Week in Review
Monday Qualifier
Bad weather was only one of the factors behind a lackluster West Coast Swing
Rickie Fowler's progress has been one of the top storylines of 2010 thus far.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- The Umbrella Swing of the PGA Tour was dominated not by Tiger, Phil and Padraig, but by lift, clean and place. At that, it failed to rain enough to wash away the controversies that dominated headlines involving Woods and irons.
Tiger Woods remains on hiatus, attempting to reassemble the pieces of his life and career. The issue of the Ping Eye2 irons with square grooves, meanwhile, has inexplicably yet to be resolved, two months into the season and several months late.
Hunter Mahan, the winner of the Waste Management Phoenix Open here on Sunday, even said that he hasn't ruled out returning to his arsenal the Ping Eye2 wedge, pre-1990, that he has used for a few years, should the issue go unresolved and the wedges remain legal.
The persistent rain also failed to cloud what is becoming abundantly clear, that Rickie Fowler rates our undivided attention. Fowler, who finished second to Mahan, has made seven PGA Tour starts as a professional, finishing second in two of them and fifth in a third.
As for stardom, who can tell? Two years ago, Anthony Kim and Camilo Villegas each appeared on the verge of appropriating the distinction as their own. We're still waiting.
That Fowler warrants this attention sans victory speaks to the mundane start to the golf season. Only two of the top 10-ranked players in the world won tournaments in the U.S., Steve Stricker (the Northern Trust Open) and Ian Poulter, who moved into the top 10 only on the basis of his victory in the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship.
Only one player from the top 10, Martin Kaymer, won a European Tour event (the Abu Dhabi Golf Championship).
Woods, Phil Mickelson, Lee Westwood, Paul Casey, Jim Furyk, Rory McIlroy and Padraig Harrington haven't won, which might reinforce, perhaps unfairly, the old perception that the golf season begins at Doral, site of the WGC-CA Championship in two weeks.
425,905, BUT WHO'S COUNTING?
The star of this show in Scottsdale, Ariz., isn't a golfer. It's the crowds, their numbers perennially staggering and exceeding any other in golf. But are they accurate and how are they counted, anyway?
Attendance for the week at the Waste Management Phoenix Open was 425,905. The most impressive number, perhaps, was 35,795, the announced attendance on Tuesday. For a practice round. On Saturday, historically featuring the largest audience in golf, attendance was 121,221.
A friend in the sports public relations business doggedly insists that the tournament exaggerates its numbers, that a golf tournament on Saturday can't possibly exceed by at least 20,000 and often by 50,000 or more a Rose Bowl crowd, which typically attracts 100,000.
Here's what we do know: The attendance figures are an estimate and a loose one at that. "We actually count cars (in the parking lots) and there's a formula that is apparently accepted in the industry on the number of people per car," tournament chairman David Rauch said. "We count the cars with aerial shots, and we're looking at it by acreage, each of the parking lots. There's an estimate of the number of cars per acre. You come up with the total (based on) the estimate of the number of cars and 3.2 people per car.
"We feel pretty good about the numbers we're giving it. Honestly, we get accused more often of lowering the figures than of jacking them up. I think people think we don't want to scare people away by saying there are 170,000 people here, so instead we say 160,000.
"Last year, on Saturday, the CBS guys all day were saying they've just never seen anything like it and they've covered the tournaments for decades. The number came in 10,000 below our record Saturday. Their conclusion was we had to have lowered the number a little bit, because they couldn't get over it."
We know this, too: Whatever the actual attendance, and by any metric, it's an impressive crowd exceeded only by the efficiency with which the tournament moves them around and gets them in and out.
PHIL THE THRILL? NOT YET
Phil Mickelson is still searching for his form, which, all things considered, should be difficult for him to locate. Mickelson tied for 26th on Sunday, after which he and wife Amy left for Houston, where Amy will undergo a breast cancer treatment on Monday at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Mickelson, who plans to play next at the WGC-CA Championship at Doral in two weeks, has had only one top-10 finish in four starts (T8 at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am).
FOLLOW THE RAIN
The idea of a professional golf tour is to follow the sun, but the PGA Tour hasn't been following the script. It rained at the Bob Hope Classic, which concluded on Monday, the Northern Trust Open in Los Angeles, the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship and the Waste Management Phoenix Open, on Sunday morning. In fact, more than half an inch of rain fell in Scottsdale overnight, requiring that preferred lies be used on Sunday, the first time since 2001 there. The AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am was played with preferred lies through three rounds because the courses were saturated from rain earlier in the week.
The weather forecast, incidentally, for Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., site of the Honda Classic this week? Mostly sunny on Thursday and Friday and partly cloudy on Saturday and Sunday. But no rain.
P.R. PAT? NOT
Public relations doesn't seem to be a strong suit with Pat Perez, who resides in Scottsdale, but claims no local knowledge or special attachment to the TPC Scottsdale.
"I never play here because during the rest of the year the course is never in good shape," he said.
AGING WELL
Age isn't a plus in sports, but experience is and in golf it often more than offsets the mounting years, as last week informed us.
At the Phoenix Open, Tom Lehman, 50, Mark Calcavecchia, 49, Lee Janzen, 45, and Fred Couples, 50, all turned up on the leaderboard and mixed it up expertly with the youth, including Rickie Fowler, 21, and Matt Every, 26. Fowler finished second.
On the women's side, Laura Davies, 46, won the New Zealand Women's Open and Juli Inkster, 49, tied for ninth at the HSBC Women's Champions, after entering the final round tied for the lead. Inkster was seeking to become the oldest winner in LPGA history.
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