Jim,
I like to think we have thick hides, but who am I to judge? I'm not really arguing there is bias or a double standard, but from my perspective as the greens chairman for the 2003 US Open at Olympia Fields, I'm still smarting a little bit about how our course was handled in the press. I was with Tom Meeks on the Monday of Open week and we measured the rough. It was over seven inches deep. He said they were going to cut it to 3 inches. I protested, even as I admitted that I had never been to a US Open, much less made any decisions on setup. He said that the USGA committee had decided that it had tired of the setup which fairly commanded players to punch back to the fairway out of the rough. They wanted to challenge the golfers to hit to the greens out of the rough, thinking that they might wind up going past the greens, which invited more peril at Olympia. I told him that the course was soft and that the pros would beat the course up, but they had made their decision. They cut the rough and the first two days' scores were very low. We were lampooned in the media, especially by Johnny Miller. The Chicago Tribune's Saturday headline was "Olympia Yields". The cause was the cutting of the rough, in conjunction with the soft greens. I went on the Golf Channel and said the membership was concerned that we would wind up being a "one-year experiment of a kinder and gentler USGA." At the end of the championship, only three players broke par, but the public relations damage was done.
Many of us in Chicago are wondering if the USGA would cut the rough at a waterlogged Merion, which would really render the course defenseless. I don't know what their committee's mindset is this year, but I do happen to believe that the USGA would do whatever it could to try to defend par to a certain extent at Merion, a club that sets all blue coats' eyes to misting.