Tiger can go distance and reign at Merion

So what’s it going to be? A thoroughbred major winner with killer course management and length to spare? A major virgin with a hot putter and an even hotter wedge? How about a straight-hitting gut-player with a laser-like long game and a brain?

Whatever the weather happens to throw up at storied Merion in Philadelphia’s north-west suburbs this week, it’s unlikely to be a place of brotherly love, despite all the doomsday predictions of record US Open scoring.

Soft as a Christmas pudding she might be but Merion, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jim Murray believed, is no pushover.