Mother Nature doling it out at PODS
By Gary Shelton, Times Columnist
Published March 9, 2008
PALM HARBOR
On Friday, there was rain and lightning.
On Saturday, there was wind and cold.
Who knows? By today, there could be volcanoes. Perhaps later on, perhaps someone will chip the ice off the water hazards.
Welcome to the Inconvenient Truth Open, the golf tournament where most of the pressure is barometric. At the PODS Championship, it seems the most important ability is trying to weather the weather.
Ah, yes. Survivor golf. There is nothing like hitting a drive when the Spanish moss is leaning sideways like a new state flag. There is nothing as satisfying as striking an iron when the cold has numbed a golfer's fingers. And there is nothing quite like the sight of a leaderboard where players are falling like Keith Richards out of a palm tree.
For the inner duffer, of course, there is a sadistic glee to all of this. If you want to watch rich men suffer, if you want to watch great golfers look mortal, then Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club is the place for you. Why? Because, one supposes, North Dakota must have been busy.
In other words, it was a fairly miserable day to take a golf ball out for a walk. Even Stewart Cink, who did so better than anyone else, managed to stub his toe. After playing a round and a half, Cink bogeyed his last hole ... in the dark. What? Weren't the other elements difficult enough?
Suggestion: If the tournament is still looking for sponsorship, someone should give a thought to Gore-Tex.
The thing is, the weather seems to be getting in the way of a pretty good golf tournament. It is one thing to prove that the weather patterns on this planet have become confused, but it is quite another to take the leaderboard with it.
Take Cink. If you don't notice Tiger Woods' footprints still fresh on his backside, Cink is the perfect kind of golfer to the lead the kind of tournament as is the PODS. He's seventh on the PGA Tour's money list, a statistic that could get even more important if he is not washed away by the flood in today's final round and change.
Want to know how bad the weather was? It was so awful in the morning that Cink believes he had an advantage because, later on, it was only slightly miserable.
"One gust could mean two shots," Cink said. "You know, bad things happen to everybody out there."
Then there is Billy Mayfair, the kind of story the PODS Championship deserves, the kind of story that all of us deserve.
How can you not pull for a guy such as Mayfair, the 41-year-old who is two strokes behind Cink?
It was seven months ago that Mayfair was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Four days after discovering a lump while in the shower, Mayfair had surgery. Since then, he has had a series of radiation treatment. After all of that, would you expect a little bad weather to take away this guy's smile?
This is why we watch sport, to watch athletes do what we cannot do after suffering the pitfalls of life that we cannot escape. For Mayfair, these are unpromised days of uncommon success.
Still, it has been a long time since Mayfair was in striking distance on the final day of a tournament. It has been longer, since 1998, since he has won.
You could say the same for Lee Janzen, who was among the leaders until falling back. It has been 10 years since Janzen won, too. In other words, there was a point where you wondered if the wind had blown this entire tournament back to 1998. And nothing says ill winds like time travel, does it?
As for today, who knows what to expect? Perhaps it will be as cold as an insurance man's heart. Perhaps it will be as windy as a presidential debate. Perhaps all the birdies will resemble penguins.
In the end, it will be a tournament that will be survived more than conquered.
Who knows?
The guess here? It ends with a Cink hole.