Gee, I thought the fields for the Shell Houston Open Golf Tournament had slipped badly over the past several years. But those depleted fields are nothing compared to the experience of this week’s Greater Greensboro Open (now called the “Wyndham” or some such thing). The PGA Tour’s final tournament before the season-ending series of “playoff” tournaments known as the Fed Ex Cup is having a bit of a problem getting any leading Tour player to show up:

The Wyndham is the final regular-season tournament of the PGA Tourís FedEx Cup, and only the top 144 players in the points race advance to the playoffs, which will start next week.
There is no shortage of players hovering around the 144th spot on the points list, but those already secure for the playoffs are taking the week off. Only two of the top 50 in the updated world rankings are in the field – Davis Love III, the defending champion and ranked 43rd, and Carl Pettersson, ranked 48th. Pettersson, a former player at N.C. State, lives near Raleigh and played his high-school golf at Greensboro Grimlsey.

And after publication of the foregoing, Love withdrew from the tournament to undergo a medical procedure for kidney stones. The Tiger Chasm widens.