CADDIE'S ROLE:The course was, like all good copies, unworthy when it came under real scrutiny on Sunday, writes COLIN BYRNE

THERE WAS a distinctively Irish feel about the 92nd PGA Championship played at Whistling Straits on the shores of Lake Michigan, Wisconsin, last week.

There was the Irish course in the same complex which really provided the space for the huge temporary infrastructure that accompanies a major golfing event. The main feature was the Whistling Straits course itself which looked exactly like a seaside course you would find amongst the dunes of the links land of our own small country.

In this Tiger-obsessed game there was also an Irish sounding link to the Great One as the American swing coach, Seán Foley, was mooted as taking on the task of reconstructing the world number one’s fragile swing.

Foley, who was born in Canada but moved to the States when he was young, could be seen advising Woods on the driving range for most of last week.

No matter how those of us who were looking at the course for the first time tried to agree that the links copy course was very much like a real links course at home, something didn’t add up.

It was a bit like a Disneyland version of golf where you got to pretend you were experiencing the real sensation of golf by the seaside beside the 118-mile wide and up to 900ft deep Lake Michigan with its lapping shores accompanied by the capricious weather that a links can provide; we had fog, wind, rain and plenty of sunshine at the Kohler venue last week.

The fact it was up to 90 degrees on most days, extremely humid and every time you walked in the fescue rough you got swamped by a platoon of mosquitoes was the giveaway that this was not really a links course.

The course was, like all good copies, unworthy when it came under real scrutiny. As the land was originally very flat and the earth had to be manipulated hugely to give the impression of a British or Irish links, visually the course looks impressive and believable.

But it never once played like a links with short irons spinning immediately on landing, even downwind, on the “links-like” greens. With undulating fairways it looked like the ball could run forever on them. Not so. The fairways were so receptive you could rightly be more concerned about there being mud on your ball rather than it running into trouble at the end of a steep slope.

Despite most of the holes offering a fair and thought-provoking challenge to the world’s best golfers last week it was the final hole that most players (especially the shorter hitters) found a little unusual. It was not surprising then it threw up so much controversy in the final showdown late on Sunday.

It sounds like the owner of Whistling Straits, Herb Kohler Jr, wanted a final hole that would get the attention of even the best golfers in the world. I can imagine that the directive to the well-respected designer Pete Dye was to make it long, tough and dramatic. The 18th is where the otherwise interesting and challenging links copy falls down.

With a west wind last Sunday and even off a forward tee my man’s (Edoardo Molinari) playing partner (admittedly the short hitter Brian Gay) had to lay up off a good drive on the fairway, with a three wood to a blind landing zone. The hole is aptly named Dye-abolical. So when the tournament leader, Dustin Johnson, came to the final tee with a one-shot lead the bizarre nature of the faux links creation caused a scene most outsiders to the game of golf would surely consider as certified insanity.

Johnson hit his drive a long way right (a good mistake as left was not the place to miss the fairway) and ended up way right of the fairway amongst a huge gallery of American spectators who seem to consider the day a success when a ball lands beside them. The design of the course is such that there are little bunkers absolutely everywhere for visual appeal rather than strategic placement.

The area that Dustin ended up in was apparently one of these adornment bunkers that had been so heavily trodden by the crowd that it just looked like bare, rugged, dusty ground. The PGA rules officials thought they had pre-empted the possible controversy by issuing a directive that all bunkers and sand areas are to be treated as bunkers under the rules of golf, but only those inside the ropes would be raked.

So if you are in the gallery and in sand, even where there were footprints and other blemishes to the hazards, they were still sand traps. Under the rules of golf of course you cannot ground your club in a bunker.

Even though Johnson had hit his tee shot 10 minutes previously, when he was actually shaping up to hit his approach shot the ogling mob were still encroaching on the golfer who was getting ready to play the shot of his life from a patch of dirt from the side of a man-made hill some 230 yards away from the pin on 18. It was a scene of chaos.

Both he and his caddie, Bobby Brown, could have been forgiven, under the circumstances for not recognising that the ball was actually in a bunker.

A group of colleagues were gathered around the television screen back in our rented house watching the scenario unfold. We saw Johnson ground his club in the dirt or bunker and immediately questioned if he had not incurred a penalty. None of the commentators digressed from the end-of-tournament drivel they were spouting when this real opportunity to talk about something interesting presented itself. Apparently they never noticed the rule infringement.

It looked like Johnson had made five on the hole and slipped back to join Bubba Watson and Martin Kaymer in a play-off for the Championship. Not so. Dustin felt the chilling hand of the rules official on his big shoulder as he headed off the 18th green as he explained what my caddie friends had pointed out – that his five iron touched the sand back up adjacent to the fairway.

Johnson would not be joining the others for the play-off.

We were in a sort of golfing Disneyland last week in Kohler, Wisconsin. Amid controversy the fantasy became reality for the gracious Johnson who would have been entitled to blow a fuse at the news of his two-shot penalty for grounding his club in the dirt.

While the patriotic gallery were naturally engulfed in the fairytale of a young home winner the staid and measured young German, Martin Kaymer, won his first major in an area of America that was settled by his German ancestors over a century ago when Whistling Straits was just a lakeside farmland.