PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- If slow play on tour was the talking point in last week's players meeting in Charlotte, then ADD sufferers will have a hard time watching the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. Phil Mickelson recently played a practice round there, and made it sound like six-hour rounds will be the norm.

"It was funny watching some of the amateurs play," Mickelson said at his Players Championship news conference Tuesday. "I was getting ready to tee off, and this group in front of us, probably an 8-handicap player, hit a nice drive out there, 230, he hits it in the first cut of rough, not even the thick stuff but the first cut. They could not find it and he takes a hack at it with an iron, and it dribbles a foot. He hacks again and it dribbles a foot, until he finally picks up and puts it in the fairway."

Asked how long it took to play behind that group, Mickelson never gave a definitive answer. "Fortunately he kept dropping it in the fairway," Mickelson said. "He looked like Hogan hitting it from the middle of the fairway. We kept stepping on balls in the rough, and it wasn't anything nearly like what it will be. It wasn't overgrown like last year where they overgrew it and then cut it back. But that kikuya grabs the club so much that it's going to be an interesting test."

In those conditions, how does Phil Mickelson think Matt Lauer, Justin Timberlake, Tony Romo and contest winner John Atkinson, an 8-handicapper, will do in the Golf Digest U.S. Open Challenge that will be played on the Friday before U.S. Open week begins? Armed with information from short-game coach Dave Pelz, Mickelson had devised an answer:

"The biggest area of difference is off the fairway," Mickelson said. "But it will be very interesting and comical to watch that challenge of trying to break 100. There's just no way that statistically (it will happen). You know, Pelz brought the ShotLink out to the World Amateur and had thousands of players and did all the statistical analysis on it. And a 10-handicap when they get moved back to tour-caliber-distance golf courses, just yardage alone, not counting greens or the rough, shoots 92, on average. It is what it is; that's the numbers.

"When you throw them on a 7,600-yard golf course, you don't even need rough; it's going to be in the 90s. You throw rough in there, you don't have the pin placements and the greens, it'll be 90 or 100. And when you throw in the pin placements and the greens, it's not even a fair challenge."

—-Tim Rosaforte

The USGA received 8,390 entries for the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in La Jolla, Calif., with the applicants ranging in age from 12 (Rico Hoey, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.) to 79 (Harris Moore Jr., Los Angeles).

Tiger Woods is among eight past champions fully exempt for the championship June 12-15. Woods, the 2000 and 2002 winner, is exempt in eight different categories, the most of any of the 58 golfers currently exempt.

Entries were received from golfers in all 50 states and 68 foreign countries, including professionals from Ghana, Nigeria and Guatemala.

Local qualifying begins May 5 at 111 sites.

--Bill Fields

HOUSTON--In an extension of what anyone who wants to see golf grow has to view as an extremely positive trend, the United States Golf Association on Friday said it awarded the 2015 U.S. Open to yet another public course--Chambers Bay, a municipal links on lower Puget Sound in Washington state.

As a prep for the big show, Chambers Bay, which is the work of Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Bruce Charleton, will also get the 2010 U.S. Amateur Championship. It will be the third municipal course to play host to the U.S. Open, following Bethpage Black in 2002 and Torrey Pines later this year. Bethpage also has the 2009 U.S. Open. The USGA also announced Friday that Erin Hills Golf Course in Wisconsin, which has this year's U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links Championship, will play host to the 2011 U.S. Amateur.

"We are excited to take the U.S. Open Championship and the U.S. Amateur to such an awesome site," says Jim Hyler, chairman of the USGA Championship Committee. "This is the first time the U.S. Open has been to Washington and we are confident that the golf course will provide a challenging test for the best players in the world, as well as a great spectator experience for those who attend the event and watch it online and on television."

Chambers Bay, opened in June 2007, is the centerpiece of a 930-acre park purchased by Pierce County, Wash., in 1992 that today features scenic trails and coastline vistas where a sand and gravel quarry once stood. Erin Hills is a links-style championship course designed by Mike Hurdzan and Dana Fry of Hurdzan-Fry Architects, and Ron Whitten, Architecture Editor for Golf Digest.

While U.S. Opens have been played at high-end resort courses such as Pebble Beach and Pinehurst No. 2, the move in 2002 to Bethpage, which is a New York state park, was the first time the national championship was taken to a truly public course. That Open was a success by every measuring stick--attendance, enthusiasm of the galleries, corporate hospitality sales, the quality of the venue and the winner, Tiger Woods.

This year the bring-golf-to-the-people trend continues at Torrey Pines, located in a public park north of San Diego. The course the players experience and the fans see at the U.S. Open will be very different than the one Woods romped across in winning the Buick Invitational by eight strokes two weeks ago.

"We are going to have a lot of fun there," says Mike Davis, the guy who sets up the courses for the USGA.  "We'll sneak tees up, move them around, make holes play differently day to day so the players have a variety of challenges. Like Pebble Beach in 2000, Torrey is a different course in June than it is in February. We will have no problem getting it firm."

Davis says the par-5 13th hole, for example, will play from three different tees and, with the prevailing wind at the back that time of the year, will still pose a risk/reward decision about going for the green in two even at 617 yards.

--Ron Sirak

At the USGA Annual Meeting on Feb. 9, incoming president Jim Vernon, executive director David Fay and the rest of the governing body's brass will have some good news to share on the financial front. Golf World got an early look at a copy of the 2007 annual report that will be released in Houston while working on a story for this week's issue on the USGA's outlook for the coming year. The report shows that the USGA and USGA Foundation had a net income of $1.21 million on revenues of nearly $137 million for the year ending Nov. 30, 2007. Net assets at year's end were $253.3 million.

The 2007 figure is modest compared to the USGA's reported net income $8.4 million in 2002, $4.4 million in 2004 and $2.3 million in 2005. However, a year ago, the governing body had a deficit of $6.12 million on revenue of $126.6 million, so things are moving in a positive direction.

An interesting note: For the first time in USGA history, revenues from the association's championships and team matches, including broadcast rights, broke the $100 million mark.

--Ryan Herrington