What a final round at the U.S. Open!

Is there anyone else out there in Golf land who was as shocked and disappointed with the final round of the U.S. Open as I was? The final round at the U.S. Open was anything but expected, to say the least. The first subject I'd like to discuss is the unfair condition of the course as set up by the USGA.

Do you remember the Open where Payne Stewart came to the final hole and had a three-foot birdie putt? I think it was to win the Open, around 1997 or 98. He putted up the hill to the hole, and then the ball did a 300 degree turn to the left and rolled backwards 25 feet!

The conditions yesterday on the 14th hole were almost as bad, and the USGA should be ashamed of themselves. When you take skill out of the equation, and add blind luck, it is no longer a tournament. It is a joke!

The first hole where the unfair conditions became apparent to me on Sunday was hole #2, when the leader at the time, Dustin Johnson, was ten feet from the green in two and had an unplayable lie. He had to turn a sand wedge upside down and swing it left-handed, because the weeds he was in made it impossible to swing right-handed! He took a triple-bogey seven on the hole, and was no longer leading. In fact, the shock of the situation led to Dustin's total dismantling of his mind, and he was a zombie for the rest of the day!

In all fairness to the course conditions, Dustin had already been brainwashed by the media and the major tournament commentators from the time he finished his third round of 66 on Saturday and the time he teed off for the final round on Sunday!

Here was a young man who was playing better than anyone else in the tournament after 54 holes, who was ready to play just another round of golf on Sunday, when the media learned he was calm and collected on Saturday night. That was not normal U.S. Open emotions, so they had to bang on him for hours, mentally, one after another, until they made sure that he knew he was supposed to be a blubbering idiot with the shakes in every extremity because he was leading the United States Open going into the final round!

How dare he consider Sunday's round just another 18 holes of golf? He wasn't human, according to the media, so they had to do something about it. They all had to tell him he had to be nervous, shaking in his boots, before teeing off on Sunday!

All anyone had to do was look into the kid's eyes to tell he was totally bewildered from the first tee onward on Sunday, and for the rest of the day.

So, getting back to the unfair course conditions. The most apparent hole where the conditions were not fair all week was hole # 14, where the surface of the green was like putting on a rock hard table top, with nothing to keep any ball from almost stopping within ten feet of the hole, then picking up speed, and then rolling another forty to eighty feet from the hole!

If we could look at a video of every player who was within five shots of the lead, on any day of the tournament, we could see how many players lost the tournament on #14 due to the unfair conditions. That's not golf, that's a roll of the dice!

And forget the surface of the green for a moment. Consider the fringe and what is supposed to be the rough outside of the fringe. The grass outside the fringe is supposed to be longer rough, not cut so close that every ball continued to roll down the steep hillside until it stopped in thick rough to the point where the player could not get a club on the ball to loft it back onto the green so he could run up the hillside to the green and then watch his ball roll another 100 feet down to another impossible lie on the other side of the green!

The best ball strikers in the game were reduced to rolling the dice, and bringing themselves down to the level of the lessor players. As a result, lessor players finished first and second. A perfect example of the unfairness of it all were the finishing putts on 18 on Sunday.

Tom Watson walked up to a one-foot putt on 18 and didn't even tough the hole with it. Tom has so much class that he blamed his missed putt on a mental lapse in his comment to the press, but it is obvious the ball bounced straight right when he tapped it.

And McDowell's tap-in par putt to win jumped dead right when he tapped it, and luckily it caught the right side of the hole and went in. Can you imagine what the comments would have been if it had missed from one foot, and went six feet past the hole, and then he missed the return putt?

Maybe that is what it will take to get the USGA to wake up and smell the rotten roses in the future!