“Golf-Tiger targets Torrey to launch his 2011 campaign” plus 1 more |
| Golf-Tiger targets Torrey to launch his 2011 campaign Posted: 19 Jan 2011 12:01 PM PST By Mark Lamport-Stokes LOS ANGELES, Jan 19 (Reuters) - With the first winless golf season of his professional career still fresh in his memory, Tiger Woods will launch his 2011 campaign in San Diego next week at one of his most successful venues. Woods confirmed on Wednesday he will play his first tournament of the year in the PGA Tour's Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines where he has won the title a record six times. "I'm really looking forward to competing," the 35-year-old American said on his website (http://web.tigerwoods). "I've been working hard on my game and I'm excited about 2011." World number two Woods will be eager to make a fresh start next week after spending much of last year unsuccessfully trying to repair his marriage and also undergoing the fourth swing change of his career. Having been engulfed by a sex scandal at the end of 2009, he finished the 2010 PGA Tour season without a single title for the first time since he turned professional in 1996. He was also deposed as world number one by Britain's Lee Westwood on Nov. 1, ending a reign of more than five years at the top. However, since Woods joined forces with Canadian swing coach Sean Foley after the PGA Championship in August, his form has steadily improved. NEAR MISS He came close to winning his first title of 2010 in his final tournament, the Chevron World Challenge, which he hosts, where he lost to Britain's Graeme McDowell in a playoff. "The way I'm playing right now, I would like to continue playing," Woods said after being beaten by the Northern Irishman at the first extra hole at Sherwood Country Club. "I'm playing well and I'm also excited about my practice sessions coming up. I'm excited about this off-season. We, meaning Sean and I, know the direction we need to go." U.S. Open champion McDowell, who ended the most successful year of his own career at Sherwood with a fourth tournament victory, expected Woods to return to winning ways in 2011. "I'm definitely a guy who says that golf needs Tiger Woods and we need him back winning tournaments," McDowell said. "I think he'll be back winning golf tournaments in 2011. There's something a bit special about his golf game and I fully expect that mystique to return as the golf clubs start doing the talking again." Woods could not wish for a better place to begin his season than at the picturesque Torrey Pines Golf Club, which hugs cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He has triumphed in his last five starts at the venue, including the 2008 U.S. Open, where he defied doctors' orders and jabbing knee pain to beat fellow American Rocco Mediate in a 19-hole playoff. In 11 appearances at the Farmers Insurance Open, he has recorded 11 top-10s, including victories in 1999, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. He did not compete at the venue in 2009 and last year. (Editing by Steve Ginsburg; To comment on this story email sportsfeedback@thomsonreuters.com) This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Abu Dhabi's Al Ghazal: The world's top sand golf course Posted: 19 Jan 2011 12:01 PM PST ABU DHABI — This week the Abu Dhabi Golf Club will be host to all four major champs from last year, including Phil Mickelson in his first playing appearance in the Middle East, as well as a procession of the city's top oil execs, financiers and other high-living expats for whom the global financial crisis is little more than an abstraction. The bubbly will be flowing (the 19th hole is a fixture even in most parts of the Arab world), the wives will be dolled up in summer dresses and hats, and the emerald fairways will be so tight that you'll want to reach down and stroke them to confirm they are real. Blink and you could be convinced you were in Phoenix or Las Vegas. But less than a mile in the sandy distance, the Al Ghazal Golf Club is a reminder of how this once-obscure emirate was not so long ago much more than half a world away. When I played Al Ghazal for the first time — on Christmas Eve, no less, when the temp topped out at a balmy 78 degrees — I was checked in at the front desk by a woman in an abiya. In the bar, two Egyptian men were drinking beers and silently watching camel races. My friend Seamus and I were there to check out what is supposedly the top sand course in the world, not least because the rumor is that it will soon be bulldozed. For the uninitiated, Abu Dhabi was the territory of a bedouin people before oil was discovered in 1958. Western oil companies rushed in to get a piece of the action, naturally, even if most of the profits were retained by the royal family. (Abu Dhabi is one of seven members of the United Arab Emirates but controls the vast majority of its oil wealth. Contrary to popular perception, neighboring Dubai has relatively little oil money.) It was British oil workers in 1961 who created the emirate's first golf club, a sand course on Das Island, a tiny atoll about 100 miles out in the Persian Gulf that was the site of some of the country's first oil production. Given the natural topography, a grass course was out of the question, so the roughnecks instead constructed elevated mounds using a clay substance called subkha. These were the greens, or the "browns" as they soon became known, according to Dennis Cox, an American helicopter pilot and 10-year Abu Dhabi resident who is writing a book on sand golf. But while the clay created the necessary shape, it did not prove a suitable putting surface. Through trial and error, the workers concocted a top dressing, essentially a mixture of sand and oil, that rolls smoothly and even presents a spongy landing area for an incoming approach shot. And to ensure that a match did not feel like one fairway bunker shot after another, they agreed that each player could carry around a small patch of Astroturf. As long as the player's ball was in the fairway, he could place it on his swatch before hitting. By the 1970s, sand golf had moved off Das Island and was a popular pastime for the growing number of expats in Abu Dhabi proper. In the Al Ghazal clubhouse, there is a collection of vintage photos — think Johnny McEnroe circa 1983 — showing sunburned expats in headbands and short white shorts. It wasn't always pretty, but for more than a quarter-century sand golf was the only game in town. That all changed in the late 1990s, when Abu Dhabi began spending some of its vast oil wealth on sod, irrigation systems and fertilizer. The first grass course opened in 1998. The original Abu Dhabi Golf Club, a sand course that happened to occupy the infield of a horse-racing track, lost more than half of its members overnight. "They all went to grass," Cox told me with more than a little bitterness. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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