Skin Tight

Last Friday, when the official field for the PGA Championship was set, Steve Flesch (below) was an outsider. As the second alternate, Flesch had hope, especially with Jim Furyk nursing a back injury, but no guarantee that he would play. That uncertainty was particularly painful this year because 2007 would have been Flesch's 10th straight PGA, an event at which he's made the cut seven times and tied for 10th in '05. But a slow start, which included only two top�25 finishes (11th at Pebble Beach and a tie for fifth at the U.S. Bank), kept Flesch on pins and needles about the PGA and out of the Bridgestone Invitational. With nowhere else to play, he went to the Reno-Tahoe Open hoping to improve his lowly 140th-place standing on the FedEx Cup points list (144 qualify for the first event). At Montreux Golf and Country Club, Flesch hit 73.6% of the greens and averaged 1.623�putts per green in regulation to shoot a 15-under 273. He became the first wire-to-wire winner on Tour this year and earned an automatic spot in the PGA. He's an insider now. . . . By the time he gets to Tulsa, site of Southern Hills Country Club, Flesch may simply wish to be inside. The long-range forecast for Thursday through Sunday calls for daytime highs of 98� to 100� with high humidity.

Tour Rookies Brendon de�Jonge and Johnson Wagner were teammates at Virginia Tech and, coincidentally or not, neither had played very well since a gunman killed 32 people on campus on April 16. De�Jonge had missed the cut in seven of 10 starts since the attack, while Wagner failed to reach the weekend in 12�of 13. As a result the pair had stalled in their quest to retain their Tour cards, with de�Jonge hovering at 187th on the money list and Wagner stuck at 135th. Last week the duo played in the same group during the first two rounds at Reno and, coincidentally or not, the string of bad results finally ended, as de�Jonge shot a seven-under 281 to tie for sixth, earning $100,500 and moving to 165th on the money list. Wagner came in with a five-under�283 for 12th and $52,000, elevating him to 131st.

It was a big weekend for numbers, with Barry Bonds hitting his 755th homer, Alex Rodriguez smacking his 500th and Tom Glavine winning his 300th game, but when it comes to digits, Tiger Woods is hard to leave out of the conversation. The Bridgestone Invitational was his 58th Tour win, and in the 25 World Golf Championships, Woods has 23 top�10s and 14 victories good for $18,532,500. At the Bridgestone alone he's won six of nine starts and taken home $7,952,500. In those 25 events he has a stroke average of 67.88.