Riviera's Resilience: The U.S. Women's Open Hits LA with More Than Just Golf

For Pine, Riviera has a significance that goes beyond just being a recognizable course. “It’s almost wild to believe,” she says, “that a championship that’s been around for 80-plus years hasn’t been to L.A.” And this is a particularly poignant time for it to happen. Wildfires don’t just torch landscapes. They mess with routines, finances, school, friendships, and a family’s sense of belonging. That’s why tennis legend Pam Shriver, who lives nearby in Brentwood, sees the Women’s Open as both a celebration and a civic marker. The championship is happening about a year and a half after those fires.

Shriver was evacuated during the Palisades fire and has spent a lot of time since then focused on recovery. Not long after the fires, she was standing near a tennis court in the Palisades and noticed something small but incredibly powerful. A tennis ball sat just off the court, covered in gray ash, the Penn logo barely visible. “I find that so moving,” she says. “The ball survived.” The nets and fences were gone, but the court was still there. The ball had endured the heat, the ash, the chaos. It just sat there, waiting, like someone was going to pick it up and play. There’s no perfect metaphor for what the Palisades went through, but that image – a ball on a burned court, still round, still usable – comes pretty damn close. “It’s the promise of resilience,” Shriver says.

Shriver and her friend Ilise Friedman have been trying to turn that symbolism into action through Village Rising, a nonprofit working to rebuild parks, schools, and sports programs damaged by the fires. “It gets families moving,” Shriver says of their work, “and creates a sense of normalcy.” Normalcy has been hard to come by since the fires ripped through Pacific Palisades and Altadena. “This [recovery] won’t be over when the champion is crowned,” Shriver says about the U.S. Women’s Open.

The players get it, too. Corpuz lived in L.A. for almost eight years. She has friends who were caught in the Altadena fire, including one whose family saw the flames from their front yard before they had to bail. She hasn’t driven through the Palisades much, but she’s seen enough to know what the region has gone through. Andrea Lee didn’t need to drive anywhere. From her deck in Hermosa Beach during the fires, she could see the sky turn black and the flames flickering in the distance. She’s since driven through the burned areas and found the sights hard to take in. “This actually happened,” she says. “It was so catastrophic.”

Alison Lee’s fire stories are more personal. One friend, pregnant with her second kid and with a toddler already, couldn’t get back to her house after the evacuation order. Another friend’s brother, a firefighter, was gone for days at a time while his wife – pregnant with twins – was home alone handling everything. “So devastating,” Lee says, “but it’s really cool to see the community come together to help.”

A lot of people who lost their homes thought they’d be gone for just a little while. Instead, evacuating turned into months of dealing with insurance, planning rebuilds, and the slow, crushing realization that everything familiar was gone, turned to ash. The Palisades feel scattered now. Friends who lived doors apart are spread all over Southern California. Yet, the sense of community is still there. Some blocks started having Zoom reunions after the fire. Eventually, neighbors met again on the street, standing on their lots, trying to picture what the rebuilt neighborhood might look like.

What strikes the people who were impacted is the weird mix of normal life and absolute chaos. In the weeks after the fire, they were working out of Brentwood Country Club, navigating insurance claims and trying to figure out what came next. Outside the window, golfers were just playing golf. That surreal contrast could have been awful. Instead, it was clarifying. It highlighted what the Palisades are trying to do now: rebuild without erasing, restore without pretending, and find those moments when life feels recognizable again.

That’s where events like the U.S. Women’s Open come into play. They don’t rebuild a house or sort out an insurance claim. But they can give people a reason to come back, to gather, and to reconnect with a place that suddenly feels a lot harder to access. For Riviera itself, the fire story is personal. Some members lost homes. Club employees watched longtime members go through hell. “It was terrible,” says club GM Richerson. “We have a lot of long-term employees, and the members are like their family… and to see what they were going through was heart-wrenching.”

The USGA is stepping up. For this year’s championship, they’re expanding the free tickets for military members to include first responders. They all get in free, any day. There’s even a Hero Pavilion on the 17th hole, a dedicated spot where first responders can watch the action from a prime vantage point. “Our first thought was, these first responders are truly heroes,” Pine says. “What can we do for them?”

Riviera is, without question, a celebrated stage for championship golf. This time, though, it’s also going to be something else – a stage for the women’s game at its highest level, and a damn reminder that communities don’t heal on a schedule. The champion will lift the trophy. The canyon will echo. And Pacific Palisades will keep rebuilding the next day. You can learn more about the history and significance of major championships like this on the USGA’s U.S. Women’s Open page.