U.S. Open: Shinnecock has played nice ... now it's time to tighten the screws

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — OK, Shinnecock. You've gotten a couple days off. You haven't brought your A game to this U.S. Open. We get it, sometimes a workday involves just getting through to quitting time.

>Now, though, it's time to step up. Time to show those teeth. Time to live up to your own legend. Time to make the players at the 126th U.S. Open greet Saturday's dawn with dread, not Christmas-morning excitement.

>If you've followed the storylines around this year's Open, you've surely heard the stat that only three players — out of more than 600 — have ever finished under par at a U.S. Open held at Shinnecock. That's a terrifying stat. Here's a worse one: right now, Wyndham Clark leads the pack at -7, and another eight players are under par at the halfway mark.

>This, Shinnecock, will not do.

>The U.S. Open stands as the supreme test of golf, not just on the course but between the ears. Any pro can roll in a straight 10-foot putt on a green laid out like a pool table, or get up and down from a perched lie in soft sand, or find a fairway that's as wide and inviting as a Buc-ees parking lot. Hell with all that. We want to see players wobbling on hillsides like mountain goats, their ball a foot below their feet. We want them firing at fairways that curve like a run-on sentence, putting on greens as bumpy as gravel roads.

The USGA has taken to watering the greens at Shinneockc in the middle of rounds in order to make them more playable.David Cannon via Getty ImagesSure, part of this is so that we can point at the TV after a pro chunks a ball three feet out of bird's-nest thatch, laughing "I could do that!" But more importantly, we want to see how the world's best fare when the conditions are the worst. How they handle — mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually — a shot that could literally change their entire life with millions of people watching. That's what makes golf so fascinating, and that's what the majors should test above all other tournaments.

>This all comes back to that classic U.S. Open line, one so famous it should be part of the tournament's official crest: "We're not trying to humiliate the best players in the world," former USGA chairman Sandy Tatum said in 1974. "We're simply trying to identify who they are." (Some versions of the quote substitute "embarrass" for "humiliate." Same difference.)

>As mantras go, it's pretty damn good. If you're wasting time complaining about the setup, well, that's energy that would be better spent focusing on your game.

>Two-time major winner Xander Schauffele gets it. "Everyone watching at home wants to see guys shooting in the 80s and doing crazy things. I get it. You know, it's once a year you get to see some carnage, and it's at a U.S. Open," he said Friday, noting that as a player, his goal is to "try to embrace it as much as you can."

>All this is the USGA's doing, and honestly, it's a strategically smart approach. The USGA expected Thursday to be a howler, wind whipping up to 40 miles an hour and drying the greens to glass. In response, the USGA slowed down the greens, so that when the wind didn't materialize, players like Clark absolutely cashed in and dove deep below par.

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>Now, though? Now we have ourselves a championship field, and it's time for the USGA to tighten the screws. And the organization — often villainized for its overly-punitive setups — bought itself the goodwill on Thursday and Friday to crank up the heat on Saturday and Sunday. Firmer, faster greens and challenging pin positions, combined with a potential return of the wind on Saturday, and we'll identify the champion golfer of the United States.

>You know what you have to do, Shinnecock. Make this a true major test. Make the champion work for it. We know you've got it in you.