Some of the best in the world quipped, some bellyached about this place and admitted they can't say good riddance to it soon enough.

Take Rory Sabbatini, for example. He of the 8-over-par 78 yesterday that funneled him further down the leader board, where his aggregate total of 18 over has left him zero chance at raising a trophy at this 107th U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club.

His objective today is simple: "Finish 18 holes and get out of town," he said, straight-faced and without a trace of humor.

This Henry Fownes-designed plot of land will do that to you -- even if you can play this game better than the vast majority of people who so much as gripped a club.

And the membership at Oakmont likes it this way. They don't necessarily derive a sense of pride from seeing grown men suffer, but the members aren't going to feel badly for these million-dollar professionals who have been relegated to people who know what it is like to miserably march their way through this Pennsylvania parcel of peril.

"As far as we are concerned, the course is set up about as well and tough as you can set it up without making it artificial, and that is important," said club historian John Fitzgerald, an Oakmont member since 1968.

"People need to remember that we are not trying to jam anything in there that would just make it ridiculous. The general feel of the membership is that we are very pleased with how the course has played."

So what about the comments by some participants that this setup is unfair, crossing over from being a exigent test to one that simply is not acceptable?

"I don't think anything has ever occurred in my life where there hasn't been a vocal minority who had to be a little obstreperous," Fitzgerald said. "You can't tamp it out of some people. They walk into the place with a little burr on their shoulder, and then they don't play as well as they might have thought they should, and they react."

Marc Bulger, the St. Louis Rams quarterback who hails from Squirrel Hill, knows what these professional golfers are going through because he has lived it. Bulger is a member at Oakmont, spending a decent chunk of his five weeks off during the summer navigating this deftly manicured expanse.

"You don't want to see them struggle," said Bulger, a 4-handicap at Oakmont. "What it does for me, as a professional athlete, is make me appreciate these guys even more. I came out about a month ago under these conditions and played not all that bad and shot about 105. I was frustrated, I picked up on four or five holes. And, like I said, I was striking the ball pretty well that day."

And while Fitzgerald, and the club as a whole, takes pride in a large contingent of members who play to single-digit handicaps, Jim Furyk is of the school of thought that the regular conditions, and those this week, are exponentially different -- even if some members swear it plays to about the same degree of difficulty on normal days.

"You hear the rumors and members say that the greens get slowed down to play the U.S. Open, and I think a lot of that gets overplayed," Furyk said.

"This is a place that's very proud of how difficult their golf course is. I'll venture to guess that 99 percent of the members can't play this course very well or finish in severe conditions, but they're proud of that fact and that's what this place is about. They like having it very tough and they're proud of having possibly the toughest golf course in the United States or one of the toughest courses in the world."

So when asked, hypothetically, what some of the most accomplished Oakmont members would shoot on this U.S. Open setup, Sabbatini dismissed the notion of so much as minimal success.

"What does he shoot?" Sabbatini asked, rhetorically, before saying with a chuckle: "A bottle of whiskey."

Still, that antidote might not be able to ease the USGA-instilled pain this course has caused this week.