Sea Change

Golfers line up in order to get a chance to take on the U.S. Open site.

A bad break? Never mind. You could hood a pitching wedge, play the ball off your back foot and take the club straight up as if you were chopping wood, only to drive your egg straight into the turf, at which point you might have to take a penalty drop, at which point you may gasp in pain as your ball sinks directly to the bottom of Kikuyu Sea. That's when you start questioning yourself about trying to play smart golf.

There's also the no-roll factor: A drive landing in one of the South's rain-free fairways might yield 30 yards of tumble. Fly it into the primary rough, however, and you had better keep your eye on it. Line it up with something in the distance as you walk off the tee, because where it hit is where it will be. And if you can't find it? "We tell people that if it goes in the four-inch stuff, and it would be inside the gallery ropes, drop a ball without penalty," says Torrey Pines starter Larry Barron, who has been playing here since 1958. "Get yourself a stack of wet towels and take a swing at it. That's what the rough is like."

Since Mike Davis took over for Tom Meeks as the USGA's senior director of rules and competitions in 2006, nobody has finished a U.S. Open better than five over par. A lot of people enjoy watching mass destruction, but Davis, an instantly likable man and a very good player, is also quite intelligent, and he seems bullish on the premise that rough never was intended to break a player's wrist or even his competitive spirit, but it should make par a chore.

"We saw too many guys trying to muscle it out," Davis says of last year's turmoil at Oakmont. "We don't want to err on the side of penal. Take away their distance and spin control, but leave them a shot." So what was five inches high in April at Torrey Pines was reduced to four in May, then by another half-inch a few weeks later.

In early 2003, about four months after Torrey Pines was awarded the '08 championship off the positive reverberations of Bethpage's successful debut, Tiger Woods won the second of his six Buick Invitational titles with a score of 16 under. Recalls Davis, "I got so many calls from people asking me, 'What are you going to do?' " It wasn't the pile of tour-pro 66s that bothered Davis at the time, but the condition of the course was still a serious concern.

Whine all you want about its rough, but when you finally get to the green, the USGA has very high standards, and the bent grass employed during Rees Jones' 2001 redesign was not up to snuff. Poor root structure and Poa annua invasions were part of the deal when the tour came to town every January, but if you can't get greens rolling in San Diego in mid June, you need to find a different surface or another place to play.

In the summer of 2006, Torrey Pines and USGA officials concurred. Instead of fighting the Poa annua, they would undergo a full conversion to it. The decision actually might not have saved this tournament, but it will make it better. "If you had asked me two years ago how confident I was in getting the greens to where we wanted them," Davis admits now, "I might not have been very confident."

From its never-a-dull-moment past to a better-than-ever future, Torrey Pines is finally ready for its close-up. In following Bethpage as only the second municipal facility to host the national championship, it also shares a distinction with Pebble Beach and Riviera CC in 1948: no other tour stop has doubled as a U.S. Open site in the same year. Whereas Bethpage (26th) and Pebble Beach (sixth) are staples in Golf Digest's ranking of America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses, Torrey South doesn't make the list.

For crying out loud, it doesn't even crack the top 30 in the state of California, but if this particular Bogeypalooza was about tradition or following the herd, Torrey Pines never would have been a candidate to end SoCal's six-decade U.S. Open drought. "Of all the [U.S. Open sites] we've redone, this one started with a dream," Jones says. "We started from scratch here."

With Congressional, Pinehurst and Bethpage among his credits as the "Open Doctor," Jones considers the work he did on Torrey South extensive enough to call it his design. Some locals clearly don't agree with Jones' claim to ownership, but you'll have a hard time finding anyone who doesn't think he did a superb job. "I think of a total redesign as a rerouting of holes, and you don't have any of that here," Hoffman says.