Stanford defends LPGA Senior Championship title

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Welsh golfer Jamie Donaldson followed his opening 62 with a solid 3-under-par 69 to take the clubhouse lead in the weather-interrupted second round of the Dubai Desert Classic on Friday. Tee times were delayed for nearly three hours because of thick fog. That led to none of the afternoon groups, including Rory McIlroy and defending champion Sergio Garcia, being able to finish their second round when darkness suspended play. Donaldson is 13-under 131 at the halfway stage, with Li Haotong second, one shot behind after a consecutive 66s. Branden Grace shot 65 to lie third in the clubhouse at 11 under. Miguel Angel Jimenez showed at 54 he could still compete with the youngsters as he moved to 10 under with a 68. Thomas Aiken (67) was tied with Jimenez. Among those still on the course, McIlroy was 10 under after 11 holes. Garcia and Henrik Stenson were 6- and 7-under par respectively playing alongside McIlroy. Rory has two top-3 finishes in his last three starts worldwide. He finished T5 when play was suspended. Tommy Fleetwood was 2 under for the day after 10 holes to move to a 5 under total. Donaldson has been ranked as high as 23rd in the world and has fallen to 292nd. He made four birdies and bogeyed the par-3 11th in his 69. He attributed his return to form to almost two months of not touching his clubs over the winter break. “We play so much golf all year. I’ve got two young kids; it’s time to have some family time with them for a couple of months and it was great,” said Donaldson, a three-time winner on the European Tour. “I came out for the season nice and fresh and you’re reacting more to what you’ve turned up with, as opposed to slogging yourself to death over the winter. To each his own. And then nearer the time, start playing a little bit. “Worked on my putting with Phil Kenyon, and that made a big difference. I have putted much better this week. It’s a case of playing the shots that you know you can play.” Li, who was a star for the Asia team recently in their narrow loss to Europe in the EurAsia Cup, made a double bogey on the first hole – his 10th – but 10 birdies more than made up for that mishap. The Chinese who has risen to No. 60 in the world rankings, said the morning delay did not bother him and in fact helped him relax. “I saw another Chinese player (Wu Ashun) and we stayed in the players’ lounge and played FIFA on PlayStation. So it was fun. Just had a lot of time to relax,” said Li, who won that match 3-1. The second round will start early, and the third round will be played as a three-ball.

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Forget Disneyland. What does the Super Bowl MVP know, anyway? When Chesson Hadley was asked how he was going to celebrate after winning the Albertsons Boise Open in 2017 to lock up his PGA TOUR card, he knew exactly what to say. “We’re going to wine country,” Hadley told the interviewer from the Golf Channel, reiterating a promise he had made to his wife Amanda. Then he even named the vineyards he wanted to visit – Alpha Omega, Frank Family and Far Niente. Robin Baggett, an avid golfer who owns Alpha Omega with his wife Michelle, was watching on TV, and it wasn’t long before their phones started blowing up with text messages from people who had seen the shout out. And Michelle – “I’m a planner,” she says – leapt into action. She reached out to friends at the other two vineyards and then contacted Hadley on social media. Later, she sent him and Amanda a lengthy email with restaurant and hotel recommendations and set up visits to wineries when they came to Napa a week later. “They didn’t know us from Adam,” Amanda says. “… She’s like the most hospitable person I’ve ever met in my life. She basically planned our whole trip.” The two couples got together that week, and a fast friendship was formed. The Hadleys have spent time at the Baggett’s homes in Pebble Beach and Lake Tahoe, and they are staying with them this week in the Napa Valley while Hadley plays in the Fortinet Championship. “They’re awesome people,” Hadley says. “They have become great friends of ours.” “A great relationship formed,” Michelle Baggett agrees. “I mean, we both have the same faith and the same values, and we both are very philanthropic with children’s causes.” And when Hadley won the weekly Birdies Fore Love competition at the PGA TOUR’s season-opener at Silverado Resort last year, he suddenly had $50,000 to donate to charity thanks to RSM. The competition lasts throughout the fall and the overall winner receives $300,000 to give to the charity of his choice. “That’s just one thing that’s so cool about the PGA TOUR and some of our partners and sponsors is that there’s stuff like this that we can do to give back and impact people,” Hadley says. “It’s really cool that have the ability to do that.” He and Amanda decided to divide the donation. They knew they wanted to leave some of the money in the Napa Valley, a place they both love, the place where the tournament is played and a place that has suffered mightily in recent years from the raging wildfires in California. So again, they turned to Michelle, who is the executive director of the Alpha Omega Foundation. They told her they wanted to make a $20,000 donation to the winery’s charitable arm, but then they wanted the money to go to help young people. Michelle suggested the Hadleys look at the Napa Valley Community Foundation’s website and one program stood out – the Fruit of the Vine Scholarship. The Fruit of the Vine Scholarship program was established by a local grape grower who was able to graduate from UC Berkley back when tuition was just $100. With that cost having increased exponentially, though, he saw a need to help – particularly those students who might be the first in the family to attend college and those whose parents work in viticulture. Nearly 100 students have received scholarships, which generally run $4,000 each year, since the program was established in 2014. Students have attended or are attending 19 different institutions, all but one of which is a California land grant university or college. The Hadleys are among an estimated two dozen families who have made donations to the Fruit of the Vine Scholarship program. Terence Mulligan, the executive director of the Napa Valley Community Foundation, says their support “means a ton. “Round numbers, it means one kid’s going to be taken care of all the way through college,” he says. “A cool 20,000 is a really generous gift, and it means opportunity basically for these hard-working young people who are really the future of our community.” Michelle Baggett agrees, saying the Hadleys “hit the ball out of the park,” when they decided to donate to Fruit of the Vine. The agriculture, hospitality and wine industries need bright young minds to learn and return to the area for it to continue to prosper. “What a blessing for these kids to get a four-year paid scholarship for an undergraduate degree to hopefully come back to Napa and to continue the good work that we do out here,” she says. Chesson and Amanda used the rest of the money that Hadley won in the Birdies For Love competition to make a $20,000 donation to the Shriners Children’s Hospital and another of $10,00 to help fund a golf scholarship at Georgia Tech where he went to college. Those donations also had special meaning to the couple. “My cousin is an orthotist and prosthetist there at Shriners in Greenville, South Carolina,” Amanda says. “So, she molds the fake legs and the orthotics and stuff. They were shocked, absolutely shocked, and they sent us some neat little videos of kids whose lives had been changed from their visits to Shiners.” And Hadley says one of the reasons he’s playing the PGA TOUR right now is Georgia Tech coach Bruce Hepler. “He does a great job of raising professional golfers, but also turning us into a functioning human being that’s going to contribute to society,” he says. That’s exactly what Hadley did when he and his wife decided to leave some of the Birdies Fore Love money that he won in the Napa Valley which has been their “spot,” Amanda says, since the couple honeymooned there more than a decade ago. Not surprisingly, long before they boarded the plane for California on Monday, the Hadleys – no longer the 23-year-olds newlyweds who “knew nothing “– had been planning their activities in the wine country when Chesson isn’t playing in the TOUR’s kickoff event at Silverado. They have their special places like Model Bakery where they get the brick oven-baked English muffins with jam that are among Oprah Winfrey’s favorite things. They’ll go to Bouchon for the macaroons and Rutherford Grill for the kale salad with peanut dressing. “Obviously the wine’s incredible, but the food is every bit as good as the wine out there,” Hadley says. One of the highlights, though, was Tuesday’s check presentation at Alpha Omega, where Chesson and Amanda got to meet two Fruit of the Vine scholarship recipients. Seeing first-hand how their donation made quite an impact on Chesson and Amanda. “We are Christians, and we have a strong faith background, and this is what we are called to do,” Hadley says. “We believe that everything that we have, and we’ve been given is not really ours. Like God has given us these things — our talents, our house and obviously our income, and we’re just stewards of it. “And so, this is just what we’re supposed to do. It’s really cool that I was able to win this and be able to give back and keep some of the money in the Napa community. And you know, I would certainly love to be able to do that again this year.”

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Tiger Woods turns 45 today. It's been an impressive body of work, with his 82 victories leaving him (momentarily?) tied with Sam Snead for most all-time. Throw in 31 seconds, 19 thirds, and 199 top-10 finishes in 368 starts. The 11-1 career playoff record, the earnings of nearly $121 million. Oh, and 15 major championship titles. (Like we could possibly forget.) But what can we expect from Woods from ages 45 to 50? It's a thorny question. He is an old and a young 45. Old because his 1,322 rounds on TOUR have taken a toll with four back surgeries - spinal fusion in 2017 - and four knee surgeries. Young because he's an athlete, he still believes he can win, and now he has a new golf buddy in 11-year-old son Charlie. "More than any other athlete he's always been the guy who exceeds expectations," five-time TOUR winner and 12-time PGA TOUR Champions winner Tom Lehman said at the recent PNC Championship in Orlando, where the adorable Tiger/Charlie team was must-see TV. "I feel like he's still capable of so much. Nothing would surprise me. If he ended up winning 20 more tournaments over the next five years I wouldn't be surprised." Twenty? Isn't that a bit - um - optimistic? "Well - it probably is optimistic," Lehman allowed, "but he's done so many things in the game that I didn't think were possible. I would never put limits on what he might do. He's not far from a five-win season (in 2013). The limitations on him are how physically fit he can be, how much he's able to practice and work, but the great champions do things you think are impossible." It was only last December, for example, that Woods went 3-0-0 as playing captain of the winning U.S. Presidents Cup Team, becoming the first in the history of that event with 27 victories. He was coming off his 82nd win at the ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP in Japan in the fall, his emotional Masters victory the previous April, and an earth-shaking TOUR Championship win before that. Three victories in 13 months. Lately, though? Well, Woods hasn't been all that good. "I haven’t put all the pieces together at the same time," he said prior to the 2020 Masters in November, when he again didn't put it all together at the same time. Tied for 10th after an opening-round 68, he faded from there before the proverbial pieces went haywire in the final round. A 10 at the 12th hole, where he hit three balls in the water, was the highest score of his career but he bounced back with birdies on five of the last six. On the plus side, Woods' closing burst showed he's still got it. On the minus side, he shot 76 and finished T38. "We love Tiger," Bubba Watson said at the PNC. "We want to see him succeed. But again, it comes down to how he feels, what's the weather like, what did he do, how's his body reacting. As you get older it's going to slow down no matter what, but now it's going to slow down even more so because of his surgeries and injuries. But hopefully we still have those roars we've seen the last couple years with Atlanta, Augusta and Japan. I think we all want to see it." Woods had but one top-10 finish in the 2020 calendar year - a T9 at the Farmers Insurance Open. He followed that with a 68th-place finish at his Genesis Invitational before back stiffness caused him to miss multiple events, including the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, which he's won eight times, and THE PLAYERS Championship (two-time champion). Then came the pandemic. His next start came at the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide (T40). Woods has been a non-factor since. His T72 at the ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP @ SHERWOOD, a course where he'd won the Hero World Challenge five times, said it all. For him, as for so many others, 2020 was a dud. One way to read the Tiger tea leaves is to watch his speed. His career best for measured clubhead speed, 129.2 mph, came in round three of the 2018 Valspar Championship, where he finished T2. More top-10 finishes followed, confidence and momentum building until on Sept. 23 he won the TOUR Championship to break a five-year dry spell. You could see it coming. By comparison, Woods has now been dormant for only about 13 months. Is his speed down? Some weeks, yes. But it could return, and surprise, as it did in 2018. "He's a very young man, but he is predisposed to a few injuries, too, and we've seen that," said Padraig Harrington, 49. "Some weeks he doesn't look like he could be competitive, but the weeks that he does come out and is walking that bit better, he's a big contender." Big, brawny courses like Bethpage Black, where Woods won the 2002 U.S. Open, are no longer his friends. But the greatest iron player of all time, with one of the best minds, can still feast on second-shot courses like Augusta National and East Lake and a whole lot of other places. Maybe he'll start playing the Bermuda Championship, where light-hitting Brian Gay just won, or the Sanderson Farms Championship, which crowned iron giant Sergio Garcia, or the Mayakoba Golf Classic presented by UNIFIN, where past champions include Brendon Todd and Fred Funk. And if that all seems far-fetched, raise your hand if you saw Woods playing the PNC this year. Picking his spots, Woods would surprise almost no one with an 83rd victory in 2021. It does not seem unreasonable to think he'll run his total up to 85, or north of that, perhaps reaching the nice round number of 90 if his body allows - the biggest four words in golf - before turning 50. More majors? Maybe. There's always the Masters, and while the U.S. Open will return to Torrey Pines South next summer, the better bet is The Open Championship at Royal St. George's, where Darren Clarke won in 2011. (Woods, injured, didn't play.) Golfing know-how is the name of the game at The Open, and guile will guide Woods through the twilight of his career. We'll be watching.

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