Rip Van Golfer.(golf tournaments and famous golfers)

For many years, I have had a recurrent dream in which Lew Weiland's headlights, in the dark of night, appear like dawn above the tenth fairway. I am standing in a hazard that is really just a pond, and have been looking for balls. Against the dark bottom in the dark water, they glow like moons. There is muck between my toes and muck around my ankles, and I cannot easily move. Neither can Mike Hettinger or John Graham. We are caddies. Weiland is the greenskeeper. It is his custom and assumed priority to drain the pond from time to time, gather the lost balls, and split profits with the club pro, who sells them to the members. Golf balls have been a great scarcity since Pearl Harbor. The aurora over the tenth fairway grows ever brighter as Weiland races up rising ground, comes over a ridge, and floods us, stuck there, with direct light.

Caddies could play the course in the evening, and we did so into deep dusk. Aged thirteen, fourteen, I loved playing golf, even after carrying the big leather bags of lumber dealers, financiers, insurance salesmen, and osteopaths--going "doubles eighteen"--in the high humidity of a New Jersey summer. We were paid a dollar a bag, and tipped, if at all, in copper. No carts. I caddied only sporadically, when I needed money for a basketball or a baseball mitt. I caddied in Wisconsin one summer, and went to the Tam O'Shanter tournament in Chicago (Bobby Locke, the knickered South African; Jimmy Demaret, at 290 yards one of the longest balls in golf). And in 1950 I was beside the ropeless fairways glimpsing Ben Hogan in the Open at Merion. Soon, though, a day of epiphany came, on a specific round, when, aged twenty-four, clearly, if not for the first time, I envisioned golf as a psychological Sing Sing in which I was an inmate. Still young enough to effect an escape, I picked up the ball I was playing--Dunlop Maxfli 2--and put it in my pocket. I quit cold, not only as a player but also as an on-site spectator, and have not been on a golf course with a club in my hand since that day.

Yet now, after a fast-forwarding dormancy of more than fifty years, I am inside the ropes and close beside a back-nine tee, watching Tiger Woods making arcs in the air as he prepares his next shot in the U.S. Open. The ball is on its tee. A couple of yards toward the back of the tee box, Woods stands motionless, feet together, his gaze levelled on the fairway, his posture as perpendicular as military attention. He steps forward and addresses the ball. About to hit, he hears the long whistle of a locomotive, on a track quite nearby. Approaching a grade crossing, the train completes its trombone chords: long, long, short, long. Woods backs off, waits. Now he re-addresses the ball. But another grade crossing is close to the first one. The engineer, at his console, again depresses his mushroom plunger. Woods again backs off, idly swings his club, resumes his pre-shot routine. Now, reorganized, he is over the ball, but once again the engineer depresses the plunger. Backing off, Woods looks up at the sky. If only that engineer could know what he is interrupting, and whom, he would go away with a lifetime memento. The four-chord signal has become a little softer; and Woods is more than a little impatient. After two longs, he drills the ball on the short.

While the train was passing and whistling, it overrode the sound of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which now, like breaking surf, returns. Seven holes are east of the turnpike, and eleven holes are west of the turnpike. Railroad track is close beside the highway. It could be said that no hazard on any golf course comes anywhere near rivalling these two, but in fact they are to a remarkable extent not only out of play but out of sight. Like a wide-open V, the topography of this great golf course in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, the first ever listed as a National Historic Landmark, descends from the clubhouse to the turnpike and then rises on the other side, as if the road were a river. Yet the right-of-way is so deeply incised that the road and the railroad are invisible, except when you are crossing them on one of the long, vertiginous footbridges that connect the first green to the second tee and the eighth green to the ninth tee.

No golfer present is going to finish this tournament under par, a fact that will not be unpleasing to the United States Golf Association, which chooses the annual venues and controls every aspect of the tournament, inside and outside the ropes. The U.S.G.A.'s annual intention is to make the U.S. Open globally the most difficult test in golf. By the players' clear consensus, that is what it is. The U.S.G.A. has chosen Oakmont, which is fourteen miles from Pittsburgh, eight times in eighty years. Why? Its credentials seem counterintuitive. It was laid out by a complete amateur at golf-course architecture--a fin-de-siecle iron-and-steel baron named Henry Clay Fownes, who, in his lifetime, designed one course, after Andrew Carnegie introduced him to the game. In the words of Rand Jerris, the U.S.G.A.'s chief archivist, "Fownes wanted to make the hardest course in America. He did. A hundred years later, and only a few yards longer, it still is the hardest course in America."

Fairways are exceptionally narrow. Beside them, balls disappear even in primary rough. After the secondary, the grass is so high that it could be mown and sold as hay. Where drainage ditches hug some fairways, the rough is kept short between fairway and ditch so that errant balls can find the ditch. Most golf courses have about seventy bunkers. Oakmont has two hundred and ten. Balls become fried eggs in the soft quartz sand. One bunker, between parallel fairways and ribbed with grass ...