Tiptoeing Through Hell: Playing the U.S. Open on Golf's Most Treacherous Courses

by John Strege

Overview

Veteran golf writer John Strege gives you the history and takes you behind the scenes of the US Open, considered the most difficult tournament in golf.

The US Open Golf tournament, one of the four 'Majors' together with The Masters, The British Open, and the PGA, is widely considered the most difficult of the four tournaments. Each year the tournament is played on a different course. Fifty years ago the US Golf Association, whose tournament this is, decided the condition of the courses had to be toughened. The fairways on the designated course narrowed, the rough was allowed to grow tall and the greens were mowed close and rolled frequently, producing surfaces whose slickness the pros have compared to billiard tables.

In Tiptoeing Through Hell, John Strege has chronicled the last 50 years of the tournament when these punitive conditions have held sway.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060934255
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/06/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

John Strege is the author of five books, including When War Played Through, which won the United States Golf Association's Herbert Warren Wind Book Award in 2005, and the bestselling Tiger: A Biography of Tiger Woods. He has covered golf for more than thirty years, and now writers for Golf Digest. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Marlene, and daughter, Hannah, in San Diego, California.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	xiii
1	Blue Blazers and Dandruff, Leather and Chains	1
2	The Monster	17
3	Olympic Mettle	33
4	Blast Furnace Open	51
5	Boston Massacre	63
6	Pasture Pool	77
7	Beauty and a Beast	91
8	Miller Time	109
9	Payback	119
10	Two-Chip Chen	135
11	A Day for a Kite	145
12	Little Big Man	157
13	Windmills and Clowns' Mouths	169
14	Painhurst	183
15	A Walk on the Beach	197
16	The Muny	211

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
While prized golf courses reduce duffers to tears, professionals generally pepper them with birdies. Not so at the U.S. Open. In Tiptoeing Through Hell, John Strege reveals in delicious detail how the USGA conjures up absurd challenges for the pros on Open courses, exacting a little revenge on those accustomed to shooting under par.

At the 1970 Open at the Hazeltine National Golf Club in Minnesota, severe doglegs kept players in the dark regarding the flagsticks' whereabouts. In addition, said pro golfer Frank Beard, "The greens look as though somebody buried a bunch of elephants in them." The scoring average for the first round of the tournament was a horrendous 79.1.

More famous but no less challenging than Hazeltine is Pebble Beach Golf Links in California. At the memorable 1972 Open, in which Jack Nicklaus outdueled Arnold Palmer before a live television audience, Nicklaus's winning tournament score was two over par. The rest of the field finished five over or higher.

The USGA inflates scores by narrowing fairways, keeping the rough high, and assigning par-four status to previously par-five holes. Professional golfers retaliate with vicious verbal slices at the USGA and the course designers. And the high-society shenanigans are uproarious -- they are captured elegantly by Strege, an author with a wicked sense of humor. (Brenn Jones)

bn.com

Strege, a writer for Golf Digest and the author of Tiger: A Biography of Tiger Woods, examines how the United States Golf Association (USGA) has made the U.S. Open a supreme test for top golfers. In golf, unlike many other sports, the test is not only of player against player but of player against the course. With the United States Open, the course is prepared to make any challenge to par a difficult proposition: the layout is lengthened, the fairways narrowed, the greens made faster. And, as if that were not enough, the USGA has been known to employ artifice: the Hinkle tree was an overnight answer to a gap in the trees that allowed Lon Hinkle to play the eighth hole at Inverness by way of the 17th. Strege's book provides a context for understanding the U.S. Open in terms of its yearly change of venue. It is a narrative history, with a cast ranging from Sam Snead to Tiger Woods, that includes flashbacks to the previous year's tournament or to the last Open held at this particular venue. Of particular interest is the chapter on Bethpage Black, in Farmingdale, NY, the first truly public course to host a U.S. Open. Both entertaining and informative, this book belongs on the shelf alongside recent titles like John Feinstein's The Majors: In Pursuit of Golf's Holy Grail and Salvatore Johnson's The Official U.S. Open Almanac. Steven Silkunas, North Wales, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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