“What am I doing in Tucson?” With Phoenix/Scottsdale and more than 3,600 golf holes just 90 minutes down the turnpike, it’s a legit question. Isn’t this sleepy college town better known for bacon-wrapped “Sonoran hot dogs” than it is for world-class golf and upscale resorts? What gives?

Hold steady there, compadre. Before you get on the iPhone and start googling for a hitman to eliminate your travel agent, take a deep breath, widen your eyes to take in the blue skies and send flowers instead. You have just arrived at the Ritz-Carlton at Dove Mountain, and all is well with the world. Unpack, flip on the flatscreen and open those sliding glass doors onto a saguaro-studded desert tableau. Now chill.

The Ritz opened its doors in December of 2009, but development in the foothills of the Tortolita Mountains has been burning steady for the past 25 years or so. Things geared up when Tucson developer David Mehl bought 1,300 acres from the legendary homesteader “Cush” Cayton, who’d been ranching here since 1926. Housing developments sprung up like wildflowers, followed by 36 holes dubbed the Gallery Golf Club, designed by John Fought with help from Tom Lehman on the North Course.

Fought’s links-style South Course played host to the Accenture Match Play Championships in 2007 and 2008, but the action moved up the hill in 2009 to 18 of Jack Nicklaus’s 27 holes at the Ritz-Carlton. (Holes 28 through 36 are in the offing as well.) Thereby hangs a controversial tale.

After numerous players complained about the unreceptive, hard greens, the PGA Tour mandated some changes, and the stripping and softening began in earnest. After all, at 7,800-plus yards, the long approach shots needed a few receptive pin positions on the Saguaro and Tortolita courses, where the tournament is routed. Jack didn’t accede without mild protest, but the changes were duly made, and the Bear confessed it amounted to an improvement.

On media day this year, with the course set up to bare its tournament teeth, I’d have been hard-pressed to guess that it had been made any easier in the past year. Green complexes were still hard to hold but for the highest, most feathery approach shots, and even then the trouble was just beginning. Facing snaking downhillers that read 12-plus on the old Stimp was like putting on a green-tinted Colorado River. Putts don’t just break here, they eddy and foam and spin drunkenly like a sailor on a weekend furlough.

That said, the pain of perpetual three-jacks is thoroughly effaced by the jigsaw joys of this demanding desert layout. While your first trip around might confound your eye off the tee on various holes — not knowing exactly where Jack wants you to drive — the next time out is difficult but not dizzying. Nicklaus knew what he was doing, fashioning a design that would make aggressive amateurs flash back to what they’d seen the pros do on TV in February.

“You have the opportunity to relate to those players,” Nicklaus has said, “and say, ‘Hey, I saw Tiger here, he didn’t get it up-and-down, and I did.’ Those are the kind of things that I think make the game fun.”

Landing areas are generous once you get used to the liberal bunkering, but there are daunting forced carries over desert wash areas on more than a few tee shots and approaches. Saguaros line the fairways and discourage players from seeking out ancient, lost Kro-Flites to pad the shag-bag. For comic relief, once-noble, 18-foot succulents are now studded with numerous errant tee shots.

If it’s unspoiled, hazard-free beauty that you hanker after, the 850 acres surrounding the Ritz-Carlton should fit the bill nicely. Twenty-five miles of improved trails ring the hotel, which you can mount on foot or mountain bike, then wind your way through the Tortolita Mountains and Wild Burro Canyon. The stillness is broken only by breezes, or the skittering of, er, scorpions and lizards and snakes; the air is clear and dry. Views go on and on and then some.

I don’t know about you, but all that talk of hiking gets me hungry. Happily, just inside the resort’s four-story main building — made of adobe, clay tile, stucco and stone — sits a culinary destination that alone is well worth a trip to the Sonoran Desert. The CORE Kitchen and Wine Bar is a stunningly sleek, glass-encased marvel, ably guided by the antic spirit of Chef Joel Harrington, whose Mohawk-hairdo and punk-rock aesthetic stand in stark contrast to the refined elegance of the room.

The chef may be the walking definition of an enfant terrible, but the menu is a perfectly mannerly model of local-ingredients-first, regionally-influenced cuisine. A beyond-tender buffalo tenderloin is done with garlic fries and a celery root pure, and there’s a lovely sweet potato bisque with a hint of chipotle that is as smooth as Steve Stricker’s putting stroke. They also serve a damn fine order of fish tacos at the poolside Turquesa Latin Grill.

For dessert, I’d skip the carb-fest and make your way down to the tranquil luxury of the Ritz’s spa. While it may usually be true that a spa is a spa, the outdoor area here, where various treatments are offered under the azure canopy above, is a little slice of desert heaven. Not only that, I had a world-class deep tissue massage that straddled the line between pleasure and pain without sacrificing therapeutic benefits. Plus, the steamroom is big enough for a touch football game and emits copious clouds of healing vapors. Ahhhhhhhhhhh …

You may want to venture some 20 miles to downtown Tucson for a funky enchilada dinner and some rock and roll. Me, I was happy on Dove Mountain with the flagsticks and the saguaros and the multi-hued sunrises and sunsets. P.S., there’s only 350 days of sunshine in this valley, so pick your vacation date carefully if you like rain.

A man can find sanctuary in the most curious place, somewhere contrary to convention and maybe even to common sense but wholly compatible with his instincts. He finds it where no one else possibly could, where no one would even think to look, and with it he also finds himself. If he is left alone.

In the months following a dispiriting 2005 season on the PGA Tour, his third in a row that seemed to reinforce the idea that whatever skills he possessed were inadequate for world-class golf, Steve Stricker retreated into the bosom of a typical Wisconsin winter to reassemble his game. He took his faulty swing, his flagging confidence and his heap of broken images to a makeshift indoor practice facility and began the long process of becoming the kind of player he finally realized he wanted to become.

He would smack yellow range balls from the open side of a mobile home into a snow-covered field, hoping the answers that Ben Hogan so desperately sought in the dirt might reveal themselves from an AstroTurf mat. He gauged his resolve not by the number of balls that burrowed into the frozen canvas near flags perched atop small mounds of green-painted snow, but by the hours that unknowingly flitted by. He wrapped himself in a cocoon, mending, evolving and transforming. And then the player who had plummeted to 337th in the World Ranking, who seemed too nice to beat hungrier and longer-hitting foes, who was tormented by his desire to stay home with his family, spread his wings and took flight.

“That’s the time I remember best, at the end of ’05, when I knew I needed to do something or move on,” says Stricker, who turns 43 Feb. 23. “That’s when I had more of a purpose than at any time in my career.”

Dressed in blue jeans, brown boots and jacket and black Peter Millar cap, Stricker is standing in one of the covered hitting bays at Cherokee CC in Madison, Wis., as he says this. A gas-fueled heater overhead is barely holding its own against the arctic gusts and snow blowing in, but Stricker doesn’t seem to notice. A native of nearby Edgerton, Stricker is acclimated to such environs. Plus, he is still basking in the warmth of his two-stroke victory two days earlier at the Northern Trust Open, which elevated him past Phil Mickelson to No. 2 in the World Ranking — or “No. 1 active” notes his father-in-law and mentor Dennis Tiziani, considering Tiger Woods is on hiatus.

The win is Stricker’s eighth since he joined the tour in 1994, but his fifth since he emerged from his own personal wilderness and fourth in his last 14 starts.

Implausible though it is, you have to talk to Stricker and see first-hand the frozen landscape that would feel purgatorial to the rest of the sun-worshipping golfing fraternity to comprehend his rise from mediocrity to this latent meteoric ascent. And even then it still seems inconceivable.

“It’s all kind of surreal,” says Stricker, who augmented his reputation last fall when he partnered with Woods to produce a 4-0 record in Team USA’s victory in the Presidents Cup at Harding Park. “After every tournament [my wife] Nicki and I will sit down and talk about what’s happened. We’re like, ‘Can you believe it, that I won again?’ That’s our feeling, that it still is unbelievable. I’m shocked by what’s happened the last year or so. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it keeps me grounded.”

Staying grounded is probably the least challenging aspect of being Steven Charles Stricker, who grew up in a modest middle-class home with two working parents. His father, Bob, ran his own electrical business; his mother, Carolyn, was a secretary. There wasn’t a lot of money, but Steve and his older brother, Scott, were given plenty of lessons about comportment and respect for others. Bob was a fine amateur golfer, and he introduced the game to both boys. Steve started at age 7, and he took to it quickly. He played mostly at Towne CC, which at the time was a nine-hole public facility with no driving range. To practice, he’d lug his bag to Edgerton Racetrack Park and hit balls between the baseball fields. He became good enough to draw the attention of the University of Wisconsin golf coach.

That would be Tiziani, who could only offer Stricker a partial scholarship, while Big Ten rival Illinois had a full ride waiting. Stricker would win three conference titles at Illinois and was an All-American in 1988-89. It says a lot about both men that Stricker would enlist the help of Tiziani as an instructor while still at Illinois, and that Tiziani would consent. But, then, Tiziani, who played the tour in the early 1970s before settling in at Cherokee CC, had long ago gotten the sense that Stricker, a pure feel player with rudimentary swing fundamentals, was already a complete person with the potential to become a complete golfer.

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.”

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Dustin Johnson stood on the 18th tee as powerful waves crashed along the sea wall along the left side of the famous 18th hole at Pebble Beach. Then he turned to face what he considers the toughest drive on the golf course.

“It’s such a gorgeous hole,” Johnson said. “If you miss it a little left, it’s not so pretty.”

What followed was a tee shot as majestic as the scenery around him.

Johnson’s drive was long and pure, setting up a simple birdie from the greenside bunker Sunday. It gave him a one-shot victory over David Duval and J.B. Holmes, making him the first player in 20 years to win back-to-back in the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.

(Read what our experts have to say about Johnson’s win, Duval’s lost opportunity and more in PGA Tour Confidential, our weekly roundtable.)

Johnson closed with a 2-over 74, the highest final round by a Pebble Beach champion since Johnny Miller (74) in 1994. The 25-year-old Johnson is the first player since Tiger Woods to go straight from college and win in each of his first three years on the PGA Tour.

Johnson hit a 3-iron into the front right bunker, the best place to miss, and blasted out to 3 feet. He lightly pumped his fist when he made the putt, a mixture of celebration and relief from a long day in which four players had a share of the lead at some point.

“All you can ask for is a chance to win on the last hole,” Johnson said.

Paul Goydos didn’t get that opportunity. Leading by one shot with five holes to play, Goydos hit a chip that ran off the other side of the treacherous 14th green, another chip that came back down the slope toward his feet and three-putted for a quadruple-bogey 9.

He wound up with a 78 and tied for fifth.

Two other players – Bryce Molder and Alex Prugh – also made a 9 on the par-5 14th hole, the kind of carnage typically seen at the U.S. Open, which will be at Pebble in four months.

“It wasn’t like I didn’t try on all nine shots,” Goydos said. “The ninth one I really wasn’t all that excited about. Just everything I did on that hole didn’t work out.”

Johnson’s two victories were nothing alike.

He essentially won last year when he walked off Spyglass Hill on a Saturday with a four-shot lead. Johnson was declared the winner two days later when the tournament was shortened to 54 holes because of rain.

He had to work a lot longer – and harder – this time around.

Duval put together his best four rounds in years, closing with a 3-under 69 that he didn’t think would be enough until Johnson went over the green and made a pair of bogeys on the back nine.

Johnson’s power, and the shot he struck on the 18th, made all the difference.

Duval doesn’t have the length to get home in two at Pebble’s closing hole, not into the ocean breeze on soft fairways, so he played smartly to the right. His wedge came up just enough short to catch the slope and roll 30 feet away.

“I feel like I did most of the things I wanted to do today,” Duval said.

Holmes has the length, but he didn’t have the direction on the 18th. Playing in the group ahead of Johnson, he hit into the right rough and had to lay up, then missed a birdie putt just outside 12 feet.

“Would have liked it to end a little better for me, but I had a good week,” Holmes said after a 71. “Had my chances.”

Johnson made the most of his.

“The tee shot he hit on 18 was all world,” Goydos said. “I mean, that’s never straight and narrow where he’s hitting the ball, consider he has to make 4 to win the golf tournament. Pretty impressive.”

Johnson became the first player since Davis Love III in 2003 to win Pebble Beach with a birdie on the 72nd hole from the final group. He finished at 16-under 270 and moved to No. 2 in the Ryder Cup standings.

His future looks as bright as the sunshine that graced the Monterey Peninsula for so much of the week. Not since Mark O’Meara in 1990 has someone won back-to-back at Pebble Beach, and this can only help Johnson with the U.S. Open coming to Pebble this summer. The other back-to-back winners are all in the Hall of Fame – Sam Snead, Cary Middlecoff, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson.

“That’s not a bad list,” Johnson said. “Anytime you’re on a list with those guys, you’re doing all right.”

Johnson joins Sean O’Hair as the only Americans in the their 20s with three PGA Tour victories.

Duval earned $545,600 and might be able to take some confidence to Mexico for the Mayakoba Classic. After he tied for second in the U.S. Open last summer, Duval took the next two weeks off and missed seven cuts over his last eight tournaments to lose his card.

The U.S. Open returns to Pebble Beach for the fifth time in June, although it will be far differently with firm greens and fast fairways. Even so, it doesn’t hurt Johnson to have won twice here, even if he had only two sub-par holes in the final round.

The other was his eagle on the par-5 sixth, when he pounded a tee shot and had only a 6-iron to the green, sticking it to 4 feet.

And while he treats his two victories equally, nothing tops walking off the 18th green in sunshine before thousands of fans, instead of last year when he got a phone call at breakfast on a rainy Monday morning with news he had won.

“Walking down that 18th hole with all the fans out there was just unbelievable, especially with the clear day,” Johnson said. “It’s one of the most beautiful holes in golf.”

By using his TaylorMade rac 10 wedge to hit his bunker shot on the final
hole to four feet, Dustin Johnson was left with an easy putt to win the AT&T
Pebble Beach National Pro-Am and become the first player since Tiger Woods
to win in each of his first three years on the PGA Tour. On the Champions
Tour, Fred Couples won the ACE Group Classic in just his second start on the
senior circuit, using Bridgestone’s J38 irons to lead the field in greens in
regulation. In his two senior starts, Couples is a combined 38 under par.

Dustin Johnson
Ball: TaylorMade Penta TP
Driver: TaylorMade R9, (Fujikura Motore F1), 10.5 degrees
3-wood: TaylorMade r9, 15 degrees
Hybrid club: TaylorMade Rescue TP FCT, 21 degrees
Irons (3-9): TaylorMade r9; (PW) TaylorMade rac 10 prototype
Wedges: TaylorMade rac 10 (54, 60 degrees)
Putter: Scotty Cameron by Titleist GSS

Fred Couples
Ball: Bridgestone B330
Driver: TaylorMade R9 460 (Fujikura Speeder 665), 8.5 degrees
3-wood: Callaway FT-i, 15 degrees
Irons (2): TaylorMade Tour Burner; (3-PW): Bridgestone J38
Wedges: Callaway X-Forged (54, 58 degrees)
Putter: TaylorMade Rossa Imola 6

In this video provided by TaylorMade Golf, big-hitting Robert Garrius, who led the PGA Tour in driving distance in 2009, gives his first reaction to the new R9 SuperTri driver.

See-Try-Buy: Learn more about TaylorMade clubs, and schedule your fitting with GolfTec.

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Officials from Ping and the USGA met Wednesday in hopes of working out a reasonable solution to the controversy surrounding the use of Ping Eye2s with square grooves. At 3:16 pm Thursday I got the following e-mail statement from the USGA:

Officials from the USGA and PING met yesterday in Dallas to discuss the use of PING EYE2 clubs on the PGA Tour.

USGA President Jim Hyler issued the following statement today:

“We met with representatives from PING yesterday. Our conversation with PING regarding the status of the PING EYE2 irons on the major professional American tours was productive, and we are hopeful that a solution can be found that respects and reflects the best interests of golfers and the game.” 

Eight minutes later I got an e-mail statement from Ping saying:

“We had a productive meeting with the USGA yesterday regarding the PING EYE2 groove debate on the PGA Tour,” said PING Chairman & CEO John Solheim. “I’m encouraged by their willingness to openly discuss some of the challenges the golf industry faces relating to equipment issues. We left the meeting with an understanding we would continue to seek a solution that benefits golfers and acknowledges the importance innovation plays in the game.”

As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” And this baby is far from over.

See-Try-Buy: Learn more about Ping clubs and schedule your fitting with GolfTec.

Related: Follow David Dusek on Twitter

(Photo: Phil Mickelson’s Ping Eye2 lob wedge, which he’s no longer carrying. By Robert Beck/SI)

With no status on the PGA Tour, John, with the help of his girlfriend Anna, writes heartfelt personal letters to all of the tournament directors asking for a spot in their fields. Being John Daly premieres March 2 at 9PM/ET.

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DRIVER:  Titleist 909 D3 (8.5°)  with UST Proforce V2 86 shaft
FAIRWAY WOOD:  Titleist 906F2 (13°)  with UST Proforce V2 95 shaft
HYBRID: Titleist 909H (19°) with UST Proforce V2 104 shaft
IRONS: Titleist 755 (3-PW) with Royal Precision Project X shafts
WEDGES:  Titleist Vokey Design (54°, 60°) with True Temper Dynamic Gold Sensicore shafts
PUTTER: Odyssey White Hot #2
BALL: Titleist Pro V1

Take a look inside more PGA Tour winners’ bags.

Related: Follow David Dusek on Twitter | Titleist Clubs and Custom Fitting