Mike Celizic

The USGA did no one any favors with the alleged dream pairing of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in the first round of the U.S. Open on Thursday. If it did anything, it was to perform a massive disservice to more than 100 other golfers who also did battle with Torrey Pines, but had to do so in near total anonymity.

We’re getting another day of the "Tiger and Phil Show" in the second round, and that’s going to be two too many. What seemed like such a brilliant idea when the USGA decided to make the pairings based on world rankings turned out to be a monumental mistake. This is the first year it has been done. It should also be the last.

It’s not that fans — and even other pro golfers — don’t want to see Phil and Tiger go head to head. They do. But the time we want to see them together is in the last group on Sunday, not the 8 a.m. threesome on Thursday. We want to see them fighting each other for the title, not fighting the golf course to match par.

That’s how golf is supposed to work. You can’t force a dream pairing. It has to come to you, the prospect of it happening building with the tournament, day by day, hole by hole. If they’re the two top guys come Saturday and Sunday, that’s when the game will put them together, not the tournament committee.

The only time you manufacture a pairing like that is when two old legends are getting the AARP discount on their greens fees. Seeing Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer together in their 50s and 60s at the Masters would have been cool. And the only time that match could be made is in the first two rounds, because they’d be gone after that.

But then you’re watching for the sake of nostalgia. And there will come a day 15 or 20 years from now when we’ll want to see Tiger creaking down the fairway on an artificial knee along with a white-haired and paunchy Lefty slicing it into the water. Heck, by then they may even have something more to say to each other than a perfunctory and insincere exchange of "Good lucks" on the first tee.

We don’t need it now, and it was obvious from the first hole, when Tiger hacked his way to a double bogey. From that first hole, it wasn’t a question of matching Phil. It was a matter of surviving his first round since undergoing knee surgery two days after the Masters.

There was no drama in Thursday’s round, no sense of Lefty and Tiger going at each other tooth and lob wedge, no trading the lead back and forth. Neither was at any time closer than three strokes to the leaders to start with, and most of their day was spent trying to get back the strokes they left on the course.

It would have been different if they had both gone low, sticking approaches next to the pin, dropping putts from everywhere, and taking over the top of the leaderboard. But that’s wishful thinking. Given Tiger’s long layoff, it was all but impossible to think that he was going to put up a red number on Thursday.

It didn’t matter to ESPN, which had the early coverage before handing off to NBC for two hours and the final half-dozen holes of the round. As far as ESPN was concerned, there were just two people on the golf course — Lefty and Tiger. They had somebody named Adam Scott playing with them, and ESPN grudgingly showed him hitting the ball now and then, but it was clear that Scott was a nuisance to be endured, not an athlete to be covered.

For more than three hours, just about all we saw was Mickelson and Woods playing golf and feature stories about them. What was really absurd was that ESPN spent so much time showing its feature stories it missed a lot of live golf. When you’re only covering two guys, you really ought to show them, don’t you think?

There were other golfers at Torrey Pines, but you wouldn’t have known it. Some of them got as low as 4-under, but none of the athletes who were playing excellent opening rounds got more than a few seconds of camera time. By making its dream pairing, the USGA had turned the U.S. Open into the Tiger and Phil Invitational.

That’s just not right. It’s hard to blame ESPN for concentrating on the two stars. The USGA all but demanded that the network do so when it made the pairing. No matter how little real drama there was, it was the reason most fans were watching. And when you get paid by ratings points, you do what you have to do.

NBC did a better job of covering others in the field, but it, too, was forced to devote a disproportionate share of its broadcast to Mickelson and Woods. The USGA made the two players the story of the first two rounds, and it has to be covered.

But you could tell how important it was to the two golfers by what they said immediately after finishing. Each talked about how he played. Neither brought up with whom he played.

Video   Tiger's first round June 12: Swing by swing of Tiger Woods' first day at the 2008 U.S. Open. NBC Sports

For them, it was a non-issue. If they’re playing head-to-head on Sunday, it will be entirely different because then it will mean they’re fighting for the trophy. But on Thursday, it was meaningless.

"We were all in our own little area," Mickelson said when asked about the pairing. "When you’re tackling a U.S. Open golf course, it’s so tough that you’re trying to just be in your own world and play it strategically the best you can, hit the best shots."

By the way, a qualifier named Justin Hicks had the mid-day clubhouse lead at 3-under, three strokes better than Lefty and four better than Tiger. Too bad he didn’t play with Phil and Tiger. We might have seen him actually hit a few balls.

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