On June 18th, I attended the U.S. Open at the Bethpage Black Course. I have attended one other Open in my life, when I was a lot younger, and David Sutherland handed me a ball after he finished a hole. I was standing right by the roped-off walkway. But this Open was different because it was closer to home and my dad knew more about the course. Having played it many times over the years, he explained everything he knew about the holes and the difficulty of the course. As my dad says, "It's a brutal course." And it's brutal just on its own, when the weather is nice. So on the Thursday when it rained steadily, you can imagine how much more difficult it was to play the course, let alone watch the match.

All the crowds were shuttled from Jones Beach to Bethpage Black. Umbrellas were up around every fairway, and every green, so visibility was very bleak. The grass, being pounded with rain, gradually turned to mud. The crowd was laden with ponchos (Hershey, Disney, Universal etc...), rain boots, rain coats and baseball hats. The unlucky majority that did not wear rain boots, myself included, was knee-deep in mud; my jeans were splattered in mud both on the bottoms and around the knees. My sneakers were more or less ruined, but every so often I attempted to clean them by rubbing them in the tall grass. I regretably half- fell but was able to wipe the mud off the sleeves of my rain coat, so all that was left were very faint stains. The fun of walking around the grounds, eating lunch in the sun and watching a good game of golf was noticeably reduced the entire morning, and resulted in everyone holding their food in their pockets.

The biggest disappointment was when the horns were blasted and play was suspended for the day. Although it had been raining constantly, we still got to see a few pros up close: Tiger, Cabrera, Harrington, Leonard, Sutherland etc. All in all we saw almost 2 and a half hours of golf because we got to the course before 7:30. After play was suspended we saw a lot of white vans making their way to the front of the course, which were transporting the pros from off the greens and fairways. The line for the buses back to the beach was about a mile long with a wait that seemed to last forever.