Not so happy hunting ground

US Open Focus on Winged Foot coursePhilip Reid profiles the course set where once the Mohicans roamed and which has bewildered the game's finest

The sign is discreet, as befits this upmarket section of New York real estate in Westchester County, one of the world's most affluent suburbs. "Winged Foot Golf Club. Private." The lettering is stylish, carved into what looks like oak and painted a nondescript khaki green. Only this week, the club's not so private, opening its doors to the world's top golfers for the US Open on a course steeped in history and with memories of the past insisting that whoever triumphs will have done it the hard way.

When AW - Arthur Warren, if you must know - Tillinghast was asked by the New York Athletic Club (the club's logo was the winged foot of the Roman god Mercury, meant to reflect the Manhattan club's track and field programmes) in 1922 to design a golf course on 280 acres of rugged terrain in Mamaroneck, he was given one set of instructions. "Give us a man-sized course," he was told.

Tiillinghast set his masterpiece on land that once was the choice deer-hunting ground of the Mohican Indians, immortalised by the author James Fenimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans. The club is on Fenimore Road, named for the writer who roamed the property.

What the foremost architect of his day did was to give them two courses, the East and the West, each a strategic golf course but so tough that no less a figure than Jack Nicklaus, when asked about the finishing holes on the West Course during the 1974 US Open, remarked: "The last 18 are very difficult."

Although he had redesigned Baltusrol (where Phil Mickelson won last year's US PGA), Tillinghast was not yet famous as a course architect when asked to design Winged Foot. For the job that would make his reputation - and which he always considered to be his finest work - Tillinghast hired 220 men, most of them local farmers. Using 60 teams of horses and 19 tractors, they cut down 7,800 small trees and moved 24,000 cubic yards of earth, not much by today's standards but a huge amount then.

"They all but scraped the 36 holes into existence with their fingernails," writes historian Douglas LaRue Smith in the club's history.

Tillinghast's team also had to blast away 7,200 tons of rock, whose rubble acts as something of a bedrock beneath the fairways of the West Course. In more recent times, some 1,000 trees (in a tree felling programmed conducted between 1999 and 2004) have been removed from the course that plays host to this week's US Open, primarily because they were encroaching on the play of the holes but also for improved agronomy.

It was the 1974 US Open that made Winged Foot, and set the USGA's standard for subsequent US Opens. By Thursday evening of the first round, there was not one player under par. The best among them, Nicklaus, had rolled his first putt of the round right off the green. It wasn't that the 1974 US Open was the first to be overly penal. There was 1951 at Oakland Hills where a victorious Ben Hogan claimed to have brought a monster to its knees but still finished at seven-over.

There was the 1963 championship at the Country Club in Brookline, then nine-over was good enough to get a place in the play-off. Long before the golf world returned to Winged Foot in 1974, Sam Snead had quipped that the US Open fairways were usually so narrow, "you had to walk down them single file." But there was still something different about the 1974 US Open, and its severity.

That 1974 US Open was euphemistically known as the "Massacre at Winged Foot," and was won by Hale Irwin with a winning score of 287, seven-over. There has not been a higher score since. "Winged Foot was the hardest golf course I've ever played, period," said Irwin. "The rough was just an unmanageable mess."

Today, they'll take a 12-inch blade of grass and top it off at four or five inches. Back then, the grass was just left to be ungainly . . . "if you were going in the direction it lay in, it was so gnarly it was always wrapping around the hosel and the ball could go sideways in either direction," was how Irwin put it.

The rough is not so tough this time round, but it is not easy either. More than five inches of rain have fallen on the West Course since last Tuesday and the course was closed to members and players on Friday and Saturday of last week, so that the soft putting surfaces wouldn't be pockmarked or have heel prints imbedded.

A notice posted by the club's greens committee outside the pro shop over the weekend informed: "With two days before the commencement of US Open week, the board believes that potential damage to putting surfaces, tee boxes and fairway and rough areas is too great. This is damage that cannot be repaired prior to the championship."

Yesterday, as the majority of players registered, the standing water on the course that had caused such concern had disappeared. The water level in the creek that rests behind the sixth green and the seventh tee, which had overflowed last week and dumped silt on to the adjoining East Course, had dropped. All was well with the world, and this grand old course looked in pristine condition.

Tillinghast's creation is one that will test, and has survived the test of time. The greens were constructed in the 1920s using a mule pulling a metal scoop, and the slow pace of grading and exactitude produced by using such an implement far more delicate than the bulldozers of today created greens with subtleties that have not lost their shrewdness. As Tillinghast himself once wrote, "a controlled shot to a closely guarded green is the surest test of any man's game".

The greens here are not as severe as you'll find at Augusta National, and the rain of the past week or so has made them not as firm as the USGA would like, but they'll firm up by Thursday and will provide one hard part of the test for players this week.

For some, they'll be treacherous. But someone, just as Retief Goosen did at Shinnecock Hills two years ago, will conquer them. Someone, just as Billy Casper did in the 1959 US Open here, will conquer them.

In that 1959 US Open, Casper needed only 114 putts over the four rounds. Of course, he was always an accomplished putter. His friend, Chi Chi Rodriquez, once said of Casper: "Billy could make a 40-foot putt just by looking at it."

The fairways are narrower this year, though. For example, they averaged 32 yards wide in 1974, but this time round the average will be closer to 27 yards.

Mike Davis, the USGA's senior director of competitions, outlined the strategy which will entail four-inch rough 18 to 21 paces off the fairway. The plan then calls for new longer tiered rough, about six inches in height, which will encourage more pitch-out shots.

"Will it be pitch-out rough?" Davis asked rhetorically. "In some cases maybe, in other cases maybe not. But the point is, the further you hit it offline, the worst deal you're going to get. That's something I think that we as an association talked about and feel that we want penal rough. It's a tradition at the U S Open, but at the same time there's not much skill to just missing the fairway by a few shots and just pitching back."

You feel, it is as Tillinghast envisaged it would play all those years ago.