It's Open week!

As a golfer, this week is important to me. It's the US Open... an event staged by the USGA  each year to make those guys who make the rest of us look like idiots... look like idiots.

Well, most of the time. There have been years where the course conditions were not all that tough. Case in point, last year's Open. But, in general, the courses are long, the greens as hard, fast, and as unforgiving as pool tables, and the rough more jungle than grass.

I don't think the US Open encourages people to take up the game. Compared to the courses I play on, the US Open course set up is impossible. It's only right. The pros would make mincemeat out of my local courses. They could hit the greens on almost all the par 4's from the tee. On some, they would be using an iron to do so. We have no rough to speak of. But we also have no fairways to match those of the pro tournaments and our greens are patchy and slow. 

If I had to play a US Open course, my score would be in triple digits... Maybe 150 if I stuck it out long enough to finish.

And the level of play is quite different. We congratulate fellow players (saying "good shot!") for just ending up on the green. We think sinking a putt from 20 foot is amazing. The pros? They get angry if they are more than 10 feet from the hole, they routinely reach par 5's in two, and sink 20 footers like they are practically tap-ins.

Bobby Jones once said Jack Nicklaus plays "a game with which I am not familiar." It was a remark made during Nicklaus' winning of the 1965 Masters Tournament. Nicklaus has said the same about Tiger Woods. I think Tiger's wife once said it, too, but I think that was about something else.

In the US Open, you will see some amazing golf shots. Shots that I and my fellow hackers could never pull off intentionally... maybe not even unintentionally.

It is, even if you aren't a golfer, great entertainment.