Come all ye players old and new

D'you know, when we browsed through our first leaderboard of the 2001 Golf Masters it was like one of those old school reunions, enough to remind us that we're not as young as we thought we were, but sufficient, too, to warm the cockles of our ageing hearts.

All the familiar faces turned up to meet us - Paul Sheehan, Declan Quinn, Pat Corby, Columba Gavigan, Rheiner Oppermann, Gerry Wickham - not one of them looking a day older than the last time we totted up their team totals, at the end of the 2000 competition. They're wearing well, all of them.

We'd love to be able to tell our old acquaintances that, in our seventh Golf Masters' year, they only have themselves to beat to our first prize of a luxurious trip for four to the Ryder Cup, plus £5,000 spending money. Alas, the news is grim - having been told by our resident authority on these matters that we'd be lucky to break the 10,000 entry barrier this year, because of these competitions' alleged limited shelf-life, we've ended up with 18,872 team totals to tally over the next 27 weeks. Welcome aboard one and all.

Tomas Tracey of Tuam has set the early pace. He sent his Old Fogies No 9 in to battle at the Genuity Championship and the Dubai Desert Classic last weekend and they limped home, zimmer-frame assisted, with £323,664 in their account. Consequently, Tomas now has a fourball and lunch for four to look forward to in Powerscourt, Co Wicklow.

When Thomas Bjorn's transfer value was upped from £3.2 million to £3.8m this year we thought no-one would spend that proportion of their £12.5 million budget on the occasionally great Dane. Yet 1,125 chose him and got a quick reward when he pipped Tiger Woods to victory in Dubai.

Tomas was one of those 1,125 but what separated his chaff from the rest of the Golf Masters' wheat was that he had also had Mike Weir and Jeff Sluman (runner-up and joint third, respectively, in Florida) in his line-up, not to mention Elliot Boult, a top 10 finisher in Dubai, Eamonn Darcy (joint 12th), John Bickerton and Robert Coles (who won close on £20,000 between them).

Now, just to clear up a couple of matters, based on queries to our helpline - this year's bonus tournaments are: the Benson and Hedges International (week 11), the Players' Championship of Europe (week 12), the Volvo PGA Championship (week 13), the British Masters (week 14), the Irish Open (week 18) and the European Open (week 19). As usual the four majors offer double the regular prize money while an Irish winner of a tournament held in Ireland will win £400,000.

We've had a number of requests for injury-updates on particular players, e.g. Mark Calcavecchia - a fortnight after undergoing surgery on his knee he's due to line up at this week's Honda Classic (with the Qatar Masters a counting tournament). Whenever we have information of this kind we'll publish it here on a Thursday, but we cannot give it out over the helpline because that wouldn't be fair on managers who don't ring.