Rain sends players off course

ATLANTA -- Banking is an indoor sport, while golf is not, no matter if you’re playing a $7-million tournament with $35 million more in FedEx Cup bonuses, which is what they’re trying to do this week at the suddenly soggy East Lake Country Club.

It was an abbreviated first round Thursday at the Tour Championship, where Tiger Woods played all of seven minutes and hit two shots before players were called off the course because bad weather was on its way.

After a three-hour rain delay, the players went back out to see how many holes they could get in before darkness. Woods finished 11 and was at four under par, four shots behind Tim Clark, who tied the course record with an eight-under 62.

Clark, who didn’t play a practice round this week, holed a 60-foot pitch from the back of the 15th green for an eagle.

“That’s one of those fortunate things to happen,” he said.

Also fortunate was British Open champion Padraig Harrington, the 30th and last qualifier for the field, who birdied the last four holes for a 63.

Harrington didn’t play in the third event of FedEx Cup playoffs, last week’s BMW Championship, and thought about skipping this week too.

“The fact that I couldn’t win the FedEx Cup was obviously one of the reasons that might have kept me away,” Harrington said, “but the fact that it’s a big tournament anyway was a big reason to come.”

The 10 players who finished the first round were a combined 29 under. Only five players are over par, which probably means someone is going to have to go quite low to win this thing.

The first round resumes at 8 a.m., with the second getting underway at 9 . . . if the weather permits. But it doesn’t appear to be leaning that way, according to the forecast.

The groups will not be re-paired for the second round.

The first tee times Thursday were at 11:50 a.m. and Woods-Steve Stricker were the last to start, at 2:10 p.m.

Before play was halted in the afternoon, the PGA Tour had already decided to move up today’s starting times because of the threat of bad weather, a plan that, had it been in effect Thursday, probably would have allowed for the first round to be completed.

The downpour and halt in play were ironic, considering that extreme drought and heat had severely damaged East Lake’s bentgrass greens.

Those greens had already been deemed slow, and after being pounded by rain, chances are they will no longer be measured by a Stimpmeter but by a squeegee. So with pillow-like surfaces and simple pin placements near the middle of each green, approach shots were more like games of darts.

Putting turned out to be a far different matter, a contrast between early groups and later groups.

Harrington said the greens are set up for scoring because they’re so soft. “The greens are at a pace that you can really be aggressive on them and run the ball at the hole,” he said.

Harrington was fortunate to be in the first group, before the greens had seen traffic. Woods, in the last pairing, wasn’t as fortunate, even though he started with three straight birdies, from nine feet, 18 feet and then a 32-footer at the 387-yard, par-four third.

“I made a couple of putts,” Woods said. “I don’t know how. I hit them up there and they bounced all over the place and somehow went in.

“Putts don’t break out here. With the greens as slow as they are and as bumpy as they are, you’ve got to take the low lines.”

Woods said his long putt at No. 3 was a case in point. “It bounced to the right, I thought I missed it; then it bounced left, I thought I was going to miss it left, and then somehow it wiggled back up to the right, up the hill, and it went in.”

Bouncing around was also the way Phil Mickelson started. He bogeyed the first hole before the rain delay, sending a three-wood about 30 yards off line to the left into some trees.

He made double bogey at the fifth after knocking his tee shot to the right into a stand of trees. He was forced to take a drop and could only chop it out back to the fairway.

The bad news for Mickelson was that after playing five holes, he was 11 shots behind Clark. The good news was, he birdied three straight holes to close out his front nine, then birdied the 12th to reach one under.

He’s still seven shots off the pace, but there is still plenty of time to make up ground on Clark once play resumes, whenever that may be. And there’s an 80% chance of rain and/or thundershowers today.

Saturday, anyone?

--

[email protected]