Morning Drive

Morning Drive

Steve Sands - February 22, 2012

By Morning Drive Team
Feb 22, 2012 9:48 AM ET

Sands began his live report from Marana, Arizona by saying that Thomas Bjorn is not 100% this morning and yesterday told Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman that his back had stiffened up on him while travelling to Arizona. He plans to give it a go today against Francesco Molinari but his back is very stiff this morning.

Tiger Woods reacted to Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano’s “beatable” comment by saying that he felt the same way about Gonzalo. Sands feels that the whole issue is being overblown because when you look at Gonzalo’s entire news conference, he said a lot of nice things about Tiger and Tiger had a smile on his face during his “response.” Although he does not feel that his opinion matters much, he does think that Gonzalo said anything wrong.

The PGA TOUR has an incredible amount of momentum right now as seen by the new TV contract through 2021, the Olympics in 2016, extending Finchem’s contract to 2016, high TV ratings, and now by the FedExCup extension to 2017. It is an exciting time on the PGA TOUR and it is always great to hear this kind of news.

A lot of people in Arizona are very interested to see how Defending Champion Luke Donald plays against Ernie Els in the first round today especially after Donald’s final round 78 at Riviera. World #1 is starting against a 3-time Major Champion and unlike the NCAA Tournament, 16 seeds actually have a pretty good chance to upset a 1 seed and it will be interesting to see what happens between the current World #1 and a former World #1.