Low and Behold, Frazar Leads With 63

What’s the secret for playing well at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic? Hey, there’s no secret.

“It’s a putting tournament,” Jeff Maggert said.

And? There has to be some trouble out there, right?

“Just make sure you don’t fire a couple into the houses,” Mark Calcavecchia said. “It’s a birdie fest.”

It’s also a real love fest this week here on four of the desert’s finest grass-carpeted playpens, where golf balls travel down courses shorter than your driveway, then roll across perfectly delightful greens and drop into the hole so softly, you can almost hear them sigh.

Tee it up and the birdies will come. That’s what fans expect at the Hope, and so do the players. After Wednesday’s first round, the leader is Harrison Frazar, who torched the Palmer Course at PGA West with a 63 and took a one-shot lead over last-minute entry Cameron Beckman, Calcavecchia and five others.

Beckman is the replacement for Jesper Parnevik, the defending champion who withdrew Tuesday night to wait for his wife to give birth. Beckman didn’t know he was in the tournament until he read it in the newspaper at 7 a.m. Wednesday.

“It was strange,” he said. “It was kind of different.”

No, strange is when you shoot 35-under and set a PGA Tour record, as Tom Kite did in 1993.

Different is when you shoot 32 under and lose, which is what Calcavecchia did in 1997 when John Cook birdied the last hole and finished 33 under.

Calcavecchia isn’t sure if this week is going to resemble that one.

“Well, the weather forecast is awful good and the scores . . . I’ve got to believe that we are going to have to get into the 30s [under par] to win this tournament, unless some vicious breeze comes up,” he said.

On opening day, the only breeze was made by red-hot pros needing oven mitts to hold their scorecards.

Exactly 102 players in the field of 128 shot under par in golf’s version of the limbo.

Calcavecchia posted his eight-under 64 at La Quinta, which he considers the second toughest of the four courses in the rotation, Bermuda Dunes being the toughest. Actually, the toughest thing to do this week is to keep track of how many birdies you are stacking up.

“Everybody is spread out all over the place,” Calcavecchia said. “There’s no leaderboard-watching going on here the first four days. . . . You just want to go out there and make as many birdies as you can and add them up after four days and see where we stand on Sunday.”

Calcavecchia has already won this year, at Phoenix, and Frazar is still searching for the first victory of his four-year career. After making nine birdies, Frazar is off to a good start to make his breakthrough. Last week at Torrey Pines, he tied for 10th, but he missed the cut two times in the three prior tournaments.

At least Frazar knows what to expect here.

“The scores are going to be low,” he said. “The guys are going to shoot low. They always do. It doesn’t matter what the weather is doing. You’ve got to make a bunch of birdies.”

In addition to Calcavecchia and Beckman at 64, the others closest to Frazar are Maggert, Glen Day, Stephen Ames, Tom Pernice and Kevin Sutherland. David Duval, who won here in 1999, shot a seven-under 65 at Bermuda Dunes and is tied with six others, including Brent Geiberger and Jason Gore of Van Nuys, a member of Pepperdine’s 1997 NCAA championship team.

Duval is back after missing his last two cuts--one while playing Nike irons and the other while playing Titleist irons. For the record, Duval was using Nike irons at Bermuda Dunes but was coy about it. He kept the irons covered with a towel most of the time.

There are still 72 holes to go, which leaves a lot of time for someone to go really, really low. And that can certainly happen out here. Remember, Cook went 62-63 on the weekend to beat Calcavecchia in 1997. Day said everybody who plays here knows there is little rough, the greens are perfect and the race is on to see who gets the most birdies.

“You feel like if you play five or six holes and you don’t make a birdie, you’re losing ground,” he said. “You know the birdies are out there. They are going to come. You’re going to make a bunch of birdies. The whole key is just to stay patient.”

Maybe that’s the secret to playing this tournament after all.