Ten years ago at Pebble Beach, the Monterey Peninsula course high up on the cliffs above Carmel Bay, Tiger Woods played four rounds of golf even more stunning than his first win at a major championship when, in 1997, he won by 12 shots at Augusta.

In what was a staggering performance, he crushed the best players in the world by 15 shots and anyone who watched his final round clinic at Kingston Heath last November would have been excused for thinking the return to Pebble Beach would be equally triumphant.

Instead his private world blew up and, on the course, his erratic driving seems to be no better than it has been for quite a while. The base of his 2000 US Open win was long and accurate hitting with his longest club; that he holed every putt he looked at that week helped but it was the ball striking clinic that astounded every observer.

It is never worth making a prediction about Woods and only he truly knows what state his swing is in and how he is really playing. His results on the tour so far have been miserable, for him, but does anyone want to say he is not without hope?

Woods has been the favourite - as Jack Nicklaus was during his long run at the top of the game - for every major championship he has played since that win at Augusta but he is far from the most favoured this week.

The Phil Mickelson mission to win the trophy he wants most has become a saga matched only by the great Sam Snead's ultimately futile quest to put his name on the National Open trophy. Mickelson has been second five times and only at Bethpage Park in 2002 did he not have an outstanding chance to win. His worst loss was his double bogey finish in 2006 when four would have beaten Geoff Ogilvy by a shot but he couldn't get the final drive anywhere near the fairway and he proved incapable of making a sensible decision from there to the end. It was not as bad as Snead's fumbling eight to finish at Spring Mill in 1939 when five would have won but it was close.

Mickelson, like Woods, has won the February PGA Tour event at Pebble Beach but this course with its tiny, steeply canted greens will be a different beast with the organizers adding the long grass to the edges of the prepared surfaces that has been so much a part of the Open.

There is a new set-up man in charge of the Championship and Mike Davis is more aware than his predecessor of the importance of giving players less long grass out of which to hack the ball of they miss a green or a fairway. The US Open is a grinding, difficult test that is not supposed to be fun but it could get awfully boring watching the one-dimensional nature of recovery play that was so much apart of the traditional organisation of the Open courses. And importantly at Pebble Beach he has cut the fairways to the edges of the cliffs that border the 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th holes. Doing that would seem so blindingly obvious to an Australian greenkeeper but they see rough as having a different function than we do.

There are high hopes in England for Lee Westwood. He was gifted the tournament in Memphis last weekend when Robert Garrigus made a mind-numbing triple bogey at the 72nd hole to fall back into a tie with Westwood and the tall, angular swinging Swede, Robert Karlsson.

Westwood was a shot short at Woods' Torrey Pines US Open in 2008 and he three-putted the final green at Turnberry last summer to miss the Stewart Cink, Tom Watson playoff and he is alongside of Mickelson at the top of the ‘most-likely' list.

Ten Australians play this week on the course where Bruce Crampton was second to Nicklaus in 1972 and where David Graham had a great chance to defend his 1981 title until be made a double bogey from nowhere at the 13th hole on Sunday.

Curiously, playing together early on the opening day are the three most hopeful Australians, Ogilvy, Adam Scott and Robert Allenby. Scott won in Texas not long ago and with a putting stroke that he looked to have confidence in and Allenby played his best golf ever in a big event when he was second to Tim Clark at The Players Championship. Ogilvy, in contrast, has not shown much since winning in Hawaii very early in the season and he will be anxious to reassert himself as a major contender. He is better when the wind is down because in the fashion of the modern powerful player he hits high and he will be hoping for some un-Pebble Beach type weather.

The Australian course most reminiscent of Pebble Beach is New South Wales and anybody who has played there knows the chance of getting four quiet days in a row there.

This will be the most interesting of events because it is played at one of America's great courses and the three of the four previous Opens have identified the games dominant player - and Tom Kite in 1992 was hardly a slouch. He may not quite have been in the class of Nicklaus, (‘72) Watson ('82) or Woods but he was one of America's best players for almost 20 years.

With Woods some way from his best, the question is who will take advantage of his decline? Or will he astound us all once again?