MARANA, Ariz. (AP) — Geoff Ogilvy has not played a competitive round of golf in nearly a month. His heart is still at home, where his wife gave birth to their third child less than a week ago.

At any other tournament, it might not be the ideal preparation to defend a title.

The Match Play Championship is different.

Ogilvy came to this event in 2006 at La Costa feeling good about his game. Ten times that week, he watched an opponent stand over a putt to eliminate him. By the end of the week, he was holding the trophy.

A year ago at Dove Mountain, he wasn’t sure he could get his first tee shot in the fairway. He struggled through the first two rounds, got better as the week went on, and in the championship match felt it was the best he had ever played.

“If this week doesn’t go well, it won’t be because of how I’m playing today,” Ogilvy said Tuesday on the eve of the first World Golf Championship of the year. “It will be because someone plays better than me.”

That’s how it is in golf’s most fickle format.

Stories abound of players who make seven birdies and lose, and players who don’t make any and win. It all starts Wednesday on the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club at Dove Mountain, when half of the 64-man field will be eliminated.

Ogilvy is among three champions who were not among the top 50 seeds. He was No. 52 when he won in 2006, while Steve Stricker was No. 55 in 2001 and Kevin Sutherland was No. 62 a year later.

Stricker’s fortunes have changed mightily, and he comes into this Match Play Championship as the No. 1 seed, but only because Tiger Woods has not returned from his indefinite leave. Phil Mickelson also is taking the week off for a family holiday that previously was postponed because of his wife’s treatment for breast cancer.

Stricker remembers what it was like to go to Australia in 2001 as one of the higher seeds. He asked a couple of caddies if they were interested in working for him, and they all turned him down. Stricker wound up taking a friend from Wisconsin, Tom Mitchell, then mowed down six guys to win the title.

Even as the No. 1 seed, his expectations aren’t much different.

“I don’t think you can look past anyone in this tournament,” Stricker said.

For him, that starts with Ross McGowan of England, in the first round. Lee Westwood is the No. 2 seed and plays Chris Wood in an All-England match, while third-seeded Jim Furyk plays former Ryder Cup teammate Scott Verplank and fourth-seeded Martin Kaymer faces Chad Campbell.

Ogilvy, who won the season-opening PGA Tour event at Kapalua, is the No. 10 seed and opens with Alexander Noren of Sweden.

Even though Woods has won this tournament three times, no one has a higher winning percentage than Ogilvy. Along with his two victories, he lost in the championship match three years ago and was beaten in the first round in 2008.

His overall record is 17-2, which in his way of thinking, makes him a better photographer than a painter.

“It’s a weird tournament,” he said. “I obviously enjoy coming to this tournament because it’s been good to me three out of the last four years. But there’s an element that’s slightly out of your control. Seventy-two holes is a big picture to paint. You can have a bad first nine holes and still win the tournament.”

He mentioned Woods shooting 40 on the front nine of the 1997 Masters and winning by 12 shots.

“This, if you have a bad first nine holes, suddenly you’re out. Bye. See you,” Ogilvy said. “It’s a tournament that you almost can’t have result expectations. You can feel good about your game. But I don’t think you’re in complete control at the end of the week.”

If he loses early, it would not be all bad.

Ogilvy lives about two hours north of Phoenix, where wife Julie is home with their three children, including the latest arrival. A son, Harvey Jack, was born on Feb. 11.

“Everyone is happy and healthy, everyone is perfect,” he said. “I feel like I’ve continued my offseason, and this is almost the start of it. It’s been really a nice three weeks. I spent it at home with my kids. They got to meet their new brother and stuff. I’m coming here pretty refreshed, so I’m ready to go.”

He can only hope he’s not leaving sooner than he wants.

Ogilvy is among the few players who have bothered to study the brackets, or at least confessed to looking at them. He tried to figure out which quadrant had the strongest road to the semifinals, only to realize none was particularly easy.

“Every match is difficult,” said Paul Casey, who lost to Ogilvy in the championship match last year. “Everybody here is capable of winning this tournament. I think you’ll hear that from a lot of guys. You just need a little bit of luck, and you need to play some good golf.”

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — We may look back at Sunday’s ungainly conclusion of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, when U.S. Open-like calamity arrived four months early, as the beginning of the Dustin Johnson era.

We’ve seen Tiger Woods win ugly and then proclaim, “It’s good to get the W.”

Johnson won ugly (74 with a double and three bogeys) and said, “Got up-and-down to get the victory. Can’t beat that.”

At only 25, Johnson has won three times. He seems to have a huge upside. For the sake of the PGA Tour, let’s hope he keeps showing it. Because it would be very easy to view Sunday’s ugly action at beautiful Pebble as an indictment of the Tour without Tiger Woods — proof that in the U.S. the game is, for now, rudderless.

Granted, we in the media usually want things to be neater and cleaner than they are in real life. Very rarely can you sum up a sport in one concise cover line, such as this Sports Illustrated summation in 1999: “David Duval is on fire.”

But it’s cause for pause when Johnson shoots 74 and wins without even having to go to sudden death, just as it was when Ben Crane yanked a two-foot putt on the 71st hole of the Farmers Insurance Open and won in regulation two weeks earlier.

These are not the types of mistakes one can make with Woods on the scene, but then Sunday at Pebble was no ordinary day, as a Biblical plague of banana peels seemed to descend on the par-5 14th hole. That’s where four guys vying for the title went a collective 13 over par — three 9s (Alex Prugh, Bryce Molder and Paul Goydos, in that order) and a comparatively spiffy but still costly bogey 6 (David Duval).

Three 9s is a pretty decent poker hand or a leisurely workweek, but it’s not what you expect from the best golfers in the world.

“That’s the amateur’s shot,” a fan said as Molder’s lay-up second shot nestled into the rough right of the 14th fairway, because, of course, pros rarely lay up into trouble.

“No, it’s Molders,” the other fan said.

You could forgive the confusion. The amateurs and pros were playing the same game in more ways than one during Sunday’s five-hour-and-40-minute final round.

Pebble Beach has the tiniest greens on Tour, but we nonetheless witnessed some egregious mistakes. From the middle of the 11th fairway, after watching J.B. Holmes make bogey from behind the green, Goydos, too, found the back bunker and bogeyed.

Tour pros are usually great at identifying where you absolutely cannot hit the ball, and then avoiding that spot. On Sunday they seemed to be aiming for it, whether it was the back bunker on 11 or left of the green on 14, or over the cliff on nine.

Those sorts of mental mishaps once dogged Phil Mickelson, but after he won the Tour Championship and HSBC Champions to close out 2009, he came into this season riding a huge wave of confidence, especially in his newly revamped putting stroke.

He looked so good, in fact, that as the curtain went up on the PGA Tour this year, you could almost hear a voice intone, “Ladies and gentlemen, in tonight’s performance, the role usually played by Tiger Woods will be played by Phil Mickelson. Thank you.”

Alas, Mickelson did not seriously contend at the Farmers, the Northern Trust or the AT&T, and revealed that his putting woes had returned after carding a final-round 71 at Pebble (T8). Like Woods, he will not play the WGC-Accenture Match Play this week.

“They weren’t what I had hoped for,” Mickelson said of his first three weeks, in essence speaking for everyone with an interest in the Tour.

And so we are left with an assortment of 2010 winners who are somewhat random (Ryan Palmer, Bill Haas, Ben Crane) and somewhat not.

Geoff Ogilvy’s repeat victory at Kapalua gave us hope, but he disappeared to play overseas and take care of family obligations as he and his wife, Juli, await the birth of their third child. Steve Stricker, the top seed at the WGC-Accenture, claimed the No. 2 ranking with his victory at Riviera, but his climb back from the abyss is an old story even if it still makes him cry. How many times can we vote a man Comeback Player of the Year?

And so we’re left with Dustin Johnson, our best hope for the breakout star the game needs in Tiger’s absence. Johnson became the first player to go back-to-back at the AT&T since Mark O’Meara 20 years ago, and he is probably one bad round (his third-round 74 at Riviera) from winning in back-to-back weeks. He’s the first player since Woods to win in each of his first three seasons on Tour, and without Woods or Mickelson in the picture this week, the Tour would very much benefit from yet another Johnson triumph.

Could Johnson be a star? He could grow into it. The night before the AT&T began, he was brought onto a stage with fellow young phenom Rickie Fowler at a crowded party emceed by CBS golf mainstays Jim Nantz and Nick Faldo.

Although Fowler took to the spotlight with apparent ease, Johnson initially looked like he might be sick. But he rallied, giving Fowler some grief for his orange golf attire. (Johnson is from South Carolina, so orange means Florida.)

“I don’t like orange,” Johnson quipped.

It wasn’t much, but it was something, a bit of almost-trash talk for the partygoers to latch onto and laugh at. As much as Johnson’s titanic, 288-yard drive into the wind on 18 on Sunday, and his ensuing sand-save for birdie, it showed promise.

We like promise, and right now there’s a lot of it on Tour. Josh Teater (T5 at AT&T) is the fourth player to earn low-rookie honors in the season’s first five weeks.

On the global stage, Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy, Japan’s Ryo Ishikawa, Germany’s Martin Kaymer and Johnson are jockeying for the title of Most Promising.

Johnson and Kaymer have already won this year, and if there’s one thing we like more than promise, it’s young winners, especially young American winners who remind us of Woods, Mickelson or Duval. It’s all about the narrative.

Supposing Johnson goes 6-0 in Tucson this week, here’s a suggested headline: “Dustin Johnson is on fire.”

Ugly invaded the prettiest place in golf on Sunday afternoon, turning an oil painting into an oil slick. The most felicitous meeting of land and sea (Robert Louis Stevenson’s description) is a blight on the landscape when viewed from the back end of a quadruple-bogey 9.

Three of them were made on, the par-5 14th, the hole of shame at Pebble Beach Golf Links, in the final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am on Sunday, one of them by Bryce Molder, with leader Paul Goydos doing more than watching from the fairway. A CBS camera and microphone caught Goydos and Dustin Johnson discussing the potential for calamity there, even as it played out in front of them.

“I’ve never known two players almost tied for the lead, discussing their strategy in the middle of a fairway,” CBS analyst Nick Faldo said. “Don’t know if that’s quite the dumb thing. Call me old-fashioned but they wouldn’t hear me chatting away in the middle of the 14th.”

Goydos’ third shot to the green was short, putting him in an identical predicament that Molder faced moments earlier. When Goydos compounded his mistake by attempting a heroic recovery, Faldo replied, “that’s not a percentage shot on the 14th on a Sunday.”

Goydos then faced a problematic chip from behind the green, one that Faldo said would require “a career shot to get it within 10 feet.” That would have been a low bar to hurdle, Goydos might have said himself given his penchant for self-deprecating humor. Still he was unable to clear it. He eventually tapped in for a nine and handed the trophy to Johnson.

Faldo’s analysis, meanwhile, was appreciably better than Goydos’ execution.

“A lot of psychologists say, start talking about making a mess of it, what are you visualizing? Making a mess,” Faldo said. “You’re talking about it. A perfect example. Stay out there on your own, put your blinkers on, plot your way up the hole and do your own thing. You scared yourself before you got there, discussing it with your fellow pro, that there’s no shot.”

CBS, for those keeping score at home, played the 14th hole expertly.

ABOUT THAT 14TH

How hard will that hole play in the U.S. Open in June, when the green is hard and fast and the USGA has to find four pin locations on a postage stamp?

It’s rare that a par 5 is the toughest hole on the course, as the 14th was Sunday at Pebble Beach. The scoring average was 5.507. There were only eight birdies there, a number that was exceeded by what the PGA Tour dubs others (double-bogeys or higher). There were nine of those, including the three quadrupble-bogeys.

SWINGING IN THE RAIN

OK, so the weather cooperated (for a change) at Pebble Beach. The courses nonetheless were so waterlogged that the first three rounds were played under the preferred lies rule (lift, clean and place).

It was the third time in four weeks that preferred lies were in effect, raising what seems to be a perennial issue: Would the tour be better served by opening in Florida, moving to Arizona and finally hitting California in March?

Good question, as journeyman Jay Williamson noted on Twitter: “Definition of insanity? Playing West Coast Swing in January & February! Only 2 bad months of weather for the entire year.”

Last week, Steve Stricker was lamenting Pebble Beach’s typical winter weather while explaining why he was opting to skip the event and return home to warmer climes in…Wisconsin?

“I just don’t care to go up there and fight with that weather too much,” Stricker said. “It’s sad. They’ve got a great venue for the tournament, and if it was in the fall, I think it would be a better date. But I’m not going.”

Adam Scott also piled on a week earlier at the Northern Trust Open. “I think it will be great if we were here at a different time of year, if it could possibly happen,” he said. “I think that would be a great move. It would be great to play courses like Riviera and Pebble Beach and Spyglass and Monterey in conditions that are tournament-suitable for the level of tournament we are playing, because a lot of the great design work of these courses is taken out when it’s so wet and the ball just plugs where it lands.”

Weather in Florida this year might not have been an improvement, but that would have been an anomaly. Still, the question is moot. One of the driest states in the union apparently is destined to continue to host PGA Tour events in its only wet months.

THE ENIGMA, CONTINUED

What is it, another aberration or another indication that David Duval is methodically (or slowly) recovering his equilibrium? Is his T2 at Pebble Beach a clone of his T2 at the U.S. Open last summer that suggested better days that failed to come, or an accurate measure of where his game stands in his bid to revisit the glory days?

Four rounds in the 60s. The last time he accomplished that in a 72-hole event was the Buick Challenge in 2001 when he was ranked No. 1 in the world. The last time he had a top 10 in a regular PGA Tour event was the Invensys Classic at Las Vegas in 2002.

Duval missed the cut 15 times in ’09 and once in three trips in ’10 (finishing T76 in the other tournament in which he made the cut). After falling to 882nd in the World Ranking, he has climbed back to 199th on the strength of only two tournaments.

PEBBLE BEACH’S REAL STAR

It wasn’t Johnson, or even the weather, though the latter warranted consideration. Short-sleeves at the Crosby? Heresy.

The Shore Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club received the highest accolades, for reasons other than bumping Poppy Hills from the AT&T rotation.

“The wet west coast almost over, sun coming rest of week. Monterey is a great course, better then PB,” Stuart Appleby posted on Twitter.

Better than Pebble Beach? He may not have been alone in his assessment. Phil Mickelson immediately ranked it among his favorites on the PGA Tour.

Mike Strantz, the architect principally responsible for re-designing the course, died in 2004, a year after it re-opened. His widow, Heidi, told Monterey Herald correspondent Jerry Stewart this: “It’s sad that Mike can’t be here. He loved working on that course. He was so very, very sick. He was physically a shell, but he was so excited and happy. Mike’s dream was to bring out the natural beauty and majesty of the timeless Shore Course. And to now see and read how the players are reacting … I’m so proud that they love it. Mike built it to create a visual artistry that you could also play a game on.”