Love Is In the Air

If it's Harbour Town time, it's Davis Love III time.

Love, who has had a rather ... unsatisfactory ... past couple seasons, is tied for the lead after the first round of the Verizon Heritage today. And that's no surprise. Love has won at Harbour Town five times.

Another way of looking at that: Love has 19 career wins; more than a quarter of them have come in this tournament.

Sam Snead won the Greater Greensboro Open eight times; Jack Nicklaus won The Masters six times and Harry Vardon won the British Open six times; Tiger Woods has won three different tournaments six times each.

But those golfers are the all-time greats. Love is much more Lanny Wadkins than Jack Nicklaus. Has any golfer comparable to (or lesser than) Love won so often in a single tournament?

Yes. Five of Mark O'Meara's 16 career wins were in the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Almost one-third of his victories.

Love and O'Meara are the only golfers with five wins in a single tournament who don't rate among the all-time greats (although both will make it into the Hall of Fame eventually). Other golfers to win one tournament at least five times - in addition to the ones mentioned above - are J.H. Taylor and James Braid (the other two of Britain's "Great Triumvirate" of turn-of-the-century linksters), Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan, Peter Thomson, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson.