Legal Commentary

It's 2009 Shell Houston Open Week

By Tom Kirkendall

The Shell Houston Open has finally arrived as a big-time PGA Tour event.

After an ugly divorce from The Woodlands, and a difficult transition period in which most of the best PGA Tour players avoided the event, the 2009 tournament has attracted the best field in the history of the event and one of the top fields of the PGA Tour season to date. Although Tiger Woods will be tuning up in Florida for the Masters next week, 15 of the top 20 players (and 21 of the top 30) in the World Rankings will be playing, including No. 2 Phil Mickelson, No. 3 Sergio Garcia, No. 5 Padraig Harrigton and No. 6 Vijay Singh.

The first Houston Open was in 1922 and the tournament is tied with the Texas Open as the third oldest non-major championship on the PGA Tour behind only only the Western Open (1899) and the Canadian Open (1904). This is the fourth Houston Open to be played on the Tournament Course at Redstone Golf Club and the seventh event overall at Redstone, which hosted its first three Houston Opens on the club's Jacobson-Hardy Course while the Tournament Course was being planned and built.

This is the SHO's third year of being played the week before The Masters and, despite Woods' policy of not playing the week before major championships, the strong field is confirmation that the SHO's move to the pre-Masters date was the right one. The Houston Golf Association has done a good job of promoting the tournament with Tour players by grooming the Tournament Course in a manner similar to Augusta National, but the course is actually a flat-land course that bears little resemblance to the hilly venues of Augusta.

Even with its superior conditioning, the Tournament Course is a favorite of neither players nor spectators. The course actually has a nice variety of interesting holes, but the routing of the course is a disaster, with 16 of the holes separated by a long walk and a drainage ditch from the 1st and 18th holes, the driving range and the clubhouse. Unfortunately, there is not much the Houston Golf Association can do about that routing problem, so let's just hope that the course's superior conditioning and the SHO's attractive tune-up date for The Masters keeps persuading the top players to overlook the routing problem.

Although I've had my doubts that the HGA would be able to turnaround the SHO at Redstone, I'm happy to be wrong on that score. Houston has a rich golfing tradition and the HGA is a fine charitable organization that worked miracles in reviving the tournament during its 20-year run in The Woodlands. It's going to be a great week at Redstone, so sit back and enjoy the SHO!

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on March 29, 2009 (boomark / email).