Anyone who put in a modest amount of research before the Bridgestone Invitational would have read Tiger Woods' comment that he intends to play in all four of the events which comprise the play-off series of the PGA Tour's new-fangled FedEx Cup.
In order, those events are the Barclays Championship, the Deutsche Bank Championship, the BMW Championship and the Tour Championship and they take place over the last four weeks of the Golf Masters season.
Everyone already knew Woods was going to play in the Bridgestone and this week's PGA Championship so all told it meant six tournament weeks out of seven, which is almost unheard of for the world number one.
You could pretty much have bet the mortgage on Woods starting that run with victory in the Bridgestone which was being played on the South Course at the Firestone Country Club where he had won five times before. "It's hard to describe, but this golf course just gives me a bunch of confidence every time I come here," said Woods.
Put all those factors together and you would expect Woods to have been heavily in demand during last week's transfer window despite the €8 milllion price tag that makes Tiger '07 the most expensive player in Golf Masters history.
Well Tiger didn't have to play second fiddle to anybody on the golf course but in our transfer log he was a long way behind Hunter Mahan. The 25-year old winner of the Travelers Championship is available for €0.6m which coupled with his recent run of good form makes him the hottest ticket in Golf Masters. Mahan was signed by 114 managers this week compared to just 10 who brought in Tiger.
Weekly winner John Canning was among those to recruit Mahan and he already had Woods which gave him a headstart in the chase for a fourball at Druids Heath and a Nike windvest. He also had Justin Leonard in action at Firestone and the trio contributed 227,437.
Where Canning's On the Rails really scored was with their choice of cheap European players. Robert-Jan Derksen (80,000 for second), Gary Murphy and Steve Webster (45,333 each for tied sixth) and Kyron Sullivan (23,875 for tied-13th) all fared well at the Russian Open and On the Rails totalled 412,979 for the week. That gave them an exceptionally large winning margin of €57,958 over Downey 1 managed by Keith Downey but overall leader Eamon Murray must have taken almost as much satisfaction as Canning from the week's events.
Murray's Eamo's Heroes 3 are a Tiger-free team but they still managed to come in seventh for the week with 333,938. Previously 82,920 ahead of Ian Baker's NBG 4, they now head Paul Dowling's Bjorn Free by €218,351. Tiger is a short-priced favourite to bridge most of that gap by winning the PGA which starts today at Southern Hills and counts for double money but Murray needn't be too worried. Of the top 50, only Frank Hastings (25th with NC's team) and Gearóid Fitzmaurice (32nd with Tiger's Lads) include Woods and unless there's a significant change in transfer patterns, that situation won't alter much in the near future.
