Open to question

Today the U.S. Open begins at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, where 14 years ago an entire hole -- No. 7 -- famously became an unplayable lie. The Shinnecock people promise that will not happen again. They do not promise not to turn the world's finest golfers into Joe Schmo from Kokomo, hauling his 15 handicap around in his cargo shorts and Joe's Aluminum Siding work polo.

All U.S. Open courses are absurdly tricked up to protect par at all costs, even if it means sowing the fairways with land mines and surrounding the greens with gator-infested moats. But Shinnecock is apparently especially treacherous. There is wind. There are brutal elevation changes. There are greens sculpted like the foothills of the Adirondacks. And of course there is the requisite Open rough, thick as equatorial jungle and salted with leg-hold traps and punji sticks.

OK, so the last is an exaggeration. Saying it's so thick you could lose small children in it, on the other hand, might not be.

In any case, this does not seem to be the sort of track where Tiger Woods, even playing again like a reasonable facsimile of Tiger Woods, is going to win his first major in a decade. Everyone in America (including no doubt Tiger's competitors) would love to see it happen, because, as has been noted in this space before, no one juices the golf needle the way Tiger does. Even on the backside of his prime, he's the one guy everyone tunes in to watch.

Alas, the Blob suspects Tiger's game is not in a place where he can beat everyone he needs to beat and Shinnecock Hills, too. The painful reality is he may never be in that place, because there are simply too many Rembrandts vying for majors these days. There may be more great sticks on tour now than there has been in two generations. That's a lot of people to crawl over for a 42-year-old man with surgical knees and a surgical back.

This is not to say Tiger can't, or won't, contend. He very well could. But the likelihood of him beating not just, say, Rory, but Rory and Rickie and Dustin and Justin and Jordan and Jason and who knows how many other guys, is pretty small.

So who wins?

Lots of people like Dustin (Johnson), and also Justin (Thomas). The Blob, however, suspects it's going to be a lesser mortal, because that's what seems to happen more often than not in the U.S. Open. As fabled golf writer Dan Jenkins used to call then, logo clods.

So: Logo Clod for the win. And Tiger somewhere in the pack.