It seems like I’ve written countless stories about some unlikely third-round leader who claims he’s ready to contend on Sunday. Kevin Streelman “is another one of those”:http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080824/SPORTS01/808240356/1108/SPORTS01.

A PGA Tour rookie, with only one top-five finish to his credit, Streelman is most likely today to hit his first drive off a corporate tent and into a garbage can. If you look at the players directly behind him—be it Sergio Garcia or Vijay Singh, or even the newly bearded Mike Weir—those are the players you can expect to contend. And from a sponsor’s or even a media’s perspective, those are the players that are most likely to hold fans’ attention.

But for once, I’d like to see a guy like Streelman defy the odds and hold those players off. Some of it has to do with the fact that Streelman seems like a genuine guy who fans would come to like if they just got to know him. But the other part is that he’s the type of Cinderella story that could really inject life into the FedEx Cup playoffs.

Chances are that’s not going to happen. But it would make for compelling theater if it did.

So much energy is expended trying to figure out why certain guys play well on certain courses. Is it the style of architecture? The length? The galleries?

It’s probably all of the above, not to mention the type of grass, the weather, the food, and whether or not you got stuck in traffic on the way to your round.

I mention this because the leaderboard at this first-ever Barclays away from Westchester Country Club looks a lot like a leaderboard….at Westchester Country Club.

First came Hunter Mahan with “his blistering opening 62”:http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080822/SPORTS01/808220373, and now there’s defending champion Steve Stricker, who has moved atop the board with his second-round 64.

That both players fared well at last year’s tournament could be a coincidence seeing how only the Barclays logo is the same. Or maybe there’s enough similarities between the two courses that the same players respond well.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that your typical PGA Tour player is so oblivious, he might not even be aware they’re at a new course.

Mill River’s (N.Y.) Mark Mielke shot a 1-under-par 69 to finish at 5-under and capture the Met Open Championship by three shots.

Fenway’s Heath Wassem finished runner-up with a three-day total of 2-under 208.

Mielke, who also won the event in 1992, won $27,500 for the victory. He set the record for longest gap between wins in the event.

Sleepy Hollow’s Tim Hegarty, the first round leader after shooting a tournament-record 62, finished in a tie for fifth place at even par. He had quite a roller-coaster week with a 77 in the second round and a 71 in the third round that included a bogey, double bogey finish.

Unfortunately for him, he spent a good chunk of money with that ending, but to his credit, he seemed very upbeat following the event.

So did Wassem, who hasn’t had his best summer, but certainly looked in form this week, especially with back-to-back 68s to close. His birdie on the last hole snagged him a solo second place and a check for $15,000. Not bad for three-days of “work” on this gorgeous golf course.

GlenArbor’s Rob Labritz and Hudson National’s Matt Dobyns finished in a third-place tie at 1-under. Century’s Frank Bensel, the defending champion finished tied with Hegarty for fifth place.

All in all it was a great week with spectacular weather on a fantastic links-style course. Ironically, next year this event will be at Ridgewood Country Club, the site of the ongoing Barclay’s Championship for the PGA Tour.

I haven’t ever seen that course (Sam ihas the good fortune of camping out there all week), but it would be tough to beat this layout.

Okay, I’m off to Saratoga for a weekend of horseracing at the Travers Stakes. I’m not a big horse guy, but I’ve heard from a variety of sources that all sports fans need to take in a race at the historic track.

Hopefully, I’ll get to make a couple stops at the Stadium Cafe, a Journal News favorite during basketball state playoffs, as well…

So let me get this straight:

Hunter Mahan “rips the PGA of America and the Ryder Cup”:http://www.golf.com/golf/tours_news/article/0,28136,1826837-3,00.html, says how much he prefers the Presidents Cup, then misses the cut at the PGA….and still wants to be included on the U.S. Ryder Cup team???!!!!

Well, you can get away with that sort of thing when you shoot 62, which is what Mahan did today in the first round of The Barclays. And let’s face it, given the U.S.’s recent track record in the Ryder Cup, captain Paul Azinger can’t afford to be too picky.

“Well, I see here you’ve spent a few years in prison and you’re cruel to children and small animals. But you also bust it 320 off the tee and make a ton of birdies. Welcome to the team! What size shirt do you wear?”

By almost all accounts, the pre-tournament reviews of Ridgewood Country Club have been positive, to the extent that players’ affections for Westchester Country Club sound like a distant memory. To wit, Phil Mickelson:

I like Westchester. I think it’s a great golf course. I do feel as though Ridgewood is a step up in quality. I’ve always loved going to Westchester, but this course really has a major-championship feel. It’s a Tillinghast, same designer as Winged Foot, same designer as Baltusrol. It has that Northeast, major-championship feel.

Heck, even Johnson Wagner, the closest thing this area has to a home grown product, said he preferred Ridgewood to Westchester (although, it’s worth noting that Wagner won both of his Met Open titles on A.W. Tillinghast courses—Bethpage Black and Winged Foot—like Ridgewood.

I have been a fan of Ridgewood since I covered the 2001 Senior PGA here, and I don’t doubt many players really feel that this week is an upgrade. But I also think the glowing feedback speaks to a common psychological tactic of PGA Tour players, many of whom think the best way to channel good vibes on a new layout is to accentuate the positive. Because if you start thinking about the parts you don’t like, that’s the part you’ll find yourself dealing with.

It sounds silly, I know. But it’s easy to love a golf course before you’ve hit your first official shot there. It gets tougher after you’ve missed the cut.

Yesterday I was at round one of the Met Open at the Country Club of Fairfield and it appeared that one player might runaway with the prestigious tournament, one of the MGA’s three major championships.

Wrong.

In the latest example of how crazy a game golf can be, Sleepy Hollow’s Tim Hegarty, who scorched the track for a course-record tying and Met Open (93 years!) record 8-under-par 62 in round one, came back to shoot a 77 in round two. A 15 shot difference on the same course on back to back days? Who is this guy, Andres Romero?

Anyway, even with the disappointing round two, Hegarty is in position to make a run at the title. At 1-under, he’s in a tie for third place, three shots behind Mill River’s (N.Y.) Mark Mielke.

A host of others are in the mix, so tomorrow’s final round should be exciting as the pros battle for the $150,000 purse and the $27,500 payout to the winner. I’ll be on hand and I’ll let you know how it all turns out. Goodnight.

Actually, I don’t get a vote for PGA Tour Player of the Year. That’s only for players, and seeing how my low round of the year is an 86 (and that was very good for me), I’m pretty sure I don’t qualify.

But one of the early storylines emerging this week at The Barclays is who should be tour player of the year: Tiger Woods with his four wins, one of which was his Willis Reed imitation at the U.S. Open; or Padraig Harrington, who has simply won each of the last two majors.

It sounds like players are leaning toward Harrington, and it’s hard to disagree. As remarkable as Woods was at Torrey Pines and with his three straight wins to start the year, the fact that he simply hasn’t been around much this season should disqualify him.

I know, I know. I don’t think Woods wanted to blow out his knee. But the reality is Woods’ sparse playing schedule is a factor every year, and this one was merely an extreme.

In fact, new rule: you can’t win Player of the Year if you don’t know who your fellow players are. Every time you turn to your caddie and say, “Who’s that guy?” is a deduction in points.

Chances are if you’re visiting a golf blog, you know about, and presumably care a little about this year-old venture known as the FedEx Cup. The question is how much?

I’ll say my piece here from the press room at The Barclays at Westchester Ridgewood Country Club: I care more about golf at this time of summer than I did two years ago—heck, I’m here aren’t I?—so that immediately makes the FedEx Cup an upgrade. It’s not a major. It’s not the Ryder Cup. But it’s something, which immediately makes it better than nothing.

Granted, this is hardly in line with the PGA Tour marketing campaign that makes you think the FedEx Cup is golf’s version of the Stanley Cup (minus the playoff beards, of course). When the tour launched this initiative, they didn’t envision golf blogs a year into it asking if anyone cared.  But I’ll also say the venture is young enough that it has time to mature and grow on people.

And should Tiger Woods ever get around to playing golf again, it might even gain traction.

Okay, so I’ve gotten a comment that I should try to liven up this blog by talking about subjects local golfers can get involved with. I think this is a great idea.

Since Rich S suggested we talk about sandbagging, let’s go with it.

So what can we say about sandbagging. Many of us have either been accused of it or have accused others of it.

As a joke, I was even once tossed an actual bag of sand by a friend with whom I often play with. He is an Earth Science teacher so he had the sand on hand, but nevertheless, I was impressed with the effort.

Ironically, that same person has been accused a couple times of sandbagging himself, including today. He also once shot so far below his handicap in a club championship that it was deemed statistically impossible (A net 57!) and a couple of his friends had to be called in to testify that he was in fact that bad… true story.

In case you’re reading this and you don’t know, a sandbagger is someone who misrepresents his/her handicap to gain an advantage. Why would someone do this? Simply to win some money by being given more strokes by a competitor in a round.

Obviously, this goes against the integrity of the game, but it definitely happens. However, I have noticed that when it comes to inflated handicaps, it usually seems that people exaggerate how good they are in the opposite direction, making them sound much better than they actually are (I’d probably be more likely to be accused of this now being that I’m a 5.9 thanks to playing 95% of my rounds on the shortest course in the county…)

Sure you can have a bad day, but if you’re a single digit handicapper, you shouldn’t be in triple digits. Unless you were that guy who won the contest to play Torrey Pines under U.S. Open conditions with Justin Timberlake, Tony Romo and Matt Lauer…

You can also have a career day as a high handicapper, as was the case with my friend. In any event, if you do that, make sure I’m your partner.

Anyway, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this and if they have any stories. Maybe we can get a discussion going. In the meantime, I’ll be at the Country Club of Fairfield tomorrow for the first round of the Met Open. Back with more from that.

This past week, several local junior golfers really proved themselves on a big stage with strong performances in the AJGA’s Northwestern Mutual Financial Network – Blumberg Group Junior Classic.

The tournament was held at Richter Park Golf Course in Danbury, Conn., and both Brewster’s Mike Miller and Mahopac’s Marisa Kamelgarn each finished in second place in their respective boys and girls divisions.

Miller nearly caught winner David Zhang of South Glastonbury (Conn.) with a sparkling 3-under 33 on the back nine (he shot 69 for the round), highlighted by ramming in a 40-foot birdie putt on the final hole. Zhang responded with a par, however, to win the event by a stroke with a 5-under total of 211.

As you can see by the scores, the quality of play was outstanding. That shouldn’t be a surprise though since AJGA events attract the best in junior golf and this tournament was no different with the field being peppered by golfers from all over the country and beyond.

Rye’s Mark Mumford finished third at even par and Cortlandt Manor’s Jon Renza, who had a stretch of five straight birdies in his final round of 70, finished tied for 8th.

I was so impressed by the beauty of the public course that I enlisted fellow Journal News team member Eric Lebowitz to make a run up there with me on Monday to play. Unfortunately, we ended up waiting around in the clubhouse for over an hour while watching a torrential downpour outside that was supposedly “just passing through.”

We did get a chance to check out all of the articles on the tournament, though, including the story I wrote for Saturday’s paper. The Danbury NewsTimes did a terrific job covering the event and since Brewster is in there coverage zone, the wall essentially became an ode to Miller.

The rain may have stopped us once, but we will get back out to this beautiful track again. I’ll let you know if its worth the drive and the $85, but after seeing most of the course, I’m pretty sure it will be.