It is no strange twist of fate that the three greatest golfers of their eras - Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods - all won the United States Amateur Championship multiple times.

Jones won it in 1924, ‘25, ‘27, ‘28 and ‘30. Nicklaus in 1959 and ‘61. And Woods won three consecutive titles from 1994-96.

Nicklaus has always held that 90 percent of golf is played between the ears - and he, Woods and Jones are all renowned as much for lockdown mental toughness as for their technique with the sticks - it takes a lot of both to maneuver a ball around 18 holes of championship golf day after day. And 36 of them on the final day.

Consider the manner in which Woods won his three titles. (By the way, here is a fun fact: Woods had won four straight USGA Junior titles prior to his Amateur wins - meaning for seven straight years the kid had won a USGA title). All of them were of the heroic, come-from-behind variety. (More details on B4).

This year’s Amateur will be another formidable test of mental toughness for the 312 golfers who begin play next week at Chambers Bay and The Home Course, before the field gets narrowed for the match play at Chambers toward the end of the week. It will no doubt also offer a glimpse at how adept these world-class amateurs are at the fine art of shot making, because the links-style course at Chambers will require more imagination on the part of the players than your typical USGA venue, where patience and straightness are often enough to get the job done.

Will we see another Phil Mickelson in the making?

Mickelson won it in 1990 with an early display of his phenomenal ability with a lob wedge that, as Brett Avery of Golf World wrote, “left spectators, hovering a polite distance behind him, rubbing their eyes in disbelief.”

When architect Robert Trent Jones, Jr. was in the thick of designing Chambers Bay, his greatest hope was that a USGA event would be held on it, so that, indeed, not only golf swings but imagination and creativity would be tested among world-class players.

Jones found a delightful number of opportunities to employ some of his fondest techniques for creating illusions (shaping a bunker so that it hides an area from the golfer’s vision and so from a distance the green looks much closer than it is, for example).

Jones has always admired the work that George Thomas did at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, Calif., where he developed a reputation as a virtuoso of this technique.

“Golf presents distance puzzles that make the game unique,” Jones says.

And on a treeless 250 acres of dunes land, Jones had a ball creating illusions of distance with the various sizes of placements of swales and bunkers.

(Read more about how players will try to attack the course on page B4).

At a U.S. Amateur, spectators get a view of all of this that is much more up-close and personal than at a PGA Tour event or a U.S. Open.

Of course it was not always like that with the Open.

When Billy Maxwell, who learned the game on the hard, flat plains of West Texas, was the reigning Amateur champion in 1952, he found out first-hand how intimate the crowds could be.

On the second hole of the first round, he drove the ball just to the edge of the fairway, except when he got to the area the ball was nowhere to be seen.

“I walked back to the tee to play another, and I never quite recovered from that mishap. For the rest of the round, I kept wondering what happened to that ball and I continued to wonder for years afterward. About 40 years later, a woman introduced herself to me and said, ‘I know you don’t remember, Billy, but I attended the U.S. Open in Dallas. I was the one who picked up your ball. Can you forgive me?’”

The girl was 5 years old at the time and was there with her father. After Maxwell’s group had hit their drives, she was walking through the crosswalk and without her father noticing, she picked up the ball.

“Of course I forgave her,” Maxwell says.

At the Amateur there are few roped off areas and, as spectators will discover, there are fantastic views all around the course from vistas taking in the entire layout to banked areas around greens, tees and fairways. Many of the players in the contest will be stars of the PGA Tour in the future. This is a wonderful opportunity to get a good close look at them. And maybe rub your eyes a few times with disbelief at some of the shots they make.