The Daily Wrap-up, Thursday: Bob Hope Classic
By Staff and Wire Reports
LA QUINTA, Calif. (AP) -- Heavy rains forced the postponement of the second round of the Bob Hope Classic on Thursday, wiping out a day of competition at the tournament for the first time in 30 years.
The latest wave of Southern California's major rainstorms hit the Palm Springs area Wednesday afternoon and scarcely let up Thursday morning, with water pooling on greens and fairways. The area already has received 2 inches of rain this week -- a rarity in the deserts east of Los Angeles.
The ducks loved it, but the players had no chance. With better weather in the forecast for Friday and the weekend, tournament organizers quickly decided to scrap Thursday's play.
"I went out on the Nicklaus Course, went to the range, and it's just under water," PGA TOUR rules official Slugger White said. "It's a mess. I've been coming out here for a long time and I've never seen anything like this."
The Hope Classic is the PGA TOUR's only five-day, four-course event, giving the tournament extra time to make up Thursday's lost round. The tournament hadn't been interrupted by rain since the opening round of the 1980 tournament, which was suspended and completed the next day.
The TOUR hasn't decided whether the Bob Hope Classic will be extended into Monday. Next week's event is at Torrey Pines in the San Diego area, making for a simple travel schedule for the players.
"There's just no place to play. When you take casual water relief you have to take full relief. So we would be up on the cart paths, on the rocks and everything else," White said. "We held off as long as we could to make the decision."
Shane Bertsch leads after Wednesday's opening round with a 10-under 62, two strokes ahead of Jeff Quinney and Alex Prugh. The Bob Hope Classic has a lackluster field this year by its usual standards, with no players in the top 35.
INSIDE THE ROPES WITH THE PGA TOUR NETWORK
PGA TOUR Network correspondent Bob Stevens offers these observations from Thursday. Listen to PGA TOUR Live coverage on XM 146/SIRIUS 209 or right here at PGATOUR.COM.
How rare is the rain that postponed the second round until Friday? I lived in the area for four years (we even played our conference championship at La Quinta and there's a women's tee marker with a dent in it that might still be proof of the excellence of my game) and my high school yearbook actually dedicated two pages of pictures to the "day of the big rain." There might be one day a year, though lately it has been one day every three years that there is a downpour like we've had this week. We've already had two days of it this week and Friday might be a third. A good portion of this field wasn't born the last time the Bob Hope Classic lost a day to the weather (1980).
Yet with all the rain, a couple of TOUR officials I talked with that shared a weekend with me at the Viking Classic in Mississippi last fall (the Fall Series event that never got played) say there's a much better chance we'll get this tournament in because of the soil differences. The sand will eventually soak up all the precipitation that the Mississippi mud held onto like a sponge for weeks.
The players never had to come to the courses Thursday, but we did have the chance to speak with celebrity player Toby Dawson, the American medal-winning freestyle skier from the last Winter Olympics. He's now doing public relations work for his native South Korea and says Y.E. Yang's PGA Championship victory has meant as much to golf in Korea as the great performances of the Korean women and puts Yang in the company of Se Ri Pak at the pinnacle of Korean golf "stardom" -- as much as for who he beat mano-a-mano at Hazeltine (Tiger Woods) as for being the first male winner of a major.
| Live Essentials | ||||
|
Shop your favorite brand name golf equipment and accessories at SHOP.PGATOUR.COM
PGATOUR.com is part of Turner - SI Digital, part of the Turner Sports & Entertainment Digital Network 