Mystical Setting for 100th Open

Staging the 100th U.S. Open at Pebble Beach appears no more a stroke of genius than pairing bread with butter.

If you were going to celebrate 10 decades of golf in America with the supreme test on supreme soil, mesh the beauty of the Seventeen Mile Drive with the 300 Yard Drive, match pitches with postcards, was this not the logical place to tee it up?

Sergio Garcia, the bubbly 20-year-old Spaniard, took his mother on a walking tour this week.

She kept telling her son, “I can’t believe how beautiful this place is. It’s just incredible.”

Jack Nicklaus, winner of four U.S. Opens, has said Pebble Beach is the course he’d choose to play last before taking the fairway to heaven.

This is a major with backdrop. It is our national championship, an Open in the truest sense. Sixty-nine players in the 156-man field are here via exemptions. The rest of the field was settled on courses across America. More than 7,000 players with handicaps of 1.4 or better competed in local and sectional qualifying to vie for the Tin Cup chance to make history, if not par.

Ben Crenshaw and Fuzzy Zoeller wanted to be here, but didn’t pass muster.

Craig Stadler had to muscle his way in with a bunch of other scrubs.

Sometimes, at the U.S. Open, the dream lives.

In 1996, Steve Jones barely survived sectional qualifying at Columbus, Ohio, and became the first non-exempt Open winner since Jerry Pate in 1976.

This is Pebble Beach, yes, but no clambake.

The stakes are high and the rough is higher.

U.S. Golf Assn. officials love to rig the Open to the degree that rich men cower to make par.

Tiger Woods won the regular PGA Tour stop here earlier this year, but knows this is not the same patch.

“It’s playing quite a bit different than it did during the AT&T;,” Woods said. “All of the fairways are drier, they are faster, the greens are harder and firmer.”

Pebble Beach has even been tampered with for this event, the No. 2 hole reduced from a par five to par four because of the loss of a Monterey pine to a disease known as pitch canker.

Par for the course will be 71, not 72.

This is a championship with backdrop, some of it somber.

It is the Open that Payne Stewart did not live to defend.

Last year’s champion at Pinehurst was killed in an Oct. 25 plane crash, casting a pall on this ocean view.

Yet, strangely, it is the last week Stewart can be spoken of in the present tense. Until his title is officially taken on Sunday, he is the defending champion.

“Something is going to be missing in this U.S. Open,” Garcia says of Stewart’s absence.

This is the Open that may actually be won by a foreigner. No European since England’s Tony Jacklin in 1970 has won the title and only three international players in the last 20 years--Australian-born David Graham and South Africa’s Ernie Els (twice)--have conquered the U.S. championship.

This year, the field is filled with potential interlopers. Sweden’s Jesper Parnevik, one of the PGA Tour’s hottest players, may blind the competition with his pants alone and steal the title.

Vijay Singh of Fiji will be focused, if anything. Not only is he fresh off his Masters win at Augusta in April, he recently underwent laser eye surgery.

Darren Clarke of Northern Ireland is a threat, a man who boasts of a win over Woods in the WGC Match Play at La Costa.

And what about Japan’s Shigeki Maruyama? He has climbed to 15th on the earnings list and turned in a stunning round of 58 in U.S. Open sectional qualifying.

Els, of course, is a two-time champion and remains a threat, and Scotland’s Colin Montgomerie knows his way around Pebble Beach, finishing third to Tom Kite at the 1992 Open.

This is an Open that will again test and tease two of the best U.S. golfers who have yet to win a major, Phil Mickelson and David Duval.

Last year, at Pinehurst, Stewart’s dramatic 18-foot par putt for victory denied Mickelson a shot.

Duval has been close before. In April, at the Masters, his ill-advised shot into Rae’s Creek at the 13th hole all but dashed his chances at catching Singh.

“I feel like I have my head where it needs to be,” Duval said this week. “I’ll be the first to tell you it hasn’t been where it should be ever since Augusta.”

If you think Duval is tired of his billing as Best Player Not To Have Won A Major, you’d be right.

“It seems that everybody is worried about it more than I am,” Duval said. “I feel like my game is getting very good again, and it’s where it should be.’

Once, only months ago, Duval at his best would have made him the odds-on favorite.

But even Duval concedes the U.S. Open is probably Woods’ to lose.

“It’s not a fair comparison, comparing Tiger and me,” Duval said. “He’s really outplayed me for the past year.

“I think any time Tiger plays a golf tournament, you have to look at him as a favorite. But I think this is the kind of event that brings everybody closer together and it becomes a real patience contest.”

Woods was 13 when he first played Pebble Beach.

He recalled this week how long the course seemed then.

Since, of course, Woods has turned the world into his own par three.

At 24, and holder of two major titles, Pebble Beach, and the U.S. Open are his to conquer.

“I don’t really pay attention to it,” Woods said of the expectations. “I’m out there trying to get ready. I don’t really read any articles or watch the TV when it comes on to the golf. I kind of just turn away from it, change the channel.”

The rest of us will stay tuned.