Golf Question of the Week: A Kinder, Gentler U.S. Open?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3184/2571193000_ce0c46c9c9_m.jpgA few weeks back, we wondered aloud about the chances of Europe ending its 38-year drought of U.S. Open championships. So I was curious to read this piece by John Huggan of Scotland on Sunday, which alternately offers bitter rips of the USGA’s history of course set-ups, and glimmers of hope in the fact that the USGA’s director of rules and competitions appears to have taken steps in the past two years to ease the bloodletting.

You’d never know it by last year’s showing at Oakmont, though, where Angel Cabrera won with a score (+5) that would have players booking Friday night flights out of town at virtually any other PGA TOUR event.

I can hear the purists wailing already.

”But it’s supposed to be the toughest test in professional golf.”

”Major championships aren’t supposed to be birdie-fests.”

Yada yada yada.

Sorry. I just don’t get much of a kick out of seeing only one player in the field (guess who?) able to reach the fairway from the 10th tee at Bethpage Black in 2002, or the USGA turning one of the world’s hallowed golf courses (Shinnecock Hills) into a Clyde Beatty Cole Bros. freak show two years later, with greens so dry and hard players were bouncing Titleists off them like Spaldeens off asphalt.

So this year, how much of a difference in scoring will we see with the USGA’s implementation of “graduated rough”? Consider Bill Davis’ point/counterpoint:

"The concept is that, if a guy misses a fairway by 25 feet or less, he will have an opportunity to create a shot and get the ball to the green – if he is good enough. All we really want to do is take the spin off the ball and make it more difficult but not impossible for him to control his distance. "The great thing about that scenario is that it brings more numbers into play. I have long argued that we'd see that scores actually go up if you tempt players into going for shots they maybe shouldn't go for."

Does that mean we might have a fighting chance of seeing some red numbers this year? Or is this just a sly USGA trick that merely switches submission holds from an armbar to a rear naked choke?

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