The mentally unprepared ‘may as well not even tee it up’ at Oakmont, says Jason Day

Jason Day suggests that players psyched out by the brutal challenge awaiting them at Oakmont might as well beat the Friday trunk-slamming crowd and fire up their homeward-bound private jets now.

For Rory McIlroy, the key to winning his second US Open is having the ability to control his emotions in the face of a daunting venue that, essentially from tee to green, will test the mettle of the best golfers in the world.

Defending champ Jordan Spieth believes he put any lingering anxiety about his post-Masters meltdown ability to finish off a win firmly behind him by earning a “huge” victory at Colonial late last month.

That the three best players in the world — and virtual co-favorites to tame, or at least not be consumed by what Phil Mickelson called “the hardest golf course we’ve ever played” — are as concerned with the six inches between their ears as they are the 7,254 yards between the first tee and 18th green is no coincidence. Just the slightest apprehension or indecision about how to play what many in addition to Lefty consider the toughest U.S. Open track could derail the chances of even the greatest ball striker or maestro with a flat stick.

“The US Open is more of a mental game than any other venue,” golf psychologist Dr. Gio Valiante told SB Nation by phone on Tuesday.

Paul Azinger wholeheartedly agrees.

“You have to be a mental giant to [win],” the 1993 PGA champion and Joe Buck’s new sidekick in the Fox Sports booth said last week during a conference call. “The US Open is always about putting it in play off the tee, being the best wedge player around the greens and holing the critical putts … Oakmont exaggerates the severity of just about all three of those things, but in the end … the guy with the best mind, the guy who’s the most unflappable, usually ends up doing it.”

Which is why Rory’s planning a more methodical, thoughtful and less aggressive strategy than the swashbuckling approach he used to conquer soft and approachable layouts on his way to lapping the fields in his four major triumphs. This week, it’s all about rough avoidance, which for McIlroy means having the “discipline” to hit more 2-irons off the tee than driver.

“You have to get the ball in play. You really need to put the ball on the fairway. That’s a huge premium,” he said. “And if you get your ball on the fairway, you’ve just got to make sure that you leave yourself below the hole on the greens. I’d much rather have a 30-foot putt up the hill on these greens than even an 8-footer down the hill.”

Better yet, how about not having to putt at all?

Players with the ability and poise to avoid the thick, ball-smothering non-fairway parts of the course and leave pin hunting on the severely sloping, glassy greens to others are the ones likely to be in the chase down the stretch.

“You know full well that you’re not going to have the same opportunities and the same number of birdies [as in a non-US Open],” observed Azinger. “You’re going to have to be able to take advantage of those few opportunities and then you’re going to have to salvage par, save par, save those shots.

“The Open isn’t about how many birdies you make; it’s about how you save shots … Nobody’s going to hit every fairway, nobody’s going to hit every green,” he added. “It’s about being patient and not getting rattled, because if you get rattled, you’re going to lose.”

McIlroy is a believer in what Azinger’s preaching.

“If guys are playing well and they’re confident, you’ll maybe get it around in under par,” said McIlroy, one of the few competitors to envision a winning score in the red. “But the guys that are struggling, it will really magnify that weakness, and you’ll see a lot of high scores as well. So I feel like it will stretch the field out a bit between the guys that are playing very well and are very comfortable and the guys that are struggling a little bit.”

Those with vested interests in picking Sunday’s champ might keep in mind that the players heading to the tee on Thursday with even the slightest doubts will likely be gone before the weekend. That, said Azinger colleague Curtis Strange, could rule out all but those who have been here before.

“I don’t think we’re going to see a fluke winner,” said the most recent player to win back-to-back (1988, 1989) national championships. The 2016 victor will be “somebody with experience, major championship experience, and then certainly, experience to handle themselves under that kind of pressure.”

Can we get an amen to that, Jason?

“You have to come into major championships [with] a good attitude regardless of what the situation is,” said Day, who noted that carping about the greens at Chambers Bay in 2015 helped none of the whiners (we’re looking at you, Billy Horschel).

“This year, we got tough rough, the greens are tough, practically the whole course is tough,” said Day, an acolyte of 14-time major winner Tiger Woods, perhaps the mentally fittest golfer of all time in his prime.

For Day, a player’s demeanor will go a long way toward determining his success or failure this week.

“If you’re going to have a bad attitude, you may as well not even tee it up,” he said. “That’s just one less person you have to worry about at the end of the week.”

We wonder if Spieth — who claimed to “will” his putts to drop at Augusta, where, with nothing close to his “A” game, he was fortunate to be in contention at all before the double dunk at No. 12 — got that memo.

“They have dumped so much sand into these bunkers,” Spieth complained on Monday, “and now it is so tough to get a clean strike on the ball.”

Valiante, a mental coach who works with Justin Rose, Davis Love III and other tour players, was disappointed to hear Spieth ripping course conditions.

“He’s sounding more and more critical,” said Valiante, who will help fans on-site and digitally sharpen their mental approaches to the game via an American Express initiative. “I don’t like to see that in Jordan … It may be just an observation or it may be something that’s in his head.”

Despite having issues with parts of the course, Spieth said he was “as confident as I can be” about peaking in time for this week’s event. As for angst over his Masters meltdown, Spieth said he had put that in the rear-view mirror.

“If you’re coming off kind of a heartbreaking loss, getting back into contention can be fearful, and you’ve just got to push through the fear,” he said. “When I say the ‘fear,’ the potential for bad memories to pop up, right? I feel like we got through that.”

For the top three players in the world, and everybody else in this week’s contest, it’s all about holding your head high on a track that has the capacity to bring the cockiest of players to his knees.

“You don’t want to make it sound like some kind of awful death march out there,” said Azinger. “But when you get on those fast greens … when that bell rings, it kind of freaks you out a little bit.”