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The decision to put the 2000 United States Open at Pebble Beach has always made perfect sense, because there are so few other places in America that scream out “GOLF” even to people who regard the sport as a monumental waste of time and land.

Your ocean … your cypress trees … your blustery winds … your rogue sea otters yearning to be skulled by a duck hook … why, if the Scots hadn’t thought of it first, golf would surely have been invented right here.

There is, however, a slight problem for those who are not steeped neck-deep in golf. They will tune in the Open to see the Pebble Beach they know and remember, and notice that there is a scandalous lack of semi-indolent celebrities.

Pebble Beach may be a championship golf course (and only an idiot would suggest otherwise), but we know Pebble Beach as the place Bing Crosby used to drop his empties, the place where Jack Lemmon wishes he had the guts to change that nine into a four just to play two more rounds, the place where Bill Murray hurls elderly women into sandtraps.

For golf fiends, Pebble Beach is a true test of the sport, especially after the handy folks of the United States Golf Association have finished placing in the coyote traps and land mines. The idea of Davis Love or Justin Leonard completely snapping on Friday afternoon and felling a tree that has been stuck in the middle of the 13th green by a sadistic USGA official is just too perfect for the true aficionado.

For everyone else, though, your much-maligned casual fan, Pebble is more Clint Eastwood than Ernie Els, and always has been. For them, Pebble is half golf course, half movie lot - the place where ESPN meets E!

In other words, how are you going to get them to watch Frank Lickliter after they’ve seen Kevin Costner?

And never mind that. What about all the people who have come to know Pebble Beach as the only stop on the PGA Tour that doesn’t play on the weekend? There hasn’t been a full weekend of nice weather since Kathryn Crosby left the pro-am to AT&T, and the last several events have either stretched into summer or blown up altogether.

That’s OK, though. Mark Grace soaking wet and being blown across the fairway while trying to hold an umbrella still has its funky extended Bay Area charm.

But there won’t be any of that this coming week. You want star quality? You get Tiger. You want the hot new artist? You get Shigeki Maruyama, the man who shot a 25 or some such ridiculous number at a qualifying round last week. You want flash? Well, there will be the usual number of sneaky amateur camera jockeys waiting for that perfect pose at the top of Steve Elkington’s backswing.

This, children, isn’t the Pebble Beach you remember from those rainy weekends in February. This is U.S. Opengolf-hardcore,mean-spirited,talk-into-the-clubhouse-waving-your-middle-finger-at-the-people-who-haven’t-cut-the-rough-since-springbreak golf.

The golfers won’t have time to wander over and sign an autograph while trying to negotiate that Siberian wind. They won’t be bantering good-naturedly with every Skippy or Muffy behind the rope. They won’t be teaching the president of IncrediblyDisposableMoney.Com how to read a green.

They have come on the grimmest business there is, on the hardest course there is - hardest not because of the rocks and ocean but because the USGA makes the Open a test for explorers of the Amazon and a spirit-crushing nightmare for everyone with a bag of sticks.

Thus, you may see the players at a restaurant next weekend, but they won’t be there sharing off-color jokes and throwing down the Old Overcoat with their playing partners over the surf-and-turf. You may see them smiling, but it will far more likely be a grimace.

The AT&T is the wealthy man at play. The Open is the wealthy man at work. Stressful, pressurized, unforgiving work with a hundred-plus co-workers all fighting for the same promotion.

Years ago, Joe Sargis, the Bay Area correspondent for United Press International, used to cover the Crosby Clambake and curse the tube every time the blimp showed a diorama of lovely, bucolic sun-splashed Pebble Beach. He always feared that every televised picture postcard would induce a new horde of Kansans, Dakotans and Kentuckians to sell the farm and move west, turning the Bay Area into a crowded, polluted, expensive and barely inhabitable ant farm.

He was right, although it was the computer industry that did it rather than the golf.

This week, though, all those panoramic shots will be counterbalanced by the faces of fulminating pros trying to make 70 on a course built for 78. There won’t be all those sunshiny faces just happy to be working an approach shot somewhere on God’s course while trying not to laugh at what Murray did back on 11.

But there will be golf, difficult and potentially rewarding golf. If you can’t enjoy it without a vaudeville act, you’re probably better off watching Lakers-Pacers. There won’t be a lot of celebrities in Indianapolis, either, but it will only last four quarters rather than four days.