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OAKVILLE, ONT. — The Glen Abbey Golf Club will be a soft touch for players at the RBC Canadian Open this week, especially for those who played in the wind-swept British Open last week.
The suburban Toronto course has been drenched with rain every day this week and was so wet on Monday it was closed to give grounds crew a chance to mop up.
Yesterday, for the second day in a row, thunderstorms halted practice sessions. Almost three centimetres of rain fell in one 30-minute period yesterday afternoon, bringing the total amount since the weekend to 19.5 cm.
The national championship begins today, with more rain in the forecast.
Research-In-Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie looks to see if his next NHL ownership bid will land safely on the franchise fairway, or if it will fall foul of Bettman's bunker. Or maybe he was just taking part in Glen Abbey's Pro-Am day Wednesday. (Mike Cassese/Reuters)
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All this wet weather has made Glen Abbey soft and will inevitably lead, players say, to low scores as they bomb drives down receptive fairways and shoot directly at flagsticks without fear of balls rolling off the green.
Expect a birdie-fest, with the advantage going to players who hit the ball long off the tee.
"When it's very soft like this, you can pretty much take dead aim at the pin and you're kind of playing point-to-point golf," said Mike Weir, a native of Bright's Grove, Ont., with the muddy cuffs on his tan trousers providing evidence of the course conditions.
Defending champion Jim Furyk reported seeing standing water on the course before players were called off it yesterday. He said preferred lies would have been in effect had the tournament started yesterday.
(In preferred lies, a player can lift his ball if it's in the fairway, clean it and put it back on the ground. It's dismissively called lift, clean and cheat.)
"There would have been no other way to play but playing the ball up [preferred lies]," said Furyk, who's bidding to become to first to win the Canadian Open three years in a row.
Glen Abbey has staged the Canadian Open 24 times in the tournament's 104-year history, more than any other course.
The lowest four-round total there is 22-under-par 266, set by Tiger Woods in 2000, when Glen Abbey played as a par 72. (It will be a par-71 this year. The 16th hole has been converted to a par-4.)
It's hard to say whether anyone in the field of 156 will reach Woods's gaudy mark come Sunday, but it's a safe bet the scoring will be considerably better than it was at the Royal Birkdale Golf Club last Sunday.
Padraig Harrington's winning score at the British Open was three over par. Battling cold weather, rain and winds that reached 60 kilometres an hour, only four players were better than 10 over.
"For four straight days, it didn't stop," Weir said of the howling wind. "It just kept humming all the way through. I've never seen anything like it."
About 30 players who competed in the British Open are at Glen Abbey. They'll definitely find a lusher course in Oakville.
But Weir noted Glen Abbey won't be defenceless, no matter how soft. A player will still have to drive his ball straight and stay out of the wet, gnarly rough.
"The player who does the best this week and wins is going to be driving it in the fairway, because the rough is thick," he said.
Course superintendent Scott Bowman, who's been at Glen Abbey for just five months and was scrambling to put the course in shape last night, agreed.
"They'll have some trouble in the rough," he said earlier in the week. "If they keep it in the fairway, though, they should be all right."
Today's play was expected to start on time, but could be delayed if the course isn't ready, the Royal Canadian Golf Association said.
Stephen Ames of Calgary, playing in his 11th Canadian Open, had his doubts that tee times will be on schedule.
"If this [rain] continues all night, I don't think we'll be playing at 7:30 [a.m.], that's for sure," Ames told reporters as rain pelted down on the media tent. "The golf course will still be under water."
