Maybe it was out of respect to Tom Watson that the PGA Championship dropped their toe-curling "Glory's Last Shot" slogan recently.

Watson managed to collect eight Major titles in his time - and, memorably, almost added a ninth at Turnberry four years ago - but the PGA was not one of them, an omission that denied him the career Grand Slam that only five players have completed.

As next year's US Ryder Cup captain, Watson has been given a special invitation to this week's tournament at Oak Hill, his first appearance in the event for 10 years. All things considered, billing the thing as some sort of last chance saloon would probably not be the politest way of greeting the 63-year-old. Not with his record at the place.

"I make about two birdies a round there," sighed Watson as he talked about his return to the course, which sits in the suburbs of Rochester, about 250 miles north-west of New York. "That's about all I could handle. That's a hard course for me. I've never played it very well."

He is not alone. Starting with the 1956 US Open, Oak Hill has hosted six professional Majors, the most recent being the 2003 PGA. In total, that adds up to 1074 entrants. And how many of them finished with a score less than par? Ten.

That startling figure - which amounts to less than 1% - lends a hollow and ironic ring to the comment of Ben Hogan ahead of Oak Hill's 1956 debut. Never short of an opinion, the more negative the better, when he first turned up Hogan declared the course to be unworthy of the tournament, on the basis that it was not challenging enough. Hogan lost that US Open by one shot to Cary Middlecoff. He would later describe the opening hole as the toughest he had played.

From the way he has played in the Majors this year, with a best finish of a tie for 25th at the Masters, Rory McIlroy would probably prefer to defend his PGA title on a County Down pitch-and-putt course (were it not for the fact that neither his pitching nor his putting have been up to much) this week.

"There's a lot of doglegs and there's going to be a lot of times where if you don't work the ball one way or another, you're going to run out of fairway or you're going to run through the fairway," said McIlroy when he visited the course a few weeks ago.

"That's going to be the real challenge, because if you keep your ball in the fairway here, you've got chances to score. But if you don't and you hit it into that rough, that big rough here, you're going to struggle to even get it to the greens, let alone control your ball to try to get it close to the pin."

In the strokeplay era - the tournament was a matchplay event until 1957 - Tiger Woods is the only player who has mounted a successful defence of a PGA Championship title. And likely to be so still at the end of this week. Everyone expects McIlroy to be back at his best before too long. But not just yet.

It is the PGA's proudest boast that it has the strongest field of any of the four Majors. Last year, all but one of the world's top 100 players teed it up on the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island. But so, too, did 20 completely unheard of club professionals who had earned their places through the PGA Professional National Championship. Their presence is usually brief - it is a rare thing for a club pro to make the cut - but they do give the event a blue-collar feel that the other Majors lack.

And the Championship does have a welcome habit of producing fabulous finishes. Who could ever forget the ferocious battle between Woods and Sergio Garcia in 1999? Or Woods being taken to the wire by the journeyman Bob May at Valhalla the following year? Or Keegan Bradley beating Jason Dufner in a play-off in Atlanta two years ago, becoming the first player since Ben Curtis, at The Open in 2003, to win on his Major debut?

But the best, by a street, was Shaun Micheel at Oak Hill 10 years ago. The final round had been a nip-and-tuck affair between Micheel and Chad Campbell, and a play-off looked likely as the two men played the last. Then, though, Micheel struck an imperious 7-iron from 174 yards that saw the ball bound up the green and stop barely two inches from the hole.

How we would relish a finish like that this week. Especially by Tom.