KAPALUA, Hawaii (AP) — The Mercedes-Benz Championship typically makes first-round pairings based on the chronological order of when players won their PGA Tour events to qualify for the event. This year, the tour decided to based pairings on the final FedEx Cup standings, putting the defending champion at Kapalua (Daniel Chopra) with the FedEx Cup champion (Vijay Singh).
That allowed for quite the rivalry in the opening round beyond golf.
In front of them will be Camilo Villegas, who graduated from Florida, and Anthony Kim, who spent two years at Oklahoma. They tee off about two hours before the BCS Championship game between the Gators and the Sooners.
``I'm going to be thinking more about that game than my round, because I've got three more days to make up ground, but the Sooners need every minute,'' Kim said. ``It's going to be very fun playing with Camilo.''
Villegas is from Colombia and doesn't have quite the grasp of American football as Kim does, although he loved going to Gators game.
``I'm not a Chris DiMarco that knows the name of every player and knows the stats up and down, but I would love watching the game,'' Villegas said. ``I'll be pulling hard.''
Kim took a recruiting trip to Oklahoma, not intending to play golf. The trip included a football game against Alabama, which the Sooners won in the rain. He was sold on the Sooners that day.
``After the football game, I knew that was the school for me,'' Kim said.
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Geoff Ogilvy is one of the most articulate players on the PGA Tour, but even he was verbally challenged when talking about changes to the Titleist golf ball.
Titleist is involved in an ongoing dispute with Callaway over patents applied to the popular Pro V1 ball. Two courts have ruled in favor of Callaway, and Titleist is appealing. Before the latest court ruling, Titleist converted the Pro V1 to be outside the patents in question.
So what does that mean for PGA Tour players, the majority of whom use Titleist?
Some are using the modified ball. Others are using the new Pro V1, which carries a ``plus'' in the side marking, although that's not the name of the ball. Steve Stricker used it at the Chevron World Challenge last month.
As for Ogilvy?
``The new-new one, I'm not going to use this week,'' he said. ``I'm going to play these two weeks with the new version of the old one, and then do a bit more testing. There are good reports about the new-new one. So I've got a whole month in Phoenix to test them all out. They never make a bad ball. They're always pretty good.''
Asked to clarify, things really got entertaining.
``There's a new-old one, and there's a new-new one, which is the new one, which is the model in front of the old one,'' Ogilvy said, grinning as he spoke. ``The other one is a 2007 ball, and this is a 2009 ball. There's a version of the 2007 ball, but it doesn't breach the patent. So I'm using the non-patent breaching version of the 2007 ball these two weeks.''
Thankfully, players only have to put a number on their scorecard.
