PGA West Should Make It Tough on Legends

These are truly the oldies but goodies of golf. But aren’t they asking too much?

The 18th Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf, the event that inspired the Senior PGA Tour, opens today at PGA West. A better-ball tournament in three divisions, it features some of the biggest names in the sport, including Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino and Dave Stockton. The ages range from Tony Jacklin, 50, to Snead, 82.

Palmer and partner Tom Wargo will be among those challenging defending champions Dale Douglass and Charles Coody for 54 holes over the next three days in the Legends Division, which includes most of the senior tour’s top players.

Those players 60 and older, headed by Gene Littler, Don January, Miller Barber and Jim Ferree, will also play three days in the Legendary division. Those 70 and over, in the Demaret division, will play a 36-hole event Saturday and Sunday.

The surprise is that the tournament has come to the Stadium Course, among the world’s toughest. It is so difficult that PGA Tour players decided after one year to eliminate it from the courses used for the Bob Hope tournament.

The seniors will play from the championship tees of the Pete Dye-designed course. It measures 6,843 yards and, although par is 72, it has a rating of 74.2.

Because there were so many low rounds shot on the senior tour last year, officials decided to make the courses tougher.

The Stadium Course might be carrying it too far, but, when Legends founder Fred Raphael found that PGA West was available, he wasted no time.

“When the senior tour told us there was an opening for our event in the desert, we jumped at it,” he said. “We had 17 great years in Texas, and we made history there. We created history at Onion Creek (in Austin) in 1978. But I’ve traveled all over the world to cover golf, and the Coachella Valley is one of the most beautiful places in the world for golf.”

The Douglass-Coody duo won last year by a stroke over Jim Colbert-Bob Murphy and Jim Dent-Chi Chi Rodriguez.