They are all here, Ernie and Tiger and Monty and David Duval, the world's number one-rated golfer. Duval will test his blistered hands and Jack Nicklaus will test his new surgically-implanted artificial hip in a Major championship for the first time but it is already clear that the REAL star of the 99th US Open will be a wee Scotsman dead now these 51 years. Donald Ross is credited with having designed some 383 golf courses in the first half of this century, and there is no question that among them, his vision was to create in Pinehurst's No 2 a lasting monument to himself.

"I don't think you would see any other golf course in the world similar to this one," said the Spaniard Jose Maria Olazabal following his practice round on Tuesday. "You're playing in a golf course that there's a lot of pine trees, but sort of a links course tee-to-green, and around the greens is very unique layout."

My friend Harry Lipson is a member at Oakley Country Club in Watertown, Massachusetts, a club which just celebrated its centenary and which was the first golf course Donald Ross ever built. Harry is a left-handed golfer who plays to an 8, and spent most of his adult life as New England's premier producer of folk-music concerts. After a Super Bowl a few years ago he and I made the pilgrimage from Atlanta to North Carolina and spent a few days playing at Pinehurst. He found it remarkable that the same man who had designed his own course had also built No 2. Now, Oakley is actually a wonderful little track carved out of what was even then a semi-urban landscape, but I couldn't resist giving him the needle.

"That's because," I told him, "Ross made all his mistakes at Oakley, and spent the next 50 years trying to get it right."

If Pinehurst No 2 was created as an instant masterpiece, it is safe to say that Ross himself didn't think so. He spent the rest of his life tinkering with the course in continual efforts to improve it. It is said that he was deeply hurt by Bobby Jones' choice of Dr Alister MacKenzie over himself as his design partner for Augusta National, and became almost obsessed with making Pinehurst No 2 the better course.

The bare bones of Ross' career have been well-chronicled. Born in the Scottish Highlands, he grew up as a caddie on what is now Royal Dornoch and had already taken up the carpenter's trade when, at 20, came the offer that would shape the rest of his life. The club needed a full-time professional, and Ross was dispatched to St Andrews and Carnoustie for two years' apprenticeship. The first year was to prove of particular importance, for at St Andrews he worked under Tom Morris and occasionally accompanied Old Tom on his frequent excursions laying out new golf courses around the British Isles.

When he returned to Dornoch he was the full-time professional, club-maker and green-keeper - another occupation which would greatly influence his subsequent endeavours - and, much to the chagrin of the Dornoch membership, his residence at his home club was all too brief. In a 1937 interview with columnist Richards Vidmer, Ross described the process.

"Well, sir, one time a Professor Robert Wilson, or Harvard University, came to Dornoch, and after he had played a few times he approached me and explained that golf was just beginning to catch hold in America," recalled Ross. "He asked how I would like to come over to America. I said I had never given the matter any thought, but when he said that I could make 60 dollars a month and I would get 50 cents an hour for lessons, I began to think about it. You see, that was three times what I was making at Dornoch.

"Although when I told my mother about the idea of going to America she said I had the best job in town, which I had, and why should I give it up? I was making a hundred pounds a year where I was. Still, I thought I might be able to do better in this country, so I accepted the offer."

When Ross arrived in Boston in 1898 he had two dollars in his pocket but within the first year he was able to send $2,000 home to his mother in Scotland.

Meanwhile, the wealthy Boston industrialist James W Tufts had built a winter resort in the sandhills of North Carolina. The Tufts family, whose fortune originally came from the manufacture of ice-cream soda paraphernalia, always tended to be an eccentric lot. James W Tufts was ridiculed when he conceived the idea of a sporting retreat for the wealthy.

An enduring popular legend has it that Tufts became alarmed because so many of his guests were hitting little white balls with sticks in a nearby pasture that they were frightening the cows, and hired Ross to come build a golf course in order to protect the dairy herd.

This may indeed be the manner in which Tufts had his initial encounter with golf, but by 1899, Pinehurst (which in its early years was still known as "Tuftsville") already had a nine-hole course, and Tufts was a practicing member at Oakley Country Club. The rest of the story, however, is true. He did engage Ross to travel to North Carolina to build another nine holes for Pinehurst No 1. The course that would become this week's US Open venue followed a few years later.

With the passage of time, many of Ross' several hundred creations have come to describe themselves as the designer's "home course," or his "favourite," or both. There is little question that Pinehurst alone actually merits this distinction. Although Ross's enterprise eventually grew to encompass 3,000 employees with offices in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, he spent nearly every winter, from October through May, for the rest of his life in residence at Pinehurst, as designer, professional, member, and club president.

Donald Ross's courses remain distinctive, particularly in his work around the greens, but the crowned "turtle-back " greens that will torment the world's best golfers at Pinehurst No 2 this week are not necessarily a common Ross trait. The hump-backed greens were initially built that way for drainage purposes, and were originally made of sand, which was raked as each four-ball passed through. Years would pass before developments in agronomy allowed Ross to convert to grass greens that would withstand the year-round climactic conditions prevailing in the sand-hills of North Carolina.

"I was pretty fortunate," says Duval. "I grew up on a Donald Ross course in Florida. It wasn't a world-famous one like this one but you can see some of the same thinking involved. I think what you see with these golf courses is that they're ageless. There will always seem to be good golf-and-chip challenges for any type player, and I think that's what you're going to find this week."

And what would Ross think of today's player?

"Golfers used to be made on the golf courses. Now they're made in the machine shops."

The author of the quote was Donald Ross himself. The year was 1905!