The U.S. Open golf tournament is on this weekend.
Miss Merion is giving the boys a spanking.
At a paltry 6,900 yards, probably the shortest U.S. Open since the last time they played at Merion in 1981, the pundits were all raving about how it wouldn't stand up to the modern beefed-up player and his technological bag of tricks in the form of 12th-generation Big Bertha drivers and multi-faceted computer-generated putters. They were predicting scores of 8 or 9 under par, easy.
The current tied two leaders after two days of play?
1 under.
There are three playing at even par and the entire rest of the field is in the plus column.
Like I said, a spanking.
Of the four masters, the Open is usually considered the 'nastiest' of the lot. While the others might rely upon ultra-long holes, ultra-slick greens and ultra-tough pin placements, the Open is usually defined by a zillion sand traps and rough that goes halfway up your calf.
And there's even more to it than that, such as the toughness of the grass. Merion uses a particularly tough grass around the greens, a lesson Tiger Woods handily learned just yesterday. The ball was a few feet off the green, embedded in some short, gnarly rough. He took the proper swack at it and the ball plopped about 10 inches. He took another swack and it flopped onto the green a few feet and stopped nine feet from the pin. Welcome to Merion Golf Club, Mr. Woods, still catering to that old, pre-modern tough-love style.
They also don't have pin flags at Merion; they use straw baskets which were originally used to store the players' lunches so they'd stay safely out of reach of deer, caddies, and other course varmints. What this means is that the players are forced to use such ancient, archaic means of determining wind direction as "blowing tree branches" and "clouds". This 'getting back to the basics' approach is enough to throw the strongest player off his game.
Broadcast time is noon (ET), NBC. Original info and slideshow here, updates here. Live streaming is here, fairly decent full-screen quality.
What's going to add to a spanking good time is that Merion was drenched with rain in the week up through Thursday, so it's actually been playing slow these last two days. As things dry out, the fairways will become even faster (giving the ball an even greater chance of rolling off into the rough, something that happened over and over again on a couple of particular holes yesterday, even to the greats like Mickelson and Woods) and, of course, the greens will make a big jump on the Stimpmeter. They were already in the 'scary' category yesterday (it was raining Thursday to the point where they were basically putting around small lakes, so yesterday was the first day in which the course could actually be judged), so today should take a fairly dramatic jump in green speeds.
A bit more below the fold. Go, Team Merion!
Scuttlebutt Dept
— While Mickelson was originally lauded for 'being such a great dad' by jetting back to the West Coast to catch his daughter's 8th grade graduation a few days before the event (he got back at 11 pm the night before kickoff), he only posted one birdie yesterday — on the last hole, no less — so now the pundits are saying he might have lost that something extra and/or run out of gas with all the jetsetting.
Sat Update: Phil is leading the pack, once again proving the pundits wrong.
— While the stat on Tiger is that he's never won a major when he was over par after 36 holes of play, this might be the one where he breaks the mold. If he can get his full game on, and with the competition falling by the wayside as Merion plays nothing but tougher and tougher, this is the situation where Tiger shines. When you start playing at age 3, not a lot cows you.
Sat update: Tiger's now about 50 shots over par, once again proving the pundits wrong.
— My personal fave is Rory McIlroy, who won the U.S. Open two years ago. If I were going to ascribe two words to him, they'd be determination and confidence. He doesn't quail from the tough shots and he's not afraid to attack the ball. You really don't often see a pro totally pull the trigger and give it 100%, but Rory let out a few on Thursday that... that... that Merion's rough promptly gobbled up and spat out, thus imparting another old-timey welcome to them-thar fancy city boys who've come a'visitin'.
Let the battle between them commence.
