The U.S. Open Is The Peoples' Championship

Will this week's U.S. Open be about the course or about the players? You could argue that last years Open was too much about the golf course and it's ridiculous setup. Oakmont and it's membership's attitude that harder is always better is a unique venue in many ways. Torrey Pines is more representative of the U.S. Open's desire to play the annual national championship competition on public courses. And, that's as it should be.

Every amateur player should have the chance to play the courses that the Open uses, and that just isn't going to happen at the private courses representative of economic privilege that sometime slip into the rotation. Go ahead and play the Masters at Augusta and the PGA Championship where you will, but keep the Open as the peoples' championship. The U.S. Open, like the British Open, has unrestricted qualifying. You don't have to be from a special society or group or even country to qualify to play, you just have to be a great golfer. Let's hope that tradition never changes.

As for the competition itself, for me it's always about the golfers in the end because they all have to play the same conditions and course. However, as we've sometimes seen in the past, course setup can be too much of an unwanted factor. There seems to be an unwarranted amount of focus on the final score being around par. It's as if the USGA feels they've failed if the winning score is minus something. The focus should be exciting competition on challenging courses with the golfers having to make a lot of risk reward calculations. As many have commented, Augusta these days leaves little if any choices, every golfer plays it strategy-wise identically.

From what I've seen and read so far, it looks like Torrey Pines is a very fair setup. The rough is tiered a little more than in the past, while the fairways are wide by Open standards. There's been a lot written about how fast the greens will be, but they are generally very large greens and tend to be flatter. The putting challenge comes more from the 'pockets' built into the greens for pin placements rather than the spectacle of putting uphill to a cup placement only to have the ball roll past you and back into the fairway. Hard isn't always fair or even interesting to watch.

From a spectators' viewpoint, I think the test for Torrey Pines will be how many different ways an individual hole is played. If every golfer is forced into the same strategy then, in my book, it will be a big failure. A few years back, Tiger won the British Open by keeping his driver in the bag, while most of the field was using theirs. Not only was that Open championship about the golfers, it was also about the strategic beauty of the course design, something that hasn't been improved upon for a hundred years.