May10 Players champs roundone

Tiger Woods no longer is the most daunting name at The Players Championship. Someone named Andrea joined the strongest field in golf yesterday.

That was the name assigned the first storm of the year, off the coast of northeast Florida and arriving just in time to rain on the PGA Tour’s parade. After all, one reason the tour moved its flagship event from March to May was to avoid the kind of wet weather that has caused the tournament to end on Monday three of the last six years.

“Welcome to sunny, dry, warm Florida,” commissioner Tim Finchem said yesterday. “We never said it doesn’t rain in May. We just said the patterns are different, and it’s not going to rain as much.”

Players won’t be the only ones tested when The Players begins today with the deepest field of the year on a refurbished Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass for US$9 million, the biggest purse in the golf.

Sawgrass is nothing like it was last year, when Calgary native Stephen Ames blew away the competition by closing with a 67 for a six-shot victory.

Tired of a little rain leaving small rivers in the middle of the golf course, the tour spent more than $12 million to make the famed Stadium Course as close to indoor golf as the game allows.

Every fairway was stripped of its grass and replenished with soil that allows for better drainage. Ditto for the greens, which resembled empty pie shells as workers installed a vacuum under each putting surface and restored the original design, except for a few greens in which the slopes were made less severe.

And because the tournament moved to May, the common Bermuda grass was left alone.

“It looks very different,” said Woods, who last saw these conditions at Sawgrass when he was a skinny 18-year-old who won his first U.S. Amateur title here in 1994.

But that was after he played it in sunshine, before anyone realized Andrea would show up and shower the course. That means the tour’s plan to build a course to withstand rain might get its first big test.

Even in the on-and-off rain, the fairways looked like carpet, minus some of the roll.

“The greens stayed pretty firm,” Justin Leonard said after playing the back nine. “They didn’t soften any.”

The one conclusion just about everyone drew was summed up best by former Players champion Adam Scott.

“There’s going to be no faking your way up to the top of this leaderboard,” he said. “Anytime it’s soft, you can play bad and score pretty good. The ball won’t run out of the fairway. The ball never runs into any trouble. Once it comes down to having to strike the ball well to get any spin on it to hold a green, that’s when you see the guys who are playing their best.”

If recent history is any indication, the best could be anybody.

The list of champions have ranged from the long (Woods and Davis Love III) to short (Fred Funk), from great iron players (Ames and Hal Sutton) to remarkable short games (Craig Perks).