Pilot Editor Steve Bouser, a non-golfer, spent three days at the 1998 U.S. Open golf championship in San Francisco, to gain a better idea of the impact the 1999 Open would have on Pinehurst and Moore County. His impressions, which follow, appeared originally in The Pilot during U.S. Open Week 1998.

You have to see this thing to believe it. And to understand what is coming our way a year from now.

It’s part Olympic Games, part high-class Shriners’ convention, part Kentucky Derby — a slow-motion Super Bowl spread out over most of a week. You watch the affluent throngs of Polo-shirted humanity surging through the midway set up along the main thoroughfare of the Olympic Park country club, lining up six deep along fairways and even occasionally climbing trees like the biblical Zaccheas to glimpse an idolized player passing by. You see them trampling the grass to mud in places, keeping 36 cash registers clattering nonstop in the colossal merchandise tent, filling up whole fleets of buses from dawn till dusk.

And you think: Wait a minute. There are "only"25,000 people a day here. And, though they may cause some traffic jams in the immediate vicinity of the club, they’re mostly absorbed without a ripple by a sprawling metropolitan area that has had a lot of practice handling millions of tourists since Gold Rush days.

Next year, there will be more like 45,000 invaders a day coming into a community that — no offense — looks like a complex of sleepy rural hamlets by comparison. The population of Moore County will swell by 60 percent overnight. The region has hardly seen anything like this since Gen. Sherman played through.

Instead of azaleas and periwinkle gracing roadside embankments, there are exotic dry-climate succulents like ice plant, whose fat little leaves look like green french fries.Instead of stately longleaf pines around the fringes of the golf course, there are gnarly cypresses twisted and stunted by generationsof powerful winds blowing in from the blue-green Pacific. And stands of drooping eucalyptus trees that smell like Vick’s Vapo-Rub.

Instead of a course like Pinehurst No. 2, which is largely flat despite its celebrated manmade swales, players here confront a set of links arrayed on a series of steep coastal hills. Just walking nine holes leaves a pooped spectator understanding better why Jack Nicklaus and some of the other players made such a big deal out of the special exemption allowing game-legged Casey Martin to ride the course in a cart.

The same but different: The contrasts between the 1998 U.S. Open and the 1999 version could hardly be more dramatic. Some of the differences work against us, but others cut in our favor.

Besides the obvious stark difference in the sizes of the host communities, Pinehurst can simply never hope to match the spectacular beauty and fabulous tourism opportunities of a San Francisco, where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars. It’s a different world.On the other hand, this hard-eyed, seen-it-all big city offers nothing of the gracious Southern hospitality and relaxing pace that Open-goers will encounter in Moore County.

Visitors next year may not be able to stand around on Fisherman’s Wharf eating crabmeat cocktails amid mewing seagulls, but they will have their choice of dozens of other charming golf courses nearby on which to get in a few whacks of their own when they tire of watching others play. And they can always take side trips to the Atlantic Ocean or the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Though our town is smaller, the golf course is more spacious — which is one reason the USGA feels safe in selling more tickets to the ‘99 Open. There will be less of the annoyingly cramped feeling you often get here, where spectators climbing single-file up a narrow trail keep rubbing shoulders with others coming down the other side.

Climate is another major difference. And it, too, cuts both ways. Though it is great to come out and escape the kind of humid heat that will no doubt envelop next year’s visitors to Pinehurst, June evenings here can be uncomfortably cold. You get a little tired of wearing a jacket in the morning and then going around for the rest of the day with it tied around your waist.

Parts of an elephant: Watching a big golf tournament is a strange proposition. You don’t get to watch a golf tournament, at all, the way you watch a tennis match or a baseball game.

Instead, you watch stray bits and pieces of a tournament while 95 percent of it goes on without you elsewhere. If you’re lucky, or good, you may end up catching some of the best bits and pieces.

Tiger Woods hitting a 390-yard drive, say. Or Matt Kuchar chipping the ball into the cup from a bad spot in the rough.

Of course, there’s always the danger that you’ll pick and choose too well, so that you end up going to see bits and pieces that everyone else has already gone to see. In those cases, you spend a lot of time looking at those size adjusters on the backs of other people’s ball caps.

Wherever you are, chances are you’ll only see part of a play, especially on a course this hilly and curvy.

If you’re near the tee, you may get to watch the ball go sailing out of sight down the fairway, but that’s all.

If you’re standing next to the green, all you may see is a ball falling out of the sky like incoming artillery. If it plops near the pin, everyone claps, though the player probably can’t hear them.

In general, there seem to be two kinds of golf watchers: those who pick one group of players and follow them around the course, and those who plant themselves in one strategic location and watch as the players, one at a time, bring the mountain to Mohammed.

At any time, both groups are pretty much clueless about what’s going on at any other place. Besides the leader boards placed here and there, about the only hints of how the action is going elsewhere are the sudden, faint roars occasionally heard from two or three hills away, as of a throng of people somewhere shouting "Oh!"in unison.

These distant battle sounds die away as quickly as they spring up, allowing the birds to resume their twittering uninterrupted.

‘Where’s Pinehurst?’ Though there will be more people at Pinehurst’s Open next year than at San Francisco’s this year, they won’t be the same people.

This conclusion results from a man- (and woman-) on-the-course survey conducted Sunday. The margin of error is plus or minus a gazillion or so.

Your Pilot pollster approached 10 interviewees, chosen at random as they waited to watch the then-leaders tee off on the last round. Care was taken to choose only those wearing spectator passes and not those with media or volunteer badges.

For control purposes, they were asked a preliminary question ("What do you think of Payne Stewart’s knickers?") before the central query was posed: "Are you planning to attend next year’s Open in Pinehurst?"

"Where’s Pinehurst?" asked one respondent. But that was stricken from the record, since she was from Brighton, England. (Of the others, seven were from the San Francisco area and two were from New York state.)

The 10 answers broke down this way: No, 6. Maybe, or "I’m thinking about it,"4. Yes. 0.In fact, though, you have to put all the maybes down as nos. They can think about it all they want. But if they didn’t send off for their tickets on the day after this Open ended, they aren’t going to the next one.

Tiger Who? It’s too early to write off Tiger Woods as a has-been when he’s still scarcely old enough to buy a beer legally. Still, you have to wonder after watching himhere: What’s the big deal?

Both San Francisco papers put out advance sections before the playing started, and both felt obliged to show Woods prominently on the front page. Inside, both included Tiger among the 20 (or 24) players to bet on. (Neither mentioned ultimate winner Lee Janzen.)

During most of the play, Woods seemed to have the biggest crowd of groupies clamoring after him from hole to hole, often cheering whether he deserved it or not.

But when the rubber met the road, Tiger didn’t play for diddly. He barely survived the cut after the first two days and finished a full 10 strokes off the lead. In person, he came across as a bit arrogant and self-centered, hardly acknowledging his followers, seldom smiling, and giving in to little fits of pique when he blew a drive or missed a putt.

It was the tight Olympic Club course that did him in, they said. With its narrow, treacherous fairways and tricky, slick greens, it did not lend itself to his power drives and go-for-broke style. Instead, it favored a finesse game that was not his strong suit. (The same things can probably be said of Pinehurst No. 2.)

But then, he hasn’t won a major tournament since catching the world’s imagination last year at the Masters, and this is the fourth Open in which he has scarcely been a factor. That sure must have been a run of bad courses.

On the second hole on opening day, Woods hit a solid tee shot onto the fairway but then shied the ball into an unfortunate position to the right of the green. For once, everyone was silent. After watching the ball’s errant path in dismay, Tiger bent over and looked at the ground for several painful seconds with his hand on the back of his neck. If you happened to be standing nearby, you could hear him let out a boyish, whining "damn!"under hisbreath.

For a moment, one of the world’s hottest sports icons was just another frustrated kid.

Pretty good job: Just as you’re better off not knowing how laws and sausages are made, newspaper editors are better off not having an experience like this. It reinforces our suspicions (no doubt slanderous and unfair) that sportswriters have it pretty easy.

It would be entirely possible to show up here, claim your spot inside the cavernous, air-conditioned media tent, and never leave it again for the next week. Except, that is, for the evenings, when it would be time to catch the free, air-conditioned shuttle bus back to your hotel for another night of expense-account revelry.

And all the while, you could be filing good, meaty stores full of sparkling quotes and vivid descriptions of the action. Rather like covering a war from the comfort of CNN headquarters.

They provide you with phone and computer hookups here. They look after your faxes and messages. There is constant live coverage of the play on big-screen TVs. The players are often trotted down to the interview room after they finish their rounds. If you were too lazy to walk down to the other end of the tent for the interview, you could remain in your chair and watch it on closed-circuit TV. If you were too lazy to take notes, no problem. They spoon-feed you a printed summary, along with the best live quotes.

There’s a special media food tent next door and special media johns nearby, allowing them to look after your needs coming and going. There’s even free Haagen-Dazs ice cream, chocolate or vanilla.

Ever get the feeling you’re in the wrong line of work?

Still, you can’t watch the news pros at work here without feeling the same awed respect you feel while watching the players: These guys are good! It’s amazing how many original and entertaining ways they can find of saying that Mark Carnevale had to hit the ball six times to get it in the hole when he should have had to hit it only four or five.

‘Better be ready’: In real life, Mike Nehring is a mild-mannered corporate purchasing agent. Jack Benedict is in the office furniture distribution game.

But every year at this time, they step into a phone booth, don golf shirts and become — ta-da! — media staff volunteers for the U.S. Open. Faster than a speeding fax. More efficient than a Hollywood press agent at setting up player interviews or photo ops. Able to help reporters leap coverage obstacles in a single bound.

They’re part of the so-called Minnesota 10, who first volunteered to work with the press at the ‘91 U.S. Open at Hazeltine, Minn., and have been invited back to do it every year since. They do it all for free, out of love for the game and for the thrill of rubbing up against its legends.

"It’s a great way to see some great courses," said Nehring.

There are 16 volunteers working in the media tent alone, and hundreds of others throughout the park — taking tickets, shuttling players, selling souvenirs, administering first aid. Jon Wagner, tournament director for the Pinehurst Open, has been quick to point out that you couldn’t run an Open without them.

Volunteering has its advantages, of course. Nehring played Pinehurst No. 2 years ago as a college student and can’t wait to go back.

"I love the greens," he said. "I love the pines, too. But what makes the course unique is the greens — the slopes and the way they camel-back to push the balls away from the holes.

"It’s a Donald Ross course, and he made the greens very challenging. You have to be accurate and play in the proper position to make the putt."

So which of the players does the course favor?

"The golfers with extremely good short games," Nehring said. "Whoever has a good short game, with nerves of steel on the greens, has a good chance."

What to expect next year in the way of media?

"You’ll have a setup similar to this," Benedict said, pointing to the rows and rows of work stations filling the gymnasium-size tent. "Expect 1,500 to 2,000 media people. Be prepared for a lot of media attention for a week and a half: demands for information on the local area, the history of the course, that kind of thing.

"You’d better be ready."