ADT Championship – 1st Round

Ai Miyazato’s round of 68 gave her the first round lead at the ADT Championship. Karrie Webb and Il Mi Chung are tied for second one shot back with Julieta Granada, Natalie Gulbis and Mi Hyun Kim two shots behind.

On a windy day which made many holes on this difficult course treacherous, Miyazato carded six birdies. Her one stumble was a double-bogey on the 10th, a hole which provided a large number for several players and played as the toughest on Thursday. The 10th wasn’t alone – it seems as though every hole has potential for disaster (mostly of the watery kind) and if you watch long enough, someone will get caught up in it. Annika Sorenstam (74), Lorena Ochoa (75), Jeong Jang (74), Stacy Prammanasudh (76) and Seon Hwa Lee (77) are the most notable players who are outside the Top 16, and need to step it up on Friday to make the cut for Round Three.

The players who are currently in the Top 16 include Paula Creamer (71), Se Ri Pak (71), Morgan Pressel (71), Pat Hurst (72), Jee Young Lee (72), Juli Inkster (73) and Cristie Kerr (73). The overall scoring should be a bit lower on Friday as the winds are expected to calm down to below 10 mph, a far cry from Thursday’s 25-30 mph.

I don’t know who is producing the telecast (TGC, NBC or a combination of the two) but they have a few bugs they need to get ironed out. On at least one occasion Roger Maltbie was obviously using a telestrator to outline the contour of a green and the markings didn’t show up nor did Roger appear to realize his audience wasn’t seeing it. And after one commercial break we got a nice 60-second beauty shot of (I believe) the 18th fairway while the commentators were discussing a birdie putt by Annika, which she made and we never got to see. Maybe I overreact but repeated television mistakes really bug the crap out of me, especially when they aren’t acknowledged or corrected – they really could have tried showing Annika’s putt again, ya know.

One good thing they did do on TV Thursday - they showed us a Top 10 prize money breakdown for this event. We had all heard about the difference between first and second place ($1 million and $100,000), but third place only gets $20,000! Sunday afternoon promises to be rather entertaining.