COLORADO SPRINGS — There are few people more qualified than Hale Irwin to judge the test a U.S. Open presents.
Of course, Irwin might be a bit biased when it comes to The Broadmoor.
The former two-sport star at Colorado and three-time U.S. Open champion is back at a place he loves this week, serving as the U.S. Senior Open’s honorary tournament chair.
Irwin, 80, joked Friday he doesn’t quite know what that title means.
He certainly knows this course, however. And he knows the challenge of trying to navigate this tournament, both the PGA Tour version and on the senior tour.
“You have to drive the ball on the fairway — let’s check that box,” Irwin told reporters here as he started down the list of what makes a worthy Open challenge. “You have to put the ball on the right part of the green — check that box. You have to have great management of your game because not every shot is going to come off as planned, and not every putt is going to be as planned. The greens are very exacting. … Double-check that box.”
“This course and this tournament has met all the credentials of being a major championship. It’s played at altitude, so you think, ‘Well, there’s going to be a lot of short irons hit.’ That may be. However, you still have to be so precise when you’re playing at altitude and playing with differentials and temperature. They did it right. It’s really hard to do.”
Irwin clearly loves this place. He’s been coming to the Broadmoor Golf Club since his high school playing days at Boulder High. He and his wife still come back to relax and beat the summer Arizona heat.
Every time he returns to Colorado, Irwin says memories come piling back in.
Of friends and family — he’s got plenty of both around the course this week. Of tournaments. Of his playing days, both golf and football, at the University of Colorado in the 1960s.
Irwin recalled Friday being hurt his sophomore football season and giving serious consideration to quitting football and focusing solely on golf, perhaps at Oklahoma State or Houston rather than in Boulder.
The interest from those schools, which had more golf pedigree? Lukewarm at best.
So he decided to stick out playing both sports at CU, became a two-time All-Big 8 defensive back on the football field and won an individual golf national championship as a senior in 1967.
He says now the competitiveness he learned playing against bigger players in football proved integral to his soaring golf accomplishments.
“That probably is what helped me (advance). Talent? Everybody has talent,” he said. “There’s not a guy that can’t hit a golf ball. That’s not it. It is, but it’s really not. It’s, ‘What do you do with it? How do you live away from home? How do you get a score that’s reasonable when you’re not playing well? How do you follow up a good round with another good round?’”
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He won 20 PGA Tour events, including three U.S. Opens. The final of those came in 1990 at 45 years old, 11 years after his second. He won 45 times on the senior tour, a record that stood until Bernhard Langer passed him last year, including Senior U.S. Opens in 1998 and 2000. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 1974.
He’s experienced golfing triumphs all over the world, but there’s still something special about the afternoon sun giving way to a quick Front Range thunderstorm on the East Course. Hale said he simply has “a great fondness for not only Colorado but here at the Broadmoor.”
“When I come back here, it brings up an awful lot of ‘Where it all started’ for me,” he added. “The successes that I had not just in golf, but I think in football, too, really kind of helped mold the competitive spirit, which you have to have against these guys. I mean, they’re just too good.
“If you don’t have that spirit and the belief itself, you’re not going to make it.”
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