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Fog Should Clear in Three Years

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Times Staff Writer

When it sets up its U.S. Open courses, the U.S. Golf Assn. thinks about the length of rough, the firmness of greens and the width of fairways, but despite what happened last week at Torrey Pines in the Buick Invitational, one thing that’s never on anyone’s mind is fog.

Four fog delays adding up to more than eight hours might have messed up the Buick, but not enough to give David Fay, the USGA’s executive director, a moment of worry about the 2008 U.S. Open to be staged in June, or fog month, at Torrey Pines.

“Not at all,” Fay said. “You can’t worry about fog three years ahead of time, and you can’t worry about it three minutes ahead of time because of the vagaries of fog.”

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What about the so-called “June gloom” and the chance of fog?

“I also know if it’s clear, the sun will probably bring breezes. We also couldn’t worry about Pinehurst [in 1999] when it was cool and wet and foggy,” Fay said.

“All I know is that we are very excited about our long-overdue return to Southern California for the Open.”

The last U.S. Open in Southern California was in 1948 at Riviera.

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By the time the PGA Tour shows up at Pebble Beach in two weeks, a temporary reconstruction project will be complete on a 500-square-foot portion of the 18th fairway that was washed out because of heavy rains.

The area, which is about 270 yards from the tee, is supposed to be repaired by Friday.

A vertical seawall is being built within the eroded area, and it will be anchored to the bedrock below and the soil under the fairway.

The wall is going to be back-filled with soil and then coated and textured with a liquid cement to fit the character of the coastline.

Because the project is considered temporary under an emergency-repair permit, plans for a permanent repair are still on the drawing board for this year.

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Maybe Tiger Woods did win at Torrey Pines playing “lousy,” as Tom Lehman noted, but don’t expect to see Woods back on the West Coast portion of the schedule any time soon, perhaps not until the Match Play Championship at La Costa, Feb. 23.

Woods may wind up taking a month off. He isn’t sure he’ll play Riviera the week before La Costa, and there are indications he has Doral on his radar, which is being played the week after La Costa.

The problem for Woods is that if he does play Riviera and Doral, his workload would mean five tournaments in six weeks through the Players Championship, and six out of eight through the Masters.

Last year, Woods played six tournaments before the Masters, so expect him to cut out Doral or Riviera this year.

By the way, Woods hit 44.6% of the fairways at Torrey Pines, far below his 2004 average of 56.1%, but he was second (to Scott McCarron) in putting and fourth in driving distance.

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The Champions Tour, formerly the Senior PGA Tour, is off and walking. For the first time, no carts are allowed during competition, a situation that 69-year-old Gary Player said is entirely correct.

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“I would be embarrassed, quite honestly, to see a 60-year-old man and wife come out and watch us play, and you stand here and they want to see you tee off and the next thing you zoom off in a cart and they say, ‘Well, now, here we are, 60 years old, how in the world are we going to possibly keep up with those guys?’

“And we are supposed to be athletes. And I mean, Arnold Palmer at 76, he’s had a prostate cancer operation and he still walks around there.”

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Empire Lakes Golf Course has signed a three-year renewal to play host to the Nationwide Tour’s Mark Christopher Charity Classic through 2008, with options through 2011.

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Vijay Singh leads a list of 33 players on the World Golf Hall of Fame ballots that were mailed to voters this week. Singh, who won nine times in 2004, earned a record $10.9 million, rose to No. 1 in the rankings and won the PGA Tour player-of-the-year award.

Larry Nelson, who won three majors, and Fuzzy Zoeller, who won two majors, also are on the ballot, which includes Curtis Strange, Fred Couples, Mark O’Meara, Harold “Jug” McSpaden, Henry Picard, Macdonald Smith, Ken Venturi, Craig Wood, Sandy Lyle, Graham Marsh, Colin Montgomerie, Kel Nagle, Christy O’Connor Sr., Jumbo Ozaki and Ian Woosnam.

The 2004 inductees were Tom Kite and Asao Aoki. The 2005 induction ceremony will be Nov. 14.

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