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Sports Watch

By Bill Kwon

Friday, January 28, 2000

GOLF WATCH

Senior Skins Game will
be over before it’s over

TALK about close-your-eyes time. This year's Senior Skins Game featuring the four players who took part in the original Skins Game in 1983 - Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Tom Watson - will be a made-for-television event in more ways than one.

All 18 holes will be played tomorrow, starting at 10 a.m. at the Mauna Lani Resort South Course. But only the first 12 holes will be shown live on ABC-TV.

The final six holes will be televised delayed on Sunday as a lead-in to Super Bowl XXXIV between the Tennessee Titans and the St. Louis Rams on the same network.

Want to know who won? Read Sunday morning's sports section.

You don't want to know because you want to watch it on KITV later that morning? Look at the Long's ad, if you don't turn to it first like most people I know.

It should create for some amusing situations tomorrow.

For one thing, the players will have an intermission after the 12th hole. They'll change clothes and make believe like it's another day at work.

Trouble is, the gallery will be wearing the same outfits, so who's fooling whom? Plus, the sun should be creeping along, lengthening the shadows.

So much for verisimilitude.

Why all this, you ask? It has never happened before in all the years at Mauna Lani.

Well, it's because ABC is doing the Super Bowl telecast this Sunday with Al, Boomer and the gang.

With the final six holes of the Senior Skins Games already a wrap and in the can, the network can control the lead-in to the Super Bowl without having to worry about any unpredictable occurrences.

So much for spontaneity.

One of the interesting sidebars tomorrow will focus on Player and Watson, who have had a feud going.

Will they kiss and make up, now that they're both "geezers" playing on the same tour again, or will they remain grumpy old men to each other.

In a press conference, Player seemed cordial.

"Tom's a highly intelligent man with a great education, who has done well in the game of golf," Player said.

But Player adds, "He can hit it farther, but I think we can still putt as well as he can."

Now, that wasn't a dig at Tom's shaky history of putting, is it, Gary?

TWICE AS NICE:

The Hualalai Resort is adding a second 18-hole course to complement the current Nicklaus-designed course, site of the MasterCard Championship for the last four years.

The new course will be designed by Tom Weiskopf. Construction will start late this summer and is expected to be completed in early 2002. It will be located mauka of the existing course.

"My job is to complement that golf course and this development," said Weiskopf, who also designed the Waikoloa King's Course up the Kona Coast from Hualalai.

BEST WISHES:

All the best to crackerjack PR person Linn Nishikawa, who leaves the Kapalua Bay resort as its public relations director after 12 years, to start her own one-woman firm, at least for now.

No one was more cordial and indispensable to the visiting golf media as Nishikawa.

She made the resort's two golf tournaments - the Kapalua International and the Mercedes Championships - the best-run operation of any of the events that make up what the local golf media call the "Hawaii Mini Tour."