Quail Hollow taking bite out of big boys

The Wachovia Championship attracted the best players in golf, with nine of the top 12 players in the Official World Golf Ranking participating this week.

You wouldn't know it by the scores through the first two rounds.

The 7,442-yard Quail Hollow Club is bringing most of them to their knees, and Mother Nature is helping to push them there with a blustery wind.

The scoring average for the first two rounds is 2.34 strokes above par, while through the first 17 stroke-play events on the PGA Tour this year, the highest average was less than 2.25 above par at the MCI Heritage at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head Island. The highest average through two rounds was nearly 2.7 above par at the Masters.

The only player better than 5 under through two rounds is Sergio Garcia at 7-under 137, and the 4-over cut line is within a shot of the highest cut number this year.

It could have been even worse on Friday, when the par-72 course played to a stroke average of 74.63, had it not been for a light rain on Thursday night that softened the course a bit.

"I thank the Pope it rained last night," Garcia said, "because if the greens would have stayed as firm as they were [Thursday] with this kind of wind, we probably would have had some trouble with balls moving on the greens, and then it would have been almost impossible to hit some of those greens."

A steady 15- to 20-mph wind that gusted near 30 mph most of the day on Friday left players guessing. "That ball would get going like a Frisbee and you can't know where it was going to come down," said Joey Sindelar, the 2004 champion who is tied for second.

The fact that it seldom came from a predictable direction made an already difficult course dangerous. There were 90 double bogeys and 18 triples or worse on Friday.

"At times you think it's calm and you're going to be making contact with the ball and the wind comes up. The ball can go anywhere," said Vijay Singh, who is tied with Sindelar and D.J. Trahan for second. "This is the worst kind of wind where it's up and down, up and down. If you take the right club, you don't know if it's the right one or not."

On more than one occasion Garcia hit a shot thinking it would be good and the wind left him befuddled. "Sometimes you're posing thinking, 'Wow, what a shot,' " Garcia said, "and it makes you look a little stupid."

Players have hit just 47.7 percent of the fairways through two rounds, which is nearly 7 percent fewer than the fewest hit on tour this year. Many of the holes are doglegs with the fairway sloping away from the players, and the wind didn't always help matters. "Some of those fairways are almost impossible to hit," Garcia said.

Quail Hollow's undulating greens are wind-dried, slick and fast, and several pins were near ridges on Friday. "On number eight it was like putting on peanut brittle - very, very dry," Sindelar said. "I made probably a four- or five-footer for par, otherwise it would still be rolling."

Players weary of battling the course for 15 holes have perhaps the toughest stretch of three finishing holes on tour. The 16th, a 478-yard par-4 with a narrow landing area and shallow, undulating green, is playing to a stroke average of 4.28. The 17th, a 217-yard par-3 with water left and little bail-out area, is playing to an average of 3.43. And the 18th, a 478-yard par-4 with a meandering creek, is currently the toughest hole on tour, playing to a 4.45 average.

"Those holes are torture," Sindelar said.

The difficulty of Quail Hollow all but ensures one of the world's top players will be in contention on the back nine on Sunday.

"This golf course is such that if you shoot a round in the mid-60s you'll move up that board, and that's the great thing about it," Tiger Woods said. "Hopefully tomorrow I can do that."

Woods isn't the only player who enjoys the difficult conditions. "To me, the harder the better," said South Carolina alum Brett Quigley, who is tied for fifth at 4 under. "We're supposed to be the best in the world, so we can handle it."

The Sun News (Myrtle Beach, SC) - Copyright (c) 2005 The Sun News

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