Golf too good for the Games

The game's perennial 'fourth major', the American PGA Championship, tees off in Detroit this week fighting for attention with the opening week of the carnival of largely unwatchable minority sports in Beijing.

Unhelpful also is the absence of the injured Tiger Woods but that is what the championship is dealing with and for the Olympic cynics at least we know the golfers are playing on a level field when it comes to complying with the rules. One wonders why there is this seemingly never-ending quest to include golf in the Olympics.

Presumably it would qualify the game for extra government funding but whilst the PGA may be the fourth most important title in the game, an Olympic tournament could never approach the importance of the game's Grand Slam championships.

The marketing spin of the Olympics is that it is the pinnacle of achievement for an athlete - and it is for the majority of Olympic competitors - but who really cares which tennis player prevails in China? Golf would be no different.

The course this week, Oakland Hills, has endured a long history of alteration since it was first laid out by the great Scottish architect Donald Ross. It was a good enough course to hold the 1924 and the 1937 US Open championships but for the 1951 Open Robert Trent-Jones was hired to ready the course for the best players of the time.

Out went the strategies of Ross, who was one of the masters of the use of the diagonal hazard, and instead Jones took the game down the road of forcing players to execute shots he demanded. The fairways were pinched in to create driving gaps between penal bunkers of only 30 yards and the winner Ben Hogan, aside from noting that he had 'bought the monster to its knees', suggested to Mrs Trent-Jones that perhaps her husband ought to be looking for another line of work.

For this Championship, Mrs Jones' son Rees was employed to add distance and make the course more difficult and it seems he headed down the same path as his father. The course is the length of Tiger Woods' 72nd-hole putt at Torrey Pines short of 7400 yards and no doubt there has been the usual employment of long grass to punish those who miss the narrow strips of fairway.

It is one way to play the game and organise it for a big event but we in Australia must never follow the American path. Ross and his great contemporary Alister MacKenzie realized the game was a lot more than a straight hitting contest. Indeed, neither saw driving straight as a great virtue. Rather they organised their holes with wide fairways and they placed their hazards strategically and dared players to challenge them and the test was for the player to decide for himself where best to go.

This week, where to go has been designated by Jones, the greenkeeper and the organisers of the championship and one assumes Ross would be shaking his head at where they have taken his golf course.

With Woods watching on television there is no obvious favourite. Vijay Singh continues his remarkable career and his big win last week reminded a few he is still capable and there is the usual line of suspects beginning with Mickelson, Harrington and Furyk.

And for Australians the hopes are the obvious quartet of Scott, Appleby, Allenby -who is having his best year in America - and Ogilvy.