Open Season on the US Open

Tom Ferrell

It's an uphill battle to qualify for the U.S. Open. Photo: Ryan Nelson, who qualified at Hawks Ridge Golf Club, north of Atlanta, GA.

Frankly, the US Open is not my favorite major championship.

Yes, there’s the exquisite sense of Schadenfreude that comes from watching the best golfers in the world struggle like weekend choppers. However, there’s also the nagging sense that the USGA has jumped the shark in its efforts to “protect” par. By creating dental-floss-wide fairways, inordinately penalizing slight mistakes and pushing putting surfaces to the very edge in a quest for higher and higher speeds, the blue coats from Far Hills have created an almost unwatchable affair (I’m holding out hope for 2014 at the newly restored Pinehurst No. 2, by the way) that, over time, has crowned the most ragged group of major winners in the game.

Andy North, Lee Janzen and Retief Goosen won TWO US Opens apiece, for Pete’s sake.

There’s another element, however, that makes the US Open one of the most interesting and romantic championships in the world. That is the saga of the qualifier – golf’s Ballad of Everyman.

This past Monday, club pros, instructors, flat-bellied amateurs, some not-so-flat-bellied amateurs and a host of nervous PGA TOUR pros teed it up in Sectional Qualifying tournaments around the country. The stories of the triumphs and heartbreaks have been well documented. For me, I’ll just say that there is something very heartening about watching amateurs competing alongside TOUR pros wearing shorts and toting carry bags. One or two outliers always seem to sneak in, and some sure-things end up with an unexpected week off.

It’s the “Open” part that I love. No one wins the US Open, they say; someone ends up the last man standing. The four days of the championship don’t always make for compelling sport. But the road there is a journey indeed.