Settling in and heading out

It's like clockwork: When one of golf's major championships heads into the weekend, you can be sure any moaning and complaining about golf course conditioning and set-up that might have dominated the early part of the week will begin to fade into the background, the grousing about bumpy greens replaced by grousing about wayward swings.

That held true to form following Friday's second round of the 2010 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, where I noted just two notable comments about the topic. Certainly, other players were asked about and responded to questions about conditions, most notably on the putting surfaces, but the answers by Dustin Johnson and Alex Cejka were really the only ones that caught my attention:

Dustin Johnson: The golf course is in great shape. The greens were rolling really well, and playing in the morning it kind of helps with that. But the greens were rolling great all day.  It was a little easier to get putts in the hole and the golf course is set up really fair.

Alex Cejka: Yeah, yesterday the greens were really firm and really bouncy.  So it was tricky to make your 3-, 4-footers on bouncy greens like this. Today it was a little bit smoother, the greens were holding a little bit better, so you can approach the greens and kind of one hop and then kind of it stops.

That change in focus is also the prime reason that we wrap up over live, inside-the-ropes blogging coverage of golf course management at this time of the week. In fact, I've already said goodbye to the Monterey Peninsula and am sitting in a San Jose hotel awaiting an early morning flight back to the Midwest.

But we won't cut you off completely. As the weekend wears on, we'll continue to post the daily conditioning and set-up briefs from the USGA. We'll keep our eyes and ears open for other news and information that might be of interest to readers of this blog. We'll unveil the winners of the GCM pick 'em contest. And once the dust settles at Pebble Beach, we'll reach out to superintendent Chris Dalhamer, CGCS and get his final thoughts on the week.

Since I arrived in California last Sunday, this blog received almost 2,000 page views from folks seeking out information about golf course management activities at the U.S. Open. That's a slow five minutes if you're ESPN.com, but it's a huge success for us and we thank all of you for your interest. We hope you'll stick with us long after the final putt falls at Pebble. After all, in addition to our regular weekly traffic on the blog, we'll be back at it again in August when the PGA Championship visits Wisconsin and Whistling Straits.

Comments

[Sean H]

Great work this week Scott. I really enjoy your Blog, it gives me a feel for things on the ground and has helped me answer questions or just inject some inside information that our golfers are always interested in.

Sean

[Scott Hollister]

Thanks for the nice words, Sean. It was a great week and I'm glad you're able to use the information we're able to dig up in a constructive way. We're getting more and more interest from outside of our industry during these weeks, so I hope the blog can help provide them a primer on golf course conditions.

Hope all is well out West. Sorry about my Royals taking two of three from the Sox. We're at .500 since Yost took over, which feels like a 25-game winning streak to us!

Scott