How different is Winged Foot’s U.S. Open setup versus normal member play?

In order to get some on-the-ground insights into this week’s U.S. Open, we sat down with five Winged Foot club champions to break down a series of questions that only course insiders would really know how to answer. This is the fourth part of that roundtable. Part I on rooting interests is here, Part II on predicting the winning score is here and Part III on winning secrets is here.

MAMARONECK, N.Y. — You’ve heard plenty already this week about just how brutal Winged Foot’s U.S. Open setup is. But you’ve also heard plenty about just how hard Winged Foot is on the day-to-day.

“Well, I think it’s right up there next to Oakmont and I think Carnoustie as far as just sheer difficulty without even doing anything to it,” Tiger Woods said on Tuesday. “I think those three golf courses, they can host major championships without ever doing anything to them.”

So which is it? Is the USGA’s setup brutal, or is the course just brutal, period? We tracked down five of Winged Foot’s club champions to find out — here’s what they had to say.

You can also hear their complete conversation in the podcast below, or in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts!

Dylan Dethier, GOLF: What is the biggest difference between the day-to-day conditions at Winged Foot and the conditions that guys will see for the U.S. Open?

Eddie Bugniazet (1984, 1994, 1997 club champ): I think the rough is really the easy answer, and then narrowing the fairways. Last week I lasered the 6th fairway, which looks like a ribbon right now, at 23 yards wide. Normally that fairway’s probably 30-35. But I think just with what I saw this weekend and the last two weeks, the rough.

The greens are always tough, and if they’re rolling 11+, to everybody’s point, there’s a comment about Winged Foot that the closer you get to the hole, the harder it gets. So the shots out of the rough are going to really turn. So I think the rough is really the biggest change factor, because we play it pretty tough generally.

Jeff Putman (2009 club champ): I concur, the rough is the difference. But we play this golf course like this pretty much since the last Open [in 2006]. They didn’t really widen the fairways back out much. They had narrowed them, and they didn’t really widen back out. You look at 4 and 15, I mean, they didn’t move. So yeah, the rough is definitely more difficult but everything else is pretty much the same. I swear we could have the U.S. Open with a week’s notice any year, any time of year.

Robbie Williams (2013 club champ): The biggest thing for me is really the firmness of the greens, not necessarily the speed but the firmness of the greens, and it really shines at some of our championships whether its our Anderson [a four-ball championship] or club championship when they really get the course in great shape and kind of close to these conditions.

What that does for me is makes you actually have to read the green from 200 yards away and you have to land a 6-iron or 5-iron in a spot that’s not natural to the eyes, away from the pin and you have to play off contours that you wouldn’t even think of if the greens were soft. So, God willing, it’ll be really firm and we won’t get a lot of rain, but if that’s the case then it’s almost impossible to make a birdie from the rough and really challenging from the fairway, no matter what shot you have.

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John Lamendola (2018 club champ): Yeah, I would totally agree with Robbie, I think in the club championship and in the Anderson, a lot of the time the Nibs, now that we have the sub-air system it’s easy for Rabideau to suck out the moisture in two days, so I’m being told he’s going to get them up to 12, 13 and that makes it really pretty hard.

George Boudria (2019, 2020 club champ): I agree with all of these guys. For me, the rough’s brutal right now, I played twice last weekend and I was chipping out in certain spots but it’s kind of like the Anderson to me where suddenly you tuck a couple pins, you grow the rough out and it just turns into a different animal. To me it’s that simple.