Pardon the Interruption
Overcoming the elements and delays, Swede Daniel Chopra scores his first U.S. win at the Ginn sur Mer Classic
Chopra spent a restless Sunday night visualizing his stretch run at the Tesoro Club.
Worldwide winners Daniel Chopra, Fredrik Jacobson and Shigeki Maruyama came back Monday morning tied for the lead in the Ginn sur Mer Classic at the Tesoro Club in Port St. Lucie, Fla., but it was Chopra who had the easiest hole on the golf course, the par-5 16th, yet to play. He took advantage of it, hitting 3-wood off the tee, a 9-wood out of a bad lie in the rough and a gap wedge to nine feet for the birdie that led to a 19-under-par 273 and his first victory on the PGA Tour.
The darkness Sunday came just in time for the struggling half-Swede, half-Indian who jokes he would carry dual citizenship if India would allow it so he could play the Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup. After having a four-shot lead in the final round, Chopra stumbled with a three-putt at the 10th -- his only one of the week -- and was caught by Maruyama and Jacobson. Before he left the golf course after play was suspended, Chopra said, "If I come out on top, I'll treasure it so much more [because I had] to really fight for it and work for it. I'm going to have to do that tomorrow morning."
Waking up just past midnight, Chopra tossed and turned and played his remaining three holes over and over in his mind. "Never once did I play them the way I actually played them today," he said after scratching out his one-shot victory with a birdie and two pars.
When the Running Horse Champion-ship galloped to the glue factory (Tour Talk, Feb. 9), the Ginn golf machine had four months to fill the void in the Fall Series, adding the PGA Tour event to its Champions Tour and LPGA tournaments. The Tesoro clubhouse wasn't even finished until six days before the event. Unfortunately, you don't play the clubhouse.
Due to a confluence of aggravations, not a single round finished on the day it began. To begin with, the size of the field and the diminishing hours of available daylight didn't bode well from the get-go. Then, there were the heavy rains early in the week and again Friday afternoon, the latter halting play. What with the off-and-on downpours adding a little more than 3½ inches of rain to three-plus inches the course received the week prior, the ball was in the players' hands all four -- make that five -- days. Lifting, cleaning and finding just the right piece of turf on which to put little precious back down (taking full relief from casual water, of course) takes some doing. And, lastly, there were the lengthy commutes between holes. All this combined for rounds that reached six hours and invariably lasted overnight.
In fairness, the 7,381-yard, par-73 Tesoro Club was never intended to be walked, much less host a $4.5 million golf tournament with agility-challenged spectators. It is a Florida real-estate development, built for thumpity-thumping golf carts across miles of wooden bridges traversing prime alligator habitat while sipping piña coladas and occasionally terrifying a blue heron or two with wildly erratic hybrids. All in all, an ambition to which the course seems comfortably attuned.
On the other hand, it wasn't so much the vast distances between tees and greens as it was the fact you can build strip malls with cinemaplexes between most of them, environmental permitting notwithstanding. But, regardless of what anyone thinks of Tesoro's suitability as an interim host (next year it will be at Hammock Beach in Palm Coast, Fla.), it was a darn sight better than a bankrupt piece of bare dirt in Fresno, Calif., roughly 2,800 Google Map miles away.
When Bobby Ginn rescued the tour from the ill-fated Running Horse, he transported it from California to a part of Florida where a man was recently attacked by a flesh-eating bacteria and the most popular spectator sport involves the you-know-who Normans, taxes on a private jet and a brand-spanking-new subpoena for Chris Evert. Flesh-eating bacteria might look like a reprieve to Greg right about now.
