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By GREG AUMAN
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 15, 2001
If the 642-yard fifth hole at the U.S. Open makes you wonder who could come up with such a Tiger-worthy challenge, the answer is, well, just about anyone these days.
There's no shortage of imagination when computers and golf collide, and a contest this summer asks novice cyber-designers to build a championship 18-hole course.
The winner gets to play a round with PGA Tour player Sergio Garcia -- nine holes on the winning computer course and nine on a real course. (Just a tip: Be careful when asking him which club to use.)
The contest, at armchairarchitect.com, uses Arnold Palmer Course Designer software from Microsoft Links 2001, a popular simulation available for about $25. The program allows you to choose everything from distance to surroundings. "Courses come alive with flying birds!" the preview exclaims.
Because the software is from Microsoft, you keep expecting that cursed paperclip to show up and say, "It looks like you're trying to make a dogleg." The contest is very user-friendly, and the site has expert tips to keep your course from looking like something out of Caddyshack 2.
"Avoid cluttering up the landscape with useless features and hazards," you read, control-Xing that scale model of the Statue of Liberty overlooking the fairway. The advice is more than common sense, though: Rotate holes in a clockwise direction, it explains, to keep slices on the property.
And if course design seems a little ambitious, you can always just play the courses. Before you joke about getting your mouse re-gripped, know that 200,000 golfers competed on the Virtual Golf Association tour (linkstour.zone.com) last season.
The top VGA hackers advanced to a 64-player tournament that wrapped up in Hawaii. Paul Willey, a retired Army electronics specialist from Maine, won $100,000 from Bill Gates.
What makes the story special is that Willey, 37, has multiple sclerosis, and he has waged a Casey Martin-like battle for better handicapped access on local courses. The Links program gave him a chance to play golf without the restrictions the disease has placed on his body, and last year he launched a Web site (withoutwheels.org) to inspire other people with disabilities.
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TID-BYTES: The odds on Tiger Woods winning this weekend have been even -- $1 bet, $1 won -- but public sentiment may be even more in his favor. A poll at NBCsports.com asked how many strokes Woods will win by, and 20 percent of 12,000-plus voters said he wouldn't win. Three percent said he'd match last year's winning margin of 15 strokes or better. ... ESPN.com's poll asked which golfer will finish second, and Woods won that one, too, getting 31 percent to edge Phil Mickelson and David Duval.