The USGA's fast-talking, people-person boss has been breaking the mold

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Mike Whan was on the move, along the dusty roads on the perimeter of the fabled U.S. Open course here. Whan was in a no-fuss, no-roof cart, a kind of descendant of the jalopy work carts he drove as a teenager in Cincinnati, when he would rake traps at a country-club course on hot summer days in the name of minimum wage and free afternoon golf. Whan’s U.S. Open credential — he’s the CEO of the USGA — was shoved in his back left pocket, and if he had ever had a hat on this warm and sunny Friday afternoon, it was long gone.

This Mike Whan could sell an egg to a mother hen — he has the knack to connect with people like nobody’s business. At this moment, he was off to the USGA merchandise tent, because merch is a profit center, and the more money the USGA makes at a U.S. Open, any U.S. Open, the more money it will have for the Walker Cup, the Adaptive Open, the U.S. Senior Women’s Open and the rest. Whan is a business guy, but the USGA is a nonprofit organization with 450 employees and thousands of volunteers. It’s a good combo.

“This is kind of a bougie, arrive-late crowd,” Whan said on his way into the USGA’s temple of merchandising. From the French, bourgeois. Quiet luxury, chill vibe, all that. “At Oakmont last year, gates open at 6:45, there’s 15,000 people there, and they’re packing lunch,” Whan said. That was then, this is now.

Not that Whan was dissing his 2026 customer base. Never! He would never be disrespectful to the people who are helping to fund the U.S. Senior Women’s Open (etc.) by way of $165 Peter Millar quarter-zip pullovers embroidered with the proud Indian-head logo of this week’s host club, the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. You wanna sell, you have to know your customers. You wanna lead, you have to know your employees.

Whan is 61, though you wouldn’t guess it. (Full cheeks, engaged manner, kid-at-recess energy.) He’s been in and around golf pretty much all his life. He collects golf’s people like some golfer’s collect brand-name courses. In the merchandise tent, he knew a dozen or more workers by name or nickname and sometimes both. (Merch Mary, for instance, aka Mary Lopuszynski, who runs the whole show.) Peter Millar (not a real person) is owned by the South African businessman Johann Rupert, who is a mentor and advisor to Ernie Els. Whan, not surprisingly, knows both, Ernie and Rupert.

Whan signed Els to TaylorMade years ago, when Whan was a marketing executive there. “Rupert wanted Ernie to be ‘the South African lion,’” Whan said. He’s a good storyteller though not a leisurely one. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ You already had Tiger.

“We did some research, asked people to give us three words to describe Ernie. They came back with big, easy and laid-back. We came up with ‘The Big Easy.’ Gary McCord ran with it on CBS. He was a TaylorMade guy.” Knowing your customers makes the business world go ’round in business. Knowing people makes the world go ’round, period.

Driving on the edges of the course Whan knew something about pretty much every player he saw and sometimes those he could not. A golfer he couldn’t see smashed a drive right over Whan’s head, with a whistle that sounded almost like a jet in takeoff. A minute or two later, the threesome emerged: Ben Silverman, Adrien Dumont de Chassart and Emiliano Grillo. “That had to be Grillo,” Whan said of the author of the whistling shot, and it was.

Whan’s dark-horse pick for this week, before the first shot was struck, was Max Greyserman. He likes Max’s game and he likes Max. Whan didn’t take him in the office pool. The USGA does not have a U.S. Open office pool.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the preamble days of this and all U.S. Opens, were tough for Whan and his people. Whan was studying wind forecasts, preparing for a press conference partly devoted to the fascinating subject of ODS (overall distance standard) testing protocols, getting Stimp speed briefings. Thursday morning was tougher yet, what with a fog delay that was getting extended by 15 minutes every 15 minutes.

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But now it was Friday afternoon, the sun was out, spectators were out, the weather worries were over and the broadcast was up and running. Probably the most significant piece of business Whan has done in the past year or two was extending the USGA’s deal with NBC Sports by six years, through 2032. Now Whan was pointing his cart to the NBC Sports compound, an annual visit for him. It was about a mile of dusty trails to get there from the merchandise tent. On his way there, Whan got lost only a couple times.

He was greeted there by Dave Giancola, a USGA media executive; by Tommy Roy, the longtime NBC Sports golf producer; by Tom Randolph, Roy’s longtime deputy; by a half-dozen other people Whan knew by name and nickname. The energy and speed of a broadcast trailer, with its controlled chaos and voluble countdowns and 30 or more screens competing for your attention, seemed like a natural home for Whan, with his own peripatetic energy.

A major championship is a great many different things and one of those things is a TV show. For Whan, the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst was the gift of all gifts: Rory McIlroy and Bryson DeChambeau dueling in the sun, frenemies at best, different in every possible way. If you follow golf, you know how it played out. “I rented a big house in the village, I had my family there, I had my own golf cart,” Whan said. You can relate to this guy, right?

And now it was two years later and Whan was at Shinnecock Hills, and once again he had his own golf cart. The forecast was for good weekend weather. The forecast was for good weekend golf.

Whan found his way to the back door of the media center, another stop along the way on his Friday afternoon tour. He happened upon one of his marketing people stepping out of a walk-in freezer with a treat in hand.

“Geller, look at you, going for an ice-cream sandwich —don’t get locked in there,” Whan said.

The man’s name is not Geller. It’s Greg Ross. Only Whan calls him “Geller,” from the character Ross Geller, from the TV show “Friends,” the tall, dark-haired character played by David Schmimmer. It’s all telling: the one-off nickname; the name of the show it comes from; the stolen moment of a guy getting a treat from a walk-in freezer; the boss noticing and having some fun with it. Yes, the CEO of the USGA, chilling at the U.S. Open!

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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