A HISTORICAL RETROSPECTIVE

In 1995, the USGA gets the unique opportunity to review its past in one large chunk -- 100 years.

WE MARK the passage of time in golf not with pages on a calendar but the use of championship courses. Augusta National means spring. The U.S. Open heralds summer. The PGA Championship hints of the coming autumn and the winter beckoning beyond.

We think of Shinnecock Hills and the U.S. Open and the mind flashes back nine years, to Raymond Floyd and his emergence over the final nine, or the arduous conditions from the first round. Last year's Open at Oakmont took us back to Larry Nelson in '83, and then to Johnny Miller's 63 another decade back. Oakland Hills next year? Tze-Chung Chen in '85.

And that is the way we observe time, in blocks roughly a decade wide, pieces we can digest in one sitting, places we remember visiting even if it was a couple Presidents ago. Yet this Open -- in fact, all of this year's championships -- should be different in the USGA's Centennial season. We should pause to examine the scope of a century, not just in the courses being used -- including USGA charter members Shinnecock, The Country Club and Newport -- but in the way the game is played.

Scan the pages of history and it is difficult to note the transition from players dressed in Sunday best, long-sleeved shirts and ties firmly knotted, billowing skirts that restricted the most fluid of swings, to the jumbled mass of patterned cottons and spandex and double knits. Spectators once covered the grounds in a way not to different from the competitors themselves -- in the fairway, on foot, leaning one way or the other to see over shoulders and between Derbys and Stetsons. It was a far cry from closed-circuit broadcasts in corporate hospitality tents that teeter precariously in the whipping winds.

When did the game change? We cannot place our finger on the date long ago, in part because of our tidy decade-long remembrances. But the game is essentially the same as it was in 1895, when 11 men strode to the first tee at the inaugural Open. Did they not feel the same pit in the emptiness of their stomachs? Just as they could not have imagined metal woods or two-piece balls or double-cut greens, they could not have have imagined the immortality accorded the winner of that Open, or any other USGA championship.

When did the game change? It has not. Only the way we look at the game has changed.