What Buzz! PGA Tour Opening Day Is Here!

Calendar year golf is here and just in case you think there was a common sense reason for making the PGA Tour a year-round proposition, Doug Ferguson previews the Frys.com Open and the real reason FedExCup points are on the line starting Thursday.

To avoid losing sponsorship of the fall tournaments (and some $25 million in prize money), the tour made them part of the FedEx Cup season.

Nothing says important golf and playing opportunities for the rank-and-file like 57-year-old Fred Funk planning to make a go of it!

Ron Kroichick assesses the field and concludes it's not any better than previous years.

None of the top 29 players in the world ranking, many of whom have played five times in the past seven weeks, booked a trip to Northern California.

Matsuyama, the 21-year-old from Japan, is the highest-ranked player in the field at No. 30.
Other notable players include Y.E. Yang, who memorably tamed Tiger Woods to win the 2009 PGA Championship; Ryo Ishikawa, the dynamic 22-year-old from Japan; and former Cal golfer Max Homa, who won the NCAA individual title in June and will make his pro debut.

Commissioner Samaranch is thrilled with the start of the season and get this, the chance to promote lists during the holiday season! And they're not shopping lists.

Now we're off and running with FedExCup competition as we look to the next 12 months.

The results of the restructure, of course starting with the new season right now, are yet to be determined.  But we feel very positive about the opportunity to get players into FedExCup competition with full points in the fall for the first time and get to the holidays when we'll have an actual competitive list of players and how they're competing so we can talk a lot about that over the holidays, which is a good promotional time for us.  So we like that.

The "we" he would be referring to is a very small number of older white men who sit in a conference room with the Commish, impersonate bobble heads and vote on each other's compensation.

Bob Harig concurs that the "move to a wraparound schedule is a good one, even if we don't see a majority of big names competing."

Perhaps best of all, this gives golf a clean start and finish line. The tour season begins now. It ends next year at the Tour Championship in Atlanta. If you qualify for the PGA Tour playoffs, you are exempt the following year. If you don't, and don't have some other eligibility criteria, you're fighting for your card in the Web.com Finals. It's simpler, and ultimately will become commonplace for those who follow the game.

That is, if they are following the next six weeks. No breaks for these fans!

Steve Elling is more skeptical of how this will work but finds a silver lining.

The field at Hawaii’s Tournament of Champions in early January is limited to players who won the previous season, though Mickelson and Woods rarely turned up.

Still, it looks like an all-star game compared to this week.

Rex Hoggard sounds positively giddy.

If the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, the traditional season opener since 1986, had a soft-opening feel to it, this week’s stop at CordeValle is more like a split-squad spring training bout.

If the field at the Frys.com Open wore jerseys, there would be a lot of 58s and 97s on the tee sheet, fine players all of them but you really shouldn’t expect to see many of them when the Tour hits prime time again next spring.

This isn’t a knock on the Frys.com Open, a quality event with a big purse ($5 million) on a hard and fast golf course, or the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open or McGladrey Classic or OHL Classic at Mayakoba, which will follow the “season opener” into the fall.

Speaking of the Frys folks and Cordevalle, which is hosting for the final time, Joe Passov said this first-rate resort deserved a better cast.

Jeff Shain talks to Cordevalle superintendent Tom Gray about the oddity of hosting a USGA championship just a little over a week ago and now a PGA Tour event. And in a year where Cordevalle has seen just 1.94 inches of rain.

It’s been a delicate balance in one of Northern California’s driest years in recent memory. Just 1.94 inches of rain has been recorded in the San Martin area since Jan. 1.
“And we haven’t had any rain since the middle of March – zero,” Gray added.

It’s a big contrast with the PGA TOUR’s previous visits to CordeValle, when storms played a role at some point during the week. Last year, hail during the pro-am damaged one green to the point that Gray’s entire 40-man staff spent more than two hours fanned out to repair indentations.

“It was awesome to see how the crew banded together to fix everything,” Gray recalled.

Not that the lack of rain hasn’t presented challenges. In addition to general conservation concerns, salt has a higher concentration in the water as it nears the bottom of the region’s aquifers.