ON THE FRINGE

By Doug Ferguson

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. - The Players Championship dodged a major bullet last year.

The PGA Tour’s showcase event was teetering on the edge of ridicule, although not for obvious reasons. It only would have looked bad if the fifth major had needed six days to find a winner.

Was it three rain delays that left players stranded in the clubhouse with nothing better to do than complain?

Not at all.

Weather happens. Golf should be thankful it doesn’t happen more often. Besides, wholesale grumbling is heard the loudest at majors, so perhaps The Players Championship made big strides this year.

It wasn’t the condition of the course or “preferred lies” that tarnished its stature, either.

Rain turned the TPC at Sawgrass into a sloppy mess, leaving tournament officials no choice but to allow players to lift, clean and place the ball in the fairway. That doesn’t happen at any other major, and purists will argue that the ball should be played where it lies.

That was one of the original 13 rules established in 1744 when golf primarily was played on seaside links courses. What would the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers have thought about the Stadium Course at Sawgrass? Or a course with a name closer to home, like Muirfield Village?

A popular phrase last week was playing golf “the way it was meant to be played.”

Noble, indeed, but that carried an entirely different meaning depending on who was talking. For rules officials, that meant playing the ball down. For players, it meant playing shots without globs of mud on the side of the ball.

Peter Dawson, the square-jawed secretary of the Royal & Ancient, was hardly offended to see players handing golf balls to their caddies to be scrubbed clean and gently placed in the fairway.

“On this type of course, when it gets as wet as this, you’ve almost got no option,” he said. “I think the ball should be played as it lies, as long as you can play proper golf. But with the conditions we’ve had, you couldn’t have done that.”

Then there was that bizarre mulligan in the second round.

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Thirty players began the round without being able to lift, clean and place. Once rain made preferred lies the only option, those scores were erased and the round started over. That cost players like Jesper Parnevik, Joe Ogilvie and Skip Kendall, and rescued Ernie Els.

But the most anyone had played was four holes.

That’s like a bad call in the first quarter of a football game. No one remembers, and it rarely makes a difference.

What nearly cost The Players Championship major credibility was the fifth day.

It was the seventh time this tournament had to be finished on Monday, so that was nothing new. And there is a precedent on the major scene; the 1983 U.S. Open at Oakmont did not end until Monday because of rain.

But the wind that shooed away the storm nearly exposed the 17th hole as the gimmick it is, and showed why one hole might be the obstacle that keeps The Players Championship from being regarded as a major.

As it stands, the tournament has 17 holes of championship golf.

The other hole is a circus.

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