Merion: "It is a golf-themed Mardi Gras wrapped within one of the year’s biggest sporting events — all encircled by nine miles of chain-link fencing."

It's still more than a week away, we have trophies to hand out at the Memorial and NCAA along with U.S. Open Sectional Qualifying on Monday, but Bill Pennington files a nice Sunday NY Times table-setter for the U.S. Open's return to Merion.

He touches mostly on the difficulty that is placing an open at such a small venue and the role Haverford College played (including an emergency tarp hanging to help the baseball field)

“The college is not a golfing community, so some people were taken aback at the size of what was coming,” said Dick Wynn, Haverford’s vice president for finance, who was involved in the negotiations with the U.S.G.A. “But we wanted to be good neighbors, and as everyone learned that Merion is like a golf museum to golfers, we wanted to help the event come here.”

The college received more than 100 free tickets to the Open, which have been useful for institutional fund-raising. Other tickets have been raffled off to the college community.

There is also a nice video accompanying the story: