” 

It began innocently enough in 2009, when LACC agreed to stage the 2017 Walker Cup, in which the U.S. defeated Great Britain and Ireland 19-7.

O’Toole still remembers the day Shortz hosted him and Los Angeles resident (but non-member) and past USGA president Jim Vernon (2008-09) and then-president Glen Nager for a round of golf in 2013. Afterwards, they came into the clubhouse, which is a museum to the game, to have lunch. Shortz pulled O’Toole aside and said he wanted to show him some memorabilia in the locker room.

“So I got up and followed back to the locker room and we walk down to the farthest aisle and I turned around,” O’Toole recalled. “I’m thinking, what are we going to see here? There’s no memorabilia here.”

And that was Shortz’s point. This is where he envisioned the memorabilia from a future U.S. Open on display someday.

“He said, ‘I want a U.S. Open here, and you and I are going to make it happen,’ ” O’Toole said. “I told him, ‘You know, you don’t have to get on any soap box for me.’ And that’s how he and I started the journey with him working the back halls of Congress so-to-speak of his membership and board.”

Then-USGA executive director Mike Davis delivered a persuasive speech to the club ahead of what was a membership vote to decide the fate of the club welcoming a future Open. Eighteen months after Shortz took the lead on bringing a major to LACC, his dream received a landslide of support.

The 547-yard, par-5 eighth hole at the Los Angeles Country Club. (Photo: John Mummert/USGA)

“It was 90 percent in favor of doing it,” Shortz told Fore Magazine. “There is a lot of enthusiasm about working with the USGA. The club has become a lot more community oriented. As we look around at the landscape of golf and see what we might do in the community, that played a role in our thinking.”

O’Toole and USGA president Jim Hyler (2010-11) were so impressed with how Shortz excelled at negotiating his position, they supported his candidacy to become the USGA’s general counsel, a role he assumed in 2018-2020.

The silver-haired Shortz, who is now retired, has served in various roles including co-chair of this year’s U.S. Open, and the club already has secured the 2032 U.S. Women’s Open and 2039 U.S. Open. But none of it may have come to fruition without the behind-the-scenes efforts of Shortz. He declined to be interviewed for this story but graciously showed off the club’s Colonial Georgian clubhouse, where the likes of billionaire owners Steve Ballmer (L.A. Clippers) and Stan Kroenke (L.A. Rams) keep lockers and former member President Ronald Reagan is remembered with a plaque. But to hear O’Toole tell it, the club ought to make space for another shrine – this one for Shortz. 

“They ought to build a monument for him,” O’Toole said.