World Matchplay Championship:With a spaghetti-western backdrop of desert and cacti, there was more than a hint of the good, the bad and the ugly on the opening day of the World Matchplay Championship at The Gallery Golf Club.
The good was produced by the defending champion, Geoff Ogilvy, who took up where he left off last year with a facile 4 and 3 win over the 2001 champion, Steve Stricker, in sun-splashed Arizona.
But the bad and the ugly came from the likes of the South African Ernie Els and the Irish Open champion, Thomas Bjorn, who pocketed cheques for $40,000 as first-round losers before heading for the airport under an azure sky.
Bjorn was the first to bite the dust when he was crushed 6 and 5 by the South African Trevor Immelman in the curtain-raiser. But the real shock was the 4 and 2 defeat of the world number three, Els, at the hands of 62nd-ranked Welshman and event debutant, Bradley Dredge.
Els made just one birdie, at the par-five 10th, but that was still only good enough for a half against the 33-year-old Cardiff man, who won the 12th in par to go two up and the short 14th with a birdie before the South African shook hands at the 16th.
"It's very special to beat Ernie Els in your first match in the Accenture," Dredge beamed afterwards.
Bjorn won the first against the head in his clash, but was totally out of sorts after that with four bogeys in the next seven holes putting him four down before Immelman effectively closed out the match with birdies at the 10th and 11th.
"Trevor played nicely without doing anything special," Bjorn lamented. "It was probably the easiest game he will ever win. It was poor. Disappointing to come all this way for that."
Immelman, the last man to beat Tiger Woods in a PGA Tour event when he took the Cialis Western Open in July last year, will face Chris DiMarco today, following the New Yorker's clinical 4 and 3 win over his 2006 Ryder Cup team-mate Brett Wetterich.
Ogilvy, meanwhile, rattled in three successive birdies from the 10th to go three up and then had a two at the short 14th to extend his advantage and clinch a second-round clash with Jose Maria Olazabal, who downed Paul Goydos with a birdie at the 19th.
"I didn't make any bogeys and made a lot of birdies," said Ogilvy, who birdied all the three par fives he faced at Dove Mountain. "It's what you've got to do here because the greens are perfect, the weather is perfect. It's going to take a lot of birdies to do well here."
While Els failed to spark, his South African compatriot, Retief Goosen, crushed Scott Verplank by carding five birdies and an eagle three in a 5 and 4 win.
