O'Hair grabs lead, Woods lurks at Tour Championship
Friday, September 25, 2009
Oops.
O'Hair offset two bogeys with six birdies Thursday to grab the lead after the first round of the sun-splashed Tour Championship, the final event of the $65 million FedExCup playoffs. His 66 on the firm, 7,034-yard East Lake Golf Club layout also put him in position to topple Woods in the race for the $10 million grand prize.
Woods, a stroke back in a tie for second place with Padraig Harrington and Stewart Cink, fell to second place in the projected points standings for the lucrative FedExCup payoff. O'Hair can win the FedExCup if he wins this week and Woods finishes in a three-way tie for second or worse and Steve Stricker (70) finishes tied for second or worse.
"I truly believe in what (Woods) said, and I think it's the key for me to kind of take my putting to another level," said O'Hair, who one-putted eight greens, including making a 56-footer for birdie on No. 4, and finished with 28 putts on the extremely fast greens. "As far as getting that kind of advice from basically the greatest of all time is pretty cool. I'm his competition, and for him to help me out like he did was very classy.
"Today was just an all-around good round. I pretty much did everything the way I needed to. Hit it really nicely off the tee, the ball was going actually a very, very long way, and I putted it nicely."
Woods had no regrets in helping out his rival with the tip, which involves the backswing of O'Hair's putting stroke.
"I'm going to go chew him out right now," joked Woods, who was 1 over after eight holes but made four birdies in his last 10 holes. "Sean is a friend of mine, and like all my friends, you always try to make their life better somehow. That's the whole idea of having friends in your life.
"Sean has been struggling a little bit on the greens this year, and I thought I could offer a little bit of help and insight to how he could change that."
Other players could have used some tips for Woods. Only eight of the 30 players broke par on a course that was a soggy mess Monday after receiving 12 inches of rain in seven days.
On Thursday, the course was nearly as hard as a cart path.
"The golf course, considering all that rain we had, it's really dried out, and the greens are like bricks," Cink said. "You have to be very smart coming into the greens here to give yourself any kind of aggressive birdies.
"It's borderline sometimes out there. But if you hit it in the fairway you can control the ball in there and get it close to pin high. If you're in the rough, you can forget about it. So that's the hallmark of a great test."
The test won't get any easier — even if it does rain some more this week as expected. Forecasts call for possible thunderstorms each day through Saturday. But with high-tech drainage systems below the course — especially the SubAir systems underneath each of the putting surfaces that can drain as much moisture out of the greens as the PGA Tour officials want. In other words, "soft" is a word the players will probably not use again this week — at least not for the greens.
"They can't get much firmer, I'm sure," Harrington said. "Well, I suppose they could get a little bit firmer. It's a great advertisement for SubAir. Any tournament, any regular tournament golf course, if you've got SubAir, you can really put us under pressure as players. They went easy on the pin positions in general (Thursday). Most pins were 4, 5, 6, 7 (feet) off the edge of the greens at times, and they can do that with firm greens.
"It's more of a quality test."
Cink, a member at East Lake, said the course will be fine if more rain falls.
"If it doesn't rain, they'll probably water (the greens) a little bit," he added. "I think they want to keep them about how they are right now. Any more than this it gets a little bit out of hand."
Under sunny skies amidst stifling heat, the greens weren't the only obstacles. Narrow fairways and thin, scruffy rough added to the players' challenges. Phil Mickelson took an 8 on the par-4 14th when he sculled a bunker shot across the green into rough, then hit his next shot back into the aforementioned bunker. His next shot stayed in the bunker. He finally two-putted for a snowman and finished with a 73.
"The conditions are tough," Dustin Johnson said after his 69. "The greens are really firm, so it's real hard to get it close to the flag. I hit a lot of good shots today. Just had a lot of 20-, 25-footers."
No one played better than O'Hair.
"The course was playing fairly long," he said. "And then the greens are just incredibly firm, probably the most firm we've played all year. Maybe The Players Championship is a close second, but these are by far the firmest greens we've played all year, which is kind of ironic since we've got so much rain. But this SubAir system is just amazing.
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