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Driving Ambition: MIT Alumnus Could Reach U.S. Open Course—with Your Help

Erik Norton '93 knows about playing the odds. He was a member of the MIT blackjack team in the early 90s and now works as a hedge fund trader. This month, however, Erik is close to winning his most improbable bet ever—and he needs MIT's help.

When Golf Digest introduced its "What Would You Shoot?" contest this spring to give one amateur golfer a chance to play the 2008 U.S. Open course, the response from golf fans across America was overwhelming: more than 56,000 people submitted a 100-word essay on why they deserved the chance to play the same course as the pros at the nation's golf championship.

To his surprise, Erik made the cut as one of the five finalists. "If you're an avid golfer like I am—and there are millions of other people like me who really just eat, sleep, and breathe golf as much as possible—this is a dream come true," says Norton, who was captain of the MIT golf team in his student days.

But only one of the five finalists will travel in June to Torrey Pines Golf Course near San Diego, and the winner will be chosen by the voting public via the Golf Digest website, where anyone can vote once a day for the month of April. Erik is trailing on the leader board right now, but with the entire MIT community behind him, he believes he can come out on top. "What I've been able to accomplish in my life probably has a lot to do with the fact that I went to MIT," he says. "To have MIT run with this thing and have it be a real fight would just be phenomenal."

If he wins the vote, Erik won't golf alone. He'll play in a foursome with Matt Lauer of the Today show, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, and pop singer Justin Timberlake. They'll take on Torrey Pines under the same conditions as the pros who will play a week later.

Non-golfers may wonder why it would be a big deal to play a round before the main event, especially since Torrey Pines is a public golf club. According to Erik, it's all in the setup. The course will be closed prior to the U.S. Open and reconfigured to be extraordinarily difficult—holes will be much longer, fairways narrowed, the rough rougher. Add NBC recording every stroke for broadcast during its Open coverage, and "it's as close to the real thing as an amateur can get," says Erik.

The contest was inspired by a comment from Tiger Woods at last year's U.S. Open at Oakmont in Pennsylvania. "If you're a 10-handicapper," Woods told reporters, "there is no way you're breaking 100 out there."

A golfer with a 10 handicap should shoot an 83 or 84 on a normal day, explains Erik, who is the best-rated of the finalists with a 5 handicap. "What he was trying to convey was the common golfer just has no concept of how much more difficult the setup of a golf course is for a U.S. Open."

The editors at Golf Digest agree: they played with all five finalists earlier in the winter and are giving the winner just 4-1 odds to beat the 100-stroke challenge. Having defied the odds to make it this far, Erik will take that bet. "I really, really believe I can," he says, "but there's only one way to find out. That's to be elected the winner."

By Thomas Gearty

April 10, 2008