U.S. Open Reads: Early Friday Edition

Andrew Weiss has the Aussie perspective, focusing on Geoff Ogilvy's play in this story, and on Ogilvy and Tiger's thoughts on the greens in this sidebar.
 
John Hopkins of the Times writes about...who else, but Monty, while Lawrence Donegan does the same only in more entertaining fashion.

Doug Ferguson has the American perspective on round one, while John Huggan looks at Phil Mickelson's round and talks to his masseur swing coach, Rick Smith.

Golfonline has first round audio analysis from Peter Kostis and Dave Pelz. They also offer some notes on the opening round.

For course stats, you have to go to the USGA's scoring page and then click on the Course Summary link to salivate over those cost of rough stats, which are new this year and speak such volumes about the state of the game. Eye-openers:

Averages putts per GIR on No. 1:  2.10 (only hole over 2)
Round one scoring average: 75.984
Driving distance: 289.2
Cost of rough on No. 14:  0.784
Cost of rough on non-tiered rough holes: .571 (5), .348 (6), .536 (11)

Boy I'm glad they didn't tier it on No. 6, more birdies would have been made and the USGA would have looked silly! Perish the thought! 

Finally Seth Davis has several entertaining blog posts about the media center antics over at SI.com, though someone needs to het him a New York Post after this post:

-- There's a rumor going around the press tent that Tiger Woods is staying not at a local hotel but on his yacht, which is presumably parked somewhere either on Long Island Sound or the Hudson River. If I were a real journalist, I would try to chase down that glistening nugget before passing it along to my readers, but since I am blogging I can put it out there and ask you all to chase it down for me. Any takers?

The New York Post story is here in case Davis wants to read it.