   
| Few players conquer tough TPC Sawgrass on a difficult day  PGATOUR.com Senior Correspondent PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- Nobody likes a blowhard, especially on a golf course. And certainly not on a golf course as hard as the TPC Sawgrass that already was disposed to dishing out hard blows.  Retief Goosen posted the only bogey-free round on Thursday. (Chris Condon/PGA TOUR/WireImage)
Contestants in THE PLAYERS Championship had no choice Thursday but to suck it up and try to ignore the elements -- well, primarily just one decidedly pesky and persistent element -- during the opening round of the PGA TOUR's richest and most prestigious tournament. Winds with gusts up to 35 miles per hour kept players guessing and grinding and added an extra element of toughness to the recently renovated PLAYERS Stadium Course, which showed a different kind of bite pattern than what golf's best had seen when the tournament was held in March. "(It was) gusty and not golfing weather, really," said Vijay Singh, who lives nearby and is a regular at the TPC Sawgrass but had to battle just to shoot a 2-over-par 74. "Today was weather when you come out here and look around and go back to your car and go home." "It's really hard work today," said Australia's Rod Pampling, who with a 2-under 70 was one of just 16 players to break into red numbers. "A breeze is one thing, but you got some shots where it was so gusty that you could almost miss the ball (on the downswing)." "It was a great test of skill and really a great test of nerves," said two-time PLAYERS champion Steve Elkington, who carded a 73. "It was a very tough golf course, very tricky." Nevertheless, it didn't take magic to get it around. Fine play with a few tablespoons of patience and dash of fortune was the recipe for success, one that few players were able to apply to the fullest. Just one man, Retief Goosen, toured TPC Sawgrass without a bogey. "It was definitely tough, but the golf course stood up well to it. It was still playable," said Steve Stricker, one of 10 men to equal par 72. "You had to play well, but it was playable." The course was not, however, pliable. The $8 million renovation was intended to make the TPC Sawgrass a consistently firm and fast track, and those particular properties were as good as advertised. Green speeds that were kept under control and rough that allowed players to advance approaches toward the greens prevented more insidious carnage. Still, the field averaged a hardy 75.403 strokes, making Thursday's proceedings the second-hardest opening round and the fourth hardest since THE PLAYERS moved to TPC Sawgrass in 1982. Unsurprisingly, the hole most damaging to score and psyche was the par-3 17th island green. Though just 137 yards, players were hitting mostly 7- and 8-irons and many times coming up woefully short as the wind quartered towards them. Fifty balls found a watery demise -- a record for a single round. Heck, last year only 59 balls went swimming for the entire week. No wonder the hole ended up playing .699 strokes over par, by far the highest in tournament history.
"I thought that (the wind) may not have been the strongest point on 17, but that was certainly the toughest shot," said co-leader Phil Mickelson, who eked out a par there on the way to an impressive 67. Club selection was a guessing game throughout the layout. "Every hole was hard to get the yardage right," said Ben Curtis, who was one of 61 players to make bogey or worse at 17. He found water twice in carding a quadruple-bogey 7. "I went through a stretch on 17, 18 and 1 where I was 6 over par and I made one bad swing. That's the kind of day it was." Sticker added that sudden wind bursts might have made putting the toughest element of the game. "Even 3- [and] 4-footers were a chore," he said. "A gust at the wrong time and it's not even up to you anymore whether the putt goes in." And hope for a bit of a break here and there. "Today you needed that little bit of luck and the right bounces to keep yourself in there," Pampling said. "There's definitely an element of bad luck when something kicks up when your shot is in the air, which is why I backed off a lot today," Tom Lehman said after his up-and-down round of 70. "I backed off a lot of shots because I could kind of hear the trees start moving more, so I'd back off to see what was coming. "But sometimes you just can't help it." Copyright 2007 PGATOUR.com. All rights reserved. |
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