Chris Smith simply couldn’t wait.

He got back to his home in Indiana on Sunday after playing in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. He knew Valentine’s Day was still 48 hours away.

For the last two months, though, Smith had been working on a very special gift for his wife, Beth. He went through an estimated 10,000 family photos and worked with a friend to set them to music on a DVD.

Smith had the finished product FedExed to him while he was at Pebble Beach. As he watched it, alternately laughing and shedding more than a few tears, Smith knew he had created the perfect Valentine’s Day gift, and he was anxious to show it to his wife.

“It was killing me,” Smith admitted. “But I fought it off. I was going to make it until Tuesday.”

Wrong. On Monday afternoon, after their two children were in school and his mother-in-law was busy in another part of the house, Smith blindfolded his wife and sat her down in front of their television set.

For the next five minutes, Beth Smith was treated to her own video history – “a labor of love,” her husband called it – that was set to songs by Eric Clapton and Natalie Merchant. She laughed. She cried. Most of all, though, she knew how much her husband cared.

“There is no way I could do what I do without her helping and her support,” said Smith, who won the 2002 Buick Open. “I can go out and play golf, and I don’t have to worry about what’s happening at home. I know the kids are taken care of, and that they are good kids.

“She’s been incredible since the day we got married. She has been so strong and supportive and kept the family unit together. It’s a hard job when both parents are at home every day, much less when you travel like I do.”

Smith, who ended the DVD with the words “you are the center of my universe,” first got the idea for the project last November. He called his mother and her mother, trying to round up pictures. He went through all the photos at their house, too.

“The funniest part is that I have given my wife a hard time over our 14 years of marriage saying how I didn’t think we take enough pictures,” Smith said. “Once I started going through them, though, I realized we had a LOT of them.”

Smith spent about two months choosing the photos. He and his friend put in about five hours assembling the pictures before his buddy set about the task of synchronizing them to the music. That took another 12 hours or so.

Clapton’s song, “Wonderful Tonight” had been a favorite of Smith’s when he met Beth while both were students at Ohio State. She would turn out to be the last woman Smith ever dated. The two danced to the song at their November 1991 wedding, so it was a no-brainer for the DVD.

He needed more, though. Beth Smith loves ‘80s music, so her husband searched Peter Gabriel, et al, before he came across Merchant’s “Kind and Generous.” The words, he thought, particularly the gentle refrain of “I want to thank you, thank you,” were perfect.

“It’s funny how things work out,” Smith said. “I ended up getting more enjoyment out of doing this for her than if I had done something for myself.”

Truth be told, though, this Valentine’s Day gift is par for the course for Smith. After all, this is a man who proposed in a candlelit room, strewn with flowers and a huge banner with the words “Will you marry me” hung on the walls.

“I just wanted to show her how far her life has come,” Smith said. “I tried to include a lot of her friends and family. I wanted to give her a snapshot of her life. She’s about to be 40, and this felt like a good time to do it.

“I wanted to thank her, and tell her I love her a lot. I am a very lucky man.”