By Ron Whitten
Photos By Dom Furore
August 1, 2008
They've already held this year's PGA Championship. You may remember it. Tiger Woods won over Rocco Mediate, out at Torrey Pines on the Pacific Coast. OK, they called it the U.S. Open, but it looked and felt and played like the PGA Championship usually does, except for that cumbersome 18-hole playoff.
Every year, it is the PGA Championship that offers edge-of-your-seat thrills involving a superstar and a journeyman. Most times the superstar wins (Woods over Bob May in 2000, over Woody Austin in 2007). Sometimes the journeyman wins (David Toms over Mickelson in 2001, Rich Beem over Tiger in 2002). Even in 2003, when the PGA came down to a battle of two journeyman, Shaun Micheel and Chad Campbell, it still was a sensational finish.
In contrast, recent U.S. Opens have been a succession of train wrecks: Mickelson fumbling the trophy into Retief Goosen's waiting arms at Shinnecock Hills in 2004; Goosen inexplicably melting down in the last round the following year at Pinehurst, giving Michael Campbell the win; Mickelson's and Colin Montgomerie's painful final-hole double bogeys in 2006 that left Geoff Ogilvy on top.
You have to go back to 2002 at Bethpage (Tiger's second Open triumph, with Mickelson the runner-up) to find any Open that compared to the drama regularly found in the PGA. Until this year, that is.
Which brings us to next week's PGA, or as I prefer to call it, the U.S. Open Two Months Late. It won't be fun and games. It won't be thrust and parry. It won't be can-you-top-this-birdie-with-one-of-your-own. It will be a U.S. Open in everything but name. Players will struggle. They will play defensively. One or more big names will self-destruct in the final round. The winner will be a slightly shell-shocked sole survivor—who nobody expected to win.
The main reason this will happen is that the PGA is being contested at the South Course at Oakland Hills, of U.S. Open fame and infamy. Oakland Hills, a lush, green torture chamber situated in Bloomfield Township, Mich., is a certified monster dating back to the days when real golfers played with sticks and stones. It gives up subpar rounds as often as a bulldog lets go of a pant leg.
Yes, I'm aware that the last time Oakland Hills hosted a PGA Championship, in 1979, players picked it clean, like turkey buzzards on roadkill. Nine players finished under par. David Graham posted a final-round five-under 65 (even with a double bogey on the 18th) to tie Ben Crenshaw at eight-under 272, then won on the third hole of sudden-death playoff (the way ties in majors should be handled, by the way, over by sundown.)
But Oakland Hills had been saturated by rain back in the summer of '79. The rough was low, and the greens were soft. It won't be that way next week. It has been hot and dry in the Detroit area this summer, good weather for growing grass. The rough is a consistent four inches in depth, and so dense that course superintendent Steven Cook has had to use push mowers because regular mowers have bogged down in the stuff. The greens will be running around 12½ on a Stimpmeter, which means they'll be breathtakingly fast down some of the steep slopes of those notorious putting surfaces. That's about how it plays for members every day, and they like it that way.
All of which means Oakland Hills is no namby-pamby municipal course gussied up for a big show.
"Now, don't be diminishing Torrey Pines," says Rees Jones, the golf architect who knows both layouts intimately, having revamped both in preparation for this year's championships. (Jones did a good deal more redesign to Torrey Pines than to Oakland Hills.) He points out that the winning score of one-under-par 283 at this year's U.S. Open was just two strokes shy of the winning 285s of the two previous years, five over at Oakmont and Winged Foot's West Course, both par 70s. (He might have added that a Tiger Woods victory on a course forever legitimizes its selection as a major championship host. See: Valhalla, Bethpage and Royal Liverpool.)
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