"The starter put them with another couple who just started playing golf five months ago."

Doug Ferguson with a fun note on Henrik Stenson booking a U.S. Open tune-up round at Torrey Pines recently:

When he arrived in California for the Target World Challenge, he made a detour to San Diego and booked a twosome on the golf course. The starter put them with another couple who just started playing golf five months ago.

Turns out the woman's name was Pamela Anderson - no, not that one - and Stenson's remembers her boyfriend's name only as Jesse.

"Let's just say it was an interesting round," Stenson said. "She told me, 'The next time you're south of L.A., give me a call.' And I told her, 'Which Pamela Anderson am I going to look up?"'

It was an awakening of sorts for Stenson, who won last year in Dubai and the Accenture Match Play Championship. Outside of a round in Spain last year, he said it had been 10 years since he paid a greens fee. The good news is he received the San Diego County residents rate.

And he bought a bucket of balls for the range, the first time in a while he hit balls with a black stripe around them.

"They were limited-flight balls," he said. "It was cool in the morning, and the ball was going nowhere. But it took a couple of swings to realize this is not down to me. Some of it was the balls."