In response to the reality that the custodians of the game who have been charged with controlling the distance the golf ball travels have failed in their duty, we have witnessed a year of brutally difficult course set-ups for the major championships.
Geoff Ogilvy noted early in the week that for the first time in the history of Grand Slam golf the US Open course might have been the easiest of the lot - that has included Augusta, Birkdale, Torrey Pines and Oakland Hills.
The PGA and the US Open have always employed the same version of setting up the courses and Oakland Hills so far has extracted a cut of eight-over-par and a leaderboard where one man is under par after the opening rounds.
JB Holmes is best known for winning twice in the desert of Scottsdale (this year beating Mickelson in a playoff) and for hitting the ball unimaginable distances. From a three-quarter length backswing, he crashes three woods well over the 300-yard mark and given a reasonable level of common sense, moderately straight-hitting, and half-decent putting it is hard to see how anyone who hits that far ever shoots over par given that his wedges are the high-use clubs in his set.
He is one-under-par. a shot ahead of Charlie Wi, Ben Curtis and Justin Rose and two ahead of former winner David Toms and Henrik Stensen.
The leading Australian is Aaron Baddeley who managed a pair of one-over-par rounds and his play at the final hole exemplified how much differently the golf in America is organized from golf on our best courses headed by Kingston Heath and Royal Melbourne.
The Americans have always revered the principle of equity of punishment so they strive for consistency of rough all over the course but in Australia we followed the British path of random punishment if players missed fairways and greens.
You might get a good lie or a horrible one but the British who pioneered the game recognized that dealing with the inequity of the game was one of its greatest challenges.
Jack Nicklaus only recently was quoted as saying that the great thing about golf was that 'it isn't fair' and he famously said at a British Open press conference years ago in response to a writer's observation that something that happened to him out on the course was unfair, 'of course it wasn't fair but the game is not supposed to be fair.'
Anyway, Baddeley drove perfectly down the final fairway and was left with a middle iron into the brutally difficult final green. What looked like a beautifully struck shot bounded over the back of the green and whilst there is nothing wrong with that, the ball buried itself into the matted, thick, green rough only three feet from the edge of the green.
He was left with what would have been a very simple shot if he had been playing from a good lie but instead he faced a shot of high difficulty because of the lie - and only because of the lie.
At Royal Melbourne, or any of the best sandbelt courses, the same shot would have run over the back of the green and perhaps into a bunker or down a slope designed to feed the ball away from the green.
The shots back are often as difficult as the one Baddeley faced