On the Eve of Round 1

Just a few thoughts on what I've seen and heard so far, thanks to the wonderful Golf Channel:

Stop talking about who's not playing this week. It's going to be a great tournament without them. I don't know why people think that golf is dead without the precious top 3 or 4 in the field. You can't beat Sean O'Hair, Jason Gore, Brad Faxon for human interest stories and excitement, and Vijay and Stuart Appleby for expected competitiveness. I think the media is deliberately doing this as a way to try to control some money issues behind the scenes - talking up the importance of the lack of a 'good' field to maybe reduce the price of tv contracts or something. And then to get someone like Phil Mickelson to make comments like he did in that Mark Rolfing interview only supports the media's position. It can be quite Machiavellian if you're in to conspiracy theories.

As for Mickelson's notion that to fix the tour they should force players to play x number of tournaments a year or lose their playing privileges - I love to repeat that I don't play golf and therefore am not knowledgeable enough to have any really good opinions on some of these things, but I do have to wonder what an idea like this would do to the international players. Those guys may not want to commit that much time to the American tour if they make their homes in other countries. If that's the case, then we could actually end up with the best international players not playing in America at all, which would totally suck. Maybe that's Mickelson's intention, to lessen the competition and make it easier for him to win tournaments out there. Who knows. But I would rather see Retief Goosen a few times a year here in America than none at all. And I liked how Mickelson told Rolfing that he thought that people should step up and run the tour like a business and if it was in the best interest of the tour he would have no problem doing what he was told and play certain tournaments. Sure, he's all for the best interest of the tour, but not until he's forced to be. Until then, he'll skip tournaments when he wants and the tour can get by on its own I guess.

As I've said in the past, I'm not a Tiger Woods fan. But, you all will be pleased to read that I've nearly come to the conclusion that if I had to choose between Mickelson or Woods, I'd almost have to pick Woods at this point. However, I think that's just because Tiger knows when to keep his mouth shut.

And all the Golf Channel analysts are predicting that Sergio Garcia will win a major this year. I sure hope they don't jinx him. I would love to see him win, but I don't know if his putting will let him. Hopefully, he's worked on it and will kick butt this year. They had one prediction that a certain golfer would reach the top 3 in the world rankings - I won't name the golfer because every time I mention him, I jinx him, but I hope he does climb up in the world rankings.