As the old saying goes, no one remembers who came second. Well, outside households where the Golf Channel isn’t on at all hours of the day, most people would have trouble telling you who came first at the PGA Tour’s opening three events of the season.

That’s not to say they were dull; far from it in fact. Daniel Chopra eventually beat Steve Stricker in a thrilling four-hole playoff at the Mercedes Championships in Maui. K.J. Choi held off a typically spirited Rory Sabbatini in Honolulu to land the Sony Open and his seventh career win, and D.J. Trahan won his second after shooting a final round 65 at the Hope in Palm Springs to overcome a four-shot deficit and beat Justin Leonard by three.

But no matter how dramatic each of these tournaments may have been, none came close to the level of excitement and drama anticipated this week at the Buick Invitational in San Diego, where, for most sports fans at least, the PGA Tour season truly kicks off.

After a five-week break from the game, Tiger Woods is making his 2008 debut and arrives at Torrey Pines as the three-time defending champion. Woods has played the Buick in each of the last 10 years, has won it five times, and never once finished outside the top 10. His stroke average for the 39 rounds (the 1998 final round was cancelled due to rain) he’s completed here is 68.44, and the 62 he shot on the South Course in 1999’s third round remains the course record. However, after a major remodel by Rees Jones in 2001, today’s South is a very different animal than that which Woods humbled nine years ago.

Woods has the opportunity to become the first player in history to win two different PGA Tour events in four successive years (he won at Bay Hill from 2000–2003) and unless he displays any early season rust, which, let’s face it, is extremely unlikely given that he’s won his season opener five times since joining the tour in September 1996, he could very well join Arnold Palmer with 62 career victories.

Out to stop him will be fellow Southern Californian Phil Mickelson, who is also teeing it up for the first time this year and who has three victories of his own at a venue he’s been playing since he was a child. After being confined to bed over the weekend on doctor’s orders following a reoccurrence of the respiratory problems he has suffered since October, Lefty is feeling strong again and played in yesterday’s pro-am without difficulty. This is good news considering he is about to embark on a five-week stretch that won’t see him resting up again until the end of February.

Mickelson has clearly already made himself — and also broken himself once or twice (Winged Foot? Oakland Hills? Shinnecock Hills?) — but, in a sense, this is another make or break year for the world no. 2.

When Mickelson spoke at last year’s Masters of Woods’s vastly superior record, and said how exciting it was to be able to pay, while in his prime, against arguably the best player who ever lived, Mickelson effectively freed himself from the pressure of trying to emulate his greatest rival. When he later joined Butch Harmon’s stable of players, he made instant inroads into the problem of his erratic driving. He quickly recorded two third-place finishes and a win — at the Players Championship — in the weeks immediately following the switch to Woods’s former swing coach.

There have been numerous false dawns, and perhaps Mickelson’s very nature will always make him hard to predict, but could it be that he now possesses the serenity and technique to battle Woods for Player of the Year honors, win two majors in a single season, and enjoy his most successful year ever? His victory over Woods at last year’s Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston was an obvious sign he was headed in the right direction. If Harmon can somehow succeed in containing his pupil’s notorious inconsistencies, the question of his supplanting Woods at the top of the tree might not sound quite as dumb as it has the last couple of years. A win this week will be a good start.

Three others from the world’s top 10 — Jim Furyk, Choi, and Mike Weir — and a total of 11 of the top 25 are also at Torrey Pines, looking not only to claim the $936,000 first-place check but also to get a preview of this year’s U.S. Open venue.

The 7,569-yard South Course was chosen by the USGA to stage the 108th U.S. Open after Rees Jones turned a pleasant enough seaside track into a mighty beast. Playing to a par 72 this week, it will become a par 71 in June after the par-5 6th is shortened slightly to become a par 4. Otherwise, what the players see this week will be fairly similar to what they will encounter later this year. The rough will be thicker, longer, and wider, as the USGA is planning on pulling the ropes further away from the fairway to prevent wayward drives from finding areas that the gallery has flattened. Also, the greens will surely be a touch faster, and the weather hopefully a lot better, but the fairways are likely to be the same width, and the length of the holes, except for the 6th, will be virtually the same.

Should Woods win his fourth Buick Invitational in a row this week, and his sixth in all, his odds for the U.S. Open will shorten, naturally. And who knows? By the time June rolls around, he might even be the first player in history to start a major championship as an odds-on favorite. Regardless, he’s probably still a good bet.

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