It’s as Wet as ... Melted Ice

Here’s how bad it was at the Nissan Open: At one point over the weekend it looked like the NHL season would resume before this tournament.

Now that’s bad.

“Welcome to my hell,” said Michael Rosenberg, the tournament chairman.

He served on the tournament committee for eight years before finally getting his one-time shot as chairman. Now he’s presiding over half a tournament.

The only way this rain-deluged edition of the Nissan Open could have been worse would be if one of the multimillion-dollar homes on the hillside above Riviera Country Club had slid down onto the course. As it stands now they’ve completed two full rounds of golf since Thursday, aren’t close to naming a winner and don’t even have a leader. And the folks in charge don’t have a firm idea of what they’ll do next.

“We’re getting into waters that I can’t remember us being in,” said Mark Russell, the PGA Tour’s tournament director.

And the waters are getting deeper by the minute. It rained hard enough Friday night to halt the second round, and rained hard enough Saturday morning that they canceled the full day’s play by 10 a.m. After they managed to complete the second round on Sunday afternoon, another downpour brought the third round to an abrupt stop at 3:15. The golfers’ workday officially ended about an hour later.

When I got out to Riviera I was surprised to see the golfers grouped in threesomes. Rain this hard usually calls for the animals to travel two by two.

Get it? Rain? Noah’s Ark.

Man, it was wet out there.

How wet was it?

On the par fives, the golfers used driver, five-iron, paddle to reach the green.

Ba-dump-bump. Thank you. I’ll be here all week. And if they try to get in a full 72 holes, so will the golfers.

The problem is there’s this little event called the Accenture World Match Play Championship starting in Carlsbad on Wednesday, and the players would really like to get down there so they can get their crack at that $7.5-million purse.

Let ‘em get going. Release everybody except the co-leaders, Chad Campbell and Adam Scott. We know the PGA Tour wants to preserve the integrity of the Nissan Open, but it’s already getting to be so gimmicky that there’s no need to play through the charade anymore. Keep Campbell and Scott in the clubhouse, wait for a break in the rain and send them out for a playoff. Perhaps they could have gotten it done in the time it took to play the abbreviated third round Sunday, when 12 golfers managed to get out on the course before the horn sounded.

We’ve already entered such goofy territory that tour representatives are making statements such as, “It’s not an official win, but it’s a win.”

That’s because if anyone should be declared the winner without three full rounds being played, they won’t be credited with a victory for purposes of the tour or the world rankings.

“It’s strange, but I guess there must be a reason for it,” Scott said. “I can’t think of one, though.”

The winner would get to keep the trophy and the money. And the winnings would count toward the list of money leaders, the top 125 of whom get a one-year tour exemption.

Russell’s fear is that if they yield to the forecasts for today, which call for an 80% chance of rain, they could wind up with the same situation they experienced Saturday afternoon: unexpectedly pleasant weather. Russell said that although the greens and fairways have held up well under the deluge, the bunkers were too soggy to meet play requirements and would have required too much time to get ready.

(At least we know Scott, for one, took advantage of his afternoon off. “Had some In-N-Out Burger, which was good,” Scott said.)

It would be better to live with the regret of settling for a quick champion than living with the completely unsatisfactory ending of a co-championship. As Herman Edwards would say, you play to win the tournament. Ties are for soccer. And hockey.

And you don’t want to be remotely like hockey right now.

We thought NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and his players’ union counterpart, Bob Goodenow, couldn’t look any worse than they did Wednesday, when the two sides couldn’t close a $6.5-million difference in the salary cap number and Bettman canceled the season. Then they got a second chance, when Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux tried to ride to the rescue and talks resumed. The preliminary reports were a little giddy, with words that the season would be “un-canceled.”

Un-canceled? I never knew that word existed before Friday. So the NHL taught us something.

Too bad the hockey folks couldn’t learn from their own demise. They had the rare opportunity to read their own obituaries, then get another chance to change the ending. They blew it. This is like Ebenezer Scrooge coming back from his time with the Ghost of Christmas Future and firing Bob Cratchit. The un-cancellation came undone.

The final round of the Nissan Open should be canceled as well. Instead of keeping everyone around and watching the skies, they can keep around the two guys who managed to play the best between raindrops in the first two rounds. Don’t make a full corps of volunteers come back and give up another day for something that may or may not take place. Don’t waste any more time.

We can guarantee one thing: It wouldn’t be the dumbest sports move of the year. The NHL folks already have that award locked up.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.