The U.S. Open

First of all, much thanks to Mr. Zimmerman for the kind comments he left last week. As I mentioned early on when just starting this blog, "I write because I want to figure out what I think, and why," to give some order to the jumble of inchoate thoughts that are always bouncing around in my head. So my motives in keeping up this blog are personal, even selfish, but it is nice to know someone else is getting some pleasure from my musings. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a momentary ego surge when I read the good man's compliments. Thank you, sir.

Besides being gracious, Mr. Zimmerman's comments were well-timed too. I've been wondering lately whether I should keep this blog up. You might have noticed posting has been light lately. While this has to do somewhat with the fact that I've been busy at work, it's also true that I haven't really felt like blogging. No surprise because summer is here and my interest in intellectual matters seems to wane with the warm weather. I'd rather be out on the golf course.

Speaking of which, the U.S. Open set up at Torrey Pines seems eminently fair, unlike many other years when the rough has been made overly punitive. This doesn't surprise me much. The USGA's ideas on how to set up a golf course to identify the world's finest golfers have evolved over the past decade and I think they've finally got it right. I would point back to the 1999 Open at Pinehurst as the beginning of this new thinking. There, for the first time in years, they shaved the areas around Pinehust's bowl-shaped greens, allowing approach shots that weren't struck properly to run off the sides. This penalized bad approaches but also gave the player a chance to recover with an excellent shot. It also gave a player who hit a wayward tee shot the opportunity to run the ball up towards the green - again, it provided the opportunity to recover, rather than the old hack-and-hope approach of previous years. In short, it gave the players an opportunity to play golf and to show off their talents. As a result, the 1999 Open was terrifically entertaining and it must have opened some eyes at the USGA. Over the past few years, the idea of a graduated fairway rough has also taken hold, i.e a fringe, then a first cut, then a second cut, each progressively longer and therefore more difficult to extricate oneself from - the worse the tee shot, the worse the penalty. For years at the Open the longest rough was just off the fairway. A well struck tee shot might barely trickle into five inches of hay and the player had no choice but to hack a wedge out to the middle of the fairway. Not only was this boring golf, it was completely unfair and went against the USGA's purported goal of identifying the finest golfers in the world. The folks at the USGA seems to have learned their lessons though, for we've had a number of fine setups over the past decade and Torrey Pines looks like another. I expect an excellent tournament.

With Tiger and Phil paired together for the first two rounds, now would be the perfect opportunity to add my two cents. But what else is there left to say? I'll only repeat the old story about Jack and Arnie, which seems to apply to Tiger and Phil forty years on. The story goes that Jack and Arnie are walking down the fairway side by side when God taps Jack on the shoulder and says, "You will be the best." Then He taps Arnie on the shoulder and says, "But they will love you more."