PINEHURST, N.C. – Famed golf architect Donald Ross has been gone for some time, but his reputation as one of the best course designers of all-time lives on. Ross’s imaginative designs have challenged players’ creativity and precision since the turn of the 20th century, and the peculiarities of his famed Pinehurst No. 2 course will play a central role when the world’s best players meet in the 105th U.S. Open, beginning today.

Pinehurst No. 2 is the gem of the Sandhills, part of a geographic expanse stretching from Maine to Georgia that consists of a sandy base of soil. The course is a classic Ross design: not too taxing off the tee and featuring generous fairways. The difficulties arise from the second shot in. It’s a course that has not tired over the years, having withstood as well as any course the technological leaps and bounds of the golf industry.

Stretching to 7,214 yards for this year’s Open – just 92 yards longer than when the last Open was held here in 1999 – Pinehurst No. 2 has never required length to protect its integrity. Instead, it demands accuracy and a deft short game.

“It is one thing to go out and hit every shot the same, merely using a different club for the various distances, and still another to play the shot as it should be played,” Ross wrote in “Golf Has Never Failed Me,” a collection of essays that wasn’t published until 1996, 48 years after his death. “In the old days we did not have the dozen different irons the present golfer carries. We played with one wooden club, a midiron, a mashie, a niblick, and a putter. The exact distance from the green did not always determine the club to use. We all learned to play several types of shots with each of these clubs … The golfer with one shot in his bag will go nowhere in the future.”

That design philosophy goes a long way toward explaining Pinehurst No.2. A former apprentice of Old Tom Morris of St. Andrews (who helped design many of the best courses in the United Kingdom), Ross completed No. 2 in 1907 with the aim of making the second shot the most taxing. No. 2 tempts the best players to do things they would not normally do; when they make critical mistakes, it dares them to use their imaginations to hit shots with clubs rarely used for that purpose.

A second-shot course, then, No.2 should reward the best shot-makers this week. In 1999, when Payne Stewart beat Phil Mickelson by a stroke to win the U.S. Open here, Stewart ranked eighth in greens in regulation (a mere 57%) during the tournament. All told, six of the top 10 finishers at the 1999 Open also ranked in the top 10 in greens in regulation at Pinehurst.

This year, the top five ranked players in greens in regulation are Kenny Perry (72.9%), Vijay Singh (72.3), Sergio Garcia (72.1), Luke Donald (70.5), and Tiger Woods (70.5); between them, they have won nine tournaments in 2005, with Woods and Singh winning three apiece. Each of these players should have a good shot at contention this week.

The favorite, Woods, ranked third in greens in regulation at the 1999 Open. With 10 major championship trophies on his mantle, including this year’s Green Jacket, Woods knows how to win on the toughest courses. At Pinehurst, his length off the tee should give him an added advantage on the eighth (467 yards) and 16th (492 yards) holes, which have been converted from par-5 to par-4. He will likely be hitting shorter irons than most, giving him a better opportunity to keep his second shot on the green.

“Premium is always on ball-striking at a USGA, and more so here,” Woods said on Tuesday. “You have to hit the ball well, put the ball on the green, and have it stay on the green. I mean, that’s going to be the key. I think the guy who hits the most greens is probably going to have – either be the winner or be right there with a chance on the back nine.”

Another aspect of the shot-making process is the discrepancy between the size of the greens and the area that is actually puttable. The greens at Pinehurst average 6,000 square feet in size and, according to Paul Jett, the No.2 course superintendent, only 35% of the green area (2,100 square feet) is actually puttable. That means that players will rarely see putts longer than 30 feet, a relatively short distance from which to two-putt – once they reach the green. That’s the hard part: Many shots that hit the turtle-shaped greens will carom off or release down to treacherous shipping areas.

The greens themselves present yet another issue. In the early days of Pinehurst, the greens were made of sand, which, due to the lack of agronomic talents, was the custom at many courses in North Carolina. By the 1920s, the greens were grassed and eventually were designed to roll six feet on the stimpmeter, a tool for measuring greens’ speed. For this year’s Open, that number will be up to 11 1/2 or 12, twice as fast as what Ross would have experienced in his day. This can become a major issue if a hole is located on a hump or bump, or on the edge of a non-puttable area that will force putts to roll off.

“I didn’t like the changes they made to it the last time because they used pin placements where there weren’t pin placements, and they played all those outside knobs,” Jack Nicklaus said. “Ross did not design those as pin placements, but they used them, and I think they’ll use them again, which took away from the golf course.”

With all those obstacles thrown in, this week’s winner will need to do everything well and have a little luck mixed in. Woods may be the odds-on favorite, but the Open has a habit of finding diamonds in the rough.

U. S. OPEN AT A GLANCE

Site: Pinehurst Resort, Course No. 2.
Length: 7,214 yards.
Par: 35-35: 70.
Changes: 92 yards have been added to the layout.
Format: 72 holes of stroke play, 18-hole playoff if necessary.
Purse: To be determined ($6.25 million in 2004, with $1.125 million to the winner).
Field: 147 pros, nine amateurs.
Defending champ: Retief Goosen.
Today’s forecast: Sunny with a high of 90 and breezes around 10 mph.
Noteworthy: Chris DiMarco has lost in a playoff in the last two majors, becoming the first to do that since Tom Watson in 1978-79.
Key tee times: Tiger Woods, Chris DiMarco, Luke Donald, 7:44 a.m. (10th tee); Phil Mickelson, Stewart Cink, Adam Scott, 12:48 p.m.; Vijay Singh, Bart Bryant, Padraig Harrington, 1:10 p.m. (10th tee); Ryan Moore, Todd Hamilton, Retief Goosen, 7:55 a.m.
TV: Thursday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., ESPN; 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., NBC.