Bad weather a major player once again
Updated: March 27, 2005, 7:34 PM ET
By Jason Sobel | ESPN.com
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- If golf is, indeed, a good walk spoiled, as Mark Twain so eloquently put it, then what should we make of this year's version of The Players Championship?
A good week spoiled?
GettyTPC-Sawgrass has seen more than its share of rain during the past three days.
Maybe not yet, but we certainly had our good weekend spoiled by the booming thunder and wicked lightning that has monopolized the tournament so far.
And you thought Tiger Woods andVijay Singh were the two most dominant forces on the PGA Tour!
In case you were sleeping for three days, four hours and some 30 minutes, you missed a little golf. Very little, actually, since that's exactly how long it took for the field of 146 players to complete its opening two rounds.
Upon completing the second round, the 84 players who made the cut steadfastly headed back onto the course, starting at 11:30 a.m. local time … only to head right back in when the horn blared at 2:30, halting play for good on Sunday.
"It would be nice to know what's going on a little bit," Tim Herron said. "But there's nothing you can do about Mother Nature."
One idea is an original Lee Trevino one-liner: "In case of a thunderstorm, stand in the middle of the fairway and hold up a one-iron. Not even God can hit a one-iron." The other is to just keep slogging along, as the tour players have been doing all season.
There was fog at Torrey Pines, wind in Scottsdale (imagine that, a golf tournament suspended due to blustery conditions!) and rain just about everywhere else.
In all, seven of the 13 events on tour so far this season have been delayed by some kind of inclement weather.
There's an old saying about going to a fight and seeing a hockey game break out. Well, this year the PGA Tour has been attracting some unfortunate weather situations ... and, once in a while, a golf tournament breaks out.
"I don't know what's wrong with the weather at the moment, but the weather is better in England," Englishman Lee Westwood said Saturday. "You just have to put up with it and just be patient and accept it."
"Obviously, the weather is frustrating, but it's frustrating for everybody," Zach Johnson said. "It stinks for the fans, it stinks for the whole tournament, it stinks for Jacksonville."
Johnson certainly could have added himself and his fellow golfers to that list, too.
After all, golf on the PGA Tour these days is less a battle of skills and more a test of endurance -- like those contests in which a dozen people must keep their hands on the body of a pick-up truck. Last one standing wins the prize.
So far, the top golfers -- or, perhaps, the most patient golfers -- have been Joe Durant and Luke Donald, who share the lead at 11 under through three holes in their third rounds. Herron, Johnson, Westwood and defending champion Adam Scott are each one stroke behind.
And then there's poor Mark Russell. His official title is Tournament Director for the PGA Tour, but as the man who presides over weather delays and suspensions, he could have earned a Ph.D in meteorology over the last two months.
"The thing about these rain delays, no two situations are ever the same," said Russell, who's seemingly gotten more face time on The Golf Channel than any golfer this year. "It's like working out a difficult algebra problem, figuring out when we're going to play and when we have to do it, what are the time barriers, how much daylight do we have."
In what has been an otherwise exemplary season, with plenty of elite players competing at the top of their games, bad weather -- the player everybody loves to hate -- has controlled the week yet again.
After all, when golf tournaments bring about analogies to algebra problems, nobody wins.
Jason Sobel is ESPN.com's golf editor. He can be reached at Jason.Sobel@espn3.com
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