Dominic Urrutia, an Athletics Media Relations Student Assistant, and Richard Stern, Assistant Athletics Media Relations Director, are spending the week working at the U.S. Open Golf Championship at The Olympic Club in San Francisco.  This is the second in a series of blogs they will post from the Championship.  Below is Richard's post from Thursday.

I don't know who came up with the quote "the calm before the storm", but I think the chance is better than not that he or she was in the Media Center of a U.S. Open Golf Championship on a Thursday.

Just off the 17,000 square foot media workroom is the interview area where player press conferences are conducted.  Every interview is transcribed and sent to us for distribution to the over 450 credentialed members of the media who are in attendance as well as following the action from around the world.

On Tuesday and Wednesday there was a steady flow of interviews as players finished up their practice rounds and came in to meet the press.  We probably handled 15 press conferences in those two days (THE CALM).

Today, beginning at 7:15 a.m., groups teed off on both the first and ninth holes for their first competitive round of the championship.  By 11:30 a.m. they were finishing up and heading to one of two USGA interview areas as well as appearing on NBC and the Golf Channel.  Every word that is said can and generally is turned into a transcript that the media can and do request copies of…fulfilling those requests is our job.

From 11:30 a.m. to about 2:15 p.m. we handled 17 press conferences, virtually non-stop, with four copiers running off multiple copies of each interview's transcript (THE STORM).  We got a couple of hours reprieve from the chaos…(Nick Watney just got an albatross! - a double eagle!  It's believed to be just the third time in the 112-year history of the U.S. Open that a player has holed out from the fairway on a par-5.  T.C. Chen in 1985 & Shaun Micheel in 2010 are the other two that we are aware of)…and then the whole thing started over again with the second wave of players who finished up in the evening.

This is just day one of four competitive rounds and although at times it is "crazy" busy we are having the time of our lives.