Preliminaries aside, it's time to get serious

For all the sparkle and smiles that came with the Tiger Woods-Michael Jordan pro-am party Wednesday, the main order of business comes today when the Wachovia Championship begins at the Quail Hollow Club.

With the top 10 players in the world golf rankings sprinkled across the tee sheet and a course primed for the moment, the tournament begins with great expectations.

It begins with:

• Woods, the world's No. 1, playing his first tournament since finishing tied for second at the Masters last month.
• Phil Mickelson in the second week of his new golf life with swing coach Butch Harmon, coming off a tie for third Sunday at the EDS Byron Nelson Championship and returning to a course where he's flirted with winning.
• Defending champion Jim Furyk back at the place where he's tied for first the past two years, losing a playoff to Vijay Singh in 2005 before beating Trevor Immelman in extra holes last year.
• And, new Masters champion Zach Johnson, Sergio Garcia, Adam Scott, Henrik Stenson, Retief Goosen and many others lined up in a tournament that precedes The Players Championship by one week but stands far from its shadow.

"It's like a U.S. Open out there almost," Johnson said.

If the weather holds—and the course is firm enough that a little rain won't douse its fire completely—this Wachovia Championship might play differently than in its first four years.

It will be more difficult to keep the ball in the fairways if tee shots are running out, and putting will require a delicate blend of science and art to handle the slopes and speed of the greens.

"It's very difficult to hit fairways because the ball just seems to spring off them into the rough. That's, I guess, normal for me, but it's actually happening to everybody," Mickelson said, poking fun at his occasional bouts with wildness off the tee.

That's the primary reason he made public two weeks ago his switch from Rick Smith to Butch Harmon as his primary instructor. The move didn't draw quite the attention of the Woods-Jordan pairing, but it's had tongues wagging on and around the PGA Tour.

It was only briefly overshadowed by the mini-storm that erupted when Mickelson missed his tee time in the Byron Nelson pro-am last Wednesday because thunderstorms kept his plane grounded after he played in a charity event in Arkansas on Tuesday. Tour rules require players to show up for their pro-am tee times or face possible disqualification from the tournament.

Mickelson's absence was excused, but not before some players complained about a perceived double standard for top players, just one more chapter in his rarely dull story.

"It is what it is," Mickelson said ruefully of the attention swirling around him.

Woods, meanwhile, seemed to revel in the moment Wednesday, playing with his buddy Jordan while starting his build-up toward the U.S. Open next month.

Distracted by a camera taking a sequence of pictures when he was on the ninth hole, Woods stopped his swing suddenly and did not complete the hole, walking off some brief discomfort.

He spent a chunk of Wednesday afternoon hitting practice balls in the near 90-degree heat while coach Hank Haney watched him intently.

"I'm really excited to get back," Woods said. "I took probably two weeks off and started cranking up pretty hard over the last week and a half or so. I'm starting to really get back into it."

This is the start of one of the most intense stretches on the tour schedule, with The Players Championship, the Memorial and the Open lined up over a six-week period after the Wachovia.

It's one reason Europeans Darren Clarke, Padraig Harrington and Henrik Stenson are in Charlotte, adding uncommon depth to the tournament field.

There's the course itself, which has been the Wachovia Championship's ultimate selling point.

"It's a simple equation," Furyk said in explaining the attraction of this week. "It's played on a very, very good golf course. It gets a very, very strong field and always has a very big purse. Those three ingredients make a pretty darn good golf tournament."

Provider:
Knight-Ridder / Tribune Business News / Charlotte Observer, The (NC)