A popular refrain has been wafting through the pines around Augusta National Golf Club, and it makes you cringe to hear it.

The Masters Tournament has turned into the U.S. Open. At least that's a phrase some critics are throwing around way too casually.

For starters, it's pure blasphemy ... not to mention ludicrous.

After two torturously difficult days of golf in the 71st Masters Tournament, the players have come off the course grumbling about the test they've been presented with. That's about as close to a U.S. Open as this gets.

Granted, the Masters has been a little bit too much like work this week and a lot less like fun. Granted, the high scores are similar to what the U.S. Golf Association salivates over every time it sets up a championship venue. Granted, the tranquility of the course seemed a little more like a Good Friday Mass.

"Most of those roars are par putts from 30 or 40 feet," Tiger Woods said. "Certainly not eagles and not too many birdies out there. This golf course is playing really difficult right now, and you're probably not going to hear the roars you normally hear."

True enough, but that doesn't make this a U.S. Open. Fundamentally and philosophically, it's not even close.

Hopefully, former USGA President Fred Ridley got the memo about that.

He took over this year as chairman of rules and competition from another former USGA president, Will Nicholson. He is in charge of making sure the playing field doesn't get out of hand. Considering the history of the USGA in this area, it doesn't instill the highest confidence.

But Sunday at the Masters isn't the kind of sadistic test that is preferred at the U.S. Open. Augusta National doesn't care about preserving par. It cares about giving the best players the chance to rise above the competition, especially on Sunday.

For those who claim that this "new" golf course reduces the list of contenders to six or seven players, please tell me which ones they are on the leaderboard. It seems more egalitarian than ever.

Has it dealt too many unfair hands?

"No, it just asks too many questions that there is no answer to," Lee Westwood answered.

The Masters has become the most well-rounded test in golf, and there is no shame in that. It asks players to control the ball off the tee. It asks them to be precise approaching the greens. It asks them to recover from trouble. And it asks them to putt like their lives depend on it.

For 70 years, that general philosophy - give or take an errant tee shot - has been able to identify some of the greatest players in the history of the game. That the predicted favorites haven't fared well this week isn't because the course is too hard. It's because they haven't played well.

While conceding that the forest of towering 2-year-old pines that imprison the right side of the 11th fairway is an abomination to the strategic principles on which the hole was designed and should be chopped down in due haste, most of the changes made in the past 10 years have been spot-on.

In case anyone was wondering, the course was always hard and is supposed to be hard. It's a major championship, for goodness' sake. It's not the Bob Hope Desert Classic.

"This is obviously how they wanted it, with the lengthening of the golf course and adding the second cut," Woods said. "Now they're trying to get dry conditions and we're seeing what the golf course is really capable of."

To listen to some of the players and read some of the commentary this week, you'd think the course had been ruined.

"You don't go to the Masters to see a bunch of pars and bogeys," wrote Ed Sherman in the Chicago Tribune.

"Attritional golf," Lawrence Donegan of The Guardian in the U.K. calls it.

Well, it's been that way before at Augusta National. It was in 1999, before the bulk of the course overhaul was made. Nobody broke 70 on that Sunday, and nobody screamed that the tournament was ruined.

"It is as dry as it was in '99 except they added 500 yards and a billion trees," Woods said. "The greens are getting that sheen."

Good. This is what the Masters should be: a damnable hard test. On Sunday, the course should be accessible for scoring - but you have to play well to do it.

Let's see where the next two days lead it before redubbing it a U.S. Open.

Reach Scott Michaux at (706) 823-3219 or scott.michaux@augustachronicle.com.