Dick Shortz, the man who made it happen at LACC for the 2023 U.S. Open

During the 2016 U.S. Golf Association Annual Meeting, outgoing president Tom O’Toole Jr. was delivering his closing remarks when he declared the selection of Los Angeles Country Club as the host of the 123rd U.S. Open. It the most significant U.S. Open announcement in decades.

The famed private club, whose North Course ties for No. 13 on Golfweek’s Best list of Classic Courses in the U.S., will become the third U.S. Open venue in Southern California (most recently at San Diego’s Torrey Pines in 2008 and 2021) when Matt Fitzpatrick returns to defend his championship, June 15-18. It also marks the return to Tinseltown for the first time since Ben Hogan won the 1948 title at neighboring Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. 

As O’Toole noted in his speech, “Pick a number, the USGA had been trying to get the U.S. Open at L.A. Country Club for 75 years. We heard (past USGA presidents) Sandy Tatum and Bill Campbell talk about it. For years it had seemed unthinkable until Dick Shortz pulled a rabbit out of his hat.” 

That would be Richard A. Shortz, a graduate of Indiana University and Harvard Law School who served in the United States Army as a second lieutenant before practicing law for more than 40 years and supporting major corporations and leading initiatives in the field of corporate governance. A junior club champion at age 15, Shortz has had a passion for golf throughout his life and joined LACC in 1988.

The club, which was established in 1897 and has two 18-hole courses – the North and the South – opened near the Beverly Hilton in 1911, spanning 320 acres and occupying half a mile of frontage on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard between Beverly Hills to the east, Century City to the south, Westwood to the west and Bel Air to the north. A 2010 restoration project led by Gil Hanse returned the club’s famed North Course, where the Open will be contested, to its design by Herbert Fowler and George C. Thomas Jr.

In the early half of the 20th century, LACC was a frequent host of top-tier events, having been the site of five L.A. Opens between 1926 and 1940. The North Course also hosted the 1930 U.S. Women’s Amateur, in which Glenna Collett Vare captured the fifth of her record six titles. In 1954, Foster Bradley Jr. defeated Al Geiberger to claim the U.S. Amateur title, and the club was on the books to stage the 1958 U.S. Amateur that eventually was played instead at The Olympic Club in San Francisco. 

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