Some research published recently showed that when Tiger Woods is in a competition other players perform worse than when he is not. The suggestion is that his mere presence sows the seeds of failure in their minds. Someone who might have a thought about that is Stewart Cink. After sealing his final date with the world’s number one, he must surely have cast his mind back two years to their last bruising putter-to-putter encounter. Who can forget the Bridgestone Invitational of 2006, the one Tiger won after lobbing a ball over the clubhouse roof, after his worst run of straight bogeys ...

Out Tucson way it ain’t over till the Coyotes howl, and then some. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wondering what household chores I should be doing as Vijay Singh and Rod Pampling trudged round those extra holes in seemingly eternal stalemate. I’d picked the American to win, but was just glad someone finally had the nous to finish the job before everyone was engulfed in desert darkness. Otherwise, what a(nother) splendid day’s golf. Tiger Woods’s tense tussle with Aaron Baddeley will live long in the memory - 12 birdies and still he almost failed to get the job done. That’s ...

How Henrik Stenson is still in this thing is anyone’s guess. Not only did he play the worst shot in the competition, if not the history of professional golf, on Wednesday (running it pretty close on the same 18th hole the next day), but Trevor Immelman should have buried him Thursday, if only to make up for the fact that Robert Allenby should have dispatched him the day before. Let’s hear it for the Phil Mickelson fans who might justly point to the Swede’s continued participation when poor Lefty departs after notching up a round with seven birdies. For once I ...

Wow! Wasn’t that lucky! No, not Tiger Woods’s recovery against J B Holmes, but the fact that his survival saves the competition from going prematurely flat. However, I throw the word in as it seems from comments I read there is a conspiracy afoot, of which I am apparently a part, to say everything Phil Mickelson does is lucky and everything Woods does is down to sheer brilliance. Is there a problem with that? I jest - a bit. I have to, because even Tiger admits Wednesday’s result owed something to luck, mainly the way Holmes opened the door with a ...

Welcome to the wacky world of match play. Or at least that is what everyone is trying to have us a believe with headlines like ‘A lottery’, ‘Crap shoot’, ‘Tales of the unexpected’, even ‘March madness’ (did I miss something?). I used to think the same, but looking over the Match Play records of our contestants I’m not so sure. Many of them seem the model of consistency, although the jury is still out on the true effect of moving to the desert. Mike Weir for instance has never gone past the 3rd round in seven tries and only once has ...

Imagine Phil Mickelson as Tina Turner, only this time singing “What’s luck got to do with it?” I know, it’s a stretch, but the real question is how much he’s entitled to sing it. He was, after all, extremely lucky with the weather, missing out on the winds that allowed him and 54 others who kicked off Thursday morning through to the weekend, against just 23 who started Thursday afternoon. He was also very lucky in just having one inexperienced opponent to finish off on the Sunday. It was Jeff Quinney’s four-bogey stretch down the back nine that sealed the deal ...

The golfing gods left Phil Mickelson to his own devices Saturday, which at least means we have the vestiges of a competition on day four. This is now widely taken to be a virtual match play, quite appropriate given next week’s little shindig in Tucson. Lefty is obviously the heavy favourite with his one-shot advantage over the intrepid Jeff Quinney. The market has already made its mind up, pricing Mickelson at 1.4 to Quinney’s 4.4. But hold on a minute, that’s not as resounding a vote of confidence as you might think. To put it in perspective, Tiger Woods was 1.6 ...

It is as if all the heavenly bodies have aligned for Phil Mickelson to win this. Maybe they had a meeting up in Heavenly HQ and decided Lefty couldn’t do it by himself. Did he get the best of the weather or what? At least he acknowledges the fact. Oh and a big thank you to the weather people for getting that one wrong again. The day was turned on its head as the tricky winds from Thursday afternoon blew over into Friday morning. The difference is quite startling: those who went out early Thursday averaged 71.3 and came back Friday ...

It’s been 10 long years since a first-round winner went on to take the spoils at the Riviera country club - Billy Mayfair, who you will note is hovering three shots off the pace after round one. But if there’s a man to follow in his footsteps it’s K J Choi, who will almost certainly go into the second round as leader. He’s three from four for converting first round leads into wins. If only it were that easy. The course was up to its usual windy tricks Thursday and Choi enjoyed by far the most benign conditions of the day. ...

Tiger Woods? Who he? We should thank our lucky stars he’s not in this competition so’s we don’t have to talk constantly about the battle for second place. As it is we have the cream from the two big tours clashing in one of the season’s more up-market events. What we learn from the past is that you need a whacking driver, nifty irons and the usual fiery putter. Accuracy off the tee is not vital, although the rough is no picnic. Trouble is you are spoilt for choice: there are more in-form players and/or past winners than you can shake ...

If you’ve ever monitored an in-play betting market or tables like the ones I produce, you might wonder who the generous souls are that lay players right down to the wire when they are clearly home and hosed. The squeals of anguish and gentle sobbing of Vijay Singh backers who didn’t “lay off” their profits when his price hit the floor Sunday will give you a strong clue. Singh’s price went right down to 1.05 amid such complacent forum statements as “Who on earth is going to beat him?” and “All over … can’t imagine him losing from here". Heck, even ...

Saturday was a tale of two putters. Phil Mickelson went from 26 putts per round on Friday to 33 (and nearly 2 putts per green in regulation) while Vijay Singh went from 32 putts in round two to 28 on Saturday (1.6 PPG). Not hard to figure who’s top of the leaderboard and who missed the cut. Mickelson’s dramatic exit must be especially hard because the rest of his game was clearly coming round. He actually equalled Singh for finding greens Saturday, topping 80 per cent for only the second round this season. His accuracy off the tee was almost the ...

I never had Padraig Harrington or Phil Mickelson down as shy, retiring types, but what else can explain their reluctance to join proceedings at the top of the table? Of the heavyweights in this competition, it’s still down to good old Vijay Singh to growl at the leaders from three shots off the pace. But it is a growl rather than a roar. It says something for the lack of bite to this competition so far that his putting was actually worse in round two. He now ranks 152nd for putts per round for goodness sake, and that shouldn’t be anywhere ...

Memo to self: Steve Elkington simply doesn’t do the AT&T Pebble Beach, okay? Instead of looking at his racy start to the season and the fine set of stats it has produced, I should have been looking back over his last six Pebble Beach efforts: MC-69-MC-MC-69-46. That’s more like it. There’s one thing you can say for his scorecard Thursday - it’s very colourful, with the two blue birdies, the four orange bogeys and the two red double bogeys. As the weekly golf column says: A Lesson Learned. It was the most glaring of the strange crop of results from round ...

Over the last two weeks Phil Mickelson’s golf has veered from the sublime to the ridiculous. A quick look at his stats suggests he’s still a long way off the top of his game. But there isn’t much ridiculous about the 6th and 2nd places (first in regular play) he has earned in that fortnight. Tiger Woods it ain’t, but it’s emphatically the next best thing. No surprise then that he is the hot pick for a tournament where he is the defending champion and three-time winner. Lefty loves Pebble Beach in the way Tiger loves Torrey Pines and must really ...

Without exception, every golfer I heard interviewed on Sunday tipped the Patriots to win the Super Bowl. Shows how much they know about football. Not a few seemed equally clueless on how to win a golf tournament, because the way things were panning out I would have been happy to award it to Tiger Woods by default. It was the tough pin positions, the golfers lamented, and the cold - funny places these American deserts. But the players weren’t the only ones to get things wrong. The pre-match prediction that J B Holmes would have to go low again was as ...

If I am later than usual it’s because I have only just recovered from Tiger’s blistering recovery to win the Dubai Classic. Six birdies on the back nine left Ernie Els crumbling in his wake. It’s barely credible. What is even less credible, though, is that something similar will happen at Scottsdale later in the day. You have to go back to the year 2000 to find anyone winning from more than two back on the Sunday, when Tom Lehman came from three behind. Since then two players have come from two behind, one from a shot adrift and four overnight ...

The top of the leaderboard is a lot more confused than it ought to be. By rights Camilo Villegas should be peering down at his rivals as he prepares to tee off in the third round Saturday. Fate has not been kind to the Spiderman, with six holes from round two still to finish because of the frost delays. Saturday is going to be a big test for the Colombian, who showed enough in the FedEx playoffs at the end of last season to suggest his rookie year could be the foundation for some big results. At the start Friday it ...

The stage looks set for Phil Mickelson to slash and burn his way to the top after a decidedly dodgy start Thursday. The eagle on his 12th hole just about made amends for the two par five bogeys that started the round. At least he didn’t try to blame it on the frost that delayed proceedings. Some of his later play, though, was superlative, suggesting there might be an interesting round to follow. He is going to have to elbow his way through an interesting gaggle of players at the top. Exactly who is top though is unclear - there’s still ...

It’s okay guys, it’s safe to come out and play now, he’s over in the Gulf giving the European boys some grief instead. So we can all relax and look forward to a rowdy four days of warm-up to the Super Bowl in the desert with hopefully more of a golfing competition than last week. What intrigued me most in the aftermath of the Buick was that television ratings were down 18% on the previous year. Not everyone is captivated by a Tiger Woods masterclass it seems. Fortunately it looks as if we are to be spared the bad weather that spoiled ...

The people entitled to feel really pleased right now are those who gave themselves a Christmas present of a bet on Tiger Woods for the grand slam. At that time they would have got a price somewhere a little south of 30. After just one outing by the great man you’ll struggle to get on at 16 (it’s 14.5 on Betfair). So they are already as happy as pigs in the proverbial, able to lock in a hefty profit, albeit one they might have to wait until August to collect. Given Tiger’s absolute mastery of the Buick Invitational, despite Sunday’s wind-blown ...

It’s raining, the wind’s already up around 20mph, and it’s not yet dawn. There’s plenty more rain on the way - up to two inches we’re told - plus some hail, we could see lightning too, and the wind’ll likely gust anywhere up to 40mph. It’s not the way I remember California. So heaven knows when we’ll finish this one, if at all. Which is a pity considering it is effectively already finished. You can lump all your money, your house, your car, yacht, life insurance on Tiger Woods if they’ll let you, although at 1.01 on the exchange and 1.005 ...

There’s a big storm a’coming, but it’ll have to go some to match the one that’s already passing through. As Tiger Woods himself said, he’s been driving like a dog, yet the rest of his golf has blown him to what must surely be an unassailable position. To struggle so much off the tee on Friday yet still card a bogey-free round is quite something. This is actually a rare position for him at the Buick, despite being a five-time winner. Before Woods has invariably had to play catchup at the half-way stage. In the last two years he was seven ...

Not only was Troy Matteson’s seven under on the south course the most surprising round of the day, the manner of it was even more startling. No one else among Thursday’s leaders came close to his stats - top ten in all the key disciplines. But he is by no means an unlikely leader - he was the choice of at least one prominent tipster for the Hope last week because his record shows a predilection for the pro-am format, including his win two years ago at Las Vegas. A week ago he never recovered from a horrendous opening round of ...

The betting on the real ’season opener’ is predictably lopsided. The money on Tiger Woods is already a flood running at more than 30 times his nearest challenger, Phil Mickelson. I suppose it’s a bit late to suggest both sides of the betting equation are a trifle barmy. The case against laying Tiger is obvious. A five-time winner, including the last three on the trot, who even in an off-year finishes top 10, and his nearest challenger this year supposedly suffering the after-effects of bronchitis. Tiger sounds raring to go at the start of a quest to do the grand slam. ...

Justin Leonard put a brave face on things, but that defeat is going to hurt for a while. Strikes me he got a bit cocky over Sunday’s opening holes, with his four-shot lead still intact after D J Trahan’s bogey on the seventh. Some of his shots were positively swashbuckling. Then “puff", in the space of three holes the lead was gone. But I doubt Leonard is feeling any worse than the punters who spent more than £150,000 on the Betfair market alone chasing his price all the way down to 1.09, while gleefully slagging off the layers that took them ...

So Justin Leonard, which do you want first, the good news or the bad? Okay, here’s the bad. The local Palm Springs newspaper The Desert Sun thinks you should be aware that in this tournament’s 48-year history only 19 of those leading on Sunday morning have gone on to win. It even handily does the math(s) for you - that’s a success rate of just 39.5%. Must have been easier in the good old days then, because since the turn of the century that figure has fallen to 37.5 %, with just three winners out of eight events. Ah yes, you might ...

The really surprising thing about Boo Weekley’s 10 under on Friday was that it was one of only two rounds to go that low. With no wind to speak of these courses are particularly defenceless. Leader Robert Gamez for one was surprised so few managed to make a big impression. Birdies, he said, “were out there for the taking.” Saturday provides a perfect opportunity for the players to redeem themselves as the weather watchword is “calm". It should certainly be just the job for Justin Leonard to lay his Classic course “bogey” - 71-72-74 since the course came ...

So far there’s everything to like with what Justin Leonard is doing, although fate is playing its part. It was pretty calm at Silver Rock when he played what is proving the most challenging of the four courses, especially to someone who struggles for length as he does. Then when the wind kicked up Thursday he found himself at La Quinta, as he said afterwards “probably the golf course that you want to be on a windy day". This decade he has never played the course better than Thursday’s 64 - his previous best was as a 67 in 2003 when ...

There are no problems, only opportunities, I am often told, usually by a boss as he deliberately stands on my foot. That seemed to be the watchword for the opening day, where the lack of wind left all four courses open to a massive attack. What did I say about distance? Forget it. In these conditions the biggest problems were the logjams created by all the amateur snails. To have to wait 40 minutes as Tim Petrovic did at one stage is crazy. It’s still a bit of a puzzle that the four courses should play within a stroke of each ...

There’s a spirited body of opinion in the forums this week that can be classified as “I wouldn’t be seen dead backing Justin Leonard at less than 30.” Poor Justin is not the tipsters’ favourite either - he warrants hardly a mention. It all sits oddly with the fact that he seems to be attracting the most money in Betfair’s winner market. He might trail favourite Mike Weir on 16 by four points, but so far he’s pulling in almost double Weir’s money. Admittedly the market is thin, probably because as usual the Wednesday start will come as a bit of ...

It might not seem so to Rory Sabbatini, but that was a hot round of golf he served up on Sunday. The wind made it hell on tees for everyone - an average of more than two strokes harder than the day before. The lowest round of the day from George McNeil was only 4 under and just two of the top ten managed to get in under par. Sabbatini might rue a few fluffed putts and wayward tee shots, but the pressure of having to haul in K J Choi’s huge lead meant costly errors were bound to happen in ...

You don’t really have to do the sums. The market price of less than 1.3 says all you want to know about the likelihood of K J Choi ending up a wire-to-wire winner. It’s going to take a monumentally bad day at the office for the Korean to let this one slip. He has been easily under par all week, he has increased his lead each round and his closest rival is a rookie untested in the heat of PGA battle. Even if Choi didn’t manage to break par, all but Tim Wilkinson would have to fire their best round of ...

Steve Marino and Fred Funk are looking like the exceptions that disprove the rule. We all know what a stickler Funk is for accurate tee shots and he is again the most precise player after round two to edge himself up into 4th place. Marino might not have much of a reputation for finding fairways but he only missed four of them Friday. Yet around them are a host of players for whom the fairways often might as well have been on the moon. K J Choi barely managed to find half of them and Kevin Na and Jimmy Walker ...

So remind me. Who is it I can’t say should be lynched? Because I’ve got a long list here (I’m in a particularly vindictive mood today), but I really wouldn’t want to fall foul of that Rev Sharpton geyser. He sounds scary. Is he really a Christian? Mind you, come to think of it I could quite do with a two-week suspension a la Kelly Tilghman. I’m up to my eyes in stuff and these Hawaiian hours are doing my head in. They seem to be suiting K J Choi, though. I was surprised he did so badly at Kapalua last ...

Where’s Michelle Wie when you need her? Yes, I know I used to rant about all the media attention she used to siphon off at events like this, but at least it injected a scintilla of life into the proceedings. The news from Honolulu this year is so riveting that most column inches have been filled up with a ridiculous row over whether Tiger Woods supports capital punishment. Or did I get the wrong end of the rope? Everyone else seems to have. Back at Honolulu it’s like first day at school, with all the new first-formers lining up in their ...

I was almost on my knees by the end praying for someone to win it. The sun might have been setting on the drama at Kapalua, threatening a spill-over into Monday, but back here in England we weren’t far off the other end of the day. You really don’t want playoffs in Hawaii. What Kapalua proved beyond peradventure is there is one law for Tiger Woods and another for the poor proles that chase after him. If it had been Tiger, at least one of Daniel Chopra’s teetering birdie shots would have disappeared into the hole. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s ...

Since the turn of the millennium this competition has gone one of two ways on Sunday: the overnight leader has taken the spoils or the victor has sprung out of the chasing pack from four shots back. That’s happened three times: Stuart Appleby in 2005, Sergio Garcia in 2002 and none other than Jim Furyk the year before that. That little factoid strikes me as particularly interesting now our Jim appears to have found his feet at last with a sizzler of a back nine Saturday. He looks a potent threat in what should be an enthralling final day at Kapalua, ...

I wish all you guys would stop talking about Canada taking over the leaderboard. Mike Weir might be topping the chart at the half-way stage, but he has a doughty Brit sitting right on his tail in the shape of Stephen Ames. Don’t look at me in that tone of voice. It’s all quite clear, he said so himself at his media conference. “It is a British Commonwealth, Trinidad was a British Commonwealth. I am British, also.” So that’s settled then. If we could claim Greg Rudsetski as one of our own, which we did (with rather mixed results it has ...

So where was PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem when his small but perfectly-formed band of professionals needed him at Maui? Considering the special ceremony they held to inaugurate the 2008 season, you’d have thought he might have made at least a flying visit. Yes, I know it’s a long way to go to make a speech, but it’s not exactly Devil’s Island. He obviously agrees with Vijay Singh about the season starting too early. Heck, if the head honcho can’t be bothered to turn up, why should anyone else? Course, you could always make me commissioner instead. I assure you I’d have ...

If more players shun this season opener you’ll easily be able to fit those left into a single Merc, which would be handy for sightseeing. Not that the dwindling numbers deter the PGA Tour people. They’ve decided to hold a special ceremony at Kapalua to mark the start of the season. Before you know it we’ll have marching bands and flypasts! At one point it looked like our band of 31 would be down to 30 when the new, improved PGA Tour website was gripped by the gremlins and left Aaron Baddeley off the field sheet. But he’s there in the ...