Thoughts From Bethpage

Gary Player was T-15 at wet Winged Foot in 1959, which along with Nelson's 1983 win at Oakmont (below) were the previous Opens lengthened a day because of bad weather. Photo: golf digest resource center

The PGA Tour allows improved lies as a last resort to get tournaments completed. "I think it's great they're playing the ball down," said Mark Russell, a vice president of rules, competitions and administration for the tour. Agronomic conditions are so much better now than they used to be, the unpredictable shots that come from mud on the ball don't occur as often. "I'm looking at that beautiful grass right now," said 80-year-old former Masters winner Bob Goalby over the phone as he watched the third round on television. "Normally we had half grass, half dirt [surfaces], and you picked up a lot more mud than they do now. We played with a lot of mud on the ball. It was kind of a crap shoot. You'd hope the mud would be knocked off as soon as you hit it. Most of the time, it came off. But once in awhile, if it was really gumbo, if it really stuck on there, it would make the ball nosedive or veer to the left or right."

Goalby never tried to apply the conventional wisdom that if mud was on the left side of a ball, it would cause it to fly to the right, and if it was on the right, it would cause it to curve left. Woods, who lamented the four "mud balls" he had during a first-round 74, tried to apply the theory on one of them without success. "The one on 16, the mud was on the left side," Woods said, "and you know obviously it goes right, so I tried to put a draw on it, and it turned into a slice, so that really didn't work out."

Today's players can be glad they came along when they did. While they had to deal with "the pot luck" from the fairway (as Woods called it), before a revision of Rule 35-1d in 1960, a ball couldn't be cleaned on the green. This caused a whole other set of frustrations, as former tour pro Jackson Bradley experienced in the 1958 U.S. Open and recalled to Austin Golf magazine in 2004. "I had a pretty fair round going, and I was a cinch to make it to the weekend," Bradley said. "On the 13th hole … they'd syringed the greens, and my ball was covered in mud. I four-putted from six feet below the hole. I was furious. I walked over into the rough where John Winters and Joe Dey, who was the executive secretary of the USGA, were standing. I took the muddy ball and ground it into Joe Dey's palm and used very bad language on him. In so many words, I expressed my interest in changing the rule."

After his second consecutive T-6 at a major—the Masters in the sun, the U.S. Open in the slop—Woods is interested in changing his fortunes on the greens. He had an inconsistent putting performance at Augusta National and again in the Open, struggling with the pace of his putts, normally a strength. It negated an excellent long game that approached the way he struck the ball in winning at Bethpage in 2002.

Photo: golf digest resource center

"My good ones aren't going in, and my bad ones aren't even close," Woods said. "[The greens are] a little bit slow and bumpy, but you have to be committed to hitting it that hard, and I left a lot of putts short. And then when I tried to hit it harder, I gunned it past the hole. Overall, I gave myself so many chances and made nothing."

Woods had only one three-putt but missed some 20 putts inside 15 feet over 72 holes, including six in a final-round 69. One of Woods' most costly misses was a four-footer for bogey on the 459-yard 15th hole in the first round, when he played the last four holes four over, equaling the second-worst such stretch of his PGA Tour career. "If you can play it at 16 [strokes] for the week, that's a great score," Woods said of No. 15. Instead he played the most difficult hole of the Open (4.4699 average) in 20 strokes, and the four shots turned out to be the margin he finished behind Glover. Of course, Woods also could point to bogeys on his finishing hole the first two rounds, maddeningly similar to the way he bogeyed the 18th at the Masters in three rounds.