The 2019 US Open will see a return to one of the iconic courses of US golf as the prestigious event will be hosted by Pebble Beach. It will be the sixth time that the venue has staged the US Open in the last 50 years, and the seventh Major to be held at the course in its history.
There is also a significant shuffling of the Major calendar in 2019, with the PGA Championship being moved to May, making the US Open the third, rather than the second of the season’s Majors.
The course itself has not changed much since it was last used to host a Major in 2010, and it offers a distinctive challenge through a combination of small greens and narrow fairways, along with the buffeting winds that sweep in across the Pacific, and the firm, fast conditions.
At this early stage, the implied probabilities on the bigbetbookmakers.com site indicate that Dustin Johnson is the favourite for US Open glory. The 2016 winner has been astonishingly consistent in this competition in recent years, finishing inside the top five four times in the last five years. He also has unfinished business at Pebble Beach. At the 2010 US Open, he led the field by three shots going into the final round but endured a nightmare 82 to finish eighth.
Another leading contender at Pebble Beach this summer will be the two-time reigning champion Brooks Koepka, who completed a remarkable triumph in 2018, winning his second consecutive US Open – the first player to achieve that feat since Curtis Strange in 1989 – despite missing four months of the season as he recovered from a wrist injury. And his top-ten finish at Pebble Beach in the 2016 Pro-Am suggests that he will have no difficulty coping with the course.
At the other end of the career scale, there are two veterans who will add to the appeal of the US Open this year. The US Open is the one Major that Phil Mickelson has yet to win. The oldest winner of the US Open was Hale Irwin, who won it in 1990 when he was 45, so at the age of 49, Mickelson would have to defy history, but as one of the greatest players of the modern era, there are few better placed to do that, and there’s no doubt he would be a popular US Open winner in 2019.
Then there’s Tiger. Just when you thought the sun was finally setting on his career, he produced a string of stunning performances in 2018. His late charges through the field at the Open and the PGA Championship were followed by a famous win at the Tour Championship, and there will be plenty of golf fans betting on Woods to win his fifteenth Major at Pebble Beach in June, an incredible eleven years after his last Major success, at the 2008 US Open.
