Twenty-two years ago, eventual winner Fuzzy Zoeller and his closest contender, Greg Norman, exchanged white towel surrenders in an absorbing finale to the 84th U.S. Open – the fourth played over Winged Foot’s historic West Course. The Championship returns to the Mamaroneck club this week for a fifth time (and sixth major in all), with many such submissions on the cards.

This time, however, the laying down of arms is more likely to be in response to the USGA’s set-up of a course so difficult that many “experts” are predicting the winning score could be on the wrong side of par, especially if the sun comes out, as it is expected to do over the weekend, and dries out the greens.

The West Course’s putting surfaces are well known for their degree of difficulty. Built on granite, they are beyond firm and, more often than not, pitched at such severe angles – primarily from back to front – that even the occasional two-foot putt needs to start a ball or two outside the hole.

When Winged Foot hosted the 1997 PGA Championship, rain and the slightly more lenient PGA of America allowed Davis Love to record three rounds of 66. For sure, no such scoring will occur this weekend, with one, perhaps two, rounds in the 60s being the most any player should realistically hope for.

That said, it would be a shock to see the field come to grief as it did in 1974, 10 years before Zoeller and Norman’s playoff, when Hale Irwin won with a 7-over par total of 287 in a Championship that came to be known as the “Massacre at Winged Foot.”

That year, the USGA, with Sandy Tatum at the helm, introduced uniform six-inch rough in an effort not to embarrass the world’s best players, said Tatum, but to identify them. This year, Mike Davis, the organization’s senior director of rules and competition (who took over course set-up duties from the retired Tom Meeks) hopes to establish his concept of graduated rough, which was born of his aversion to players hitting the ball 15 yards off line and ending up in a potentially better lie than those missing the short grass by a few inches.

“It’s always been a pet peeve of mine that a guy who misses the first strip of rough by a foot could have a worse lie than a guy who hits it way out where the gallery has trampled the rough down,” Davis told Golf Digest Magazine.

As a result, Winged Foot’s 26- to 28-yard-wide fairways will be bordered by three bands of rough; the first is two-yards wide and an inch and a quarter deep, the second is six-yards wide and three inches deep, and the third is a typically thick and nasty sixinch seem from which a clean strike will be all but impossible. Galleries will also be pushed a little further back from the fairways than is usual, meaning the advantage a player used to get from veering 10 yards or more from the fairway has, in theory, been eradicated.

On the face of it, Davis’s system seems to play right into the hands of the bombers who don’t necessarily hit the short grass very often – somewhere between 50% and 60% of the time – but whose drives tend to roll into the first cut as the fairway narrows at 300 yards, rather than airmail it into the undergrowth.

That surely makes Phil Mickelson a good bet for his third consecutive major championship. Lefty is currently atop the money list with two wins and seven top-10 finishes in 13 events this year, and he is statistically the best iron player (hitting 70.4% of greens in regulation, and first in proximity to the hole from the fairway at 25-feet, 4-inches) and putter (1.71 putts per green in regulation) on the PGA Tour.

What’s more, Mickelson is finding the green from the rough 60% of the time, good for third place. And though most of what rough he’s hit out of so far in 2006 in no way compares to the nearimpenetrable stuff he’ll encounter this weekend, few players will be as well prepared for the variety of flops and flicks the green-surrounds at Winged Foot will offer up.

Last week’s deft chip from behind the 72nd green at Westchester demonstrated how adept Mickelson is at inventing any sort of chip shot to suit the occasion. Add to all that the crest of the long, tall wave of confidence he is currently surfing and the affection in which New York fans hold the West Coast native, and you have a player who should prove very hard to beat.

One man undoubtedly up for the fight is a resurgent Vijay Singh who overcame early season swing niggles – caused by a desire to find more length – to win impressively at Westchester. More notable than his typically sound ball-striking was his exceptional scrambling (23 up-anddowns from 26 attempts) and the way he crushed a seemingly out-of-sorts Adam Scott when the opportunity presented itself. With a string of top-10s already under his belt, the Fijian never really went away, of course, but now is back at something like his best and must be considered a threat.

Home-grown contenders other than Mickelson may include Tom Pernice Jr., who has two top-five finishes in the last three weeks; Brett Quigley, who ranked first for greens in regulation last week; and Jim Furyk, whose accuracy (74.5% of fairways hit) may well prove decisive. Furyk’s 276.3-yard average drive suggests he might not possess the length to win, but his one tour victory this year came at a course 174 yards longer than Winged Foot, so hitting mid-irons from the fairway while the rest of the field is hitting a wedge from the rough doesn’t seem to bother him one bit.

Elsewhere, South African superstars Ernie Els and Retief Goosen clearly haven’t been firing on all cylinders this year, and a USGA-inspired Winged Foot is not the place to revive an ailing game.That leaves the much underrated Tim Clark or the in-form Trevor Immelman as the Rainbow Nation’s most likely winner.

Europe’s chances of claiming a title they haven’t won since Tony Jacklin overcame Dave Hill by seven strokes in 1970 rest on the diminutive shoulders of Luke Donald, who benefits from the sort of unruffled disposition that enables him to remain level-headed when others might be tempted to hurl their driver into the forest – like John Daly did here during the PGA Championship nine years ago.

Fellow Englishman David Howell is also capable of winning, but Padraig Harrington and Sergio Garcia, who might have been considered contenders a few weeks ago, haven’t shown the remotest indication lately of the form necessary to withstand Winged Foot’s many perils.

All that leaves 15-year-old Tadd Fujikawa from Hawaii who, one suspects, might regard the viciously tilted and impossibly quick greens with a mixture of disbelief and terror, and a certain Tiger Woods. Rest assured, Tiger, coming off the longest layoff of his professional career, will be all fired up to honor his beloved father and, if yesterday’s practice round partner, Jeff Sluman, is to be believed, he’s striking it as cleanly as ever.

“He was playing as you would expect,” Sluman said. “There’s no rust in his game. If he drives it straight, he’ll win the tournament. And if he doesn’t, he’ll have a hell of a chance to win.”

So, Mickelson and Woods neck and neck going into the back nine on Sunday? Bring it on.