Born thirty-two years ago out of Jack Nicklaus’s desire to bring a Masters caliber tournament to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, the Memorial has quickly become one of the most popular tournaments on the PGA Tour. The 105 player invitational field is one of the strongest of the year with all top ten in the World Golf Rankings participating. However the strong field is not the only topic of discussion on the Memorial.  The infamous furrowed bunkers are also returning to Memorial as Jack tries to make bunkers true hazards again.

Last year much of the talk about the Memorial centered around the improvised bunker rakes Jack brought in for the tournament. The specially devised rakes have tines every two inches, with every other tine missing. This creates furrows in the bunkers where the ball can nestle down in in the sand making clean contact a dicey proposition. Last year the announcement of the new bunkers rankled many of the players in the field. Defending champion Carl Pettersson commented, "The bunkers were very difficult. If you missed it on the short side, it was almost impossible to get it close." However, overall the 2006 sand save statistics didn’t bear much difference when compared with other tournaments. This year they have created a new term for the furrows, now officially dubbed "rough-raking." Along with a change in title, minor modifications have also been made to the rakes to make the conditions more consistent, Jack Nicklaus said, "This year we’re consistent with the size, and we really — I don’t think the players are going to find it to be a big hazard. . . It puts a little ripple in the sand. Can you get a bad lie? Yeah, you’d be pretty hard pressed, though."

With Phil Mickelson’s convincing win at The PLAYERS Championship combined with his move to swing coach Butch Harmon he is riding quite a bit of momentum into the tournament and is a heavy favorite. Although Tiger Woods has not played up to his high standards recently, his three wins at the Memorial (1999, 2000, 2001) combined with his pension for playing well in difficult tournaments means we can likely expect his name near the top of the leaderboard on Sunday. Last year Carl Pettersson won the event by two shots, and has taken a realistic method towards preparing for his title defense, "I’m going to try to approach it just like I would any other tournament, try to go in there and do as well as I can and see what happens." A bit of a dark horse candidate for this week is Masters champion Zach Johnson. Johnson was runner up here last year and has won twice already on Tour this year including the AT&T Classic two weeks ago. In 12 starts this year, Johnson has not missed a single cut.

You can catch TV coverage of the Memorial at the following times:
Thursday: 3:00-6:00 PM EST Golf Channel
Friday: 3:00-6:00 PM EST Golf Channel
Saturday: 12:30-2:30 EST Golf Channel / 3:00-6:00 EST CBS
Sunday: 12:00-239 EST Golf Channel / 2:30-6:00 EST CBS