by Daniel Dullum

The PGA AT&T Pebble Beach Tournament is coming next week but two luminaries will be missing in attendance Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. Keep in the mind their both aging and also neither one are at the top of their game anymore. Woods at the Phoenix Open last week he just didn’t miss the cut he missed the cut by 12 strokes that’s very unTigerlike.

Mickelson it’s practically the home course for him at Scottsdale he played golf collegiately there at Arizona State and he didn’t fair much better. It’s a rare sight and you lose a little star power and at this stage of their careers and that course at Pebble Beach is a tough one and if you don’t feel like your not on the top of your game if there is one game they want to skip that might be it.

This event as a golfer is something that you earn and they both have and they have been both at the top of the PGA Tour off and on for the last 15 years or better and you reach a point where if there’s one you want to skip here and there of course you can’t skip too many. To remain on the tour there’s a minimum number of tournaments that you have to play in. Aside from an injury it’s not like you just come back but Tiger and Mickelson have earned the right to choose which events that they’ll play in and you’ll see them pop up again down the road but you can’t skip them all.

The Tournament will feature such players as K.J.Choi, John Daly, Ernie Els, and another golfer named Bill Murray. That’s brings me back to the days when the tournament was called the Bing Crosby Pro Am. It was set up very similar to the Bob Hope Desert Classic where the first two days they would bring in their Hollywood friends and maybe some athletes from other sports and they would go out and have some fun for a couple of days.

Then the final days they would get down to business with the real golfers so that’s a tradition that goes back to the Bing Crosby. If your going to the tournament just go and have some fun and enjoy it and see these shank one into the rough like they do. The AT&T has been a top flight event for years and years and even years ago when Bing was still around he would bring his friends in and it was always a great weekend for the sport of golf.

Pebble Beach has always been a top stop on the tour a and it’s one of those tournaments that the players really enjoy and the fans do as well. Since Tiger and Mickelson will not be there there is a chance that there might be some vacancy at some of the hotels in Monterey or Carmel because the fans want to see them. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the field is so bad, you got a lot of these young up and comers guys like Ernie Els in his prime and you have the show biz aspects.

Daniel Dullum is filling in Amaury Pi Gonzalez this week for News and Commentary on http://www.sportsradioservice.com listen to the rest of the podcast below