Week seven of the 1999 Golf Masters and our leading challengers to date are showing a marked reluctance to lead this competition from the front. For the seventh successive week we have a new leader, William Brennan of Dublin, whose team has opened up the biggest gap we've had so far at the top, just over £40,000.
William was one of 788 managers to profit from Glen Day's first PGA Tour victory on Sunday when he beat fellow Americans Payne Stewart and Jeff Sluman in a play-off at the MCI Classic in South Carolina.
Having started out as one of last year's least popular picks amongst our managers (at registration time he was ranked 186th out of 240 players) Day's consistency and modest transfer value (just £800,000) turned him into one of our most "hired" players and by the end of the competition he was second only to Mathias Gronberg as the bargain buy of the year, winning £505,500.
Not surprisingly then when it came to working out this year's transfer fees Day's value rocketed to £1.9 million, but, even at that, a return of £174,583 after just seven weeks (making him our 10th highest earner to date) is decent value for money.
Earnings of £182,877 at the weekend were enough to lift William Brennan from 14th to first overall (John Huston, who tied for fifth at the MCI Classic was "The Birds" second top earner) but nobody matched four-ball winner Robert McKenna's haul of £334,056. Five of Robert's players finished in the top 10 in America (Day, Stewart, Huston, Nolan Henke and Bob Tway, with Fred Funk's share of 18th and Eamonn Darcy's £1,500 from the Estoril Open completing the team total.
The average weekly score was just £47,896, bringing the overall average to £369,007, not much more than Robert picked up in one tournament. Twelve teams scored nothing at all at the weekend with another 1,447 winning less than £5,000.
There was at least some good news for managers of Paul McGinley, Philip Price, Stephen Allan, Jarmo Sandelin and Michael Long, all of whom made their first appearances of the season in Portugal. Price had the best start of the five, tying for 12th in a tournament won by Jeff Remesy, who may have done enough to clinch his 2000 Golf Masters' tour card - but he doesn't have one yet.
The news isn't so rosy for managers of some of the big guns. Darren Clarke is taking "several weeks" off to work on his game; Colin Montgomerie won't be back in action until week 11 (for the International Open); Tiger Woods is taking the same length break (he'll return at the Byron Nelson on May 13th) and Greg Norman will spend much of the next six weeks on his boat "somewhere in Central America" - he won't be back until the Memorial tournament on June 3rd (week 14).
By the way, those of you still cursing Joe Durant after he missed the cut at the Masters (with rounds of 87 and 79) should know that he was actually playing with a fractured rib, an injury he picked up swinging a club at Pebble Beach in February. He didn't mention the injury to the media because he "didn't want it to sound like he was making excuses" but he would have at least saved himself dog's abuse from the 64 managers who paid £1.2 million for his services.
Durant will be nursing his fractured rib this week and misses out on the Greater Greensboro Classic, which has the weakest field so far this year in America with only three of the world's 20 top-ranked players entered - Vijay Singh, Steve Elkington and Jesper Parnevik.
Parnevik's 534 bosses will hope the Swede manages to finish the tournament this time after his disqualification from the MCI Classic (for failing to assess himself a two-stroke penalty after he swept his putting line with his golf glove).
The Spanish Open should prove to be more rewarding than week eight's American tournament, with Clarke and Ronan Rafferty (still recovering from surgery to his left hand) the only Irish players on our list not entered.
