Toshiba Classic opens today with pro-am

Richard Dunn

Who will be celebrating on the 18th green Sunday? What will be the

highlights in this year’s Toshiba Senior Classic? And how will the

later date affect the PGA Champions Tour event at Newport Beach

Country Club?

Those questions and more will be answered soon enough, as the

ninth annual Toshiba Senior Classic opens its doors today with the

Monday Pro-Am at 12:45 p.m., when amateur foursomes will be teamed

with a Champions Tour professional.

Also today is the Toshiba Senior Classic’s Open Qualifying Round

at Goose Creek Golf Club in Mira Loma, where 144 pros over the age of

50 will try to qualify for four spots in the main tournament with a

$1.55-million purse.

With five different winners in the Champions Tour’s first five

tournaments of 2003, several players are bunched near the top of the

money leaders and Charles Schwab Cup standings. Dana Quigley, with

four top-10 finishes, including his victory at the MasterCard

Championship, is the tour’s leading money winner.

But anybody who gets hot with the putter for 54 holes can win. The

three-day professional competition begins Friday.

When you think about the Toshiba Senior Classic, the first name

that pops up is Hale Irwin, the event’s only two-time winner and last

year’s leading money winner, who has opened the 2003 campaign on fire

again. In Irwin’s first 12 rounds this year, all have been under par,

and his last two starts have been runner-up efforts. He now has 88

top-three finishes in 187 career starts.

Irwin, 57, has dominated Newport Beach with Toshiba titles in 1998

and 2002, capturing last year’s Toshiba Classic with a tournament

scoring record 17-under 196, a victory that elevated him to the top

of the money list on the PGA Champions Tour. He never moved from the

top on his way to a career-first $3-million season.

The previous tournament scoring mark at Newport Beach, where the

event has been played since 1996, was held by Irwin at 13-under 200

in 1998, when he shot a course-record 62 in the final round.

When looking for a possible winner, prognosticators must also

consider Allen Doyle, the 2000 Toshiba Classic champion who finished

as runner-up last year, shooting his 11th straight sub-70 round in as

many starts at Newport Beach. Doyle shot 66-68-67--201 and placed in

the top three here for the fourth straight year.

“The scores I get here are like what I get at my home course [in

La Grange, Ga.],” Doyle said. “Shooting [201] wasn’t good enough for

this year, but second ain’t bad. I did as good as I can do. I’ve had

a second, first, third and second here. This tournament has been good

to me. Maybe we should set up a Doyle annuity.”

As for the weather, the days we’ve been seeing lately are the type

Toshiba Senior Classic Tournament Director Jeff Purser has had in

mind since Hoag Hospital hired him in September 1997 to turn the ship

around. The Toshiba has been pushed back -- to the fourth weekend in

March, its latest ever -- and that should work to everyone’s

advantage.

“We asked the Champions Tour to move us back in the schedule, so

we believe this is a positive move for us,” Purser said. “While last

year’s weather was spectacular, we believe our chances of having

ideal conditions get better as we move later into March.”

The weather has always been an issue here, but Purser and his team

are doing a sunshine dance to keep the clouds status quo through the

week.

Practice rounds and pro-am rounds have been hampered in the past

by rain, enough to the point of disallowing golf carts on the course,

which turns into one expensive walk in the park for amateurs.

The final round of the 2000 Toshiba was completely washed out

because of inclement weather, and Allen Doyle was declared a 36-hole

winner.

In 23 years of the Newport Classic Pro-Am, a Toshiba precursor,

only once (in 1986) did rain cancel a round or shorten the two-day

event to 18 holes.

From an operational standpoint, with Hoag Hospital as the managing

charity, the Toshiba Senior Classic can be traced back to the early

1970s, when Bing Crosby got the ball rolling on a satellite tour

event called the Crosby Southern Pro-Am (later called the Newport

Classic).

Crosby, good buddies with Newport Beach’s Marshall Duffield, felt

bad for the golfers at Pebble Beach who didn’t make the cut at his

former Crosby National Pro-Am and had nowhere to play over the

weekend. And so Duffield and Charley Hester started the “Little

Crosby.”