- April 13, 2004
PGA TOUR
- Since Phil Mickelson will not be competing this week, Bernhard Langer
will remain the last player to win the Masters and win the following week as well on the PGA TOUR. Langer won in Augusta in 1985 and came back the following week to win the MCI Heritage Classic at Hilton Head.
- The T13 finish by Casey Wittenberg was the best finish by an amateur in
a PGA TOUR event since Justin Rose finished T4 at the 1998 British Open.
- With his second-place finish at the Masters, Ernie Els collected
$702,000 and became the fifth player in TOUR history to earn more than $20 million in a career. Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Davis Love III and Phil Mickelson are the other four.
- Sandy Lyle's T37 at the Masters was his best finish on the PGA TOUR
since a seventh-place effort at the 2000 SEI Pennsylvania Classic.
- Close competitions have been the call of the day on the PGA TOUR in
recent weeks. In six of the last seven tournaments, the winner wasn't decided until the final stroke.
- Should Davis Love III successfully defend his title this week at the
MCI Heritage, he would be the first player since Sam Snead at the 1949-50, 1955-56 Greater Greensboro Opens to win the same tournament, back-to-back, on two different occasions. Love also won the Hilton Head Island event in 1991-92.
CHAMPIONS TOUR
- In case you have lost track of this amazing streak, when Dana Quigley
begins play this week at the Blue Angels Classic, it will be his 240th consecutive start on the Champions Tour.
- Watch out for Gil Morgan this week in Pensacola. Not only is the
veteran off to a good start, but he's played well in his career at The Moors GC. In eight starts at the venue, he's played 22 rounds of golf with 15 scores in the 60s to his credit. He won here in 2000 and also has a playoff loss (1997), a T6 (2001), a 9th (2003) and a T9 (1998).
- Look for Hubert Green, a long-time resident of the area, to make his
return to the Champions Tour this week at the Blue Angels Classic. Green will be making only his second start of the season and his second since undergoing treatment for cancer last July.
NATIONWIDE TOUR
- With a 132-player field competing this week on the PGA TOUR, this
week's Nationwide Tour stop -- The First Tee Arkansas Classic -- will feature a strong field that includes 26 former PGA TOUR winners.
- This week's event will be the first of two consecutive Nationwide Tour
stops in the State of Arkansas. The First Tee Arkansas Classic will be played this week on the second-longest course on the Tour, the Diamante CC, which stretches to 7,519 yards. Next week, the Tour heads for Fort Smith and the Rheem Classic which will be held at Hardscrabble CC, the shortest course on Tour at 6,619 yards.
- Longer isn't necessarily harder. The much longer Diamante CC was the
11th hardest course on the Nationwide Tour in 2003 while the shortest course on the Tour, Hardscrabble CC, was the third hardest.
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