One of the perks of covering a golf major is the outside chance you have of playing the course. During every tournament there’s a lottery: if you win, you’ll be part of a small group of media who get to the play the course after the U.S. Open. Luckily for me, I was one of those 24 who got to tee it up at Oakmont Country Club on Monday morning.

I secured a set of clubs from Joel Beall, a writer at Golf Digest who had brought his along in hopes he’d get the call. I felt a little bad watching his smile mask the agony he was hiding underneath, but snatched his clubs like a rat would a piece of cheese anyway.

Oakmont is generally considered the toughest U.S. Open host course and, in many ways, the perfect Open venue. At Oakmont in 2007 there were just eight under-par scores all week. This year, despite more than two inches of rain falling on Thursday, the softened-up design only ended with four players under-par for the tournament, three of those finishing at one-under.

The greens had been cut that morning and were running at the same speed as they were during the tournament. The pins were in the same spot as they were on Sunday, too, so my playing partners (Kyle Porter of CBS Sports, Ryan Ballengee of Golf News Net, and Andy Vasquez of The Bergen Record) and I decided to keep things consistent and play the Championship tees.

As a rusty four handicap and a former college golfer, I was pretty confident that I’d be able to break 90. It took exactly one hole for me to get my rude awakening. I pulled my first drive left — I was nervous, give me a break — and found it nestled down deep in the rough.

“I can get a seven iron out of that,” I told my caddie, who flashed me a skeptical look before returning the pitching wedge he had grabbed instinctively into the bag.

You can probably guess what happened next. I swung hard, as hard as I could, but instead of feeling the ball rifling off the face all I could feel was resistance. Like trying to push a massive tire, or a driving forward with the hand break on. A shock ran through my wrists, and when I looked up, I saw the ball die 20 yards in front of where it started.

I made an 8 on that hole, and as I walked off the green embarrassed and daunted with the thought of 17 more of those, I was genuinely perplexed at how anybody could actually play a course like this well.

I’d played two U.S. Open host courses before this — Bethpage Black and Winged Foot West — and when people ask me how difficult they are I respond the same way: that at any given moment you can make a double bogey or worse. It doesn’t matter that you have a 3 footer for birdie. Hit that putt too hard and you’ll have a 10 footer for par. Hit a bad wedge shot into a green and it’s much the same. One lapse of concentration at any given moment and you’ll be knocked out cold.

Oakmont in U.S. Open condition was a different kind of beast. It had all that, of course, but what made Oakmont so difficult was the utter relentlessness of it all. It was like a fighter punched you down and kept kicking, over and over and over again. If it wasn’t the rough it was the bunkers, and if it wasn’t those it was the lightning-fast greens, or the sheer size of the course.

Thankfully, things looked up for me after that dreadful first hole. Despite finding the church pews bunkers on the third, I worked into a steady rhythm of bogeys before making my first par on the seventh. A few more on the back nine led to a 19-over 89.

The scary thing is that outside of the first hole, I actually played quite well. I probably could have shaved-away four easy shots, but apart from that, I’m not sure how I could’ve gotten that score any lower.

That’s what makes what professional golfers do so impressive. There is no secret formula that separates pros from the best good golfers you know, or one key that can help others get there. Their good shots are so much better; their bad shots are better; when they hit it in the rough, they can improvise and muscle-it-out better; they’re more creative chippers and hole more putts.

Everything they do is freakishly impressive. It’s as if their ability been piped-down from another world, one so far away that it feels unfathomable when you try to compare, and never was that more apparent than when I was hacking out of the rough at Oakmont.