PGA Championship final round made him a Ryder on the storm

Little old Sheboygan, Wis., was once best known for a summer extravaganza called Bratwurst Day —100,000 drunks eating too much pork and passing out on the beach.

Now, for awhile at least, its notoriety will be as the home of PGA Black Sunday, a day when the wind whistled through the straits and in one ear and out the other of several in the golf world who should have more brain matter blocking the breeze.

Let us count the ways.

We felt for Dustin Johnson, who would have been in the playoff for the PGA Championship had he not grounded his club in a sand trap he didn’t know was a sand trap.

But he put himself there, on that hill with all those people and bunkers, by hitting a terrible drive. Bad drives happen, but his seemed kind of a mindless flail, especially on the 72nd hole of a major with a one-shot lead.

We felt for Bubba Watson, who has had such a well-documented, emotional family situation recently and who shot a wonderful 68 to get into the playoff.

But on the last playoff hole when he hit that six-iron from more than 210 yards, from a lie in the rough, at a green fronted by rocks and thick grass and ravines and banks and a winding little creek, and then said he’d try the same shot again, we tapped ourselves on the forehead. Wouldn’t the ball landing in the creek and costing him a major title bring at least a pause before that answer?

“I play to win,” Watson said.

Ah, Bubba. You didn’t.

Is this the new way in U.S. golf? Bravado before brains? Just grip it and rip it? Does that make John Daly the next Ryder Cup captain?

We felt for PGA officials, who were suddenly under the microscope. They put in lots of hours for little attention and are often paid in blue blazers and cocktail parties.

But as they prattled on about rules sheets and things pasted on locker-room mirrors, it seemed insufficient in answering why those bunkers on No. 18 weren’t roped off. Is it that the PGA, having fallen in love with Whistling Straits and TV blimp shots that frame the course against a deep-blue Lake Michigan and capture the 1,200 bunkers and Pete Dye’s 40,000 railroad ties, didn’t really have enough space to fit the huge spectator crowd around No. 18? So a hillside of sand traps became SRO, and Johnson clunked his shot down in the middle of all that.

If a bunker is that likely to be in play — Johnson hit it lousy but not that lousy — then rope it off and keep the crowd out. That is, unless all the space has been used up with non-ambulatory hills and valleys — landscape torture chambers with railroad ties. Whistling Straits is spectacular and difficult. Also cosmetic.

If the PGA had anticipated this situation so well that it had been stressing that rule to everybody, why not encourage the walking referee with each group to be proactive? Why wait for Johnson to recognize the trap? Tell him before he gets over the ball.

In the playoffs, officials gave Watson several choices of where to drop after his shot went up the creek. What’s the difference? Are they there to help before something happens or to watch and rule after? And if they knew, as they said afterward, that bunkers with people standing in them could be a problem, then police it, don’t just rationalize it after the fact.

Mostly, we felt for Corey Pavin, this year’s U.S. Ryder Cup captain. Talk about a tough job this time around.

As he watched Johnson, one of his Ryder team qualifiers, smoke a drive into a hillside of people when the chips were down, he had to cringe. As he watched Watson, another of his team qualifiers, try to catch a flier out of the rough and instead catch the creek, he had to cringe.

And as he watched Germany’s Martin Kaymer, a Ryder Cup qualifier for the other guys, calmly decide on a brainy, not brawny, little chip-out that resulted in victory, Pavin had to cringe.

Pavin already had had a bad PGA experience. Earlier in the week, broadcaster Jim Gray allegedly told him in anger that he was “going down,” after Pavin publicly denied Gray’s report that he had said he would make Tiger Woods a Ryder pick. Maybe that’s what Gray meant — that Johnson and Watson would “go down” at the end and a German would win.

Pavin will make his four additional Ryder picks public Sept. 7, and Gray will likely look good again. Pavin is certainly hearing from sponsors, officials and TV types who know that a Ryder Cup without Woods could draw ratings like a “Gilligan’s Island” rerun. What he told Gray was not clear. Whether he’ll pick Woods seems to be.

Pavin is a gutty little Bruin who has the kind of mental toughness needed to win the Ryder Cup, even though many fear that the Oct. 1-3 event could turn the Celtic Manor course in Wales into an Alamo for U.S. golf.

There is good news. Celtic Manor reportedly has no railroad ties or spectators standing in the sand traps.

bill.dwyre@latimes.com