SteveElling

An interesting bit of intrigue emerged at noon today from Washington, D.C., where people who craft policy are often accused of doing very little of substance.

Presented with the option of voting on whether to push back a controversial new equipment revision set to take place on Jan. 1, the PGA Tour Policy Board instead elected to do nothing.

And by that, I mean they didn’t even vote on the issue.

As such, the decision on whether to proceed with the implementation of a new rule requiring new grooves that impart less spin on the ball was left to Commissioner Tim Finchem, who elected not to postpone the deadline. Finchem said “a couple” of equipment companies had asked for the rule change to be postponed. One is known to be Titleist.

“We are comfortable we can meet the challenges,” Finchem said in a teleconference. “I concluded that delaying at this time was not in our best interests.”

Exactly why the board decided to let Finchem make the call remains, for the moment, unclear. It will be interesting hearing the four players who have seats on the board explain what happened, but at minimum, it removed them from a potentially uncomfortable situation – the players have endorsement deals with manufacturers, which might have created a conflict of interest.

The commissioner is authorized to manage the rules and regs of competition, Finchem said, and the board elected to let him do exactly that. Critics had begin to sharpen knives while awaiting word as to whether the tour had capitulated to the whims of manufacturers, questioning who exactly runs the game these days – organizations like the USGA and R&A, which enacted the rule, or the equipment makers.

This apparently settles that issue. The tour will fall into line with the R&A and USGA, which wanted the rule enacted Jan. 1 all along.

“We are too late in the process,” Finchem said, noting that some manufactures have proceeded in good faith and already ramped up testing of irons with the new groove configuration. “They have taken steps to prepare for this schedule.”

Finchem said the tour would begin an all-out education push that he termed “a full-court press” for players who have questions about how the grooves will change the game. Many have procrastinated or indicated they will wait until the offseason to try the new clubs, which won’t impart as much spin in the ball out of the rough. In theory, that means bombers no longer would be able to hit massive tee balls with little regard to whether they landed in the fairway or not, placing a greater imperative on driving accuracy.

Amateurs have until 2024 before the rule takes effect in casual competition. Initially, it only applies to the highest levels of tournament play.

At USGA headquarters in New Jersey, the tour's decision was met with relief.

"We're pleased they reaffirmed the decision they had already made," said Dick Rugge, the USGA technical director. "We've offered to help them with education, communication, field testing, whatever they need. By Jan. 1, it should be old hat."

The USGA began floating the notion of rolling back ther grooves in March, 2005. The rule change has been formally in the pipeline since March, 2007, so if anybody is dragging their feet at this stage in the process, it's hard to muster up much sympathy. Some anufacturer produce new driver models every 12-18 months, replete with removable shafts and weights, but they complain about tweaking a club's groove pattern?

"We didn't come right out of the blue with this," Rugge said.

The Jan. 1 start date quickly picked up a ringing endorsement from the game's No. 1 player, Tiger Woods, who doubtlessly is ahead of most players in the adjustment phase. He currently only uses two non-compliant irons. His company, Nike, was in favor of the Jan. 1 start date.

"I think it's great," Woods said Tuesday. "We've known for over a couple years now what this decision was going to be, when it was going to come down, and we've had plenty of time to make our adjustment.

"All the companies have been testing and getting ready for this, and the guys will make the changes."

Woods already plays what he calls "the spinniest ball" on tour, so he might be ahead of the game in that regard as well, since he will be able to create more spin than most of his peers even with the new groove patterns of 2010. Other players are expected to consider moving to a softer-covered ball, which presumably won't travel as far. 

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. -- As thought the PGA Tour wasn't dealing with enough economic headaches on the domestic front as a result of failing tournament sponsors and related issues, a huge financial blow has been absorbed on the international front.

Cable-TV outlet Setanta, which had a five-year rights deal with the tour for broadcasts of certain U.S. events in the United Kingdom, has gone belly up after failing to make payment deadlines to a handful of sports organizations, according to several overseas news accounts.

Setanta, an expensive a la carte option for cable viewers that failed to establish widespread subscription levels, seems destined to fall into the U.K. version of bankruptcy protection, according to reports.

The particulars of the deal, including the nuances of the contract structure, are unclear, but reports placed the estimated value of the contract at $20 million annually for the U.S. tour. There are three years remaining on the contract, which could put a serious crimp in another tour revenue stream.

An email sent to a PGA Tour spokesman on Saturday night was not immediately returned.

Sky Sports also holds selected rights to PGA Tour broadcasts in the U.K., but it's unclear if the network would be interested in assuming the balance of the Setanta package, or willing to negotiate new terms in the event the events are picked up.

FARMINGTON, N.Y. -- Ten days earlier, the familiar figure of David Duval walked onto the driving range at the PGA Tour event in Memphis.

He was toting his tour bag on his back and carrying a big smile on his face.

The day before, he had just successfully slogged through a 36-hole sectional qualifier in Columbus, Ohio, to earn a spot in the 109th U.S. Open, and thus was being congratulated at intervals of every 10 feet or so.

Cracked Duval, who has packed on a few pounds lately: "You're just surprised I made it all 36 holes."

There was no need for the self-deprecation, because as everybody knows, the game itself has beaten the former world No. 1 up enough by now.

Turning back the clock after a two-year absence from the national championship, Duval fired an utterly unanticipated  3-under 67 in the first round at Bethpage Black, claiming a tie for third as play hurriedly began on the second round late Friday afternoon.

Unanticipated for the fans, anyway.

Duval, who is fighting off the most spectacular slump ever experienced by a premier, modern-era player, has exactly two top-10 finishes since the 2001 season, the year he won the British Open and seemed poised for a Hall of Fame career.

Whatever happens after this, Duval was darned proud of getting his foot in the door this week, via the old-fashioned way -- the democratic qualifying system.

"Forever, I've never made bones about it, I think the two Opens are the most important events of the year," he said. "The Masters is its own entity and the PGA Championship is kind of in the same boat I think, but the two Opens are events to which everyone has access, technically.

"And then to come back up here was very important to me. So the qualifying up in Columbus was a very important day and very important two rounds to me to play well."

Duval's family has roots in the Empire State, dating to his grandfather, but truth be told, it had to feel good just to put a red number on the board, period. It's been a long, mysterious skid for Duval, who now is ranked No. 882 in the world.

No, he doesn’t know why it happened. He has visited a slew of swing coached in search of fixes, including big-name guys like David Leadbetter. He's never been happier elsewhere, is married and has five children, two of them his own.

Elsewhere, none of the numbers compute. He has played on the weekend in 10 of his last 35 starts. His best finish this year in 13 events is a tie for 55th.

"You know, I feel like I'm controlling the golf ball well, hitting it good," he said. "In the first round, I did what you need to do, simple recipe, hit the ball in play and knock it on the green.

"That's been my goal ever since, well, when we started out the qualifying rounds in Columbus, that's how I approached it, just the same way, get it in play and knock it on the greens and go from there."

Oh, if it had only been that easy for the past eight years. Duval made some noise at a major last year, too, moving into contention after 36 holes at the British Open. He shot 83-71 on the weekend and finished 39th.

For anybody who was still listening, Duval has insisted that his play has been better than his totals.

"So I have felt like for most of this year, my scores have not been reflective at all of how I'm playing, and they are slowly  I feel like my scores are slowly catching up to how I'm playing," he said.

He's got catching up to do in both regards, really. But it's a start. He was asked if the low points have helped him to fully appreciate the zenith of eight years ago.

"I would say I hope I appreciate it more but I also have a very good idea what great golf is about and what bad golf is about," he said. "Other than that, I don't really know what else to say about it. 

"I accomplished what I tried to do in the first 18 and now I'm going to go try to do the exact same thing and hit it in the fairways and knock it on the greens and go from there."

FARMINGTON, N.Y. -- Just wait, kid.

It's been just short of forever since somebody smiled as much at a U.S. Open as Bronson Burgoon. Of course, he has yet to play a live tournament round at the toughest test in golf.

The college senior hit the winning hero shot to clinch the first NCAA Division I golf title for Texas A&M, then played his way into the Bethpage Black festivities a few days later by finishing second in a sectional qualifier last week in Dallas, capping a whirlwind two weeks.

The grin hasn’t left his face since.

With the A&M match-play finale with Arkansas tied on the last hole of the final match, Burgoon hit a wedge to within two inches to nail down the victory, and even at an event populated largely by professionals, he's been recognized several times by golf-savvy fans and marshals.

"A couple of guys called me 'Champ,' from national champ," he said excitedly. "I was like, what? It's just a dream come true. People have been awesome so far, and it's been the first day. So I'm really looking forward to the next few days."

Burgoon said his favorite player is Adam Scott, and as fate would have it, Scott was next in line at player registration when Burgoon logged in. Burgoon, trying to soak up every possible moment, and was among the first to arrive Monday, practicing even when it was raining.

"Any second I can have out here, I'm going to take it," he said. "I wanted to play early this morning to see how the golf course is; obviously it was still raining, but I was still practicing."

Burgoon hit the NCAA title-clinching shot at Inverness in Toledo, Ohio, which plans to mount the club in a display case alongside the sand wedge used by Bob Tway when he holed a winning shot from a bunker on the 72nd hole to beat Greg Norman by a shot to win the 1986 PGA Championship. A heady honor, no question.
 
He's one of 15 amateurs in the Open field this week, the most since 1981, according to USGA records. Amateurs have already won twice on the European Tour this year.

"I just think the level of competition as amateurs now has gone way up," he said. "You know, like you can tell Anthony Kim comes out [of college] and does real well; Dustin Johnson comes out and does really well. Time and time again, people are just proving that young guys can play, and that's why college is so great. 

"You get awesome competition and it prepares you for this.  So, you know, people are ready."

Burgoon held off turning pro so that he could hopefully earn a spot on the U.S. Walker Cup team, whcih will face Great Britain & Ireland Sept. 12-13 at Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pa.

DUBLIN, Ohio -- Jack Nicklaus has come a long way in the two years since the United States Golf Association first announced it was moving toward the modification, if not a de facto elimination, of the so-called U-grooves on irons.

Grooves over the years have gained so much traction, so to speak, that they can tear the paint off the ball, allowing top players to bash tee shots with relative impunity, because no matter where it lands in the rough, professionals can put enough backspin on the ball to get it close to the flag.

When the USGA edict was first announced in early 2007, Nicklaus, long a part of the game's conscience and a frequent critic of its huge technological gains over the years, dismissed the grooves rollback as, "like throwing a deck chair off the Titanic."

Guess he's had time to rethink his initial position.

Serving as host this week at the Memorial Tournament, Nicklaus said he now believes the move back to more moderate V-grooves, set to take place Jan. 1 on the major professional tours, will have a "domino effect" that could cause some notable changes in the game, or at least to the prevailing dump-and-chase philosophy off the tee.

Nicklaus said he had a lively conversation on that subject with a fairly decorated fellow traveler, Tom Watson, at a tournament function this week, in fact.

"Watson was saying last night that he had been fiddling around with some new clubs and played with them most this year, actually, with the new grooves," Nicklaus said. "He said, 'Man, did I hit some fliers last week.'

"These [current] guys have never hit fliers in their lives. They are going to say, 'I don’t want to do that anymore. I am going to hit the ball in the fairway.' Or they are going to have to learn how to play fliers."

That's something of an overstatement, since there are plenty of players on the PGA Tour are already using clubs that conform to the Jan. 1 regulations. Tiger Woods, for instance, only uses two clubs with U-grooves, both of them wedges.

Granted, this is "inside baseball" fare that won’t make much sense except to the most devout fans, but Nicklaus' opinion carries plenty of heft. For the uninitiated, a flier is a ball that has less backspin, and thus has a less-controllable trajectory and often sails several yards farther than expected. In other words, pure trouble given the hazards surrounding most modern courses.

Nicklaus learned how to control fliers to some degree and says the contemporary guys will have to adapt or switch to Plan B -- changing even more equipment.

"I drove the ball long and tried to put it in the fairway when I could, but there were places where I really didn’t care and I went ahead and whacked it, like a lot of the guys do today," he said. "But I also learned how to play a soft flier. It's just another shot they will have to learn.

"They will learn it. You are not going to have any spin on a flier. You have less control over the golf ball, particularly when you get water, or wet grass. It's not as consistent.

"They have worked so hard to make golf clubs and golf balls do the same distance that it makes the game, frankly, too easy for these guys, because they don’t care whether they drive it in the fairway or not, because they can still spin it out of the rough."

Nicklaus said the grooves modification could create quite a ripple, including possible changes from the existing hard, thin-covered ball design in order to maximize the bite of the less-toothy V-grooves.

"That's their first volley, going back to grooves that produce fliers, and you are going to force them to drive the ball in the fairway," he said of the USGA decision. "Obviously, once they have been playing this thin golf ball out of the rough, and the find out they can’t hit a soft flier with it, they will need a softer golf ball.

"Then they get a softer golf ball, it will have a higher spin rate, and with a higher spin rate, the ball's not going to go as far off the driver. It is going to be a domino effect that is going to pull the game back.

"What it will pull it back to, we don’t know. Let's take one step at a time."

It might be a baby step, but it's something. The biggest week-to-week topic on PGA Tour has become the setup of the tournament track, as officials wrestle with fairway width and how long to grow the rough -- wayward bashers should be penalized, but not at the risk of making courses unduly punitive and boring.

There's another delicious other element he didn’t mention. Faced with multiple choices as a result of the grooves change, it will give pause to some who have instinctively reached for the driver with nary a second's hesitation.

In other worlds, it could make more tour pros use their heads, and who's not in favor of more options, indecision and creativity in a game where power has become the No. 1 prerequisite to success?

DUBLIN, Ohio -- It went all the way down to the last swipe, but Tiger Woods couldn't quite finish off his quest for tee-box perfection in the first round of the Memorial Tournament on Thursday.

No worries. It was a day of marked progress, nonetheless.

Woods shoved a three-wood off the 18th tee at Muirfield Village Golf Club into a bunker, missing his only fairway of the day as he finished off a 3-under 69 that left him five shots after the lead at an event he has won three times.

After three weeks off, there were plenty of eyeballs on Woods, who has been both unpredictable and erratic since he came back from knee surgery. But in the area of his game that has been the most worrisome, he was particularly solid.

He hit 13 of 14 fairways and just missed recording his first perfect day off the tee since the 2003 Bay Hill Invitational. Granted, the Muirfield fairways are wider than the tour norm, but it was greeted as a definite sign of progress, he said.

"I hit the ball well all day today, just leaked it over on 18 and cut it back coming out, didn't get up and down," Woods said. "But overall the day was good."

Woods hadn’t played in three weeks since finishing a disappointing eighth at the Players Championship, where he played in the final group on Sunday and struggled with a closing 73. He spent part of the time off with his swing coach, and on Thursday, seemed to have made palpable progress.

His driving distance, which has been down as Woods favored his left knee, seems to be gradually returning. He added another half-degree of loft, using a 10-degree model, in his driver this week.

With the U.S. Open dead ahead, it was marked improvement from his last appearance, where he was launching careening hooks and slices with no predictable shot pattern. He entered this week ranked No. 145 in driving accuracy at 56.8 percent. As good as he is with the rest of his game, that's a helluva handicap to overcome.

"Yeah, you know, the swing is starting come around," he said. "I'm starting to feel good now. It's been a long time. I'm starting to get my power back. Everything is starting to kind of come around now."

Woods, who has mostly insisted that he has been ahead of schedule in his expectations despite winning one of six starts this season, said Thursday that he's getting a little antsy.

"Not quite there yet," he said. "I don't have all my length back. It's getting better each and every week. My speed is coming back, my power's coming back. It's taken a lot longer than I thought it would, but then again, most people that play other sports take two years to come back. So it's a little bit different."

Woods only birdied one of the four par-5 holes, so he left some birdies on the table.

"But overall, I felt like I controlled the ball well all day," he said. "Especially with the wind blowing like this, you have to hit it flush and I did that all day. I didn't miss any shots.

"I've seen it coming together for the last month or so. It's just that, unfortunately, it's one of those things where I would do it sporadically, because it's coming.  It just needs to be a little more consistent.  Today I did it all day."

DUBLIN, Ohio -- It has become the most persistent, long-lived, pain-in-the-butt topic of the entire golf season.

Four months old and still showing signs of a heartbeat, the discussion over whether longtime PGA Tour favorite Kenny Perry committed a rules violation en route to winning the FBR Classic was hopefully put to rest on Tuesday when Perry made his first lengthy comments about the affair.

"The truth shall set you free," he said.

Maybe, maybe not.

Perry, the defending champion this week at the Memorial Tournament, offered a lengthy explanation of what took place on the first hole of his sudden-death playoff win over Charley Hoffman, where he hit his approach shot into the rough and then soled his club behind the ball, tamping down the grass.

In the video replay (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv9OeVK6w88), which did not surface until three weeks ago, Perry's ball is not initially visible in the rough. After he soled his wedge behind the ball, however, the top half of the ball was clearly evident, prompting howls from some fans that he improved his lie -- a violation.

After the video surfaced and the question was raised about the possible violation, the PGA Tour interviewed Perry about the incident at the Players Championship on May 10 and formally cleared him of any wrongdoing. Hoffman, who has since watched the video, expressed no concern that a rule had been bent, if not broken.

The episode has been analyzed for weeks, yet was again the subject of a story over the weekend in a prominent U.K. newspaper on on GolfWorld's website on Tuesday, and has polarized those who have watched the replay. Some fans believe Perry clearly improved his lie, while others insist the popular veteran was well within the rules, which allow a player to sole his club before hitting a shot.

Purists huff and puff and hyperventilate, while moderates shrug it off as an everyday occurrence. It's a darned divisive video.

"What do you all think?" Perry said Tuesday, still confused by the continued interest. "Someone brings something up four months down the road. I didn't understand. We're going to go looking in the archives of all the players who have been on TV and see what they've done? I didn't understand that part of it.
 
"I've got a camera guy five feet behind me. He's right there looking, I turned around and looked at him.  If I thought I was doing something wrong, I definitely wouldn't have done it there."

Adding to the odd tableau were a couple of particulars that passed largely unnoticed. Firstly, in an era when seemingly every possible rules violation generates a flurry of calls from TV viewers to the broadcasting networks, the playoff incident apparently drew no comment -- the Super Bowl had just begun and millions had switched channels. Moreover, if Perry gained an advantage by tamping the grass, it didn’t help, either. He hit a fat shot that rolled across the green, leading to a bogey.

"I hit it 25 feet from the hole," he said. "It's not like I hit a great shot."

The bottom line, as rules officials on two major tours have emphasized, is that Perry broke no rules by putting his club behind the ball, a point the former Ryder Cup hero reiterated against Tuesday.

"You're allowed to, you're able to sole your club," he said. "Did you watch it? Did you actually watch that last hole?"

Pretty much everybody has seen it by now, actually.

"I soled my club on the ball," he explained. "Did you watch me sole it to the left of the golf ball? Then I went and hit the shot. When you're in the rough, you just need to find the bottom [the ground under the grass] so you can figure out how high the ball is sitting up in rough."

Perry, 48, has won the Memorial title three times and was runner-up at the Masters in April, but for the past few weeks, the Phoenix episode has generated far more ink. He's been left hurt and confused by it all.

"That's life, isn't it?" Perry said with a shrug. "People like to bring up dirty laundry, I guess."

Tiger Woods will return to one of his most fertile hunting grounds next week, the Buckeye State.

On his website Friday, Woods’ committed to making his next start on Thursday at the Memorial Tournament, hosted by Jack Nicklaus in Dublin, Ohio.

Woods won the Memorial three years in a row starting in 1999, but hasn’t often contended since, missing the tournament last year because of knee surgery.

Attempting to recapture the spark on his game after an eight-month layoff, Woods has played in six stroke-play events this year, winning another fabled shorter-field event, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, in late March.

Woods has won the World Golf Championships event in Akron six times.

Woods is using Memorial as his final tune-up before defending his title at the U.S. Open in three weeks, and there’s plenty of work to be done.

Remarkably, Woods does not rank among the top 40 on the PGA Tour in driving distance, driving accuracy, greens in regulation or putting average, yet he still stands first in scoring average at 69.13 shots.

Given the continuing political fallout from the most recent PGA Tour event staged in Los Angeles, Elgin Baylor might have been a more appropriate pick.

Weeks after prominent politicians lambasted the sponsor of the Northern Trust Open at Riviera Country Club, a new figurehead has been installed to lead the tournament’s, ahem, rebound.

Iconic Laker guard Jerry West, aka, “Mr. Clutch,” has been brought out of mothballs to serve as a bridge between the tournament and the community as the tour attempts to place a greater emphasis on the event’s charitable efforts.

At an event that already suffers from organizational cloggage – the tour’s Championship Management wing took over the tournament this year, though the L.A. Junior Chamber of Commerce remains directly involved, as do the title sponsor and the venerable club to some degree – West has been named “executive director.”

Not a bad idea, given the scorched earth created by the hospitality and entertainment monies expended in late February, when Northern Trust threw three separate off-site concerts for select invitees and muckety-mucks, despite having recently received more than $1.6 billion in federal TARP funds. Put in terms West can understand, that’s Shaq and Kobe money.

Ol’ Zeke from Cabin Creek, one of the other nicknames for the former general manager of the Lakers and Memphis Grizzlies, moves into a leadership position on a boat that has no shortages of captains.

In the tour’s press release trumpeting the creation of West’s new position, five different CEO types were quoted, including tour commissioner Tim Finchem, who recently contributed to the Northern Trust fallout when he suggested during a Washington, D.C., trip that attending a dinner concert with a certain Grammy-winning performer was no big deal.

"You or I might go to a dinner that has Sheryl Crow playing," he said two weeks ago. "You might think it's lavish. I probably wouldn't, but that's my opinion. These are decisions that should be left to companies to effectively use their dollars."

Well, except when they’re partly our dollars, pal. But thanks for tossing more kerosene on an L.A. brushfire that had finally started to dissipate.

As though the L.A. tournament totem pole wasn’t crowded enough, the tour announced that another outsider, Mike Bone, has been named the tournament’s general manager and tournament director, positions he has not previously held in his L.A.-based sports career. Tom Pulchinski, formerly the L.A. tournament director, has been reassigned.

Get all that? Leave it the tour to take over an event and install another dozen layers of bureaucracy, right? After all, whenever the wind blows in Ponte Vedra Beach, another V.P. falls out of a palm tree.

Forgive the cynicism, but this looks like the golf equivalent of a pump fake – designed to feign us into forgetting what happened in February by throwing West out as a public figurehead who can’t possibly be criticized. Good luck with that.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- Phil Mickelson has a souvenir of his admittedly memorable round with Tim Tebow, played the day before the Players Championship.

It's a nice little scuff on the top of his driver, courtesy of a drive that was popped up by the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback from the University of Florida.

Tebow, whose family lives in Jacksonville, hooked up with Mickelson at a local private track, Timuquana Country Club, an old Donald Ross course. It was rumored that Tebow, practically a sainted figure in this region, shot around 80. 

"It was probably around that," said Mickelson, who shot 73 on Thursday in the first round at TPC Sawgrass. "I didn't really keep score, but it was not bad. He got off to a good start, he made a bunch of pars, made a few birdies throughout the round, and his bad shots were not that bad."

"He's got a lot of clubhead speed, hits the ball pretty good. Not a bad player at all, and we had a good day."

Tebow, like Mickelson, plays left-handed. As a result, Tebow whacked one with Phil's Callaway driver.

"Every time I use it now, I remember that he used my driver, because there's a big mark on the top of it, so I have a memento of the day," Mickelson laughed. "He's really a nice person, though, a pretty good golfer. I was very impressed, actually, with his skills on the course."

The two had an impromptu contest to see who could throw a football the farthest in the 18th fairway, and Tebow won by two yards, although he was playing with a handicap.

"He was throwing from his knees," Mickelson said.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A competition-related note to anybody who might face Bubba Watson down the line with a tournament or match-play point on the line:

You might consider slow-playing him.

Watson, the excitable, ball-mashing, self-proclaimed redneck from the Florida Panhandle, says he constantly fights to maintain his concentration level when playing in tournament rounds, which at the professional level can be excruciatingly slow and borderline unendurable.

He could be in for a long weekend.

Watson shot a 7-under 65 on Friday to move into a share of first place with Retief Goosen halfway through the Quail Hollow Championship, so he will surely face a long, distracting walk in Saturday's third round.

Watson, who has never won on the Nationwide or PGA Tour level, said the reason for his meandering mind is simple. The 30-year-old, the tour's reigning driving-distance champion from 2008, talks fast and prefers to play even faster.

"Five hours of PGA Tour golf," he said. "I mean, it's just not fun. I love the game of golf, and I think it should be in three hours. When I'm at home, I don't know the last time I shot in the 70s playing with my buddies or playing at home. 

"I've shot in the 60s all the time because I'm in a cart, playing as fast as I want and moving around the golf course. I don't have time to think about which way the wind is blowing, I just hit the ball.

"That's what my caddie wants me to do. The mental part is just hard. It's hard for me because I didn't listen in school ... Just for me to focus for that long is just hard."

It probably fuels the problem that he hit it 315 yards on average off the tee last year, which means he's the last guy to hit his approach shot. That causes plenty of standing around.

In fact, Watson said the six inches between his ears has been tougher to conquer that any 7,500-yard golf course. The biggest barrier to winning? He never hesitated.

"My mind," he said. "Like today, I was talking to my caddie about playing a golf course, me and him go play a lot during the week, so I was thinking about three tournaments from now what golf course we're going to go play at when we're up there at Memorial.  He's like, shut up, let's talk about this putt right now. We're here. I'm like, yeah, but this golf course is so much fun.
 
"So my mind just wanders. I'm thinking about what shoes I'm going to buy; man, I need to wash my car. I'm thinking about stuff that doesn't matter because we're out there for so long. It's the truth. I'm not lying to anybody, it's the truth."

Hey nobody was doubting him. In fact, it was politely suggested that he might want to be tested for any attention-deficit issues, since he appears to be a poster child for the concentration-related malady.
 
"Talked about it many times, but I just don't see it," he said. "I think it's just a crutch. My dad is from the military, Green Beret Special Forces, and he said that a crutch. Doctors are crutches, so you've got to figure out a way to do it on your own. 

"That's why I've never had a lesson, never talked to a mental coach, never talked to a nutritionist, never talked to anything. I play golf because I love it, and if I couldn't play golf, if I started playing terrible then I'd just quit and find something else to do."

And whatever it is, he'd do it in a hurry.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Jim Furyk gets major points for prescience.

Granted, you don’t have to be a club-swinging savant or a Las Vegas oddsmaker to indirectly pick Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson as the men to beat during a given PGA Tour week.

But they are definitely the free-range horses for the course this week, the freshly shorn Quail Hollow Club, which this year is almost devoid of rough and carries little penalty for a missed fairway.

A classically styled parkland course that often has featured heavy rough and tight fairways, the rough this year was trimmed at 2 inches. In some spots, it's not even that deep. Given the new setup, Furyk predicted on the tournament eve that you might see a pair of predictable names atop the board by week's end.

It didn’t take quite that long.

Woods hit 5 of 14 fairways in his opening round and shot a 7-under 65, his best round ever at Quail Hollow, to claim the first-round lead while playing alongside Furyk, no less. Mickelson hit 7 of 14 fairways, missing 7 of his last 9, but still shot 67 and is tied for second, two shots back.

It made Furyk look like Kreskin or Carnac. Here's what he said the day before the first round began about the greatly revamped conditions this week, which were bound to annoy the straight hitters and greatly please the big-name, big-game bombers:

"Part of the guys are going to be [happy] -- we know who a couple of them are, they're going to be in here and be raving about how great the setup is, and one of them is left-handed," he said.

That drew a big laugh, and Furyk wasn't finished. 

"He's going to love the way it's set up and he's going to tell you about it, and he's going to make sure [club chairman] Johnny [Harris] knows, and he's going to make sure everyone knows how great it is because I've seen him do it before. 

"And then there's going to be a few guys back there kicking the dirt, wishing the guys missing the fairways aren't going to have such an easy play when they're missing the fairway."

As though Furyk had written the liness himself, Mickelson said, "I think this is the best setup we see on tour."

Mickelson applauded the firm greens, which required a deft short game, and the short rough, which meant players could attack the greens at their own risk.

"By always having a shot, I think the fans are enjoying seeing the recovery shot, which is the most exciting shot in golf," he said. "But because the greens are firm, those shots are difficult."