Frank's Place: Lancaster course for U.S. Women's Open a thing of beauty

LANCASTER - In the soft, still light of a perfect Sunday morning, the map, the one that said Paradise was 10 miles east of here, appeared to be mistaken.

In golf, the aesthetics are as important as the athletics. And at 7:15 a.m., 90 minutes before the earliest tee time on its final day in the U.S. Women's Open spotlight, Lancaster Country Club was as visually appealing as a sports venue gets.

From the lofty vantage of the third tee, 100 yards above the landing area, you could look down and see the swollen, mirror-calm Conestoga Creek. Across the long and graceful bridge that spanned it, a manicured green expanse stretched uphill to the horizon.

The green came in various shades - light on the putting surfaces and fairways, forest-dark in the roughs, silvery along the well-trodden edges the fans would soon occupy.

In the distance, a pair of farm silos, so fitting a backdrop for this golf club in the heart of Amish country that they might have served as its logo, glistened in the morning sun.

Blue dots, Open volunteers in the event's official color, appeared sporadically, and occasionally an electric golf cart, carrying groundskeepers or officials on their morning rounds, rolled silently past.

At the first green, a team of workers cut the Round 4 hole, placing it in a perilous corner five paces from the left edge, nine from the back. As they did, United States Golf Association officials, armed with a Stimpmeter, rolled balls to see if the surface was as swift as it was handsome.

Meanwhile, on a clubhouse veranda, a vested bartender lined his portable station with liquor bottles two and three deep as the sun, a planned accomplice in the successful day he anticipated, grew more intense.

The clubhouse lot was filling as courtesy Lexus SUVs discharged players near the practice range. Inside a tent there, pristine white balls, looking like fresh Lancaster County eggs, filled green baskets.

Finally, the spectators began to enter. They moved swiftly across the course in large, eager and extremely colorful packs, transforming what had been a vast green canvas into something resembling a Jackson Pollock painting.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" a volunteer asked a woman who took cellphone photos from the third tee.

"Yes," she said, without lowering the phone. "It almost makes you want to cry."

Golfer Brooke Pancake, a University of Alabama grad who failed to make the cut here, is sponsored, perhaps not too surprisingly, by Waffle House.

According to the Open media guide, one of the items on Imbee Park's bucket list is "to live with 10 dogs." Perhaps she could travel with the Phillies pitching staff.

Lexi Thompson's teal Sunday outfit was accented by a teal driver.

The LCC member most responsible for landing this Open, Jerry Hostetter, the event's general chairman, made his fortune as a hog farmer.

A local man was arrested when police found him drunk and naked in a hog barn.

Called to a Manor Township barn, police discovered an empty sixpack and Larry William Henry, 64, who was wallowing with the hogs.

"I just like pigs," Henry explained.

So Lancaster held its first Open.

The golf was real good and no dopin'.

And maybe one day

They'll come back this way.

At least that's what members are hopin'.

1. Young woman on a cellphone, loudly, just as Lala Anai was about to tee off, "Um, someone put toothpaste in my backpack!"

2. Woman to her husband at 2:45 p.m., by which time the leaders had played two holes, "Should we go home now? We can watch the end on TV."

3. Young man to two female companions: "William can come for free, you take the Scotch and everybody's happy."

1. "Yo, anybody hear a Phillies score?"

2. "Think they get the neighbor kids to cut the fairways?"

3. "This Fox coverage is great. Can't wait till they get the Masters, too."