Lost Winners

By the time Jay Haas shot a 15-under 201 to win the individual title at the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf and collect $395,000, Doug Ford had already been home in Palm Beach, Fla., for four days. The 1957 Masters champ and his fellow older old-timers are now relegated to the event's Demaret (over 70) Division, a team competition on Monday and Tuesday of tournament week. The only person to play in the Legends every year since its inception in 1978, Ford, 83, is not happy about the early-week tee times and other changes. "They got a bunch of hamburgers playing in it now, guys who haven't won anything, not legends," he says. "And back in '78 they guaranteed $10,000 per player. Now, 20 years later, it's $5,000. They've got all the money at the top." Ford does enjoy seeing his old buddies and says if he could change one thing, he'd make the Legends strictly a team event again since "that's the original format, which made the senior tour." Still, he never considers skipping. "I'll go until I die, but they don't appreciate us as much as they used to," he says. "We made the damn tournament, and now they're pushing us out the backdoor."

Fresh Stakes

The second Big Stakes, the high-risk match-play event in which two-man teams put up $100,000 for a chance to collect the largest winner's purse in golf, $2 million, has been postponed for more than a year and will undergo a series of changes. The new version, called the Ultimate Game, will feature an expanded field of 160 golfers anteing up $50,000 each. The first five rounds of match play will eliminate 150 players, and the remaining 10 will advance to a two-day, 36-hole, winner-take-all showdown at Wynn Las Vegas Golf Course. Organizers say the final, June 6-8, 2007, will appear on network TV.

ALSO ...

? Sung Ah Yim won the Florida's Natural Charity Championship with a 16-under 272 when 54-hole leader Annika Sorenstam shot a final-round 75. In her career Sorenstam has led or co-led going into the final round 67 times and won 46 of those events. ? Underwhelmed with the new Tournament course at Redstone and the event's '07 move to the week before the Masters, former champ Vijay Singh says this might have been his last Houston Open.

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