CADDIES' ROLE:The $5.5 million on offer at Atlanta couldn't lure most of the top golfers

IT WAS difficult to make that very important distinction last Wednesday at the Sugarloaf County Club outside Atlanta, Georgia, between amateur golfer and professional.

With the homogenised rig-outs of both pro and "schmo" it is not always that easy on a regular week to tell who has paid $100 administration fee to enter the tournament and who has shovelled out $6,000 for a stroll on the primed course with a hot-shot professional.

Naturally the amateur who can afford such an amount for a better ball round with a professional can afford a very big golf bag with all the trimmings - some even have their names embroidered on to the front of their excessive bags, just like a real golfer.

The range attendants take no chances on mistaken identity, the good balls are stashed deep in the vaults of their makeshift shelter during the pro-am and an endless supply of the round bricks that pass for golf balls and can withstand the severest of beatings from the worst of golfers are displayed enticingly for the less talented to collect.

Any tournament date that falls after a big event such as the Players Championship is going to struggle to get a top-class field at it.

This is the reason why each event has its ambassadors who trawl the ranges of the tour well in advance of their event in order to canvass support.

They are the closest we see to politicians on tour, shaking hands and back slapping, even with the humble bag-toter, in order to curry favour with a chosen player.

The easiest way to entice a player to come to your event is to pay him, like they do worldwide, but it is maintained that this sort of bribery is not permitted on the PGATour.

The $5.5 million prize-fund on offer last week should be enough to lure most hungry golfers to competition. Seemingly not.

There was a rumour spreading around Jacksonville the previous week that the Atlanta course was still showing the parched effects of the drought that Georgia has suffered since the end of summer last year.

That coupled with the head-wrecking wind that swept most of the weekend contestants away at Sawgrass was enough to scare another sizeable group of golfers away.

The result was the caddies of the more famed professionals were more recognised than most of the golfers that made up the ATT field.

I do sympathise with sponsors of the modern golf tournament with an inconvenient date on the packed Tour schedule as prize-money alone is no way the guarantee that your event will be a success.

I recovered from the mistaken identity crisis I was experiencing last Wednesday and started to recognise players that I had not seen since my days on the Asian tour, odd trips to Australia, and others I remembered from watching them on television back in the 1980s.

It was like a who's who of the alternative or ancient tours. Many of the golfers played more regularly on the Nationwide Tour. Some of the caddies were regulars on the Seniors Tour, where they were competing for a lot less loot.

They were all taking advantage of the general lack of interest by the main tour "top dogs" in a such a relative non-event.

Sugarloaf is a TPC course designed by Greg Norman set in a gated community of extremely large homes, most of them mansions.

It is an enclave of sports stars who reside in the exclusive neighbourhood. From baseball, basketball and football stars to a lone PGA Tour professional in Stuart Cink, this is where the new money is in Atlanta.

The most noticeable feature this year, having not been there for a couple of years, was the amount of "For Sale" signs very tastefully placed like young saplings in the vast landscaped and surprisingly lush looking gardens of these humongous homes.

Of the 600 or so houses, they say 100 are on the market, or "Now Available" as the signs whisper discretely from back bedrooms to the golfers as they thread their way through the back gardens of these outrageous abodes along the golf course.

If ever there was a stark reminder of the state of the US economy these tasteful signs of desperation are the reality of just how hard the credit crunch has hit at every level of society.

We seem to be drawn to play with David Duval every time both he and Retief are in the same event.

Duval has struggled for years now and despite some misleading signs of him turning his game around the scores he is producing would suggest he is not really making any progress.

There was a cruel irony on his third last hole on Friday when he was way outside the cut line. He hit a three wood off the tee, it sailed high above the towering pines to the left of the fairway towards what looked like one of the mansions "Now Available".

As we got past the trees we noticed a rubbish bin placed in bounds but way left of the fairway. Duval had managed to hit his errant tee shot into the bin.

It wasn't easy to distinguish between professional and amateur at the ATT Classic in Atlanta last week. But the rubbish that David Duval was hitting put his form in undeniable perspective.