Much of the talk about the true significance of holding a U.S. Open at a public golf course is not exactly on point. "The People’s Open" sounds great, but simply holding the championship at a municipally operated — in this case, Bethpage is state run — venue isn’t likely to trigger greater rates of golf participation. Nor does it herald an era when golf will be more democratic, more demographically diverse, or appealing to more participants.

Bethpage is but a piece of a larger puzzle; a step in a long progression. It remains to be seen what route the USGA — golf’s strongest governing body — does in the wake of staging two consecutive Opens at public courses.

Here’s the rotation for the next several years:

            2010: Pebble Beach

            2011: Congressional

            2012: Olympic

            2013: Merion

            2014: Pinehurst

            2015: Chambers Bay

On the face of it, the lineup reads like the traditional informal rotation with the usual heavy representation of private country clubs in the Northeast or across the country’s northern tier. There are two exceptions: Merion and Chambers Bay. Merion is a traditional venue but hasn’t hosted a U.S. Open since 1981, when it was the site of its fourth national championship. The USGA’s move away and return has much to do with the evolution in equipment and the recent course lengthening to 6,846 yards. More interesting a choice (for the tradition-minded USGA) is Chambers Bay, a design of recent vintage by Robert Trent Jones II.

Not only is it a new venue — it will host its first USGA championship, the U.S. Amateur, next year — it’s also somewhat off the well-worn USGA path. Located on Puget Sound, near Tacoma, Wash., it’s about an hour south of Seattle and it’s open to public play.

With the staging of a second Open at Bethpage and two consecutive on public courses, the USGA will likely know how successful these were, measured by a matrix of attendance, logistics, ability to attract and host corporate sponsors and, of course, the merits of the course itself. The USGA may have been bold in deciding to take the Open to Bethpage in 2002, but the genie is out of the bottle. And any move away from public venues — and, in fact, any evolution that doesn’t increasingly take the organization’s championships to new venues over the next 15 years — will be seen as retrenchment. Or admission that the move to venues like Bethpage, Torrey Pines and Chambers Bay was, ultimately, a step in the wrong direction.

Why is it necessarily better to be playing the national championship on these courses than a pure rotation of the best private courses (Oakmont, Olympic, Southern Hills, Winged Foot and Shinnecock) with a few resort courses (Pebble Beach and Pinehurst) sprinkled in?

Our thinking goes something like this. Tiger Woods’ great gift to golf — among the many — is that the Woods Era would welcome more people to the game, participation would increase, and the galleries, once made up disproportionately of those who played golf at private clubs, would come to look more like the fan bases who attend football, baseball and basketball games.

With Tiger (probably) slightly more than midway through his career, not all of that has happened, particularly on the participation front. On the other hand, the boisterous galleries of Bethpage (and I don’t mean the drunks among them) were a reminder that new galleries are there and that they don’t sound and act like the galleries of yore. Some may judge it better, some may judge it worse, it is certainly different. Daring to evolve in that direction will be one of the great challenges the USGA faces in the next 10 to 20 years. — Robert Lohrer