"The obvious question is: What the hell has happened to American golf?"

There are a couple of good reads today about the continued decline of American performances at majors following the U.S. Open where Kevin Chappell and Robert Garrigus were the low Yanks (though it should be noted that Chappell, a former NCAA champion, playing his first U.S. Open finished T-3).

Larry Dorman looks back to the late 80s when Americans were not making much of an impact on the world stage and Mark McCormack was calling them "complacent."

The culprits were college golf and the PGA Tour, McCormack said. By eliminating match play and de-emphasizing individual performance in their tournaments, he said, colleges trained nonwinners, and the PGA Tour compounded the problem with its top-125 exemption policy and purse-distribution structure.

He recommended the radical cure of heavily weighting purse distribution so the winner would collect 50 percent, the runner-up 20 percent and the third-place finisher 10 percent — with 5 percent to fourth place and the remaining 15 percent to players in spots 5 through 12.

Although none of his suggestions were adopted, American golf did go through a resurgence in 1987, with Americans winning three of the four majors. A year later, they won two more, including the first of Curtis Strange’s consecutive United States Open titles, and three again in 1989.

This trend will probably also cycle through, although there was some concern earlier this year when Bill Haas, one of the PGA Tour’s better young players, who won twice in 2010, said what he really wanted was “to be able to have 13 top 10s, because even without winning, that’s a better year than my year last year, in my opinion, when I won twice.”

Brian Murphy asks the question pasted into the headline above and throws out this interesting theory.

Here’s another, more crazed theory: Did Tiger Woods kill off a generation of American golfers?
Hear me out. Perhaps the enormous, historic, encompassing shadow cast by Tiger from 1997-2009 made an entire generation of American players play with an inferiority complex, knowing they’d never be as good as the all-time legend. Even though Tiger was a global icon, perhaps there is something to being across an ocean and raised in a different culture that makes players more free from Tiger’s omnipresent greatness.