Report: LA Tabs Griffith Park For 2024 Olympic Bid

Considering there is no guarantee golf will even be in the 2024 Olympic Games or that Los Angeles will win the bid, this isn't news you can use. Yet.

That is, unless you sense like I do that LA will look dreamy to the IOC after the pending Rio debacle, especially since LA has twice rescued the Olympic Games from trouble. The last minute LA plan, pulled out of the dust bin after Boston pulled out as the USOC's choice, is beginning to filter out, as David Wharton reports in the LA Times.

Alex Miceli reports exclusively for Golfweek.com that the LA group, led by Mayor Eric Garcetti and sports mogul Casey Wasserman, has tabbed Griffith Park's courses for the golf portion of the bid. It was thought that Riviera Country Club was the original choice for golf, but perhaps the shady management or dreadful optics of going to an exclusive country club over leaving a run-down muni in a better place.

Miceli writes:

The budget for updates or changes to the golf course are set at $30 million, with an additional $25 million for clubhouse construction.

Located in Griffith Park in the Hollywood area, Wilson Golf Club originally was designed by Tom Bendelow as a nine-hole course in 1914. Seven years later, George C. Thomas Jr. designed the 18-hole facility, and changes were made in 1927 by William P. Bell and William Johnson.

Wilson Golf Course played 6,802 yards and to a par 72 when it hosted the Los Angeles Open from 1937 to ’39. It has kept the same par but was lengthened to its current 6,967 over time.

Griffith Park's Wilson and Harding Courses recently hosted the Special Olympics World Games (my slideshows here and here) and is the home to two big moments in sports history: Babe Ruth was playing golf there when he learned he'd been traded from the Red Sox to the Yankees, and Babe Didrikson became the first woman to play a men's event in the 1937 Los Angeles Open (where she was paired with George Zaharias, who she married 11 months later).