• “Only four players got on the golf course Tuesday at Bellerive Country Club as the first weather delay disrupted the 100th playing of the PGA Championship.”

• “Play was suspended and players and spectators were told to seek shelter as a string of thunderstorms starting hitting the area just past 7 a.m. CT. Lightning lit up the skies, thunder cracked the silence and a deluge of rain left rivers, ponds and small lakes on the already soft golf course.”

• “The putting surfaces are already the talk of the tournament as they are on the rough side and extremely soft, so they didn’t need the water.”

• “A sign in the players’ locker room has already warned the players what to expect: “Due to the expected high temperatures and high humidity over the next couple of days, greens speeds will remain slower than they are planned for Championship Rounds.”

• “If more foul weather moves through the area – and chances are it will the rest of Tuesday and into Wednesday – another challenge could pop up when play begins Thursday. The fairways are pure but soft, which likely will deliver mud balls.”

More.

• Nick Menta writes…”In six years on Tour, Jordan Spieth has enjoyed a career’s worth of major triumphs and heartbreaks. There was the runaway at the 2015 Masters; the birdie-double bogey-birdie finish at the 2015 U.S. Open; the 12th-hole meltdown at the 2016 Masters; the driving-range theatrics at the 2017 Open; and the failure to convert a 54-hole lead last month at Carnoustie.”

• Spieth: “Yeah, just goes back to if you put yourself in the position enough times, you’re going to have some go your way and some that don’t go your way,” Spieth said Tuesday at Bellerive, where he’ll take his second crack at completing the career Grand Slam.

• “I’ve had instances where, like Chambers Bay, where I didn’t think I won when I finished, and then I ended up winning the golf tournament. So it goes both ways. Look at Jack Nicklaus’ career. There’s a perfect example of it, with 19 seconds and 18 majors and, I don’t know, probably 40 top-5s. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is you put yourself in position enough, it will go your way sometimes, and sometimes it won’t. And it’s easier to accept if that’s the way you look at it.”

• “It was funny how growing up we had different games,” the 35-year-old Francesco explained when we caught up before the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. “I was much more accurate and straight in tee shots and shots to the greens. He was a bit wild, but his short game was incredible. I don’t know how that happened growing up in the same environment with the same teacher. Maybe it was the way we saw the game.”

• “Paolo, a dentist, and Micaela, an architect, set up golf lessons with Sergio Bertaina, the revered pro at Circolo Golf Torino. But they never saw their sons as golf pros; not when they were just as passionate competing against one another in football, swimming, track and field, skiing and table tennis. “Loads and loads of sports,” Francesco says today.”

• Martin Kaufman writes …”CBS Sports plans to use the PGA Championship to make its biggest technology push to date in golf. That will include adapting one technology better known to basketball fans and reintroducing green-reading tools that were tested earlier this year in Los Angeles.”

• “At the PGA Championship, CBS will introduce 4D Replay on the 15th tee. The video can pan 270 degrees, zoom in and slow down, creating what should be an interesting tool to study players’ swings.”

• “CBS also will bring back the Putt Predictor, which illustrates the firm and lag putting lines, to give viewers an idea of the range in which putts must roll to have a chance of going in. This tool is used occasionally in coverage of the European Tour. CBS also will use an Undulation Grid, a graphical overlay to show the contours of the greens.”

• “Toptracer will be available on all 18 holes, and as we saw on Fox Sports’ coverage of the U.S. Open, CBS also will use wireless, mounted cameras to trace approach shots from the fairways. That’s not as simple as tracing tee shots.”

• “Sergio has been brought up to me a couple of times over the last couple of weeks,” he said with a smile. “Sergio is a world-class player, and he’s got some weeks ahead of him where he can go out and achieve things. But we also know that Sergio is the type of player who can turn it around in a week or two and then all of a sudden go on a great run of form. World-class players all have ups and downs. And the last few weeks he hasn’t played his best. But he’s still bobbling around. There are still some good signs here and there. He can turn it around very quickly.”

• Translation: Expect Sergio to get a pick if he needs one, which he almost certainly will.

• Inevitably, the subject of Tiger Woods came up in conversation. Did Bjorn, who played all four rounds of the 2001 Dubai Desert Classic alongside Woods and beat him by two shots, think any of his players might be intimidated competing against the great man head-to-head?

• Not surprisingly, Bjorn played a straight bat to that particular query.

• “I’m glad that this generation of players get to experience Tiger Woods, because that’s what they need,” he said. “They need to experience what he brings to the game. And they need to experience all that comes with the world of Tiger Woods.”

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