A long goodbye: For U.S. Open crew, the show starts when the golf ends

For Leighton Schwob, operations director for the U.S. Open, last week’s golf tournament technically could be considered a lull in his work schedule.

Sure, there was overnight maintenance on the course and pedestrian pathways, and the rainy weather exacerbated things somewhat. But Schwob’s small army of staff, contractors and vendors first set foot on Oakmont Country Club back in February, when they began erecting the infrastructure required to host an event for more than 200,000 people.

On Monday, that army was back on the march, taking the first steps in a methodical process of breaking down 400,000 square feet of buildings piece by piece.

“It’s chaos,” Schwob said on a damp Monday morning.

But that contradicts the great amount of organization clearly on display. Even the lot where breakdown workers park is being run by parking attendants. Security staff monitors who is coming in and out of the vendor entrance on Coxcomb Hill Road.

“Everyone’s trying to get out as quickly as they can,” said Schwob, who works for the United States Golf Association. “But there’s an order of process. It starts with taking down televisions, unhooking things, disconnecting power and collecting the miles and miles of cable that gets run.”

Over Schwob’s shoulder, a crew of about a dozen people was disassembling the massive four-sided LED screen that showed the U.S. Open leader board and broadcast live action to patrons at the Fan Central concession area.

“After that, our decor company starts to take down the interior build-out — television walls, furniture, tables and chairs,” he said. “We’ve started more recently investing in more from the tent and flooring standpoint. These tents are brought down, taken back to warehouses and built at future U.S. Opens and other events. The flooring is kind of all modular and put-together.”

It likely will be two weeks before workers start actually disassembling the flooring and buildings.

Flowers, flowers, everywhere

Decorating Oakmont Country Club is a dream for USGA landscaper Stephen Borden of Chicago.

“When you come in the main entry and you can just see the whole course? There’s no other course we’ve been where it’s like that,” Borden said. “You don’t get this kind of expansiveness.”

The lack of trees at Oakmont Country Club created long vistas that gave Borden the opportunity to paint the course with color, in the form of thousands of red, orange and pink flowers.

If anyone didn’t mind the rain this week, it was Borden.

“We still would work overnight, start around 7 p.m. watering things that needed it, and we’d go until 1 or 2 a.m.,” he said. “But the nice thing about the removal is that we recycle all of our pots. We put them in the ground with the plants and we can take them right back out this week.”

From here, many of the plants will go several miles down Allegheny River Boulevard, to the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium.

“They started taking plants from us back in 2013,” Borden said. “They take the plant material, the shrubs, they’ll take the planters we have with annuals grown in them. And my favorite thing is, they take all the interior tropicals that we put inside a lot of the tents and hospitality areas. They can place those in the tropical environments they already have set up at the zoo, and we can actually provide habitat and a food source.”

Hats and shirts

Mary Lopuszynski, USGA’s merchandise and licensing director, wanted to send a special thank-you to Western Pennsylvania on Monday morning.

“Yinzers helped us have our best year ever for U.S. Open merchandise sales,” Lopuszynski said.

Even with 24 trailers fully loaded with merchandise, Lopuszynski said staff had to place reorders during the week to keep up with demand.

The main merchandise tent — nearly indistinguishable from a regular mall department store on the inside — debuted last year at Pinehurst. Lopuszynski said it will be cleaned and prepped for next year, then packed up and stored at the USGA’s Oklahoma City facility.

“That will probably be about a 10-day process,” she said.

After returning to her office, Lopuszynski will look at data from last week’s sales and begin prioritizing items that will be sold in 2026 at Shinnecock Country Club on New York’s Long Island, the site of the next U.S. Open.

“We have great data from the past 20 years of what we’ve sold,” Lopuszynski said. “For Shinnecock, one thing we know is there will be fewer people because it’s a smaller property and they’ll cap attendance far lower. So it’s not like, ‘Oh, we sold $20,000 of those at Oakmont, we have to sell those next year.’ For example, we’re probably not going to sell much black-and-gold merchandise. We’ll meet with Peter Millar, our official outfitter, we’ll look at the data and we’ll start thinking about it in July. Then by September, we’ll probably have the entire apparel line done.”

‘An anchor site’

Schwob said one of the great advantages of Oakmont Country Club is its status as a U.S. Open “anchor site,” where the event makes regular stops.

“We have an operations compound on the grounds now, we expanded the road around the perimeter of the property, and that helps the country club as well,” he said. “We’re working very closely with the club and trying to be strategic about the investments we make and how we’re doing some of this infrastructure so it can be kept, and we can both use it in the future.”

But he still has to get the buildings torn down, restore pathways trampled by millions of footsteps and collect and truck out more than 15,000 tons of gravel brought in to create temporary vehicle paths and staging areas, along with a few hundred tons of wood chips.

“Our goal is to make sure when we leave, Oakmont is happy, the club is happy, and we leave the golf course in the same condition, if not better condition, than when we arrived,” Schwob said.