By DAVE ANDERSON NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

At the U.S. Open championship, the charm and the challenge for the world’s best golfers is coping with a course many of them have not played for more than a decade, if at all. This year’s site is the Lake Course of Olympic Club in San Francisco, a little bit of heaven with mostly side hill fairways that drift down from the sandy cliffs above the Pacific Ocean through sentries of cypress trees and sloping target greens to the shore of Lake Merced.