The Hole Story by Craig DeVrieze

He’s No. 1 in the FedEx Cup and No. 2 in the world.
Only once has a John Deere Classic champion ranked as high among the world’s finest golfers. That was in 2003, when Vijay Singh won four times, including a September JDC.
Although he ultimately agreed to return the following summer, Singh, though, was a champion JDC director Clair Peterson couldn’t immediately market for the following year’s tourney.
Singh struggled with the idea of playing here the week before the British Open.
Even if Steve Stricker were to win the FedEx Cup, and next year’s first two majors, Peterson can go ahead print the 2010 posters now.
Stricker clearly is a big-time talent, but there’s no chance he’s going to big time the JDC.
The smalltown Wisconsin kid is standing toe-to-toe with Tiger Woods these days, but he’s not likely to lose sight of the values that make him one of golf’s most soft-spoken favorites.
“He’s the easiest guy to root for ever,’’ Peterson said this week. “He’s our champion and he’s playing great. We are very excited about 2010 because we know he will be back here for sure.’’
Stricker is having the year of a lifetime and, as the continually revamped FedEx Cup hits Year 3, he is firmly established as a playoff-caliber player.
Stricker finished second in the FedEx Cup standings two years ago, and was 14th last year.
Thanks to Deustche Bank title-clinching back-to-back finishing birdies on Monday near Boston and a runner-up finish a week earlier in New York, he returns to the Illini State this weeek on top of the standings, with even Tiger Woods looking up at him.
As part of the continually changing FedEx process, Stricker could win this week’s BMW Championship in suburban Lemont and still not be guaranteed the year-end title.
The standings will be reshuffled ahead of the Tour Championship two weeks hence and anybody in the top five can claim the trophy and $10 million FedEx booty with a win at that Atlanta event.
None of that will change what Stricker has accomplished this year and the credibility his success offers the John Deere Classic.
“He is a world-class guy and playing as well as he has ever played,’’ said Peterson, who travelled to Cog Hill this week to get a head start on 2010 recruiting. “He carries our banner. We will probably be mentioned a number of times as Steve continues to play well not only through the playoffs but into next year.’’
In the meantime, we have a rooting interest in the PGA stretch run.

The PGA Tour pretty clearly is thinking outside the box in hopes of keeping current tournament sponsors in the fold.
Circled on that list of targeted sponsors, rest assured, is our very own Deere and Co.
John Deere Classic tournament director Clair Peterson, though, isn’t sure a fresh idea Tour commissioner Tim Finchem reportedly pitched last week at the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C., would carry much sway with the folks at the Glass Palace in Moline.
According to a Tuesday story in the News-Record out of Greensboro, Finchem told Wyndham leaders the Tour is considering a flexible schedule that would rotate tournaments with dates that are less attractive to the game’s top players.
While a temporary stop in June certainly would appeal to the folks at Deere, Peterson said the unattractive trade off of landing, even for just a year, in last week’s late August Wyndham spot likely would be a non-starter here.
Although in early July the JDC currently fights against the following week’s British Open, Peterson said late August would bring bigger problems.

Immediately ahead of the Wyndham were the World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational and then the PGA Championship, a major just like the British.
Behind it come four FedEx Cup playoff events, starting with this week’s The Barclays in New York.
“It would not be an advantage for us to rotate through that date,’’ he said. “The other thing for John Deere is that it is farther away from their selling season. So those ads they are required to buy would be less impactful.’’
The bottom line is that one June week that wouldn’t necessarily be bolstered by an appearance by Phil Mickelson or, gasp!, Tiger Woods could mean three years of fields not as good as the JDC has drawn the last two years.
The common demominator those two years, of course, was a JDC-sponsored charter jet to England.
“We have quite honestly made this date into an advantage,’’ Peterson said, noting that 20 of the 44 American players who competed in last month’s British Open Championship teed it up the previous week at TPC Deere Run. “We have found a way to improve our own situation. It is quantifiable and it has made a big difference.’’
Indeed. Word of mouth concerning last year’s charter enhanced the ‘09 field considerably and feedback on this year’s flight offers additional cause for confidence.
U.S. Open champ Lucas Glover has talked about booking his father-in-law a seat on next year’s JDC flight to historic St. Andrews., Peterson said. Tuesday, this year’s JDC champ Steve Stricker told Peterson he never felt fresher teeing it up in England.
All of those encouraging signs, of course, won’t mean much if Deere and Co., in the coming months opts not to extend its sponsorship beyond next year’s tourney.
And Deere isn’t the only deep-pocket with an expiring contract on Tour. Hence, the out-of-the-box thinking by Team Finchem.
Even though the flex schedule couldn’t start before 2013, Peterson said the creative thinking is a positive sign.
“The good news to me is that, whether or not any of these ideas come to pass, they are trying to find ways to improve the quality of the fields at events that struggle because of their dates,’’ Peterson said.
So far, Peterson said Deere and Co., the Tour and the tournament only have spoken informally about a sponsorship extension to 2014.
At the moment, the Deere folks are a bit busy. On Tuesday, they announced the start of negotiations to renew a contract with the United Auto Workers that is set to expire at the end of next month.
“This is a little farther on the backburner,’’ Peterson said of a JDC renewal. “But at some point we will need to talk seriously and they will need to talk seriously about anything past 2010.’’

There are holes-in-one, and then there are aces on the signature hole at Whistling Straits Golf Course in Kohler, Wis.

East Moline’s Bob Larsen scored the latter Aug. 21, sailing an 8-iron 163 yards and into the cup at the seventh hole of a golf course that recently was ranked as the third best in the world among courses constructed in the last 50 years.

The Wisconsin course was so ranked in the most recent edition of Golf Magazine. It was host to the PGA Championship in 2004 and is due to reprise that role next year.

Larsen is looking forward to watching next August.

“I can sit there and say “I had a hole-in-one. Why can’t you?” he said.

Larsen played the course with fellow Quad-Citians Todd Raufeisen, Jeff Tomachek and Bruce Wessling.

He shot an 89.

“I was excited about that, too,” he said. “It’s a pretty tough golf course.”

– Golf Magazine, by the way, turned 50 this year and the September edition identified many of what its staff deemed “The Absolute Greatest” items in golf over the last half-century.

Included among five honored living caddies was Moline’s Tony Navarro.

– A panel the magazine put together selected Jack Nicklaus over Tiger Woods as the greatest player in the history of the game, a beyond-the-last-50 years list that includes Old Tom Morris, Bobby Jones and Harry Vardon.

The top five, in order: Nicklaus, Woods, Jones, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead.

— Maybe it is because it is being played in Illinois. Maybe it’s because Michelle Wie is there. Maybe it is because I got to look into Natalie Gulbis’ dreamy eyes earlier this month. But I’m into the Solheim Cup, an event that highlights the best American players in the women’s game by pitting them in Ryder-style battle with a group of Europeans.

It’s too bad there is no LPGA equivilent of the Presidents Cup. What chance would you give the U.S. squad against an assemblage of top Korean-born players?

Today, we Quad-Citians mourn along with Ed Fiori.

What had been his — and the Quad-Cities’ — own personal slice of Tiger Woods history now has a co-owner.

Until Y.E. Yang outgunned the incompable Woods in Sunday’s final round of the PGA Championship in Chaska, Minn., Fiori’s 1996 Quad-City Classic victory at Oakwood Country Club held the distinction of being the only time Woods had taken a solo lead into a Sunday final round and not come out on top.

Yang’s rally from a shot behind to a three-shot win ended Woods’ run of 36 straight front-running successes, dating back to 1996

That is the seldom-mentioned aspect of Tiger’s incredible credentials as the best closer sports has known. We knew he was 47-for-50 when leading or tied entering a final round. We knew he had won 14 straight majors when tied or leading on Sunday morning.

But 36 straight with a lead of a stroke or more often went unremarked.

But it is remarkable. Consider: Since 1980, 54-hole leaders or co-leaders have won less than 50 percent of the tournaments staged on the PGA Tour.

When a 20-year-old Woods, then playing in his third event as a pro, stepped to the first tee at Oakwood Country Club on Sept. 15, 1996, Quad-Citians hoped their hometown would score an enduring place in history as the home to Woods’ first pro win.

Fiori burst that bubble by holding steady while Woods, the tourney’s leader since Friday afternoon, endured a quadruple bogey at the fourth hole and then four-putted the easy seventh.

(”It was quad city in Quad-City,” wrote then A.P. golf writer Ron Sirak, one of a dozen national golf writers who left the Presidents Cup in Washington, D.C.,that morning and flew tto the Q-C to chronicle history in the making.)

History didn’t happen, though. Steady Eddie “The Grip” Fiori’s closing 67 bested Woods’ by five shots that day. Tiger tied for a deflating fifth.

But who knew then that that ‘96 Sunday at Oakwood still would hold a place in Tiger’s personal history for 12-plus years.

It did. Until Sunday, when Y.E. Yang joined The Grip in the rare class of Tiger tamers.

Rest assured, that will remain a very exclusive club in the years to come.

Let’s play a nine holes of catchup with the local golf scene:
1) Fresh off an appearance at last week’s U.S. Senior Open, former Crow Valley pro Curt Schnell finished second in the Iowa PGA Section Championship played Tuesday and Thursday.
Schnell lost a sudden death playoff on the first hole at Harvester Golf Course in Rhodes, Iowa. The winner, Iowa State assistant coach Judd Gibb, claimed a spot in next year’s John Deere Classic field.
2) Props to a trio of local golfers who posted top 10 finishes in last week’s Iowa Amateur at Sunnyside Country Club in Waterloo.
Bettendorf’s Ben Peters tied for fourth with a former Bettendorfer, Gene Elliott, while former Bettendorf Bulldogs teammates Adam Seitz, Bettendorf, and Dusty Drenth, Davenport, were part of a three-way share of seventh-place.
3) A pair of Illinois side Q-C players will tee it up in next week’s Illinois State Am at Bloomington Country Club after surviving qualifiers a week ago.
Tom Miler, a Champions Tour-aged golfer from Kewanee, and David Lawrence, an Eastern Illinois sophomore golfer from Moline, both played their way into the 132-player field.
4) Miler also will play along with Rock Island’s Fred Lukasik in the Illinois Senior Am next month near Peoria.
5) A total of 100 points separate Peters and Drenth in the Player of the Year race on the Quad-Cities Amateur Tour.
Both players have won two of the Tour’s five contested events. Peters won the Quad-City Amateur at Emeis in May and at Palmer Hills earlier this month.
Drenth was a winner last month at Short Hills and a couple of weeks back at Glynns Creek.
Clinton’s Dean Cavanaugh was a playoff loser to collegian Kyle Bermel at his hometown Riverboat Days Am and took down first place PoY points there.
6) With three events remaining that race is far from run, but even more wide open is the Senior PoY chase, where 212 points separate first from fifth.
Davenport’s Mike Long is the leader with a Palmer Hills win to his credit. Other senior winners to date: Dan Dalziel (Q-C Am), Blaine Kernan (Short Hills) and Dave Waugh (Glynns Creek).
The local tour resumes this week at Pinnacle Country Club near Milan, then will make up the rained-out Hawthorn Ridge Am in Aledo in two weeks. It wraps up medal play with the major points Tour Championship at Arsenal Country Club Aug. 29-30.
7) Still to come beyond the Tour Championship, of course, is the annual Iowa-vs.-Illinois Hasley Cup matches Sept. 11-12 at Emeis.
Illinois’ chances of erasing Iowa’s stranglehold on the Cup don’t appear promising. Seven of the Tour’s 10 points leaders are Iowans, including each of the top five. The Quad-City Junior Tour wrapped up its fourth season last week at Pebble Creek. Congratulations to all the young golfers who competed in this year’s six-event schedule.
9) Skip Holton, a regular in Iowa club pro events and last year’s IGA Senior Golfer of the Year, died July 31 from complications related to a heart attack. He was 56.

Relax. The above is not an inappropriate question.

It’s a reaction to the sparse number of female competitors on the Quad-Cities links scene.

This occurred to me when I scoured last week’s list of Illinois Women’s Amateur contestants, looking for Quad-Citians, finding none.

It occurred to me when all of four women teed it up in last month’s Quad-City Amateur.

It occurred to me when a field of 75 juniors who took on Emeis Golf Course in last week’s first Quad-City Junior Tour event included 18 girls of all ages.

It occurred to Jim Hasley, the godfather of Quad-Cities golf a long time before that.

Hasley, who mucketey-mucked the Q-C Am for decades  as the former head pro at Emeis in Davenport, long has been a champion of women in golf.

Years back, he endured the huzzahs from the chauvenists on the links when he fought for the installation of women’s tees at Emeis.

Yet Hasley never saw more than 20 women sign up for the women’s field in the Q-C Am, even during a brief period a decade back when he scheduled it as an entirely separate event, played at Duck Creek. Most often, fields numbered in single digits.

Given an abundance of ladies leagues and Ladies Days across the Q-C golf-scape, Hasley stressed the issue isn’t a lack of women playing the game.

But that’s just it. They view it as a game, not a sport.

“I think there are more women playing golf,” he said. “But they don’t look at it as a competitive sport. In 40 years, I don’t think it has changed a lot.”

There’s nothing really wrong with that. I play the game for recreation myself and never would dream of embarassing myself in a competitive tournament.

But there are women out there who have more game than me who haven’t stepped up to show it. East Moline’s Patti Lee is a rare exception and she has lost count of the number of Q-C Am titles she’s won over the years, largely over paltry fields.

The real shame is that the lack of distaff competitors trickles down to the junior ranks, where Hasley thinks young female players are missing out on a good bet by declining to challenge themselves in high school and junior summer events.

Hasley now is program director of the First Tee of the Quad-Cities. Of the 6,000-plus young golfers who have gone through that program since its inception in 2002, a representative 600 to 700 have been young ladies.

Not nearly enough of thme have gotten as serious about the sport as Hasley wishes they would, however.

“I tell them the easiest way to get a college scholarship is through (women’s) golf,” he said. “They are crying for players.”

He also knows who he will have to beat to do it.

“I like his chances, I really do,” Perry said of a certain Tiger Woods.

Perry might be one of several million people picking the defending Open champion, who also was a red-clad winner at the last national championship staged at New York’s Bethpage State Park’s Black Course in 2002.

Perry is one of the 155, however, who will be battling next week to unseat the world’s top-ranked golfer and, with Stewart Cink, he was one of just two people playing alongside Woods and Jack Nicklaus, the legend Woods’ is trying to unseat as the best golfer ever, in a Skins Game last week in Columbus, Ohio.

“That was an honor for me,” said Perry, who was the defending champion at the Nicklaus-hosted Memorial that Woods went on to win last Sunday. “I mean I was in heaven. I loved it out there.

“I really paid close attention to Jack because that is probably the last time we will see him play in public. But I really paid attention to Tiger also, and his golf swing looks a whole lot better than it has.”

Perry said Woods appears to have shaken off whatever rust resulted from a 10-month layoff for knee surgery and rehabilitation following his win at the U.S. Open last June near San Diego.

“Every shot was in control,” said Perry, whose own golf swing has carried him to 13 PGA Tour victories, including last year’s John Deere Classic. “He didn’t overswing. He was hitting a hard slider, which when he played his best, that was the kind of shot he was hitting, and he has got the best short game on Tour by far.”

Despite a win and five other Top 10 finishes in his seven starts pre-Memorial, Woods had looked somewhat vulnerable due to an erratic driver that had him ranked outside the top 100 in fairways hit.

Woods hit 14 of 14 fairways en route to a come-from-behind win on Sunday in Columbus. He hit 87.5 percent of the Muirfield Village fairways over the course of the week.

If Woods hits fairways like that next week, conventional wisdom states, he’ll win in a walk.

Hold on, Perry said.

“Muirfield is a big, wide open golf course,” he noted. “Even though it plays like a U.S. Open course, it’s got 35-yard fairways. Now, when we get to the 20 yards (wide fairways) at Bethpage, it may be a different scenario.”

On the other hand, Perry noted of Woods, “He definitely has the strength and ability to move it out of the rough better than anyone else, also.”

Something else Woods has done with great success at previous U.S. and British Opens is to leave the driver in his bag and hit 3-woods and irons off the tee, a better way to avoid ankle-deep rough.

Bethpage could foil such a strategy.

“You know, Bethpage is 7,500 to 7,400 yards long,” he said. “I don’t know if he totally can put that thing away.”

But if Woods hits fairways? Look out.

“I like his chances, I really do,” said Perry, who finished four places ahead of Tiger at Augusta. “I think he’s not trying to overswing now, and I think he is highly motivated. He’s had a lot of time off and he has two kids now. He’s got college to pay for.”

I have few Illusions that the grousing won’t soon start over how the John Deere Classic lacks star appeal without the Tigers and Phils and Vijays in its field.

There is no end to the number of people who just don’t get it.

For one of the smallest communities on Tour to have a FedEx Cup date and a month-out field that includes Kenny Perry, Zach Johnson, David Toms, Chad Campbell, Jesper Parnevik, Jerry Kelly, Chris DiMarco, Todd Hamilton and Mark Calcavecchia is better than any Quad-Cities golf fan has a reasonable right to expect.

Anyone who expects a field to match that of this week’s Memorial or even next week’s event in Memphis is kindly encouraged to call 1-800-GETADOGGONEDCLUE.

This is a great start to an event that is sure to include at least a handfull more of equally exciting names.

If you are expecting way more exciting names than those listed above, you don’t seem to have a handle on where you live. This is not Chicago. This is not Memphis. This is not Columbus.

This is a quaint little river community that 156 of the best golfers breathing pay a call to every year, and if that’s not good enough for you, gas up the car, fight the traffic and go watch the Cubs and Sox waste another season.

Me? I’m pumped to see some great golf at TPC Deere Run next month.

 The only reason Tiger Woods’ re-appearance at the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship made sense was a sponsorship agreement Woods has with Accenture.

Woods’ competitive nature is matched only by his shrewd capacity for making a buck — and stroking a sponsor in today’s economy isn’t a bad idea even for the most marketable icon in sport.

From a competitive standpoint, however, the risk was considerable.

Even for the typically indomitable Woods, match play is a crapshoot.

Yes. Even after his Thursday second-round loss to Tim Clark — who’s  best known in these environs for letting a three-shot lead with five holes get away vs. Jonathan Byrd two JDCs back — Woods sports an incomparable  32-7 record over 11 years of the match play.

But on the trophy heisting front, that makes him un-Tiger-like 3-8 in the event.

Point being, this particular title is a tough son-of-gun to win, even for the best golfer ever to tee up a Titleist. And especially for one that hasn’t played competitively in eight months.

At match play, there is no room for one bad day. It is six separate sprints, whereas stroke play is a four-round marathon.

Give Tiger four rounds against the field, and the field has its hands full. Especially in these $8 million World Golf Championship parties. Take away Match Play, Woods’ record in those deals is 12-for-17.

What?

Shut up!

What I’m saying is that, if our man was intent on making a triumphant return — the only proper way, after all, to follow up that epic, one-legged Open win last June — Woods would have been better served by waiting three weeks and hitching his star to the WGC CA Championship in Miami.

That’s at the Blue Monster at Doral Golf Resort and Spa, a place where Tiger has won an unconscionable 8 of the last 11 tournaments.

Eight out of 11?

Do you realize how stupid good that is?

Anyway, that’s where we are all but certain to see him next. And, if you, like my Mom, are mourning Tiger’s Thursday fate, chill.

Says here he wins in Miami.

Ain’t I bold?

In 2005, Michelle Wie nearly made the cut at the John Deere Classic and nearly won three LPGA Tour majors.

A year later, she nearly played her way into the men’s U.S. Open and nearly scored her first LPGA title at the Evian Masters.

Then, she nearly disappeared.

That’s why Wie’s newest near miss — a runner-up finish at last week’s SBS Open in her native Hawaii — is more good news than bad for we Wie fans, never mind that she again showed that distressing inability to close that made her “The Nearly Girl” in her mid-teens.

Wie had a three-shot lead with eight holes to go Saturday before suffering a double-bogey on the 11th hole and a bogey at 17.

JDC/Wie fans will recall that a double-bogey at Deere Run’s 6th hole followed by a bogey at 7 cost the then-amateur sensation a chance to become the first woman in 60 years to make a PGA Tour cut on what was her second-round back nine in 2005.

In each of her four previous LPGA Tour seconds, a loose late swing could be fingered as a culprit as well.

The SBS winner was Angela Stanford — how’s that for irony? Isn’t Wie, still a Bay Area collegian, losing to someone named Angela Stanford a little like Michael Jordan losing to someone named Sam North Carolina?

Stanford said she saw evidence that her teen-aged foil still has to learn how to win.

“She was doing everything she needed to win, and when she made the mistake on 11, she didn’t rebound like I thought,” said Stanford, an LPGA vet who has won three of her last seven starts. “You could see her youth in that.”

And yet and still, what you also could see throughout the three-round tourney in Hawaii was Wie’s immense talent, and, by reports, a return to the languid and fluid swing that earned a 13-year-old Wie her comparisons to Ernie Els.

That’s a significant and important change from 2007, when Wie seemed to have lost her way and her game, literally missing fairways left and right with a swing many thought went off-track when she tried to match the men she played at Deere Run and elsewhere in length.

“She seems to have the rhythm back in her swing,” wrote Golf Digest’s Ron Sirak, who has chronicled Wie’s career through the good and bad. “That wonderful Big Wiesy tempo … is back.”

The legion of Wie bashers, a few of whom certainly will be checking in at the bottom of this blog, long ago forgot that Wie, now a college sophomore, was and is just a kid, a youngster learning her way against the most compelling competition she could challenge.

 She still just is 19 years old and her first year as a full-fledged member of the LPGA Tour.

Her best golf remains ahead of her. And here’s guessing it shows up soon.

“The Nearly Girl” is nearly gone.