A golf tournament director lives and dies by the weather in the weeks leading up to their tournament, and most of all, the weather in the 5-day period from Wednesday to Sunday of tournament week. After weeks of the type of weather that the our local Chambers of Commerce love to brag about, Frys.com Open tournament director Ian Knight must have been agonizing over the weather that bore down upon the South Bay early this week as the first autumn storm of the season brought chilly, windy–and worst of all, wet–weather to the Santa Clara Valley.
With rain and possible thunderstorms predicted for the Wednesday of tournament week for the Frys.com Open, things were looking dicey for pro-am play at this year’s tournament. Stormy weather did indeed sweep in off the Pacific Ocean, but the worst of the storm blew through in late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning hours, with only widely scattered showers trailing behind the front on Wednesday.
Wednesday is pro-am day at a professional golf tournament, the day when well-heeled local golfers get to play a round of golf with a Tour pro. Playing in a pro-am means more than just bragging rights at your home course and a first tee photo to put on the wall in the den—the money contributed by pro-am players is an important part of the financial success of a golf tournament.
Professional golf raisies more money for charity than any other professional sport, by far, and supporting local charities with the conduct of a tournament has been part of the business model of the PGA Tour since its inception in 1969.
Mostly clear skies and mildly blustery conditions greeted the competitors in Wednesday’s pro-am play, giving the amateurs good conditions in which to enjoy their rounds with the pros, and the pros a chance to see how the fairways and greens at the Robert Trent Jones, Jr-designed Cordevalle Resort course were holding up to rainy weather.
Of course, the biggest story of this year’s Frys.com Open has been Tiger Woods’ choice of the tournament as the venue for his return to competitive golf after a 12-week absence while he recuperated from the knee and Achilles tendon injuries that nagged him in the early part of the 2011 season. If the results of pro-am play are any indication of how the tournament itself might play out, the rest of the field might be looking like the golfers in the Nike commerical of a couple years back—celebrating the open fields and better chances at tournament victories when Tiger was out recuperating from injury, somber and quiet when he came back healthy and ready to play.
The pro-am team featuring PGA Tour rookie Brendan Steele, the 2011 Valero Texas Open champion, took top honors with a team score of 16-under. Paul Goydos, the Southern California journeyman pro whose self-deprecating humor and dry wit have earned him the nickname “Sunshine” among his fellow Tour pros, led his pro-am group to a 2nd-place finish, 2 strokes back at 14 under. Following Goydos’ group in a tie for 3rd place, at 13 under, were the teams of second-year Tour pro Derek Lamely, South African Rory Sabbatini – and Tiger Woods.
While reports from the course indicate that there’s still a bit of rust on his game, his overall performance today shows that the rest of the field would do well not to take his presence at the event lightly, rust or no rust.
