Stuart Appleby led from wire-to-wire in winning his second Shell Houston Open golf tournament Sunday at the new Tournament Course at Redstone Golf Club. The final leaderboard is here, local golf writer Ed Fowler’s report on the tournament is here, and GolfWorld senior columnist John Hawkins’ analysis of Appleby’s remarkable performance is here.
Appleby lapped the rest of the SHO field as his 19-under-par performance was six shots better than second-place finisher, University of Texas alum Bob Estes. Appleby posted seven birdies in his closing round as he shot 66-67-69-67 for the tournament on the par-72, 7,500 yard Tournament Course layout. Inasmuch as the tournament was played under near-perfect weather conditions, the field scored well on the new course — better than two thirds of the 70-player field on the final two days finished under par.
On a personal note, Houston clearly has a special place in Appleby’s heart. His first win at the SHO came in 2002, about a year after his wife, Renay, had been hit by a car at the airport in London and killed. Everyone at that tournament will recall the tears in Appleby’s eyes as he accepted the trophy and spoke of carrying on. He has since remarried, is now the proud father of a 1-year-old daughter and is enjoying his best season on the PGA Tour.
The verdict on the new Tournament Course — the foundation of the SHO’s effort to elevate its presence on the PGA Tour — was decidedly mixed. The tree-lined course looked gorgeous on television and several players in the field complimented the design over the weekend. Jesper Parnevik, playing in his first Shell Houston Open, shot a 71 Sunday to shoot a one-under par 287 for the tournament, liked the course:

ìI think it was very nice for a brand new golf course. Thereís no funkiness about it. Very fair.”

Parnevik also thinks the move to a new date next year the week before The Masters Tournament will help the SHO:

“It seems like Phil [Mickelson is] going to be here. Thereís pros and cons playing the week before a major. Some guys love to play. A guy like Tiger never plays. I think itís going to be a fairly good field. I like to play before the majors. The only thing about Atlanta is you could drive to Augusta. Now you have a 2 Ω-hour flight.”

That won’t be much of a problem as I’m reasonably sure that the SHO will charter a flight after the tournament next year to transport those players who are playing in The Masters directly from Houston to Augusta. Second-place finisher Estes also thinks the SHO field will improve with the new date:

ìOverall, itís going to help. Youíll get a lot more foreign players. Youíll definitely have a stronger field and get more of the top players.î

A couple of other players expressed optimism that the Tournament Course will help players prepare for Augusta:

ìI think itís a nice warmup for the Masters,î said Ted Purdy. ìWith the big greens (here), Iím sure theyíll be in perfect condition. Itís a very similar green design, with the big undulations. It will be fun for Houston to have a lot more of the international players here. I think youíre going to have a real strong field.î

ìIf they can find a way to get the greens good and fast, with the undulations, I think they can draw a good field here,î said Lucas Glover. ìTheyíll have to find a way to get the greens fast so everyone will want to come before the Masters. This is as good a tuneup for the Masters as anything because of the iron shots, hitting it into the right areas on the greens.î

However, a couple of key players — neither of whom played particularly well on the new course — expressed reservations about coming back next year:

“The golf course did not grow on me,” said three-time SHO winner Vijay Singh, who shot 2-under for the tournament. “Normally the more you play one, the more it grows on you. For some reason, it didn’t do that. I hope they go back to the old golf course next year. I think a lot of the players feel the same way.”
“Every hole is pretty similar. I wish they had used more trees instead of lakes. It’s a modern golf course. It’s not a bad golf course. I prefer the other one.”

Asked whether he will return to the tournament next year during its new date before The Masters, Singh didn’t sound enthusiastic:

“That’s something to be thought about. I don’t know. If we play the other golf course, I’d play.”

Meanwhile, crowd favorite John Daly, who finished in the top 10 in the last three SHO tournaments, but shot 1-over par to finish 59th, also was not happy:

“Every hole is different. Every day, you’ve got to sit there and decide what you’ve got to hit off the tee. That one (the Member Course), it’s driver. You know it’s driver. This one, there are too many certain shots you’ve got to think about each tee, depending on the wind. It makes it a lot harder.”

And will Daly return to play the Tournament Course again?

“Probably not. It doesn’t set up for me at all.”

Meanwhile, SHO tournament director Steve Timms said he heard much more positive than negative feedback about the Tournament Course during the week.

“You’re not going to get a 100 percent vote of confidence.”

Any changes in the course anticipated?:

“It’s also 11 months away, so we’ll see. Some things can change.”

Any chance that one of those changes would be a move back to the old Redstone Course:?

“None at all.”

Finally, kudos to the CBS Golf Television crew for their fine tribute to the late Dick Harmon during coverage of the tournament. On Saturday, CBS ran a moving segment on Dick in connection with reporting on the opening of the new Dick Harmon Learning Center at Redstone this week. CBS color commentator Lanny Wadkins, on old friend of Dick’s, gave a particularly tender testimonial on his friendship with Dick and his appreciation for Dick working with Wadkins’ sons on their golf games. It was a wonderful expression of admiration for a great ambassador for Houston, who is sorely missed.

As noted in this earlier post, the Shell Houston Open golf tournament is taking place this week at Redstone Golf Club. Yesterday afternoon, I was able to watch a few minutes of the USA Network telecast of the first round and was particularly impressed with the overhead shots of the new Tournament Course at Redstone from the “Bloomin’ Onion” — the Outback Steakhouse Blimp.
Unlike the other courses on which the tournament has been played recently, the new Tournament Course is not a “subdivision” course — i.e, there are no homes lining the fairways of the course. As a result, the tree-lined course with several small lakes looks much better from an aesthetic standpoint than either the other Redstone course or the TPC at The Woodlands, the two other recent venues of the tournament.
My previous post on this week’s tournament is here and my review of of the new Tournament Course is here.

This is Shell Houston Open week, and this year’s tournament is a particularly interesting edition of the venerable local stop on the PGA Tour.
As noted in this earlier post, the SHO is still recovering from a series of dubious decisions and unfortunate circumstances that have combined to place the tournament well out of the elite, non-major events on the PGA Tour. In an attempt to elevate the tournament’s stature, the Houston Golf Association — the local organization that manages the event — is putting on the tournament for the first time at its new home — the Rees Jones-designed Tournament Course at Redstone Golf Club. Moreover, next season, the tournament moves to a new date on the PGA Tour schedule in the slot on the Tour schedule the weekend before the Masters Tournament, which the HGA believes will be a superior date to the current one, which is plagued by the best players taking time off after the run-up to the Masters and before the U.S. Open in June.
The field this year certainly validates the HGA’s concern over the current date of the tournament. Only two players with top 10 World Golf rankings are playing — defending champ Vijay Singh (No. 3) and David Toms (No. 7) — and only ten others in the top 60 in the World Rankings are showing up: 2005 tournament runner-up John Daly (No. 50), No. 17 Darren Clarke, No. 30 Padraig Harrington, 1999 champion Stuart Appleby (No. 32), No. 38 Mike Weir, No. 42 K.J. Choi of The Woodlands, No. 44 Brandt Jobe, No. 47 Justin Leonard, No. 49 Greg Owen and No. 52 Lucas Glover.
Moreover, Chad Campbell (No. 14), the best Texas player on the PGA Tour this year, is not playing in his home state this week, and local favorites Steve Elkington and Fred Couples are not playing this week, Elk because of injury and Couples because, well, the SHO is not currently worth troubling with two weeks after the Masters. So, the HGA certainly has its work cut out for it over the next several years in attempting to sell the new course and the new tournament date to a currently skeptical bunch of top PGA Tour members. Although I have my doubts that the SHO will be as successful at Redstone as the HGA desires, I hope I’m wrong because Houston is a wonderful golfing community that deserves a top-flight PGA Tour event.
The following links will provide you with useful information on this year’s SHO tournament, which will be televised next weekend in the afternoon by CBS and on Thursday and Friday afternoons on USA Network:

My review of the Tournament Players Course at Redstone, including a my FilmLoop photo loop and this Chonicle/Doug Pike review of the new course.

The Shell Houston Open website where you can buy and print passes to the tournament.
A good friend who will be particularly missed during this year’s tournament.
The consequences of bad decisions regarding the SHO and the impact of next year’s new date for the tournament.
And what would golf be in Texas without a little of Clear Thinkers favorite, Dan Jenkins.

It simply doesn’t get any better than this Augusta Gazette photo of Long John Daly catching a quick smoke while hitting balls on the Augusta National driving range before his first round Thursday at The Masters Tournament.
By the way, 31 year-old Texan Chad Campbell — he of the Hoganesque swing and one of the best ball-strikers on Tour — is leading The Masters by three at six under after the first two rounds. Campbell is not well-known by casual followers of professional golf, but he has quietly become an elite Tour player since joining the Tour in 2001. He soared to seventh on the Tour money list by 2003 when he finished second at the PGA Championship and won the season-ending Tour Championship by shooting an incredible 61 in the third round at Houston’s Champions Golf Club. In nine tournaments this season, Campbell has one victory (the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic) and one runner-up finish, is sixth on the Tour money list and is currently 20th in the World Golf ranking. WaPo’s Thomas Boswell profiles Campbell here.
For those interested in the mechanics of the golf swing, Campbell’s swing is from the Ben Hogan school of the classic one-plane swing, which is fundamentally different from a two-plane swing, such as that of Daly or Fred Couples, who is currently tied for second at The Masters. As Houstonian Jim Hardy explained in his groundbreaking golf swing book The Plane Truth for Golfers (McGraw-Hill 2005) published last year, the one-plane swing is harder physically on the player, but easier to repeat consistently, while the two-plane swing is easier on the player physically, but requires more timing and hip action that is harder to repeat consistently.
Inasmuch as the swings of the contending players at the Masters are fairly evenly divided between one and two-plane swingers, It will be interesting to watch how these two fundamentally different swings hold up under the intense pressure of the weekend at Augusta National.
Meanwhile, this John Feinstein article reports on the remarkable one-under-par Masters performance through 36 holes of 54 year-old Austin native and resident, Ben Crenshaw:

[T]he Masters is frequently about memories, whether it is Jack Nicklaus charging up the leader board Sunday in 1998 at the age of 58 or Arnold Palmer simply walking up the 18th fairway to say goodbye — on more than one occasion. For two days, it has been Crenshaw turning back the clock and conjuring up warm memories.

The Masters golf tournament begins today and, as Brian Wacker reports, the tournament is — as usual — a tough ticket:

As I write this, the going rate for two badges to the second, third and fourth rounds of this year’s Masters is $4,999.99 on eBay. In case you were wondering, shipping is free. Conversely, for $1,200, you can get two Trophy Club packages for the entire week at this year’s U.S. Open at Winged Foot.

The following provides a good primer for the weekend:

Phil Richards of The Indianapolis Star provides this fine article on golf’s most exclusive dinner — The Masters Champions Dinner.
Brian Wacker’s analysis of who’s hot and who’s not;
The current thinking in Las Vegas;
Gary Van Sickle’s handicapping of — and observations about — the Masters field;
Who Golf World’s Masters Performance Index model predicts will win; and
Previous posts over the past couple of years on The Masters, including a good dose of Clear Thinkers favorite Dan Jenkins.

One of things that makes Houston such an endearing place to live is the city’s many characters, one of the most colorful of whom is Jack Burke, Jr., the former PGA Tour professional who retired at the age of 35 from the Tour in the late 1950’s to develop and operate Houston’s Champions Golf Club with his lifelong friend, the late Jimmy Demaret.
Burke — who is now 83 years old, but looks and acts like a much younger man — still runs Champions, which is one of Houston’s one of Houston’s finest golf clubs and the home club of such prominent golf swing gurus as Jim Hardy and Steve Elkington. I have had the pleasure of enjoying several lunches with Burke over the years, and they have always been highly entertaining as he holds forth with his sharp-edged and witty observations about the state of golf and its fascinating cast of characters.
Consequently, this Steve Campbell/Houston Chronicle article on the 50th anniversary of Burke’s 1956 Master’s Tournament victory is particularly interesting to me. Playing under the worst weather conditions in Master’s Tournament history (cold with 40-50 mph wind gusts), Burke charged from nine strokes back on the final day of the tournament with a one-under-par 71 to beat by a stroke the third round leader, a 24-year old car salesman from San Francisco named Ken Venturi. Twenty-nine players ó including Byron Nelson, Jimmy Demaret and Julius Boros ó shot 80 or above at Augusta National that day and the Sunday scoring average of 78.261 remains the highest for the last round in Master’s Tournament history. Burke’s one-over-par winning score of 289 matched the highest since the Masters began in 1934.

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Stephen Ames — you know, Tiger Woods’ buddy — won the Players Championship in a walkabout on Sunday, so the final round wasn’t particularly interesting. Nevertheless, the golf tournament generated some highly entertaining moments, anyway.
During the first two rounds of the tournament, the PGA Tour paired Rory Sabbatini — who is one of the hottest players on Tour this season — and NBC golf color commentator and part-time Tour player, Nick Faldo.
As you may recall, Faldo and Sabbatini had a dust-up with each other last year. During the 2005 Booz Allen, Sabbatini was harshly criticized by television commentators Paul Azinger and Faldo on the air for leaving playing partner Ben Crane behind to finish the 17th hole. Sabbatini, who is one of the fastest players on Tour, was fed up with Craneís pace of play, which is one of the slowest on Tour. Sabbatini reportedly was not pleased with Faldo and Azinger slamming him on the air, although he reportedly talked with Azinger about the incident later and made up with him. But not Faldo.
To make matters, Faldo is also a slow player himself. So, during the first round of the Players Championship, tournament officials put the Sabbatini-Faldo-Camilo Villegas group on the clock (i.e., gave them a warning before assessing a penalty to each of the players) for — you guessed it — slow play. The group sped up and no penalties were assessed.
Nonetheless, that incident prompted Sabbatiniís wife — no shrinking violet herself — to show up the next day for the second round sporting a tee shirt emblazoned with the words ìKeep Upî as she followed the group around the course. Asked about Mrs. Sabbatini’s t-shirt after the round, Faldo observed the following:

“I think itís very embarrassing for them to bring their sexual problems to the golf course. Poor fellow. I thought he had enough problems as it is without her announcing them to the world.”

Your serve, Mr. Sabbatini.

The notoriously flat and dusty West Texas terrain is not normally associated with outstanding golf courses, but golf course architectural expert Jay Flemma gives a hearty thumbs-up to the Tom Doak-designed Rawls Course at Texas Tech University in Lubbock:

He may not be a cowboy in the real or allegorical sense of the word, but the wild wind that is Tom Doakís design team blew into west Texas on top of the already legendary fierce howls that blow errant golf shots to New Mexico.
It was 2002. Doak and company had just conquered the world for the first time, fresh off the smash hit at Pacific Dunes. He was a bit of a cowboy in terms of golf course design. Unapologetic about his industry raking book The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, Doak talked the talk, then walked the walk, proving that the success of a golf course lies not in the money or the marketing, but the golf course itself.
Doak wrote on his website, ìAfter Pacific Dunes, it was inevitable that the next site we had to work with would be a letdown, so we went back all the way to square one ñ a flat cotton field on the north end of Texas Techís Lubbock campus, bounded by major streets, power lines and apartment houses.î

Flemma concludes:

There is no way to overstate Doakís accomplishment here. The land use went from the outhouse to the penthouse.
It was a roar of dust and diesel. Now itís a shining Lone Star.
And in case you forgot, itís Doak . . . [for the eminently reasonable price of] $35-$42 a round.

By the way, check out Flemma’s idea of a tournament bracket during NCAA Basketball Tournament season.

For a number of years, my favorite driving range facility in Texas has been San Antonio’s Ten Cups facility just down the road from the La Cantera Resort. Owner Dave Fineg hails Ten Cups as “maybe the finest third rate goat pasture in Bexar County” and has used the facility for years to promote his theory that golf should be an enjoyable form of recreation rather than a frustrating obsession.
Urban driving ranges such as Ten Cups are usually interim land uses, and urban encroachment is the reason for Ten Cups’ demise. So, Fineg is taking his “Golf is Fun” seminars on the corporate roadshow circuit and — if this absolutely hilarious spoof on golf club infomercials is any indication — his new endeavor should be a big success.
Hat tip to Bogey McDuff for the links.

In this LA Times article, (regis. req’d) Thomas Bonk reminds us that the upcoming Masters Tournament next month marks the 20th anniversary of Jack Nicklaus‘ stirring 1986 Masters victory at the age of 46. Bonk notes that much has changed in golf over those two decades:

When Nicklaus won the 1986 Masters, [Tiger] Woods was 10.
The 1986 Masters was not only his final victory at Augusta National, Nicklaus never won another PGA Tour event.
It was the end of an era, only nobody knew it yet. It’s possible to view Nicklaus’ monumental Masters of 20 years ago as a unique jumping-off place for professional golf, a final, startling, heart-warming salute to one generation and the start of something radically new.
Nicklaus won the 1986 Masters and nothing has been the same since. They’re no longer playing the same game.
His winning check was $144,000. Woods made $1.26 million for winning the Masters last year.
In 1986, the total prize money available in PGA Tour events was $25.4 million, about $545,000 each tournament. This year, the pros are playing for a pool of $256.8 million, an average of about $5.4 million a tournament.
Greg Norman led the money list in 1986 with $653,296. That would have put him 121st on the money list in 2005, when 78 players made more than $1 million.
And Nicklaus’ Masters victory in 1986 clearly represents the end of an era in more ways than money.
The two most important pieces of equipment in golf were going to take on a drastic new look.
It wasn’t until 1991 that Callaway Golf revolutionized drivers with the large-headed Big Bertha, shoving into the back of the closet the flat-faced, unforgiving block of persimmon wood on a steel shaft.
And it was in 2003 when Titleist brought out its Pro V1 ball. A three-piece ball instead of a wound ball, and with a thinner cover, the Pro V1 was immediately hailed for its greater control, better feel, improved trajectory and longer flight.
The combination of driver and ball has altered golf’s landscape, perhaps forever.

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