Nick Price, who aggravated muscle damage in his left side during the Alfred Dunhill Cup earlier this month, is expected to play in the world's richest tournament, starting in Houston on Thursday. It is the end-of-season USPGA Tour Championship which carries a prize fund of $4 million of which the winner will receive $720,000.
An unexpected qualifier for the elite, 30-man field, is Bill Glasson who made dramatic improvement in the money list by capturing top prize of $324,000 in the 90-hole Las Vegas Invitational on Sunday. The event was also notable for the continued poor form of the defending champion, Tiger Woods.
With a three-putt bogey on the last for a final round of 75, Woods finished down the field on fiveunder-par - no fewer than 15 strokes behind Glasson. Indeed his sharp decline in form was further emphasised by the fact that last Sunday's aggregate was 27 strokes outside his winning score of 12 months ago.
When asked after the tournament to single out his most memorable moment in 1997, Woods replied: "I think I'm going to surprise a lot of people when I say that it had nothing to do with my win in the Masters. The biggest moment of the year for me was my father's homecoming after open-heart surgery - and I happened to be there to greet him."
Surgery was certainly an appropriate topic, given the experience of Glasson in recent years. Though last Sunday's win was his seventh on the American tour, he seemed to spend most of his time in hospital, recovering from 11 different operations.
Indeed he missed much of last season - he played in only eight tournaments - after surgeons did a total reconstruction of his right elbow. It meant an absence from golfing action until March of this year. So it was small wonder that he became highly emotional in his moment of victory.
"After the surgery last year, I thought I would never golf again," he said. "In fact it's all been a bit of a struggle for me in recent years, what with one problem and another." The 37-year-old California-born player has undergone four knee operations and four sinus operations, along with lip and forearm surgery, quite apart from the right elbow.
He became so depressed after sitting out most of the 1991 season because of back problems, that he seriously contemplated signing on the state register for permanent disability. And his troubles aren't over yet, insofar as he has to enter hospital next week for screening on a problem in his left elbow.
Yet he said optimistically: "This win means that I can really look forward to next season." And for a player with such a medical history, it seems remarkable that his main hobby is flying his own plane. In fact he has often claimed it to be his only reason for playing golf.
In Las Vegas, Glasson shook off the challenge of Duffy Waldorf, Billy Mayfair, David Edwards and Mark Calcavecchia, through exemplary play of the difficult last three holes where he shot birdie, par, par for a one-shot victory.
A re-shaped money list left Billy Andrade bitterly disappointed. By a margin of only five dollars, he was squeezed out of the top-30 who will be in action at the Champions Club in Houston later this week. The qualifiers, in order, are: Tiger Woods, Justin Leonard, Davis Love, Scott Hoch, Greg Norman, Steve Elkington, Jim Furyk, Ernie Els, David Duval, Phil Mickelson, Brad Faxon, Jesper Parnevik, Mark O'Meara, Nick Price, Loren Roberts, Vijay Singh, Mark Calcavecchia, Stuart Appleby, Steve Jones, Tom Lehman, Paul Stankowski, Frank Nobilo, Lee Janzen, Jeff Maggert, Tommy Tolles, Scott McCarron, Bill Glasson, John Cook, Stewart Cink and Andrew Magee.
