Golf: Time running out for Tataurangi to deliver

The main event of the golfing summer starts at Clearwater in Christchurch on Thursday. A total of 78 players from the US second level Nationwide Tour in the New Zealand PGA Championship, as well as 68 from the Australasian PGA Tour and 10 invitees.

Of those from the Nationwide Tour, eight have won in golf's major league, the PGA Tour itself. One of them, Notah Begay, was so good until about six years ago, he was in the US Presidents Cup team.

Other past winners from the main Tour include Grant Waite and Phil Tataurangi. But then that's the kind of experience the Nationwide Tour is - a place for those who've been to the top and want to rekindle past glories, those whose best days are probably behind them, and the young and hungry looking for a way to the top.

One of the most intriguing players to follow at Clearwater will be Tataurangi. You'd think this is a make or break year for him. Much of the prime of his golfing life was snuffed out through injury. He's had heart, neck and back problems but then his career, even as a somewhat brittle teenage amateur in the late 1980s, was often interrupted by health issues until he'd return to brilliant success.

He played two rounds and missed the cut at the Nationwide Tour's Panama Open in the last week of January but before that Tataurangi hadn't played a PGA Tour-sanctioned event since late 2004. Towards the end of last year he fronted for some US mini tour events and this year is allowed to enter 21 tournaments on the PGA Tour under a medical exemption.

That's because, as a tournament winner in Las Vegas as recently as November 2002, he was granted full playing rights on the Tour for two years until the end of 2004. But much of that time was affected by injury, so the PGA Tour is now giving him one last chance. To stay on the Tour, he has to make at least the amount earned by the 125th place-getter on the Tour money list in 2004, less the $US6540 Tataurangi made that year. So the target between now and November is to bank $616,722 which seems a lot but can be reached comfortably with less than half-a-dozen top-10 finishes.

Tataurangi, who's also been playing this week at the Jacobs Creek Open, said he has no great expectations for these Nationwide Tour events but you'd like to think he might show some signs of form.

With Stephen Scahill and Grant Moorhead also playing at Clearwater by invitation, three of the famous four who won the Eisenhower Trophy in 1992 are in the field. The exception just happens to be the 14th best player in the world, the current US Open champion and probably the most high profile New Zealander on the planet. So it's well understood that Michael Campbell has commitments at the World Golf Championship matchplay tournament in California.

New Zealand winners of our top events have been as rare as a Jack Nicklaus three putt this decade. But with the country's best, except Campbell, at Clearwater it would be nice to think a Kiwi could win. But the high quality of the field makes it very unlikely.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY