Couples leader in abbreviated first round - April 24, 2003
Did Michelangelo know Mona Lisa’s dimples? Could Rodin describe the pucker in The Kiss? Would Cezanne have known what play to make had he taken a seat in Card Players?
Fred Couples
Peter Jacobsen traipsed across the canvas he had painted, splashing a 67 onto the board on Thursday as Redstone Golf Club said hello to the PGA Tour. It was the warmest greeting since the Allies arrived in Paris. Let’s keep Baghdad out of this.
“I really think this is a golf course you can’t dislike,” said Fred Couples, who led the blitz with a seven-under 65. Maybe not everyone was enraptured but most of the field found little not to love. Jacobsen, who had joined with Jim Hardy of Houston to design the 7,508-yard layout, said his first-round experience felt like playing his home course.
Local knowledge? “Absolutely,” he said. The only wrinkle in this theory was that so many others made themselves at home.
Stuart Appleby
Stuart Appleby, who won the 1999 Shell Houston Open at the Tournament Players Course in The Woodlands, shot 66 to trail Couples by one. Vijay Singh, the defending champion, tossed off a casual 67, along with Jose Coceres, David Berganio, Jr., and Jacobsen. (Carl Paulson and Tom Pernice, Jr., at six-under and David Peoples and Briny Baird at five-under were on the course when play was halted due to darkness.) Everybody else shot 68.
Well, not quite, but flocks of birdies darkened the skies. A month earlier, Jacobsen had forecast a winning score of 8 to 12 under par. After his opening round he revised that to 15 or 16 under.
Stay tuned for updates.
Jacobsen might prove right, of course. The forecast for the final three days called for sunshine. If the docile breeze of early Thursday should drift out in favor of more typically brisk springtime gusties, Redstone may not prove so accommodating. In the opening round, scores did indeed skew higher for those who started after the rain, which caused a 3 1/2-hour delay, passed through.
Raw scores may not be as much an issue as raw power. Hardy and Jacobsen know how to draw a crowd of the PGA Tour’s marquee players. Give them wide horizons and let them wield their biggest hunks of titanium and you’ll be more popular than the cart girl.
Muscles are in. Modern baseball parks dictate a different brand of ball and the golf courses tour players enjoy let them swing from the heels as well. Like the Astros, Redstone doesn’t dwell on defense.
This seems an entirely agreeable development for power-hungry fans, who find a clever flop shot amusing but a 330-yard poke off the tee inspirational.
Jacobsen was quick to note that it was not only long-knockers who went low. He himself was a case in point. He would have come in only one shot off Couples’ lead, in fact, if not for pushing his tee shot on No. 18 into some mulch at the base of a tree. He and Hardy had added that tree and a few others.
“What happened to me is exactly what we wanted to have happen,” he said. “We felt there was a little too much room to blow it to the right so we planted those trees to tighten up the hole.”
Even the great artist occasionally outwits himself.
Six former Shell Houston Open champions are still in the FedEx Cup hunt, teeing it up this week in the second round of the PGA TOUR ...
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