The old man and the tee: designer Donald Ross' masterpiece got the better of the world's best players during the 2005 U.S. Open.

• Author: Pace, Lee

The greatest players in the world assembled on a 98-year-old golf course in Pinehurst the third week in June. They came to the U.S. Open Championship armed with drivers 45 inches long and club heads 400 cubic centimeters in size. They wielded balls that have 332 dimples (in seven different shapes) and spin at 6,000 revolutions per minute. They brought swing coaches, psychologists, caddies, dietitians and agents. Few players pound cold beers after a round anymore--they pound weights in the fitness trailer, the better to hit humongous drives.

Despite all this, they wound up hitting some positively silly shots on the No. 2 course at Pinehurst Resort. Tiger Woods missed the first and second greens of the final round. With putts. Retief Goosen's shot to the second green rolled off the far side. On a chip shot. Vijay Singh hit the green of the long and difficult par-4 eighth hole with his second shot. And his third rolled off the back of the green. Goosen shot an 81 on Sunday. Playing companion Jason Gore fired an 84. Olin Browne carded an 80. And these were the leaders after 54 holes.

"Spectators in the bleachers say, 'My God, look what happened to this guy or that guy,'" says David Fay, executive director of the United States Golf Association, which conducts the U.S. Open. "Many of them have done that very same thing. That's one of the fascinating elements of an Open at Pinehurst--the course the pros get is the very same one the hotel guest gets in April or October."

Or, as the caddies like to say when No. 2's devilish greens make mincemeat of a golfer's short-game skills: "Donald got him." Donald, of course, being Donald Ross, the Scottish golf architect who created the 18-hole layout in 1907, arrived at the course's present hole configuration in 1935 and tinkered with it until his death in 1948. Nearly six decades later, his layout combined with modern agronomic wonders to provide a stern but fair test for the game's top players, just as it did in 1999. No. 2 tests their driving skills, approach shots, chipping, pitching, putting and course-management--not to mention their mental wherewithal.

"It was a bloodbath out there--the best players in the world shooting 76, 78, 79, 80," Browne says. "All you're trying to do is hang in there long enough to get down the steps at the end of 18 without throwing up along the way." Lee Westwood noted, "It's the most draining course I've played in a long time." To which two-time Open champion Lee Janzen added: "People sometimes ask what's the hardest course I've ever played. Now I...