The USGA’s Third Trip
to West Point Brings
Old Waverly into Elite Company
Twenty blistering Mississippi summers ago, Juli Inkster pured an iron into Old Waverly Golf Club’s 18th green, sealing her first U.S. Women’s Open title. She glided up that last fairway toward the green — half running, half walking — clapping and high-fiving her caddie before looking into a TV camera and saying, “Mama’s bringing home a trophy!”
It is an iconic moment, both for Inkster and for Old Waverly. And it almost never happened, because Old Waverly’s 18th fairway was almost the site of its clubhouse.
But on his first visit to rural West Point, Miss., in 1985, Jerry Pate — who designed Old Waverly along with Bob Cupp — pushed the club’s founder, George Bryan, to reconsider. “You want to be here. You want to have a clubhouse on this site,” Pate told Bryan on the hilltop above what is now the 18th green. “You want to have a clubhouse looking over the lake, so in the winter time the wind is behind you and it won’t be so cool, and in the summer time, the wind will come up from the south and blow up toward the clubhouse and cool you off.”
Bryan was persuaded. The clubhouse went on the hill; the 18th went down below. Old Waverly opened in 1988. A few years later, Inkster strode triumphantly over that ground toward a major championship — her fourth, but her first in 10 years.
And this August, someone else will make that same walk, moments away from securing the U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship — the USGA’s third trip to Old Waverly. Only 25 clubs have hosted at least three USGA events in the past 20 years; Old Waverly (which also hosted the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur in 2006) is one of them.
“We know Old Waverly. We’re very comfortable with the club and its amenities,” said Mark Hill, who manages the USGA’s championships. “We had an outstanding Women’s Open there, and any time you can take the Women’s Am to a place that’s hosted a Women’s Open, it’s a big deal to the players.”
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Clubs Hosting Three or More USGA Events (1999-2019)
Forest Highlands (Ariz.)
Pebble Beach (Calif.)
Olympic Club (Calif.)
Broadmoor (Colo.)
Sea Island (Ga.)
Olympia Fields (Ill.)
Flint Hills National (Kan.)
Old Waverly (Miss.)
Old Warson (Mo.)
Trump National (N.J.)
Winged Foot (N.Y.)
Pinehurst (N.C.)
Pine Needles (N.C.)
Charlotte CC (N.C.)
Inverness Club (Ohio)
Pumpkin Ridge (Ore.)
Bandon Dunes (Ore.)
Eugene CC (Ore.)
Merion (Pa.)
Oakmont (Pa.)
Saucon Valley (Pa.)
Honors Course (Tenn.)
Carlton Woods (Tex.)
Golden Horseshoe (Va.)
Erin Hills (Wisc.)
Old Waverly is something of a paradox — built prior to the golf architecture revolution that traces its origins to Sand Hills Country Club’s opening in 1995, but exemplifying many of the qualities that have come back into vogue in the past 25 years. Old Waverly is technically a parkland course, but its gently rolling topography and rural setting make it feel like something from a different time.
“I can remember (Bob Cupp) saying that Old Waverly reminded him of a countryside England parkland golf course,” Pate said. “And it does, because it has these stately trees, and it was farmland running through the countryside. That part of Mississippi is just beautiful, with farms and wooded areas and creeks and streams.”
Pate said that he and Cupp (who died in 2016) never set out to create a USGA venue, but that they were intentional about creating a course that could both accommodate duffers and challenge professionals. Cupp handled the routing, and Pate — who won the U.S. Amateur in 1974 and the U.S. Open in 1976 — placed most of the hazards.
“Conceptually, we tried to design most of the greens where you could run the ball up on the greens and have a good time playing it, not where you had a lot of forced carries over a pond or a lake,” Pate said. “And if you did have a forced carry, in most cases you had an alternate route. On most holes, you can almost always hit the ball 30 yards short of the green and still run it up.”
On the road to Inkster’s triumphant walk up No. 18, though, questions abounded as to whether stately character was enough to warrant a USGA event at Old Waverly. USA Today columnist Christine Brennan famously complained “that the most prestigious event in the world for women’s golfers was being held in the middle of a cow pasture.” When Inkster’s winning score of minus-16 set a new under-par scoring record for the event (a record that still stands), Associated Press columnist Doug Ferguson indicted the course: “women’s golf needed more than what Old Waverly could offer,” he wrote.
Even Ferguson acknowledged that much of what made Inkster’s performance possible was outside Old Waverly’s control, though: West Point was inundated by heavy rain earlier in the week, and an unusually cool spring had shortened the rough’s growing season. In other words, soft greens made the pins attackable, and manageable rough let players play aggressively even from off the fairway.
But another cause of the low scores had not yet fully revealed itself: Inkster was on the front side of an historic heater. At the Women’s Open, just six players finished within 10 shots of Inkster. Three weeks after running away at Old Waverly, Inkster won the LPGA Championship by four shots. She finished 1999 with five wins, all but one of them by margins of at least four shots. No one knew it at the time, but Old Waverly caught a Hall-of-Fame player as she was peaking on maybe the hottest streak of her career. You can’t blame that on the course.
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There’s no way to prevent more rain at this year’s Women’s Am, of course — August is Clay County’s second-driest month of the year, but the month still brings an average about four inches of rain. But Inkster isn’t in the field, at least. Beyond that, Old Waverly is controlling what it can control.
“This golf course requires accuracy,” said Rachel Sadowski, who’s overseeing setup at Old Waverly for the USGA. “It’s going to require great feel around the greens. My goal is that they have to use every club in their bags to get around the golf course. So it’s not about being the longest golf course they play, it’s about them having to use all of their clubs and think their way around this golf course.”
In Old Waverly’s case, that will mean aiming for firm, fast fairways lined with thick rough, and lightning-fast greens (running at least 12 on a stimpmeter) surrounded by closely mown grass. Sadowski said that by the time the tees go down, Old Waverly will play up to 6,550 yards — even longer than the 6,433 yards that Old Waverly measured in 1999.
“The golf course is fair, but yet has some penalizing areas,” said Old Waverly’s head golf pro, Greg Flannagan. “If you’re striking it well that day, you should end your match early. If I’m watching, it’ll strictly come down to whether the ball is in the fairway or the rough. That’ll be the difference-maker.“
Staying out of the rough is critical in any USGA event, of course. But Sadowski said that Old Waverly’s green complexes allow for a number of pin placements behind bunkers. Approach shots out of the rough won’t have trajectories that are high enough to attack those positions.
“Part of the test of playing the game is being able to put yourself in the right place on the green, to be able to capitalize on birdies and in some cases pars,” Sadowski said. “But we want to be able to put those hole locations behind some bunkers, on the edges of greens, but we need to have them at the right speed to be able to use those kinds of hole locations.”
Aside from restoring some bunkers, no major changes are being made ahead of the event. But in at least one respect, the greens will differ from the USGA’s two previous visits to Old Waverly: in 2009, the club converted from bentgrass to more heat-tolerant Bermuda grass.
“The beautiful thing about our greens is that since we switched over the champion Bermuda, our greens stay good no matter if it’s a ton of rain or no rain,” Flannagan said. “They’re always gonna stay consistent.”
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The USGA’s third trip to West Point effectively proves the 1999 critics wrong: Old Waverly can, and has, challenged the world’s best. More than 102,000 fans attended the 1999 Women’s Open, including more than 48,000 on the weekend (the Country Club of Charleston’s goal for this summer’s Women’s Open is 100,000). It is a capable and worthy stage of some of golf’s biggest events.
Old Waverly’s taste for hosting big events probably isn’t going anywhere, and the USGA often uses its amateur championships to test a site’s feasibility as a host for something bigger. On top of that, Old Waverly already has one Women’s Open under its belt. But even the amateur events are hard work: they require years of preparation, they require shutting down play to members for an extended period — and, if they’re successful, they result in tens of thousands of visitors trampling the golf course for a week. The Women’s Am doesn’t draw Women’s Open-level crowds, but it’s still a televised event, and TV makes a big footprint no matter what.
But Old Waverly knows by now what it’s getting into. Twice before it has hosted a USGA event and come back for more. And West Point, rural though it remains, is far more capable of hosting USGA events today than it was 20 years ago because of the hotel capacity that has built up around Mississippi State sporting events in Starkville, just 20 minutes away. So not only has Old Waverly proven it can handle the pressure that a USGA event brings, it’s actually better positioned to handle those events today than it was 20 years ago.
“When the dust settles and the club says, ‘That was fun, let’s do that again,’” said Mark Hill, the USGA’s championships managing director, “to us, that’s the ultimate compliment.”
All photos: credit USGA