If Oakmont's conditions/set-up gets high marks, how can anyone on GCA.com complain about USOPEN set-ups ?
If AMATEURS can be subjected to the conditions that existed at Oakmont this past week, why shouldn't PGA Tour pros, the greatest players in the world, be subjected to similar conditions, perhaps conditions ratcheted up a notch, due to their enhanced abilities, when they play in US OPENS ?
Patrick,
I certainly can't speak for others here but the reason I approve of the Oakmont set-up for the U.S. Amateur but not for the U.S. Open has to do with the differences in match play and stroke play tournaments.
The U.S. Am is match play, in which severe conditions generally don't affect the nature of the competition like they do stroke play. The competition is made up of individual matches, with play "starting over" each day with new matches. Once the matches start, the player only has one opponent each day. The only cumulative effect of the competition is that the winners keep playing. So a blow-up hole only costs you one hole lost, with the chance that your opponent might blow up and give you the hole right back.
The U.S. Open is stroke play, and the entire competition is cumulative; that is, every stroke taken counts in the end, and the score carries over each day. Furthermore, the player's competition is the entire field, not just one player a day. So a blow-up hole any day of the tournament is likely to put the player in jeopardy of falling out of contention, because the player can't hope for the entire rest of the field to blow up as well. so the penalty for having a blow-up hole is more severe in a stroke play event.
Because the conditions are getting so severe in the U.S. Am and U.S. Open, the line between a good shot that turns out well and a shot that is severly penalized seems to be getting smaller all the time, but again that's fine for match play because such penalties can be overcome much more easily than in stroke play. In stroke play, blurring the line between a successful shot and a disastrous one puts the competition in danger of becoming a lottery, of who can walk the tightrope and whose misses are fortunate enough not to be penalized too severely.
Furthermore, the aims of stroke and match play tournaments are different. Yes, both aim to crown a champion golfer, but certainly the aim in the stroke play U.S. Open is to "identify the best player" through manipulation of the conditions to create an ideal (in the USGA's eyes) test of golf for the players.
But I certainly don't think the intention of the U.S. Am is to "identify the best player", and the consensus seems to be that match play is so unpredictable that the chances are that the "best player" will rarely win. It is more a contest to see who can survive, who can remain standing at the end of a series of elimination matches, who can find a way to win his matches regardless of the conditions or his opponents.
So in my mind severe playing conditions are just another obstacle facing the players in a match play event, whereas in stroke play they threaten to undermine the entire purpose and nature of the competition.
Other reasons that severe conditions work better in match play are (i) the improved pace of play of match play, (ii) players don't have to hole out on every hole in match play, and (iii) more aggressive shots are played in match play knowing that the biggest penalty for getting into trouble is one hole lost.
So for all those reasons I say for match play, "Bring it on--make it tough", but for stroke play I would have a little more of a problem with conditions as severe as we saw at Oakmont this week.