In an arena of controversy over whether the USGA had set up No. 2 here at Pinehurst too tough for the championship, the gods of golf brought in rain and mist to allow us to see one of the very best final rounds in U.S. Open history.

After Payne Stewart lost in a heartache finish in last year’s Open, it looked as if once again he had been bitten by the bad luck bug.

He pitched too long to the dangerous 16th hole and looked to be out of the lead.

Looked to be, but not so. He holed a remarkable and almost unnamable putt to stay tied. Then he struck an iron stiff on the 17th and again looked like a winner. Then he got a real bad break off a fine drive.

He could not reach the 18th from his bad lie, and from a nice third shot pitch needed another miracle putt to win. The announcers, and I am sure many of the 40,000 stone-quiet fans, figured he had no chance to hole another putt, but he did.

It was pure fiction, but he did it. One of golf’s greatest Opens, and here at Donald Ross’ home. It doesn’t get much better than that for us Sandhills golfers.

On Saturday night, the Golf Channel broadcast live from here, and host Peter Kessler kept asking guests, "Doesn’t anyone think that the pins are being set too close to the fall lines on the greens?"

The USGA firmly said, "No!"

Well, as I stated earlier, with the dry greens and weather predictions of dry, fair weekend, it looked like this Open would be nothing but a Keystone Kops comedy of errors.

But the gods of the game saved our skins.

I, along with a disgruntled John Daly (and many more players) thought the course was set up too sternly, with pins hugging all the fall lines and some pin placements appearing like they were sitting on top of bunkers.

Players were dropping like flies, and the scores were climbing at a rate of almost three strokes each day. No one, not even the very best, could hold a green.

I don’t believe it is golf when you set up a course where a well-struck shot has almost no chance of stopping on a green.

That seems, to me, to be against the idea of fairness in the game. If you mis-hit a shot, yes. take your penalty. But if you hit a shot properly and it simply scrambles through the green, leaving one a tough and almost impossible recovery shot, that’s not golf.

Everyone in the USGA seems to forget that the great Donald Ross laid out this course in the 1920s and worked on it till the late ‘30s. During this time the course was made with Bermuda greens that were bushy and could hold pitch shots. Ross in no way could look into the future and imagine 300-yard drives and shots coming into the greens at supersonic speeds.

He wanted a challenge, not a debacle. Let’s all hope that if and when the USGA comes back for another Open, they properly prepare the No. 2 course to be a true test and not a comedy show.