The first of the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup playoff events featured a nice field on a nice course and a perfectly acceptable winner in Steve Stricker (67-67-65-69 — 268).
What a surprise.
The Barclays, contested at Westchester Country Club in Harrison, N.Y., was not the complete disaster that many hyperbolic newspaper columnists had forecast, nor did it triumphantly ring in a new era in golf, to borrow the grandiose Tour slogan that has been drilled into the head of every fan thanks to a seasonlong ad campaign that cost in the neighborhood of $45 million.
What the Barclays felt like was just another good tournament — no more, no less.
The cheery news is that this week Tiger Woods makes his, ahem, playoff debut at the Deutsche Bank Championship outside Boston. Woods's last-minute decision to blow off the Barclays because, as he said, "my body is spent, and I need a break," was a public-relations disaster for the Tour but helpful from a competitive standpoint.
Had Woods won at Westchester, he would have eliminated all but a handful of the other players in the four-week points race and rendered the remaining events more or less ceremonial. Now he comes to Boston fourth on the points list and — given his rabbit ears — surely smarting from the snarky reaction to having granted himself a first-round bye.
Woods's sudden case of fatigue set eyes rolling because had he played at Westchester, he would have come in off a nine-day layoff following the whopping two consecutive tournaments that so wore him down.
"I mean, you play two weeks, you fly in on your G2, you fly home on your G2, I don't know how tired you can really be," said Steve Flesch, the 165-pound pro who played 10 consecutive weeks this year. "I'm not in the shape all those top guys are, but two weeks, being exhausted. I don't know."
Even with Woods's absence the Barclays enjoyed some star power. Phil Mickelson and Ernie Els earned top 10s, and in all, 18 of the top 20 in the World Ranking were in the field.
Sunday was a tense back-and- forth among a number of accomplished players, including Stricker, 40, who blew everyone away with four birdies on the final five holes. Surely Stricker is not the household name the Tour brass were hoping for, but he makes for a nice story.
In 1996 Stricker seemed set to become one of the brightest stars in golf as he won twice and finished fourth on the money list. But he was unable to build on that breakthrough.
In '98 Stricker's careerlong caddie, wife Nicki, gave up the bag to give birth to a baby girl, Bobbi. Stricker is a softhearted guy, and he admits that he found it lonely to travel the Tour without his wife and child.
His play slipped steadily after '98, and from 2003 to '05 Stricker never finished higher than 151st on the money list. Having lost his Tour card, he spent the winter following the '05 season at home in Madison, Wis., searching for answers in a three-sided hitting bay that was heated but open to the elements.
