Oakland Hills leaves Paul Azinger with a puzzle

Azinger has seen what brutal can be this week at Oakland Hills. The first standing U.S. Ryder Cup captain to make the 36-hole cut at the PGA Championship since Tom Kite finished fifth in 1997, Azinger has suffered like the rest of the field this week and it has left him to ponder an important question.

Just how should he have Valhalla set up for the Ryder Cup match against the Europeans?

“I actually talked to Charles Howell today about whether to have it set up really, really easy or really, really hard,” Azinger said Saturday after a third-round 76 left him at 14-over-par for the tournament.

Azinger is torn because there are merits to both setups.

“There’s a little something inside me that says either one could work,” Azinger said. “It’s really interesting when you look at the board and you look at the history of the U.S. Open and you look at the history of the PGA Championship, it seems like the more difficult it is, the better off - the more the Americans show up.”

With that said, a difficult setup might not be the way Azinger goes because it could stall the momentum of his team. He has said from day one he wants to field a confident team playing its best golf. Azinger even had the points structure used to pick the team changed to make this year’s results matter more.

Now Azinger wonders if a difficult setup would do nothing more than kill the momentum his team has built up leading into the Ryder Cup.

“I think when you’ve got a bunch of guys coming in and playing well, you want to give them a chance to play golf,” Azinger said. “And so it’s kind of a Catch-22. What’s better, really, really hard and hope for the best or you set it up maybe a little easier and say, you know what, my guys are playing well, I’m going to let them play golf.”

Playing this week has done a couple things for Azinger. He’s had the chance to see potential members of his team handle major championship pressure on a tough course, and he’s also seen what really, really hard looks like up close.

It hasn’t been fun.

“Here, you’re not really playing golf as much as you’re kind of just hanging in there,” Azinger said. “You can’t play golf here from the rough this week. You chop it out and then you play from the fairway after you’ve chopped it out.”

And with that, maybe Azinger has tipped his hand. Sure, a course should be difficult, but the game should be about shotmaking and imagination, not just a brutal test of survival.

“I think truly playing golf is scrambling,” he said. “I think the most exciting shot in golf is a recovery shot and there’s not a lot of recovery shot hope here.”

And hope is one thing the U.S. Ryder Cup team will need.

Tiger Woods is out and Europe has won the last two in a rout. Despite the setup, Azinger admits, regardless of how Valhalla plays, it will come down to one thing - the players.

“Basically, it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “I don’t think it matters much. I think whichever team is playing the best comes out on top, whether it’s really hard or really easy or somewhere in between.”