By TERRY NAU

Sports editor

 EAST PROVIDENCE -- Certainly the U.S. Open is the ultimate golf championship for American-bred competitors. It is called the “Open” for a very good reason. Any scratch golfer can try to participate. And in the end, when all the strokes are tallied, an unheralded professional like Lucas Glover can beat all of the favorites, just by maintaining his composure and executing his game plan.
The Northeast Amateur Invitational, which begins on Wednesday at Wannamoisett Country Club, provides an early precursor of the pressure that elite golfers face whenever they compete in a quality tournament. That pressure is something every golfer – even the average weekend hacker -- must deal with during the course of a round. For top amateurs, the pressure is more foreboding as they test their skills against a challenging golf course while trying to keep pace with the best of their peers.
The Northeast is an event where so many great pros have first attracted our attention here in Rhode Island, a tournament that has given us early glimpses at Ben Crenshaw, John Cook, Hal Sutton, David Duval and Anthony Kim over the past four decades. And that’s just scratching the surface.
Probably half of the players on the PGA Tour have played in the Northeast. Even Tiger Woods showed up twice in the early 1990s when he was still in high school. Woods withdrew once and missed the cut in his other appearance, citing allergies as a problem.
Lucas Glover, who won the U.S. Open on Monday by two shots over Phil Mickelson and Duval, played three times without winning in the Northeast Amateur before turning pro.
“Lucas was here in 1998, 2000 and 2001,” Northeast tournament chairman Denny Glass was saying on Monday afternoon as a light rain fell on the golf course.

The education of golfers like Glover begins at an early age, with junior tournaments, and becomes more complicated during their college careers as they smooth the rough edges in their games. All of the top  collegiate golfers have one goal in mind. They want to qualify for the PGA Tour. And to make it there, they must tune their game for years and years, in tournament after tournament, grinding and practicing and refining their swings and their putting strokes until they can repeat these distinctly different motions in the heat of intense competition.
The Northeast is one of several  summer tournaments on the schedule for top amateurs. It is preceded by the Sunnehanna  in Johnstown, Pa. and followed by North and South in Pinehurst, N.C. at the end of the month. And then there is the biggest of them all -- the U.S. Amateur, which will be held in late August at the fabled Southern Hills course in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One step follows another for the best amateurs, many of whom will return to college and repeat this process for another year or two before taking the final step and heading to the dreaded PGA Tour School.
Of course, pressure is the elephant in the room for most golfers. Nobody talks about it. And they shouldn’t. The ideal mental attitude is to remain positive and never let negative thoughts enter the mind.
Golf is inherently an unfair game. The cup is only three inches wide and sometimes even the good putts don’t go in the hole. If there’s no room for crying in baseball, there’s certainly no space in golf for whining. It’s a cruel game, as Phil Mickelson learned on Monday afternoon when he made two late bogeys to fall out of the Open lead.
The idea for young amateurs is to keep the big picture in mind, play against the best available competition each week, and develop consistency in game and attitude that will hold up when the pressure comes to bear on a particular shot.
“Our defending champion, Brendan Gielow, was just interviewed here at the club by Channel 12,” Dennis Glass noted, “and he called our tournament a stepping stone in his career. I think that’s a good way to describe it. What our tournament does is provide a chance for golfers to go through the pressure of winning a top-flight tournament. They learn from the experience.”
These long-balling collegians go from course to course on their summer schedule, adapting to the unique conditions that each location provides. What they find in Wannamoisett is a short golf course by their standards (6,688 yards from the back tees). It plays to a par 69.
Wannamoisett more than holds its own in the scoring department, despite improvements in equipment technology for the players over the past two decades. John Cook held the tournament record of eight-under par for three decades. Gielow won last year with a nine-under par total. The winning scores have remained relatively consistent over the years due to Wannamoisett’s slick putting surfaces and subtle trouble around the greens.
With all the rain in Rhode Island over the past week, Wannamoisett’s rough should be longer this week and the greens not quite as fast. The tournament will begin on Wednesday with a chance of rain still in the forecast. The greens will get faster for the final three days as the sun reappears and temperatures warm into the mid-80s.
Gielow returns to defend his title. The field features the No. 1-ranked world amateur, Morgan Hoffman, a sophomore at Oklahoma State University. University of Florida star Tyson Alexander is expected to contend. Don’t count out Penn State’s Kevin Foley, who won the Sunnehanna Amateur two weeks ago.
The player who handles the pressure best on Saturday afternoon will emerge as the winner. The ones who learn from their experience also stand to succeed in future endeavors.