Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, longtime host of the Los Angeles-area event on the PGA Tour, was added to the list of venues in the Los Angeles Olympic Committee’s bid to host the Olympic Games in 2024.
Originally, the group proposed that golf in the Olympics be played at Griffith Park Golf Club in Los Angeles, a popular municipal venue featuring Harding and Wilson courses.
Staples Center, Pauley Pavilion at UCLA and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum also are among the sites on the list of venues.
“Obviously Riviera is a world-class course,” Casey Wasserman, chairman of the 2024 L.A. Olympic Committee, told the Los Angeles Times. “We feel it’s the right answer for our city and the right answer for our bid.”
Riviera hosted what started out as the Los Angeles Open for the first time in 1929 and has been the home of the tournament almost exclusively since 1973.
The course, nicknamed “Hogan’s Alley,” hosted the tournament in all but two years since, in 1983 when it was played at Rancho Park Golf Club because Riviera was site of the PGA Championship in August, and in 1998, when it was played at Valencia Country Club in Santa Clarita because Riviera was preparing to host the U.S. Senior Open in July.
Ben Hogan gave the course its nickname by winning three times in less than 18 months at Riviera, capturing the 1947 and 1948 Los Angeles Opens plus the 1948 U.S. Open.
In addition to hosting the 1948 U.S. Open and the 1983 PGA Championship, won by Hal Sutton over the great Jack Nicklaus, Riviera was site of the 1995 PGA Championship won by Steve Elkington of Australia.
Bubba Watson will defend his title in what is now the Genesis Open next February at Riviera.
Golf was played this year in the Olympics for the first time since 1904 but is not guaranteed a spot beyond 2020 in Tokyo.
