Irish pair join the elite in Atlanta

TOUR NEWS: For the world's elite players, golf is now an never-ending season. As one door closes, as occurred with the Volvo Masters' conclusion to the PGA European Tour season, others ease open offering, if anything, even greater financial rewards.

Which is why Padraig Harrington boarded a Delta flight out of Dublin shortly before noon yesterday and headed for Atlanta where this week's US Tour's finale, the Tour Championship, takes place at East Lake Country Club.

Only the top 30 players on the US money list - plus Harrington, a non-member, who is committed to taking out his card for next season - have qualified for an event which its executive director Todd Rhinehart remarked, "it's the only time of the year you see the top 30 best golfers square off against each other".

In an indication of Ireland's new found power base in international golf, two of them have qualified for the Tour Championship: Harrington, who is competing in the event for the first time, and Darren Clarke, who is making his second appearance. Neither won in America this year but accumulated sufficiently huge amounts of prize money to make the elite field.

But the two players departed Valderrama on Sunday evening - both rushing to get private jets home, in Harringotn's case to Dublin and in Clarke's to London - with widely contrasting views on the state of their games.

While Clarke offered the opinion that 2004 had been a "horrendous" year - leaving apart the Ryder Cup - because of his failure to win a tournament, Harrington (who won twice on the European Tour and also had runner-up finishes in the Players Championship in the US and the TPC of Europe) insisted he had "no real issues" with the state of his game. "I'm playing well. I've five more events left this year and I'm looking forward to them," he added.

The respective schedules of the pair for the final weeks of the year see Harrington play in this week's Tour Championship followed by the World Cup in Seville (where he partners Paul McGinley) in a fortnight's time, the start of a four-week stint that will also take in his defence of the Hong Kong Open, a tournament in Korea and, finally, the Target World Challenge - run by Tiger Woods - in Los Angeles.

Clarke's demeanour on leaving Valderrama on Sunday evening suggested he wished the season could come to a quick closure, but he still has the Tour Championship, followed by next week's Visa Taiheiyo Masters in Japan and, then, back-to-back tournaments in South Africa - for the Nelson Mandela tournament and the Nedbank Challenge in Sun City - to go before he can put his clubs away for the winter.

The Tour Championship - where world's number one Vijay Singh, who won the Chrysler Championship on Sunday to bring his winnings for 2004 above the $10 million mark, will be attempting to take his 10th title of the season - has seven multiple winners in the field and is the golden handshake at the end of the season for the US Tour's elite.

The victory moved the Fijian almost two points clear of second-placed Ernie Els in the world rankings. Singh, who deposed Tiger Woods as the game's leading player in September, has a points average of 14.14 - 1.93 ahead of South African Els.

Woods, who monopolised the world rankings for a record 264 consecutive weeks before being dislodged by Singh, is a further 0.9 points back in third.

Meanwhile, both Harrington and Clarke are due to split their time next year between the European Tour and the US Tour. As George O'Grady, the executive director designate of the PGA European Tour, who takes over from Ken Schofield in January, admitted: "We have to continue to work to make the schedule as good as you can . . . . ideally, you have sections of the European Tour which are very, very attractive to your elite group of players. I think there's aspects of our tour now that are so good it is hard for players to turn their backs on it."

However, O'Grady added that the European Tour would be making their case to the US PGA Tour at a meeting in two weeks' time of the International Golf Federation - which will take place at the World Cup in Seville - about the extra demands they are placing on players like Ernie Els and Retief Goosen to play more often in America.

"We are obviously concerned about the situation," said O'Grady, "but the very fact Ernie Els has said that he is concerned should be concerning them (the US Tour) . . . it seems a quite extraordinary pressure to put on a player of his level who plays usually 17 or 18 tournaments in the United States anyway."

The pulling power of the European Tour, nevertheless, is what will inspire 11 Irish players this week as they compete in the second stage of the tour's pre-qualifying school.

Raymond Burns, who has previous experience on the circuit, is joined by John Dwyer, Ricky Elliott, David Mortimer and Leslie Walker at Oliva Noda in northern Spain as they attempt to book places in the 108-holes final qualifying which takes place in San Roque at the end of next week.

Eamonn Brady, Justin Kehoe, Colm Moriarty and Tim Rice are seeking to advance to the final stage when competing in PQ-II at El Bosque, while Michael Collins and Ciaran McMonagle are playing in the qualifying competition at Emporda.