Sports Watch

By Bill Kwon

Tuesday, January 11, 2000

Kapalua no walk
in the park for pros

THIS week's Sony Open in Hawaii will have a tough act to follow after that spectacular shootout between Tiger Woods and Ernie Els in the Mercedes Championship.

Tiger's victory was seen on prime time nationally and it couldn't have had a more gorgeous setting than Kapalua's Plantation Course.

This time, the Waialae Country Club will be the venue as the PGA Tour concludes its one-two paradise punch to open the 2000 season.

Tiger's gone, but Els is at Waialae for the first time and should be the player to beat in the tour's first full-field event.

Els and the 19 other 1999 champions who played on Maui last week will find Waialae's flat terrain a walk in the park, compared to the hilly - sidehill, uphill, downhill - Plantation Course.

It's the most demanding golf course to walk - for players and spectators - on the tour. Some of the pros consider Plantation and Castle Pines, site of The International, as the two most difficult.

For the par-73, 7,263-yard, Plantation Course, designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, it's not surprisingly so since it sprawls over 750 acres on several plateaus on the West Maui Mountains.

For most courses, 200 acres would be more than adequate.

Plantation is a resort course, really not suitable for play without use of a golf cart. For example, it is four-tenths of a mile from the fifth green to the sixth tee.

SO even the PGA Tour, which is in a court battle with Casey Martin regarding the use of a golf cart, has to bend the rules a bit for the Mercedes Championships.

Players are shuttled from the fifth green to the sixth tee, ninth green to the 10th tee and from tee to green at the par-3 eighth hole, which is a long, slippery walk down and up a ravine.

Also, for the first time this year - and probably for the last time - the players could ride from tee to green at the uphill par-4 fourth hole, even though it is only 382 yards in length.

"No. 4 is just a tough walk. We're concerned about the pace of play," said Henry Hughes, PGA Tour's chief of operations.

Shuttling from green to tee is not an uncommon practice. But tee to green is very rare.

So is the PGA Tour being hypocritical about the use of golf carts, allowing it in certain cases, and yet insisting that Martin shouldn't be allowed to use ride?

MORE so, since today's golfers are stressing a regimen of lifting weights and running as a way of building up their stamina.

"It's difficult to compete against players who are so much stronger than you are," said Tiger Woods, who has added 22 pounds since turning pro. "You just need to get stronger to keep up.

Woods believes that pace of play is the main reason why PGA officials agree to using a shuttle system.

But if the tour insists that walking is an integral part of the game, Woods says, "We should just be able to hoof it all the way."

Plantation is obviously a course that Martin can never play if he can't ride a golf cart.

Not that he wants to make a special case for Martin, but Tiger feels his former Stanford teammate should be allowed to use a golf cart on the tour.

"If he could ride, he would have an advantage in stamina out here," Woods said. "But you have to seriously consider that he has a very painful leg. I've roomed with him on the road. People have no idea how much pain he has.

"He still has to play with pain. We play pain free."