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The Riviera Country Club is a country club with a championship golf course. It is located in Pacific Palisades, California, a community within the city limits of Los Angeles. Designed by golf course architect George C. Thomas, Jr., it has been the primary host for the PGA Tour's Northern Trust Open (originally the Los Angeles Open), an annual event in February. Riviera has hosted three major championships: the U.S. Open in 1948, and the PGA Championship in 1983 and 1995. It also hosted the U.S. Senior Open in 1998. The course is located in the Santa Monica Canyon, just below the Santa Monica Mountains and a block south of Sunset Boulevard. ==History== When the country club and course opened in 1926, it was known as the Los Angeles Athletic Club Golf Course. Alister MacKenzie and William P. Bell helped Thomas in the design and planning of the course. They were in charge of assembling a labor force to build the course from scratch in the Santa Monica Canyon. In 1927 dollars, the entire country club and golf course cost $243,827.63 to build; at the time, it was one of the most expensive in golf history. Golf Course Histories posted on its website aerial comparisons dating back to 1927; notably, the famed 10th hole lacked greenside bunkers.〔http://golfcoursehistories.com/Riv.html〕 The course has been modified a few times, most notably in 1992 when Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore redesigned the bunkers to look as they did when the course opened. The country club prospered in the 1930s. It hosted the dressage equestrian and the riding part of the modern pentathlon events for the 1932 Summer Olympics.〔(1932 Summer Olympics official report. ) pp. 73-4, 572.〕 The Riviera Equestrian Center was where prominent riders like Egan Merz trained younger people like Elizabeth Taylor how to ride; Taylor, then a child star, was preparing for her role in the movie ''National Velvet''. The movie ''Pat and Mike'', starring Katharine Hepburn and Babe Zaharias, was filmed at Riviera, as was ''The Caddy'', starring Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, with a cameo appearance by Ben Hogan, and ''Follow the Sun'', about Hogan, starring Glenn Ford and Anne Baxter. The club has had many famous members, which included Humphrey Bogart, Glen Campbell, Vic Damone, Peter Falk, Jack Ging, Dean Martin, Gregory Peck, Walt Disney, Hal Roach, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. The actor Conrad Veidt died suddenly of a heart attack in 1943 while playing golf at the Riviera Country Club.〔Conrad Veidt Obituary, Los Angeles Times 1943〕 Current celebrity members include Adam Sandler, Tom Brady, Larry David, Robbie Krieger, and Johnny Mathis. Willie Hunter, the 1921 British Amateur champion and six-time PGA Tour winner, served as the head professional from 1936 to 1964. His son Mac Hunter held the head pro job from 1964 to 1973. Willie Hunter helped save the course from severe flooding in 1939, and helped rescue the club from bankruptcy during World War II. The course is well known for Ben Hogan, and the course has been called "Hogan's Alley." In the 1940s, Hogan won the Los Angeles Open three times and finished second once. Other notable winners at Riviera include Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Hale Irwin, Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, Ben Crenshaw, Mark Calcavecchia, Fred Couples, Corey Pavin, Craig Stadler, Nick Faldo, Ernie Els, Mike Weir, and Phil Mickelson. Hogan also won the 1948 U.S. Open at Riviera, and Irwin also won the 1998 U.S. Senior Open. Hal Sutton won the 1983 PGA, and Steve Elkington won the 1995 PGA. More recent winners at Riviera include Rory Sabbatini, who won the 2006 Nissan Open and Charles Howell III, who won the 2007 Nissan Open in a sudden-death playoff against Phil Mickelson. In the 2008 Northern Trust Open, Mickelson hung on for a two-shot win over Jeff Quinney to win for the first time at Riviera. This win gave Mickelson at least one win in every West Coast Swing event. One notable exception to the list of winners is Tiger Woods. As a high school sophomore from Cypress in neighboring Orange County, Woods played his very first PGA Tour event, on a sponsor's exemption (as an amateur) at Riviera in 1992; he shot 72-75 and missed the cut. His best finish at L.A. was in 1998, when the Nissan Open was held at the Valencia Country Club (Riviera was being prepared for the U.S. Senior Open). Woods shot 65-66 on the weekend, but lost in a playoff to Billy Mayfair, one of only two playoff losses on tour (15-2 through February 2014). Woods finished tied for second in 1999 and had top-10 finishes in 2003 and 2004. The 2005 event had only two rounds due to rain; Woods finished 13th. He last played at Riviera in 2006, also rain-plagued, but withdrew after two rounds due to illness.〔http://www.golf.com/golf/tours_news/article/0,28136,1713205,00.html?eref=golf〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Riviera Country Club」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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