Inside the Media Tent: Reporting on the 2011 U.S. Open

Editor's note: Ryan McDermott is the editor of Takoma Park Patch and reported on the 2011 U.S. Open from last week. This is the first in a series of two installments about his experience covering the golf championship.

I woke up last Monday morning and stepped out into the sweltering humidity of D.C. in the summer. The city is surrounded by water with three major rivers - Rock Creek, Potomac and Anacostia – saturating the air. June had been particularly brutal. At 102 degrees, June 9 had been the hottest day since 1874. It was also the earliest reading of 100 degrees since 1925. It was like a steam bath outside.

The temperature inside my car read to be about 115 degrees and I had trouble breathing in the thick air. I could feel my button-down shirt start to cling to my chest and then dot with sweat marks.  It wasn’t going to be pretty covering my first U.S. Open golf championship.

I was a general assignment reporter, not a sportswriter, and I relished the opportunity to spend seven days with the national sporting press, a group rich with a history of storytelling, bathos, irreverence and generally disgruntled behavior - my kind of people.

Back in the car I was tearing around the outer loop of the Beltway west toward the $30,000-a-year private school where, in a cruel twist of fate, the press were supposed to park. Then I hopped a bus and was shuttled down River Road a mile-and-a-half to Congressional Country Club where the tournament was being held.

The traffic around the course was pretty light all week, a testament to the organizer's ability to reroute traffic and cause jams in other places like Dulles and Gaithersburg. Each day coming home on the Capital Beltway around 6 p.m., the combination of workday rush hour traffic and tournament traffic coming in from the two satellite lots was excruciating, though.

The course wasn’t very majestic when we first pulled in. It didn’t immediately open up and with the tents and security guards the prestigious club looked more like the site of a county fair than a golf tournament. As you got closer to the clubhouse the scenery did get pretty spectacular, but the press buses didn’t go that way. They snaked through back roads to a remote area in the northwest corner of the course and dropped us off in front a security checkpoint set up specifically for reporters covering the event.

After sending my bags on a ride through the x-ray machine and walking through a body scan (which we all ended up having to do every day of the tournament), I walked down the set of red, wooden stairs and into the massive, air conditioned press tent where there the United States Golf Association, who hosts the tournament every year, had set up 374 stations for reporters to work. The stations were all facing a giant board filled with the scores of each player and were flanked by two huge TVs showing the leader board and coverage from the course.

The tent, which at times could be freezing cold, became a refuge throughout the week for sweat-drenched reporters who’d just walked the 4.3 mile loop, following golfers who would become irrelevant after Rory McIlroy scored six-under-par Thursday on the first official day of the tournament and held strong for a stunning performance throughout.

I turned in a piece of paper with my affiliation on it, was handed a press pass and an envelope with instructions and searched for my station, which was in the last row of desks, dead center.

The tent was only about half full. All around me weathered road warriors were slapping each other on the back. These were the guys who covered the tour from stop-to-stop around the United States. The tournament didn’t start until Thursday and only the diehards came out for the Monday through Wednesday practice rounds.

Sitting next to me was a man named Jay Flemma, a short, scrappy looking character with boundless enthusiasm. He was an entertainment lawyer by day and golf writer by night.  The Open was more of a vacation for him, an opportunity to write some pieces for a golf website and visit his girl, who he called Britt, after Britt Ekland.

On that first day he pulled the paper sign labeling the desk as his out of its holder and shoved it in his bag.

“Aren’t you taking yours?” Flemma said. “I frame them.”

He rifled through his bag and set up a stack of books - a dictionary, a thesaurus, a book on the history of the U.S. Open and a book by legendary golf writer Dan Jenkins – and then pulled out a folder three inches thick with background information on the Open.

Flemma had an odd charm about him and he seemed to know everyone at Congressional. He would be a constant throughout my week and a welcome sight, as the tent got more crowded over the weekend.

The practice round days wore on in a daily grind: early morning drive and shuttle to the course, watch morning groups hit balls and all over the course trying to find every angle, eat lunch, watch afternoon groups do the same thing the morning groups did, get snack and coffee from the lunch tent, file story. It wasn't until Thursday that things started to get exciting.

Outside the media tent, where the crowds gathered, there was a distinct parity to the scene inside the tent. The people who buy the practice round tickets aren’t the same as the ones who come to see the tournament play over the weekend. They’re the ones who don’t have the money to spend $125 a pop to spend on Sunday tickets, but still want the chance to see their favorite players on a U.S. Open course. The price of basic tickets to walk the grounds and follow the players double from what they were for the practice rounds for Thursday and Friday and nearly triple for the final two days of the tournament.

Check back with Patch tomorrow for the second installment in this series.