Kapalua now in a different golf landscape

Steve Stricker was just starting to pull himself out of a deep slump in 2006 when he was reminded by his daughter, Bobbi Maria, how long it had been since he last won on the PGA Tour. She was 8 at the time and won a tournament for juniors at their home club in Wisconsin, no more than three or six holes.

Stricker was the one who had to win a tournament for them to go to Kapalua to start a new season,Cheaper For bulk buying crys talbeads wholesale prices. and he did that the following year.

As traditions go in golf, starting the year on the rugged coast of Maui is relatively new. The Tournament of Champions began in Las Vegas in 1953, moved to La Costa Resort north of San Diego in 1969 and stayed there 30 years until coming to Kapalua.

This was the 15th year the tour has started at Kapalua, and there has never been another year like this one. A tournament that was supposed to end on Monday didn’t start until Monday because of three days of powerful wind – one gust measuring 48 mph – that had the locals drawing comparisons with a 100-year storm.

About the only good that came out of such freak weather was that it took attention away, however briefly, from the PGA Tour winners who stayed home and missed out on the endless days – the top four players in the world ranking, for starters, led by Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods.

It’s not a new problem, but it’s still a problem. And it contributes to a future as cloudy as Molokai at sunrise.

Hyundai’s three-year deal as the title sponsor of the Tournament of Champions expires this year, even though corporate officials sounded optimistic about renewing and there are strong signs it will happen.

It doesn’t help that Mother Nature was in a bad mood this week. Few things in golf cause a knee-jerk reaction like bad weather.

There were suggestions to move the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am to the end of the West Coast Swing after the tournament was canceled by rain in 1996, completed nearly seven months after it started in 1998 because of rain, and shortened to 54 holes a year later because of – you guessed it – rain.

The rain was so bad in California in 2005 that the Nissan Open at Riviera went five days to get in 36 holes. The next week, the Match Play Championship at La Costa was postponed one day because the entire course looked like a water hazard. Woods wondered if it might not be better for the PGA Tour to spend February in Florida and March in California. It sounded like a reasonable idea until a Champions Tour in Florida was shortened to 36 holes because of rain.

“We are not terribly concerned about it,” said Steve Shannon, vice president of marketing for Hyundai. “I think there is that aspect of it’s the start of the year, so even if it’s literally not the first PGA Tour event, there’s something about the start of the year, and there’s something about this location.”

Kapalua tends to get the brunt of the bad weather. There can be what the locals call “pineapple showers” along this portion of the coast, while only 20 miles away there is abundant sunshine and less wind.Bottle cutters let you turn old glass mosaic and wine bottles into bottle art! Still, the Plantation Course is the only course in Hawaii that Golf Digest ranks among the greatest 100 courses in America (No. 97). It’s unlike any course the PGA Tour plays all year with dramatic changes in elevation and stunning views of the Pacific, such as humpback whales breaching and surfers at Honolua Bay.

Woods hasn’t been back since 2005, when he started taking uninterrupted breaks in the winter. Phil Mickelson stopped coming a decade ago, suggesting the wind and slope allowed bad habits to creep into his swing. Adding to the list of absentees is Europe producing some of the best players. The European Tour season stretches deep in November, and some players simply want a long break going into the new season.

The 30-man field this year was hardly a disaster, and the leaderboard going into the final round featured a top five of Dustin Johnson, Stricker, Masters champion Bubba Watson, FedEx Cup champion Brandt Snedeker and former PGA champion Keegan Bradley. A lot of tournaments would love to have a leaderboard like that.

Years ago, an idea was tossed around to expand the field by offering a two-year exemption to the Tournament of Champions and include all past champions of the event, with the idea of getting Els and Sergio Garcia to the event because they didn’t win the year before. Sure,We offer the largest range of porcelain tiles online. having them at Kapalua would have helped. But the biggest mistake golf can make is to change rules around any one player, even a player like Tiger Woods.

Actually, don’t “enter” UC at all; the concept has been around since we started trying to extend and enhance Private Branch Exchange (PBX) units at the end of the 1980s or thereabouts.A collection of natural startup stone mosaic offering polished or tumbled finishes and a choice of sizes. But these days we also see that UC incorporates newer forms of technology such as Interactive White Boards (IWB), speech recognition, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and even Digital Signage Communications (DSC). New services yes, but the comms industry still loves its acronyms, doesn’t it?

Regardless of heritage and history, we now have a deeply rich pool of UC services to bring to bear and both cloud computing and mobility have a leading role to play in terms of how the next wave is played out.

Mobility matters because users will demand an ubiquitous connection to all these new services in the palm of their hands. Mobility in this sense doesn’t just mean dialling up the office on a smartphone either; it also means the option to use mobile virtual desktop services and the ability to “sign in” to a host of other options from voicemail upwards.

Cloud matters for UC for two main reasons. Firstly, it opens the door to virtualised data services from email to document management (for example SharePoint,Find Complete Details about howo tractor Truck. Google Docs etc.) and video web conferencing (such as WebEx and others). Secondly, the cloud model offers customers a route to these services without initial upfront investment in hardware. It’s almost a “try before you buy (too much) in case you don’t find it commercially productive” arrangement.