Driving Range Gossip – Players to look out for

Each year I start off my Celebrity Golf Championship by visiting with some of my golf buddies from the Edgewood Tahoe cart department. Normally I hear the same two names year after year -- six time Celebrity Golf Champion Rick Rhoden, and four time and defending Champion Dan Quinn. This year, the first name to come up was former All Pro Quarterback Chris Chandler. Chandler just completed an amazing 17-year career as an NFL Quarterback, playing with a record eight teams during his run as one of the toughest QB’s of all time. It seems Chandler has focused all of his natural athletic talent to improving his golf game and it really shows.

Two more former All Pro Quarterbacks seemed to also be the talk around the driving range -- Steve Bartkowski and Billy Joe Tolliver. Both enjoyed 12-year careers in the NFL and both hold a USGA handicap of 0. Bartkowski held the first round lead in last year’s event and has had nine top ten finishes in this tournament alone. Tolliver won this event in 1996 and is fourth on the all time Celebrity Players Tour money list. Could this finally be the year of the Quarterbacks? I am sure there are some Hockey greats and a handful of Major League Baseball players that would like to keep that from happening.

With over 40 players in this year’s tournament holding a single digit USGA handicap, anything is possible especially with a Modified Stableford scoring system. We can speculate all we want but the tournament will probably be decided on the 18th green come Sunday.

-- Geoff Burke, TahoeCelebrityGolf.com Sports Editor