"We're not trying to embarrass the best players in the game. We're trying to identify them."

Sandy Tatum, a USGA official, made that since oft-repeated comment about the U.S. Open in 1974, when players complained loud and long about the fiendish difficulty of the nerve-wrackingly narrow and long course at Winged Foot, where Hale Irwin was the winner, despite shooting 7-over-par.

That score is a perfect example why I love the U.S. Open, which starts Thursday at the brutal Bethpage Black, on Long Island.

I can identify with 7-over.

As for 7-under, which is what the first-round leader in many PGA Tour events is after the front nine? No way. How about 14-over? Oh, yeah, now you're talking my language.

I can identify with Phil Mickelson making a quadruple-bogey 9 on the par-5, 13th hole of last year's Open at Torrey Pines.

I can identify with Rocco Mediate when, playing the par-4 5th hole in his memorable playoff loss last year to Tiger Woods, he drove into a fairway bunker and then bounced his approach shot to the green off two cart paths on his way to a bogey.

I can identify with bogeys of all sorts, including doubles, triples, and even, unfortunately, quadruples.

But, hey – if Philly Mick can make ‘em, why can't I?

That's why I love the U.S. Open.

I love it because it's the one time that the best golfers in the world experience the same woes, the same problems, as weekend hackers.

Most tournaments, the pros take pars for granted. At the Open, they're thrilled to walk off the green with a par.

Watch your average Bankrupt Car Company Classic, Subsidized Bank Championship, or Really Nifty Lawn Mower-Weed Eater Invitational, and you'll see birdies in flocks. At the Open, seeing a birdie is an event so rare as to merit calling the Audubon Society. As for eagles, well, you've got a better chance of spotting a Bald Eagle.

Truth be told, most golf fans like to watch the pros shoot low scores. Most of the time, so do I – even in the majors. Certainly, part of the thrill of the Masters is the possibility that somebody will go 5-or-6-under on the back nine on Sunday. But not at the Open, where five or six pars in a row is cause for jubilation.

At the Open, if somebody goes under par, it calls for fireworks worthy of the Fourth of July. A sub-par round at a place like Bethpage is reason to hold a parade that would make those float-filled, New Year's Day extravaganzas seem like small-town celebrations, an event momentous enough to touch off a bacchanal that makes Mardi Gras in New Orleans seem like Bingo night at a senior citizens center.

That's what makes the Open so different. That's what makes it great. That's what makes it a tournament the average golfer can identify with.

That's because, in the Open, the pros look like average golfers.

They stand on the tee in trepidation, looking nervously at the narrow ribbon of fairway where they know they have to hit their drive to have any hope of making par. Send a ball into the Danny DeVito-deep, U.S. Open rough and, if it can be found, the best that can be done is to get it back on to the fairway. Getting it on to the green is out of the question.

Ah, yes – those U.S. Open greens. Harder than a Calculus test for a kid who flunked Algebra. Faster than a Formula One racer. Slicker than a used-car salesman. More difficult to read than Dostoevsky, or one of William Faulkner's endless paragraphs.

Typically, pros don't three-putt as often in four rounds as most of us do in one. That's one of many reasons they're pros. Except, of course, it's the Open, where the greens are like glass and even the best putters sweat 3-footers, lest they turn into 6-footers coming back.

The Open is back this year at Bethpage, where Tiger won in 2002. Tiger's also the defending Open champion having beaten Mediate in that memorable playoff a year ago, when he limped around Torrey Pines on a knee that needed surgery and, after eagling the par-5 18th on Saturday, sank a 12-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole on Sunday to force an 18-hole playoff on Monday.

Bethpage, where a sign near the first tee warns those lucky enough to secure a tee time on America's most-sought-after muni, cautions: "WARNING – The Black Course is an extremely difficult course which we recommend only for highly-skilled golfers."

There are five courses at Bethpage, where, seven years ago, the Black became the first municipal layout ever to host the U.S. Open.

It was difficult then – Woods, at 3-under, was the only player to break par – and is even harder now, with a trio of par-4s playing longer than 500 yards, One is the 10th, another is the 12th, and in between is the 435-yard 11th where, as described in the souvenir program, "the putting green is one of the Black Course's most difficult, sloping steeply from back-to-front."

As a USGA official said before the 2002 Open at Bethpage: "Nowhere in the rules of golf does it say you have to reach a par-4 in two."

That's why the pros don't really "play" a U.S. Open course – they endure it. It's the golfing equivalent of boot camp, pledge initiation, and holiday dinners at your mother-in-law's, all rolled into one.

The Open isn't like any other tournament on the Tour. But it's like so many rounds played by the rest of us golf-besotted hackers.

It's the Open – the one tournament where the pros struggle like the rest of us.

We not only can identify with that – we love it.

jdonalds @projo.com