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In baseball, it doesn't matter if the backdrop is "The Green Monster" in Boston, or a warehouse in Baltimore.

The pitcher always stands 60 feet, six inches away from home plate on a mound 10 inches high. The distance between the bases is 90 feet. Never wavers from the major leagues, to the minor leagues, to the colleges, to the high schools.

In football, the field is 100 yards long and 531Ú3 yards wide, whether it's The Big House in Ann Arbor or Wisner Stadium in Pontiac.

Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke and the Carrier Dome at Syracuse couldn't be more different structurally.

The court, however, is the same both places. The baskets 10 feet high, too.

Golf is different.

The conditions facing the world's best golfers this weekend at Oakland Hills for the PGA Championship are much different than at golf's last major at Royal Birkdale in England. It's a traditional European-style course, where the wind blows mightily, and the conditions of play subsequently change on a whim.

Or The Masters, held in April, on the lush green turf of Augusta National.

Oakland Hills has a style of its own. It's very traditional -- and very American.

The first object this week will be to keep the ball in the fairway. The next object will be to keep the ball away from some wild, winding downhill putt on Oakland Hills' ever undulating greens.

The course, nicknamed "The Monster" long ago by Ben Hogan, still carries the elements of the original design by Donald Ross, and the updates made by Robert Trent Jones during the early 1950s.

While the strategy is simple, scoring at Oakland Hills won't be -- especially now that they've added length. Pretty much every hole is a beast now. The par-3 holes remain treacherous and unusually long. The 18th hole, honestly, looks unbearable.

Oakland Hills is landlocked, though. Sometimes rain gets it, and brings in that element, but wind is seldom a factor.

Length off the tee helps. Hitting long irons into the greens accurately is inevitable and imperative. Bunker play can make the difference, although it's amazing at this level just how easily the players are able to execute what seem to be even the most delicate of bunker shots. And there will be plenty of those the next four days because Oakland Hills has so many deep traps around its greens.

The last thing you will see is bump-and-run shots like at Royal Birkdale last month. They just don't exist on this course and these nightmarish greens.

"I think it's tougher to play a British Open than it is to play a U.S. Open or a PGA, mainly because the weather conditions can change dramatically," said Spain's Sergio Garcia, who played Oakland Hills skillfully in 2004 as a member of the winning European Ryder Cup team. "At the (British) Open championship, we were hitting a 5-iron from 120 yards (because of the wind). That doesn't happen very often here in the United States."

You don't see big, bombing long hitters do well on courses like Oakland Hills. They get punished too much for not being on fairway, or trying to get up and down from the side of the green.

"Shots around the green here are more like more like taking a big whack at it," Garcia said. "It's still very tough, but the variety of shots isn't as big."

Rocco Mediate, who almost edged out Tiger Woods at the U.S. Open in San Diego, played few practice holes this week.

"You have to keep the course in front of you," Mediate said. "It's a Donald Ross course. He'd make you pay for going long."

That will be the trick this week. Being long off the tee is important, because the shots into the green are going to require long irons anyway. Yet, missing the fairway will be a recipe for disaster. It should make for a perfect test of golf.

Decidedly American style.