Captain McGinley’s Clubs Stolen On AT&T Eve Prompting Annual Question About The Field For This Once Proud Event

Hamed Aleaziz of the San Francisco Chronicle reports that victorious European Ryder Cup Captain Paul McGinley stopped to check out the fresh air at SF’s Ocean Beach and came back to found his clubs, Ryder Cup charity items, passport and luggage had been stolen.

This prompted the world to ask, just who gets in this event again? Oh, wait, first the Captain's nightmare:

“I was just disappointed,” said McGinley, 48. “I had only been in the country an hour and a half. It can happen in any country, or city in the world. I thought it was safe, and it didn’t cross my mind.”

While we all sympathize with McGinley’s plight and hope the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce works quickly to ensure he has another passport and his trip made less awful, this was yet another reminder that the AT&T National Pro-Am digs deep down the depth charts to fill out its PGA Tour (mostly) field.

What some would consider a week of a lifetime—playing Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill and Monterey Peninsula CC while sipping fine Napa wines, savoring artichoke soup and hanging out with well-connected blowhards—has become a chance to see names entered in a PGA Tour event that recall glory days of centuries past. I know that some of today's Hogan and Sneads can't deal with poa and the craters created by amateurs, but isn't this mostly about the PGA Tour calendar spreading stars thin and turning what should be one of the most watched events of the year into a glorified Callaway Invitational?