Iced tee on menu for early starters

It was not long ago that the only people mad enough to hold a golf tournament on the first weekend of the year were the Blues - the colour most of them wore as they returned from the magnificent but chillily windswept links at Rye after playing in the President's Putter - of Oxford and Cambridge.

It was not long ago that the only people mad enough to hold a golf tournament on the first weekend of the year were the Blues - the colour most of them wore as they returned from the magnificent but chillily windswept links at Rye after playing in the President's Putter - of Oxford and Cambridge.

Then came the professional Tours, whose business is to make golf into a 52-weeks-a-year business, with their own matchplay event, the Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) Championship.

It is arguable which had the better field this year or, indeed, the better known, given that Ted Dexter, the former England cricket captain and chairman of selectors, and Peter Dawson, secretary of the Royal and Ancient, were competing at Rye. What is not in doubt is which was more enthusiastically attended.

In an event which was meant to be restricted to the top 64 in the world, Steve Stricker, ranked 90th and the 26th alternate, resurrected his career and his bank balance by pocketing the $1m on offer. In all, there were 40 withdrawals. Meanwhile at Rye, 178 entries gave the event its largest ever field. Some of the early-round matches were moved to Littlestone, where one match was suspended at all-square after 18 holes due to darkness and competed the following morning at Rye.

History was made by Bruce Streather, a London solicitor. At 54, he became the oldest winner - Dexter was two years younger in 1985 - and beat an opponent 34 years his junior in the final.

Since its inauguration in 1920, the event has been cancelled for snow only once. For the hardiest Blues, the icy snap after Christmas came a week too early. They should have been at the Tucson Open in Arizona on Friday: parts of the Gallery course are as high as 3,000 feet and disappeared under snow, the first time that particular element has interrupted play on the US Tour for 14 years.

The old US Tour always ran from January to September. The winter season would follow the sun through California and then Florida up to the Masters. By the end of the summer, the pros went back to their club jobs as the nation's sporting interest centred on baseball's World Series and the start of the gridiron season.

For a while recently, the "West Coast Swing" of the US Tour became so unpopular -with the stars attracted away to Dubai or the Johnnie Walker Asian Classic - that Doral, the first stop in Florida at the beginning of March became known as the "unofficial start" of the Tour. This is not the sort of message the image-conscious US Tour likes to send out and the purses in California and Arizona have risen dramatically.

It is no coincidence that this weekend's Mercedes Championship, for all last year's winners, was played in Hawaii and so offering prime-time action and avoiding a clash with the afternoon NFL playoff games.

It helps that some of the younger players, like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, are native Californian, while Floridian David Duval has a holiday home in Sun Valley, Idaho where he goes snowboarding between tournaments.

Duval has recently been encouraging Woods to take up the sport, presumably in the hope that the world No 1 will end up with several broken bones.

With the major battles still to come, there is an element of a phoney war to the opening months of the season. However, two of Woods' most memorable non-major wins in 2000 came at the beginning of the year. He finished eagle-birdie-birdie to Ernie Els' eagle-birdie-par to win the Mercedes at the second extra hole, and then came from seven down with seven to play to win the AT&T Pro-am at Pebble Beach.

And two years ago, Duval shot his historic final-round 59 to win the Bob Hope Classic. Like the AT&T, the Hope is a pro-am event. Once it was all very sociable; these days the pros would prefer just to get on with it themselves. The AT&T has been plagued by the Monterey Peninsula's erratic weather.

It was cut to three rounds in 1999 and five years ago, the event was cancelled because not all the players could complete at least one round at each of the three courses involved. In 1998, they only got 54 holes in by going back to Pebble for an extra day seven months later.

The European Tour is to get its own pro-am event this year. It will be played in late October at St Andrews, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns. Unless the organisers ignore the usual cast list of film and sports stars and other minor celebs and make up the amateur numbers with members of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society, the event may not be finished until the following May.