I was able to attend all four days of this year's Open. If you ever get a chance to attend the Open and I could give you one piece of advice it would be to arrive late in the day on Thu, Fri or Sat. Maybe that's obvious if you have attended a lot of tournaments (I haven't). It's a long, long day of golf. Most people come early, do a lot of walking, absorb a lot of sun, get tired and go home early. Really, the USGA could/should sell "happy hour" tickets that don't allow you in until after 4pm because they could very easily accommodate a second wave of fans. By 6pm on Fri and Sat the grandstands were practically empty and we had the place to ourselves. We finished Saturday in the top row of the grandstand behind 18 green, from which we had a perfect view of 18 green, 9 green, 10 tee, and 12 tee. An absolute orgy of great players and hardly anybody else around.
The Open is a really impressive event just in terms of the manpower and coordination required to pull it off. Perhaps even moreso at Oakmont where the gargantuan layout means more marshals, more volunteers, more concessions. You could make a reasonable case that the Open is the most logistically challenging US sports event because of the massive physical footprint, the new location every year, the fact that you're wedging temporary grandstands and facilities into a place that wasn't designed for tens of thousands of fans, the need for hundreds of volunteers with little to no prior expertise with the course. The USGA is taking some well-deserved knocks for the way they handled the possible DJ penalty, but I came away from the weekend blown away by how well they manage the mechanics of the Open. First class event all the way.