An Interview With USGA
President Jim Vernon

The lanky 59-year-old from Pasadena studied engineering and law at Stanford University. He met Tom Watson at a fraternity rush, forming a close friendship that remains strong today. After practicing law in Los Angeles for nine years, Vernon left the legal world behind to take over a diamond business started by his father. Presidencies at Lakeside Golf Club in Burbank, Calif., and at the Southern California Golf Association led to a position on the USGA's Regional Affairs Committee and, in 2003, Vernonwasasked to join the USGA's Executive Committee.

A self-described struggling golfer but avowed "gearhead," Vernon has also served on the Equipment Standards Committee. And befitting an engineer turned lawyer turned diamond broker, as a Rules official Vernon renders decisions with precision and 24-karat clarity. (He scored 98 out of 100 on the Rules of Golf test.) He remains active on that front while juggling the myriad duties of the USGA presidency. In fact, he first sat down to speak with us at the U.S. Amateur, after officiating a match on Pinehurst No. 2. We followed up with Vernon in Adelaide, Australia, where he was attending theWorld Amateur Team Championships , the final competition of the year .

What are your thoughts on your first championship season as president of the USGA?

JimVernon: It's our championship season, and it's been fabulous. Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate put on such a good show at the U.S. Open, and it was so well received by golfers and the public at large that we gained a lot of goodwill and momentum as we went through the rest of the championship season.

Of course we had the good weather of Southern California and the drama, suspense and shotmaking that Tiger and Rocco provided;  having that particular pairing - two very well-liked individuals, both fan favorites for two different reasons, got our championship season off to a great start. For the U.S. Women's Open at Interlachen, again we had a course that was set up great and had a very receptive community - Minnesota is so golf crazy, it's the perfect setting for the Women's Open. And then going to Colorado Springs for the Senior Open, another golf course that was set up beautifully and a resort, the Broadmoor, that went out of its way, not just to accommodate us, but all the players. So all three of our Open Championships went great, and we saw more of the same at our oldest championship, the U.S. Amateur, contested at Pinehurst Resort and Country Club and won by the youngest Amateur champion in our history, Danny Lee, an 18-year-old from New Zealand. 

We have nine other national championships, from the U.S. Girls' Junior played at Connecticut's Hartford Golf Club in July and won by 13-year-old Alexis Thompson to the USGA Senior Amateur at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth captured by our Walker Cup captain 56-year-old Buddy Marucci this September. These championships may be lesser known, but are still important to us, and thanks to our volunteers and host clubs, each one went very, very well.

But I'm still basking in the glow of Torrey Pines. It was a confluence of a number of good things: We had a receptive community. We had wonderful preparations. We had a course that was, to my mind, set up as well as you could set that course up. Mike Davis, senior director of rules and competitions, and Executive Committee member Jim Hyler, our championship chair, really looked at that course and asked, 'How can we make this not just the best test but to really have some variety that you don't always see in a championship setup?'

Any guilt about fan interest in theU.S.Open playoff causing a drop in the gross domestic product?

Vernon: I did see some figures that some business activity was down measurably during the Monday playoff, but our online activities at usopen.com are something we've been working hard on, and are very proud of what we've accomplished. If you look at the numbers - 2.9 million fans watching Monday's playoff on our new video console, what I've heard is the largest viewership of streaming video for any sports event ever - well, there were an awful lot of people on Thursday and Friday, the first two rounds, who may have been in the office, but they weren't working. And Monday was just off the charts.

Torrey Pines raised theU.S.Open bar pretty high. Can you talk about following up such a fantastic event inSouthern Californiawith what the USGA is planning for 2009 atBethpageBlack onNew York'sLong Island?

Jim Vernon presented the U.S. Open trophy to Tiger Woods at Torrey Pines. (USGA Museum)

Vernon: You start with the realization that, first off, you cannot re-create that playoff drama. We would love to be able to set that up every year - we couldn't have scripted it any better - but what we can do is provide a stage for these players that allows them to demonstrate why they're the best golfers in the world and why one of them is the best golfer in the world that week. We did that at Torrey Pines.

Fundamentally, Bethpage is an even more difficult golf course, and in some ways that gives us an even more dramatic stage. But it also gives us more responsibilities, because it's the kind of course where you can go over the edge if you don't watch yourself. But I think our 14-point course-setup philosophy ( see U.S. Open philosophy ) will serve us well at Bethpage. Our goal is "difficult but fair," to provide a great test that forces the players to make choices. 

We heard from a lot of golf fans, and even a few tour pros, that this season theU.S.Open was the most "fun" championship, the major during which you heard the roars from the gallery, whereas historically, theU.S.Open has always been considered the sternest test of all. Is that change in perception the result ofMikeDavis' efforts in course setup, or does it represent an institutional change within the organization itself?

Vernon: Very good question. All four of the major championships have had their individual identities. But they have shifted over time as well. After some of the unpleasantness of at least one of our Opens, it took a lot of soul-searching, with [Past President] Walter Driver driving it and Mike Davis and Jim Hyler right there with him, to come up with our current course-setup philosophy. The philosophy that we established and live by and the one that you saw exhibited not just at Torrey Pines but at Oakmont in 2007 and, in an earlier stage, the year before at Winged Foot, all three of those venues provided great U.S. Open Championships.

I was at [Royal] Birkdale for the British Open, and that was a fabulous championship. That was links golf at its truest, with those wind conditions, and it was great golf. We'll never duplicate those conditions here in the United States, or are unlikely to. And the Masters is something all of itself, with its own identity, but it's shifted. I wasn't at Oakland Hills, but the PGA of America has a great tournament setup team, led by Kerry Haig, who does a fabulous job. We think we run the best championships, yet those organizations are pretty proud of theirs, too. But right now, we're doing what we set out to do, and we'll continue to do that.

As the USGA's philosophy regarding course setup has evolved, is the process for selecting future Open championships also undergoing a change in direction?

Vernon: With all of our championships, and the U.S. Open in particular, we're looking for the best sites available. You cannot have, in our minds, the best championship in golf without having a great golf course for it. But at the same time there are new courses being built and there are older courses that may have certain restrictions on them, so we're constantly looking for really good places. One new course we're fortunate to have, looking ahead to 2015, is Chambers Bay, a public-access facility near Tacoma, Wash. It's the first time we'll take a U.S. Open to the Pacific Northwest, and it is a spectacular site.

There's another factor at play, in that the majority of rounds are played not at private clubs but on public courses. So we had Torrey Pines this year, we had Bethpage earlier for us and again in 2009, we have Chambers Bay, and we have Pebble Beach, which is a resort but in theory at least accessible to the public. We're also looking at Erin Hills in Wisconsin, which we're taking a U.S. Amateur to in 2010, and we're looking at it as a potential U.S. Open site as well. That is another course that's truly open to the public. These are great courses that you and I and everyone else can play, and then sit back and watch the world's best golfers play.

Speaking of watching the world's best golfers play, this summer the USGA announced its support of a campaign to bring golf to the 2016 Summer Olympics. How does golf fit into the Olympic ideal, and how do you see the USGA's role in seeing that initiative come to pass?

Vernon: We are strongly supportive of getting golf into the Olympics . Especially given what the United States Golf Association stands for with respect to golf, this fits in very closely with the international golf Olympic movement. We are hopeful that we will get golf back into the Olympics in 2016, and, frankly, it is important for golf. It's good for golf in the United States, but the greatest impact of getting golf into the Olympics will be internationally. In so many countries in the world where we'd be interested in getting golf rooted, or establishing a foothold at least, you'll need some sort of government support, as a practical matter. And that government support won't happen unless golf is an Olympic sport. That, in itself, may provide some funds to different countries, but it also provides the stature and the ability for the golf organizations in those countries to establish a program to get golf as a development sport going. And, well, I'm an old-fashioned guy, I guess, and I really do believe strongly in the values that underlie golf, and I think to the extent those values can spread to any place around the globe, the world's a better place for it.

To paraphrase, "democracies rarely make war on one another, and golfing democracies never do"…

Vernon: Exactly right.

In August, after several years of research and study, as well as comment by manufacturers, the USGA announced changes in the rules regarding golf-club grooves. Can you take us through that process and tell us why the rules needed to be changed?

Vernon: First, here's what we've done: We're placing new restrictions of the cross-sectional area of grooves on all clubs and the limiting the sharpness of groove edges on clubs with lofts greater than 25 degrees - about a 5-iron and up. The rules changes take effect in 2010 for tour professionals, with USGA amateur championships to follow in 2014. Clubs manufactured prior to Jan. 1, 2010, that conform to current regulations will continue to be considered conforming to the USGA Rules of Golf until at least 2024, which means that, in all likelihood, for average golfers the new rules won't have an effect on their set makeup or the local competitions they typically play in.

Secondly, here's why we've changed the rules: One way to describe the goal of the Equipment Standards Committee is to make sure that skill and not technology remains the dominant factor to success in the game. It used to be that driving accuracy was as important a predictor of success on the PGA Tour as was putting. The correlation between driving accuracy and success on the tour over the past couple years has been almost zero. So we know the way the game has been played, the skills that are required to succeed at that level, have been changed.

Our Research and Test Center staff identified this as an issue, and then undertook a research program to study it that turned out to be world-class. I just can't say enough about how Senior Research Director Dick Rugge and his staff approached the problem and the innovations they developed to study this issue. They had very convincing evidence that the change in grooves from the V- to U-shape allowed elite players to do a lot more with controlling the ball out of the rough than they could do, or did do, with V grooves back in the 1980s and early '90s, before the new U grooves came into play.

And then they set about considering, well, if we wanted to present the same challenge to the elite players that was presented back in the 1980s, given today's modern equipment and the modern ball, how could we do it? And they tested all sorts of club-ball combinations to try to figure out how that could be accomplished and also what we could anticipate ball manufacturers doing, for example, to try to get around the fix that was being considered. Fabulous process. I'm also proud of the fact that the process continued to work as we went out with the "Notice and Comment" period, and we got some very good feedback, especially from some of our manufacturers about manufacturing problems with what we were proposing. And finally we were able to reach a consensus with the R&A so that we could adopt these new regulations. We have a very high standard for all of our activities; we've shown it in our championships, and in this case we've shown it in our equipment regulations as well.

How do you expect the rules changes concerning grooves to impact how courses are set up for tour-level and championship competitions?

Vernon: For those setting up courses for players of this level, I think you'll see a whole array of opportunities. If you look at the PGA Tour, the major championships, or the European Tour for that matter, you've seen a trend over the past 15 years showing hole locations have gotten closer and closer to the edge of the green each year, and that won't need to be as much the case anymore. The rules changes may well reopen greens to some different hole locations that will still reward accuracy, but you won't have to put it three or four paces from the edge of most of your greens.  It also is likely that there will be less of a need for long, punitive rough.

Has the USGA been too circumspect in making golfers more aware of its state-of-the-art Research andTestCenter? It's open to the public, isn't it?

Vernon: Yes, and with the opening of the recently renovated USGA Museum and new Arnold Palmer Center for Golf History at our headquarters in Far Hills, N.J., we've upgraded the daily tour we provide of the Test Center, and more people are coming over to see that facility as well. And recently, we've opened The Pynes Putting Course, a wonderfully designed and maintained putting green right outside the back door of the Museum. The neat thing about The Pynes is that you can play with replica putters like one that Old Tom Morris designed and played with, not to mention Bob Jones' famous Calamity Jane, perhaps the most famous golf club ever.

Next year we have several great opportunities to expand upon our outreach programs and further elevate the USGA Museum's profile. For one, we're conducting the U.S. Junior Championships, boys' and girls',  next July at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., which is right in the neighborhood. I assure you, there will be opportunities provided to visit the Museum and tour the Test Center for anyone participating in or planning to come to those events, or who plan to attend the U.S. Women's Open at Saucon Valley in Bethlehem, Pa., which is hardly an hour's drive to the west of the USGA campus.

USGA Museum Director Rand Jerris has said, "Anybody can display racks and racks of old clubs and balls …We're focusing the Museum on telling the history of American golf and the USGA through the people who have played it and supported the growth of the game, through golf's champions." Does that resonate with you, and how does that tie in with the purpose of the USGA?

Vernon: Golf is about people. We talk about the values underlying the game, well, those are values of people, of how we conduct ourselves, our lives and how we compete. It's people. The tools - the balls and the implements - I'm an equipment geek from way back and I love that kind of stuff. But if you really want to tell the story of golf, you tell it through the people who play it. In the case of the USGA, in particular, the national championships we've conducted, they really tell the story of golf in the United States, and the way it's been presented, the way Rand Jerris, [USGA Vice-President] Jay Rains and the rest of the staff have worked and outside groups who've helped, it's just drop-dead great. You know the story, but the way they tell it, the context, it really resonates with me, personally. And judging from the reactions of the people who have gone through the new Museum, well, we nailed it.

You mention getting help from outside groups. Care to comment on the USGA's corporate partners, which, with the addition of RBS andIBMthis year, now include American Express, Lexus and Rolex?

Vernon: When we first started the Corporate Partner Program, we were criticized in some corners, or at least met with some head-scratching. The fact is there's been a great transformation in the USGA over the years, and much of it has been the result of revenue that we derive from televising the Open championships, most prominently our U.S. Open Championship. It transformed a small organization into one that was able to do more things and other things better than we were doing before. And we've come to rely on that TV revenue, quite frankly.

I think it was fortunate that we started looking at our revenue streams a few years ago. It was [Past Presidents] Walter Driver and Fred Ridley who were pushing us to take that look, and we determined that there was uncertainty about the TV revenue - with the rise of the Internet and new media - and we just don't know what broadcast revenue will provide the USGA in the future. At the same time, part of our revenue also depends heavily on corporate hospitality at our Open championships. And with what Wall Street and the overall economy have done over the past year or so, we all see - the PGA Tour, the R&A and other golf-event organizers - a falling off of corporate hospitality revenue.

Our analysis suggests that it's not just a reflection of the general economy but a shift in the way corporations spend their marketing dollars. Some of it is tax driven, some of it is PR driven, but the reality is we cannot rely on that revenue resource in the future.

Well, we want to continue doing all of the things we're doing now, we want to be doing them even better than we're doing now, so we need to find money to do it. And there are also certain skills that we need to develop in order to serve our members better, such as New Media and the Internet - skills that we have some expertise in but not enough to do it all in house.

In IBM, we have a partner that is providing a tremendous amount of expertise in helping us develop our Internet assets and our New Media opportunities, information technology, all of that. We have a world-class automotive organization in Lexus, that is not only helping to provide us with automobiles for our players during our Open championships but also has taught us an awful lot about marketing. They are helping us in many ways behind the scenes in which the rest of the world doesn't see, except in the sense that we are now marketing better, communicating better, and the world sees that.

We have a Members program, and I don't know of a better, more successful membership program than the one American Express has developed. Yes, we get money from American Express, but just as important, they are helping us with our marketing efforts and how we communicate with our members. RBS: Tremendous involvement in the community, very much involved in philanthropic efforts and efforts to develop junior golfers and to provide access to the game to those who might not otherwise have it - all the sorts of things we're involved in, too. All these together translate into four partners, along with our original corporate partner, Rolex, who are providing us with resources, monetary and otherwise, that help us do our job better, help us serve the game better, help us communicate better, not just with our members but with golfers everywhere.

The USGA does many good things with the "revenue streams" you mention. Tell us more about the USGA's Grants and Fellowship Programs and its research in agronomy and the larger environmental initiatives concerning golf?

Vernon: I'll speak to those two areas, and I'll add a third. First of all, our Grants Program, through which we provide $4 million to $5 million a year to support programs that provide access to those who might not otherwise have access to golf:  underprivileged children, disabled people - and girls, who have traditionally had more trouble getting access to the game. These are tremendous programs, from coast to coast, north to south. To cite just one example, we're the biggest cash provider to the First Tee program. We don't usually get credit for that, but we are, and we are very proud of that.

The second area is the USGA's environmental program and turfgrass research. It's another one of the things we have gotten very little credit for. And it's also an issue I've had a strong interest in since, back in an earlier life, I was an environmental attorney. For years we have been funding research into different aspects of what are the environmental effects, both good and what is perhaps not so good, of golf.

We've supported research on developing strains of grasses that require less water and are more salt tolerant. We've done research into demonstrating how turfgrass on golf courses may actually be an environmental filter. We've studied the impacts on water quality on growing grass and using fertilizers and pesticides and other chemicals, and in the academic community and the environmental community generally, we have a wonderful reputation, because the research that we have done has been really good. We haven't been trying to direct how that research comes out: We are honest generators of facts - just like we are in equipment. Let's find out what the facts are, then let's deal with the facts.

I'd like to mention a third area that we also support. The USGA allocates more than $1 million a year to provide interns, fellowships and financial support to state and regional golf associations. We are an organization of 300-plus employees, most of whom are back in Far Hills. We do have turfgrass advisory representatives around the country, and a few regional directors. But the fact is the state and regional golf associations, along with the PGA of America, are the ones who serve individual golfers and clubs across the nation.

They do a lot for us, specifically, running qualifying events and all sorts of things for the United States Golf Association, as well as for the game in general, so we provide what is in my mind a significant amount of support to them. The most obvious is our P.J. Boatwright Intern Program, in which we help fund people on their staff to help them, especially in the smaller associations or even in larger organizations that operate seasonally. We can provide them with help during their busiest times, and also provide very specific types of assistance, whether it's helping with their IT program or running a championship.

In addition to helping fund internships and specific types of operations, we also provide equipment and equipment grants, for example, for radios to conduct their championships. That's important. The state and regional associations I think appreciate what we do for them, but the rest of the world doesn't really know about it. But it's important for the game, because those are the organizations that are on the ground, day to day.

Related Links:

2009 USGA Executive Committee Nominations Announced

Multi-Talented Vernon Set To Grab Reigns Of USGA Presidency

Vernon Elected As 60th USGA President

IGF Delegates Get Update On Olympic Golf Movement

USGA Announces Changes To Rules Regarding Golf Club Grooves