US Open LA Country Club could expect barranca

LOS ANGELES –

It will be everywhere the players look at this year’s US Open. Chances are if they’re in it, they really don’t want to.

The word of the week at the Los Angeles Country Club: barranca.

Sand-lined and dotted with native grasses and ball-entangling plants, the barranca at LACC meanders through most of the front nine holes and part of the back nine as well.

Like the cliffs on the seawall at Pebble Beach or the pew bunker at Oakmont, it’s the barranca that stands out as the most feared and talked about element for the US Open’s first return to LA since 1948.

The word itself comes from the Spanish word meaning cliff, abyss, gully or ravine. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a deep gully or arroyo with steep walls.”

Use it in a sentence: “The barranca down where the bunker is, it’s very bad,” Collin Morikawa said when asked how he would approach the short par-4 sixth, a hole with options.

One of those options is to drive over trees to the right of the fairway and go for the green. But that carries the risk of being sprayed into barranca that forms a 180-degree semicircle around the left side of the putting surface. If you land in the wrong spot there, a potential eagle 2 can turn into any number.

“It’s the risk-reward part of this golf course,” said USGA Chief Championships Officer John Bodenhamer.

Walking through this natural-looking brown-green landscape, you hardly feel like you’re in the heart of modern LA. But it’s the contrast of the runway’s features against the skyscrapers and the glimmer of Beverly Hills on the horizon that makes LACC unique.

The barranca first comes into play on the par-4 second hole, which is listed at 497 yards. It runs in front of the green, meaning any player who misses the fairway must decide whether to try to carry the expanse or lie behind it.

That choice, like so many others related to barranca on this course, is not necessarily an all-or-nothing proposition.

“You can get a really bad lie, but you can also get a lie that’s okay so you can chop it to the middle of the green,” Morikawa said.

During a practice round this week, Justin Thomas, after making a drive into a clog in the barranca to the right of the 17th fairway, took the time to assess the situation, took a stance in the slippery silt and nailed, with his foot sliding, a low liner back in play.

That was a good result. Other shots, as USGA agriculturist Darin Bevard noted in a story on the society’s website, lead to situations “where you get what you deserve if you succeed.”

Some areas in the barrancas are marked as red-outlined hazards, but others are not, meaning that a drop from an unplayable lie is still just a one-time penalty, but with no guarantee that the lie resulting from a drop will be clean.

When architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner began renovating LACC in 2009, they gained access to photos taken not long after the course’s first major overhaul. That was in 1928 by acclaimed designer George C. Thomas, who also designed two of LA’s other signature layouts, Riviera and Bel-Air Country Club.

Before Hanse’s renovation, most of the barranca area was grassed and the course as a whole resembled a parkland with many trees. Hanse insisted on trying to return LACC to what Thomas envisioned.

Barrancas are unpredictable by nature, as they primarily serve as drainage. During a historically wet winter and spring in Los Angeles this year, up to 3 feet of water sometimes poured through the barrancas at LACC. Much of the sand that formed the base of the barrancas was washed away. In other places the vegetation grew too high.

No one wanted the barrancas to resemble rushing streams or completely unplayable hazards. Course workers used a weed killer, hundreds of rakes and some strategic tree plantings to thin out some areas and make others less prone to erosion.

The planners were looking for a gritty look. Wild flowers sprouted in some places.

“But the main part of the project was getting back to a California feel rather than fabricated,” said journalist and author Geoff Shackelford, who consulted with Hanse about the redesign. “We didn’t just want it for risk playability, we wanted it to be beautiful and a more fun environment.”

On days when there aren’t 22,000 fans on site for a major championship, club members are likely to see more birds and butterflies fluttering through the barrancas than in the past, “and it’s kind of a little Audubon shrine by the track,” Shackelford said.

A nice layout.

But for the 156 men trying to work their way through this week, a classic case of looking but not touching.