2009 U.S. Open Clippings, Second Final Edition

John Hawkins' Golf World game story almost pulls a Cloyce Windham on us (obscure literary reference...) but does actually tell us about the guy who won.

Jaime Diaz looks at Phil Mickelson's week and talks to those around him.

Because they played the ball down, Michael Bamberger just loves the USGA's handling of the week at Bethpage, putting him in select company!

Evan Rothman gets on Deepdale and for a few days anyway, is glad not to be a public course golfer celebrating the People's Open.

Dottie Pepper thinks the back-to-back Opens at Pinehurst will be super-duper. We'll see if she agrees after two weeks in Pinehurst.

And Bill Fields shares his thoughts from Bethpage and offers this:

Architect Rees Jones, who renovated the Black course before the '02 Open, wondered if covering the greens with tarps to keep rain from softening them was the solution. "I would love to see them use tarps," said Jones, whose dad, Robert Trent Jones Sr., had encouraged the USGA to use fairway gallery ropes for the first time in the 1954 Open at Baltusrol so the rough wouldn't get tamped down by spectators. "The greens would be in the same condition for every player in the field. Now that Opens are so big, maybe we could do it. It would be a big undertaking, but it might take less time to put the tarp on and off than it does to squeegee them. I'd like to protect the setup like my father did in 1954."

"We talked about it in 2002," Currier said. "If you knew you were going to have a heavy rainfall at night, it might be something you could try. But we got caught in a couple of downpours [during play] this week—we wouldn't have had time to get tarps on them, and it really wouldn't have mattered."

But it would be Rees' legacy, Craig!