It's the start of a sport schedule that doesn't get the fanfare of Major League Baseball, the NFL or even NASCAR. The PGA Tour kicked off it's 2013 season last weekend in Hawaii, in case you didn't notice and chances are you didn't. I did, for a variety of reasons-some that go back years, some that go back 12 months.
I've been a golfer for about 30 years now and even before I started playing golf, I loved watching it on TV. As a 13-year-old boy growing up in Lexington, Kentucky in a family that was at best middle-class, probably more accurately filed away in the lower-middle-class category, I was thrilled when Dad brought home our first color TV. Even with only 4 channels to watch, (and one of those was PBS), I was mesmerized, mainly with how color TV brought sports to life. Seeing the bright red helmets of my favorite baseball team with their high stirrups was thrilling after watching them in fuzzy black and white images in previous seasons.
One sport that really came to life on color TV was golf. It was just so beautifully green. Plus, it didn't hurt that the best golfer in the world in those days was Jack Nicklaus. He happened to not only be from my home state of Ohio, but he also went to the Ohio State, our family's favorite university. Once I started playing golf in the early to mid 1980s, I really got into watching golf, an interest that was heightened when my favorite golfer, Curtis Strange, won back-to-back U.S. Opens in 1988 and 1989. He was the first player to do that since Ben Hogan in the early 1950s and no one has done it since. Not even Tiger Woods. You remember him, right?
I don't watch every PGA event on TV, but I watch almost all of them, and I plan my life around being able to see the four majors. That's been especially since we got Direct TV about 5 years ago. Direct TV offers spectacular viewing options for the major tournaments. Their coverage typically offers viewers the choice of three or four different channels to watch. For instance, at the Masters, viewers can choose from the network coverage, Amen Corner, the par 3s, and the featured group. As a passionate golf viewer, it doesn't get much better than that. When the network coverage goes to commercial or switches to one of those tiresome maudlin features about some golfer who had something bad happen in his life (oh he's the one who had a parent die, boo-hoo!), I switch over to a shot of a player pondering the breeze over Rae's Creek, trying to decide if it's an easy 8 or hard 9. I love that power.
I gave up that power in 2012, as my wife and I quit our jobs, and took our 11-year old twins on a trip around the world. Great adventure as a family, sucky time to try to follow the PGA Tour. We launched the trip in December of 2011, going to Fiji while no Tour events were being held, then heading to New Zealand for the month of January. Of all the places we stayed in New Zealand, only one had any golf coverage at all, and that was a place in Akaroa, where the Golf Channel was one of the featured channels. We did manage to catch a bit of the Women's Australian Open while in Australia which was cool, but I really missed the steady, metronome-like progress of the PGA Schedule.
There's a great scene from Field of Dreams where James Earl Jones character talks about how baseball has marked the passage of time over the years in the US. That's what the PGA tour schedule does for me each year, especially in the dreary winter months in Ohio. If the tour is in Arizona, it's got to be late January and early February, where the images of the bermuda rough and palm trees with greens bordered by lakes and cacti help offset the gray tableau of snow-covered lawns and barren trees that linger outside my windows. Then it's on to California for San Diego, LA and Pebble Beach, where the coverage of the beauty of the Monterey Peninsula is negated by the endless shots of hack celebrities hamming their way through mindless interviews. Bill Murray is funny, Ray Romano is not.
The first indication for me of the arrival of spring is when the tour moves to Florida. By now it's March, and the players are gearing up for April and the Masters. At this time, the weather is starting to improve in Ohio, and maybe we've even gotten to play a round or two of golf as the courses shed their coatings of snow and the tees, with greens and fairways starting to show evidence of new growth after about five months of slumber. The courses of the Florida swing aren't that great, especially now that the Players Championship has been moved to May, but it still marks the inevitability of the changing of the seasons, and the surrender of winter to the unstoppable approach of spring.
By the time the Masters rolls around, the weather is warm enough in Ohio where I'm usually playing golf often enough to whet my appetite and the golf schedule doesn't become quite as important. I still follow the tour, and look forward to the US Open and The Open Championship, but the schedule doesn't have the importance to me that it does in January and February. And it all starts with the first tournament of the year, the Tournament of Champions in Hawaii.
Hawaii is home to one of the best courses I've ever played. The Prince Course at Princeville on Kauai is stunning in it's beauty. The first time I played it was on my honeymoon with my second wife, (I call my first wife Mulligan) and it was fantastic. The setting is amazing, with 360 degrees of Hawaiian beauty on every hole. I had a great round that was almost marred by disaster on the last hole.
My keeper wife, Annie, was enjoying some spa time at the Princeville Resort while I enjoyed all 18 fantastic holes. As I drove up the cart path on the left side of the fairway, I thought I spotted Annie up at the clubhouse. Turns out it wasn't her, and when I realized that, I turned the cart to the right toward the right side of the hole, which is where my tee shot was. I made that turn without taking a close look at where I was headed, and before I knew it, the front right wheel of the cart was dangling in the air, about six or seven feet above the bottom of a fairway bunker. Somehow, I managed to yank the wheel back to the left without the rear right wheel also finding the bunker, which would have sent me and the cart cartwheeling into the bunker, probably leaving me with some sort of disability, or at least a bill for destroying a golf cart at a pricey resort course.
My second round at Princeville also left me with a story to tell. Annie and I loved Kauai so much, we returned there two years later for a getaway just after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, it was during a rainy week in Hawaii, while Ohio happened to have record-setting warmth. I managed to squeeze in a round of golf on one of the few sunny days we had, and was pleased when I got paired up with an older fellow, who had a gentle and pleasing disposition from our initial meeting on the first tee.
He was good company, and we had a great time talking about life and golf. The discussion turned to our beginnings in golf, which for me, was a move to the Carolinas in the mid-80s, where working on a morning show on a radio station in Raleigh gave me time to play golf almost year-round. For my playing partner, Bill Easterbrook, the game was handed down to him from his dad, Sydney.
Turns out Sydney was not just some pharmacist or life insurance agent who raised his son in a country club atmosphere. Sydney Easterbrooke played for the Great Britain Ryder Cup team in 1931 and 1933, securing the cup for GB in 1933 by beating Denny Shute. How cool is that? Bill was one of the most enjoyable playing partners I ever had, and I let him know that at the end of our round as we shared handshakes that can only be shared between two people who were strangers a mere four hours before, but were friends thanks to the game of golf.
Howling Hawaii winds last weekend unfortunately kept the TOC from getting in 72 holes. Instead, Tour officials wound up with a schedule of 36 holes on Monday and 18 holes on Tuesday to make it an official 54-hole tournament. Dustin Johnson cruised to a four-shot win over Steve Stricker, extending his streak of seasons with a win since coming out of college to six, the first player to do that since some guy named Tiger Woods. You remember him, right? Johnson has some serious talent, contending in majors in the past, and look for him to be a force at Augusta and also at the PGA at Oak Hill. The U.S. Open this year is being held at Merion, which is not a bomber's course, so that doesn't set up well for DJ. (I use that moniker of familiarity because I've been to Myrtle Beach a few times, and that's his home town.)
The Tour stayed in Hawaii for the second tournament of the season, the Sony Open in Hawaii. It's not a tournament I normally pay that much attention to, in part because it usually falls on the same weekend of the Divisional Playoff games in the NFL, which typically produce some of the best football action of the year, and this weekend followed that pattern. The main story line was the play of two rookies, Russell Henley and Steve Langley. The two newbies are good friends and Henley picked up the win in his first tour event as a PGA Tour member. His play down the stretch (five birdies over the last five holes!) was very impressive and set him up as a player to watch in 2013.
The PGA Tour heads to the California Desert this week for what's now called the Humana Challenge in partnership with the Clinton Foundation. It's what used to be known as the Hope and is the first of a series of events that tortures us with the presence of amateurs playing on TV. I loathe watching hacker celebrities and corporate CEOs just butcher a golf course. I'll be paying more attention to the action on the European Tour which is holding the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at the Abu Dhabi Golf Club. Abu Dhabi is about as European as Nebraska, but I happen to have a golf shirt from the Abu Dhabi Golf Club from our trip around the world last year. And there is a Cincinnati connection to my round there. More on that next time.
I've been a golfer for about 30 years now and even before I started playing golf, I loved watching it on TV. As a 13-year-old boy growing up in Lexington, Kentucky in a family that was at best middle-class, probably more accurately filed away in the lower-middle-class category, I was thrilled when Dad brought home our first color TV. Even with only 4 channels to watch, (and one of those was PBS), I was mesmerized, mainly with how color TV brought sports to life. Seeing the bright red helmets of my favorite baseball team with their high stirrups was thrilling after watching them in fuzzy black and white images in previous seasons.
One sport that really came to life on color TV was golf. It was just so beautifully green. Plus, it didn't hurt that the best golfer in the world in those days was Jack Nicklaus. He happened to not only be from my home state of Ohio, but he also went to the Ohio State, our family's favorite university. Once I started playing golf in the early to mid 1980s, I really got into watching golf, an interest that was heightened when my favorite golfer, Curtis Strange, won back-to-back U.S. Opens in 1988 and 1989. He was the first player to do that since Ben Hogan in the early 1950s and no one has done it since. Not even Tiger Woods. You remember him, right?
I don't watch every PGA event on TV, but I watch almost all of them, and I plan my life around being able to see the four majors. That's been especially since we got Direct TV about 5 years ago. Direct TV offers spectacular viewing options for the major tournaments. Their coverage typically offers viewers the choice of three or four different channels to watch. For instance, at the Masters, viewers can choose from the network coverage, Amen Corner, the par 3s, and the featured group. As a passionate golf viewer, it doesn't get much better than that. When the network coverage goes to commercial or switches to one of those tiresome maudlin features about some golfer who had something bad happen in his life (oh he's the one who had a parent die, boo-hoo!), I switch over to a shot of a player pondering the breeze over Rae's Creek, trying to decide if it's an easy 8 or hard 9. I love that power.
I gave up that power in 2012, as my wife and I quit our jobs, and took our 11-year old twins on a trip around the world. Great adventure as a family, sucky time to try to follow the PGA Tour. We launched the trip in December of 2011, going to Fiji while no Tour events were being held, then heading to New Zealand for the month of January. Of all the places we stayed in New Zealand, only one had any golf coverage at all, and that was a place in Akaroa, where the Golf Channel was one of the featured channels. We did manage to catch a bit of the Women's Australian Open while in Australia which was cool, but I really missed the steady, metronome-like progress of the PGA Schedule.
There's a great scene from Field of Dreams where James Earl Jones character talks about how baseball has marked the passage of time over the years in the US. That's what the PGA tour schedule does for me each year, especially in the dreary winter months in Ohio. If the tour is in Arizona, it's got to be late January and early February, where the images of the bermuda rough and palm trees with greens bordered by lakes and cacti help offset the gray tableau of snow-covered lawns and barren trees that linger outside my windows. Then it's on to California for San Diego, LA and Pebble Beach, where the coverage of the beauty of the Monterey Peninsula is negated by the endless shots of hack celebrities hamming their way through mindless interviews. Bill Murray is funny, Ray Romano is not.
The first indication for me of the arrival of spring is when the tour moves to Florida. By now it's March, and the players are gearing up for April and the Masters. At this time, the weather is starting to improve in Ohio, and maybe we've even gotten to play a round or two of golf as the courses shed their coatings of snow and the tees, with greens and fairways starting to show evidence of new growth after about five months of slumber. The courses of the Florida swing aren't that great, especially now that the Players Championship has been moved to May, but it still marks the inevitability of the changing of the seasons, and the surrender of winter to the unstoppable approach of spring.
By the time the Masters rolls around, the weather is warm enough in Ohio where I'm usually playing golf often enough to whet my appetite and the golf schedule doesn't become quite as important. I still follow the tour, and look forward to the US Open and The Open Championship, but the schedule doesn't have the importance to me that it does in January and February. And it all starts with the first tournament of the year, the Tournament of Champions in Hawaii.
Hawaii is home to one of the best courses I've ever played. The Prince Course at Princeville on Kauai is stunning in it's beauty. The first time I played it was on my honeymoon with my second wife, (I call my first wife Mulligan) and it was fantastic. The setting is amazing, with 360 degrees of Hawaiian beauty on every hole. I had a great round that was almost marred by disaster on the last hole.
My keeper wife, Annie, was enjoying some spa time at the Princeville Resort while I enjoyed all 18 fantastic holes. As I drove up the cart path on the left side of the fairway, I thought I spotted Annie up at the clubhouse. Turns out it wasn't her, and when I realized that, I turned the cart to the right toward the right side of the hole, which is where my tee shot was. I made that turn without taking a close look at where I was headed, and before I knew it, the front right wheel of the cart was dangling in the air, about six or seven feet above the bottom of a fairway bunker. Somehow, I managed to yank the wheel back to the left without the rear right wheel also finding the bunker, which would have sent me and the cart cartwheeling into the bunker, probably leaving me with some sort of disability, or at least a bill for destroying a golf cart at a pricey resort course.
My second round at Princeville also left me with a story to tell. Annie and I loved Kauai so much, we returned there two years later for a getaway just after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, it was during a rainy week in Hawaii, while Ohio happened to have record-setting warmth. I managed to squeeze in a round of golf on one of the few sunny days we had, and was pleased when I got paired up with an older fellow, who had a gentle and pleasing disposition from our initial meeting on the first tee.
He was good company, and we had a great time talking about life and golf. The discussion turned to our beginnings in golf, which for me, was a move to the Carolinas in the mid-80s, where working on a morning show on a radio station in Raleigh gave me time to play golf almost year-round. For my playing partner, Bill Easterbrook, the game was handed down to him from his dad, Sydney.
Turns out Sydney was not just some pharmacist or life insurance agent who raised his son in a country club atmosphere. Sydney Easterbrooke played for the Great Britain Ryder Cup team in 1931 and 1933, securing the cup for GB in 1933 by beating Denny Shute. How cool is that? Bill was one of the most enjoyable playing partners I ever had, and I let him know that at the end of our round as we shared handshakes that can only be shared between two people who were strangers a mere four hours before, but were friends thanks to the game of golf.
Howling Hawaii winds last weekend unfortunately kept the TOC from getting in 72 holes. Instead, Tour officials wound up with a schedule of 36 holes on Monday and 18 holes on Tuesday to make it an official 54-hole tournament. Dustin Johnson cruised to a four-shot win over Steve Stricker, extending his streak of seasons with a win since coming out of college to six, the first player to do that since some guy named Tiger Woods. You remember him, right? Johnson has some serious talent, contending in majors in the past, and look for him to be a force at Augusta and also at the PGA at Oak Hill. The U.S. Open this year is being held at Merion, which is not a bomber's course, so that doesn't set up well for DJ. (I use that moniker of familiarity because I've been to Myrtle Beach a few times, and that's his home town.)
The Tour stayed in Hawaii for the second tournament of the season, the Sony Open in Hawaii. It's not a tournament I normally pay that much attention to, in part because it usually falls on the same weekend of the Divisional Playoff games in the NFL, which typically produce some of the best football action of the year, and this weekend followed that pattern. The main story line was the play of two rookies, Russell Henley and Steve Langley. The two newbies are good friends and Henley picked up the win in his first tour event as a PGA Tour member. His play down the stretch (five birdies over the last five holes!) was very impressive and set him up as a player to watch in 2013.
The PGA Tour heads to the California Desert this week for what's now called the Humana Challenge in partnership with the Clinton Foundation. It's what used to be known as the Hope and is the first of a series of events that tortures us with the presence of amateurs playing on TV. I loathe watching hacker celebrities and corporate CEOs just butcher a golf course. I'll be paying more attention to the action on the European Tour which is holding the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at the Abu Dhabi Golf Club. Abu Dhabi is about as European as Nebraska, but I happen to have a golf shirt from the Abu Dhabi Golf Club from our trip around the world last year. And there is a Cincinnati connection to my round there. More on that next time.
