“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.

Golf at the highest level has become such a global game it’s tougher than ever to pinpoint the best professional tour, the most fertile country for world-class players, the most impressive young talent, or even, in the absence of Tiger Woods, the top player.

With Woods out indefinitely, the game is a land grab contested by old reliables like Kenny Perry, 49, Steve Stricker, 42, and Vijay Singh, 46; global stars like Padraig Harrington and Geoff Ogilvy; and several would-be No. 1s including (but not limited to) Ryo Ishikawa, Dustin Johnson, Martin Kaymer, Rory McIlroy and Michael Sim.

No tournament better exemplifies the game’s current state than the frenzied free-for-all that is the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship at 7,849-yard Ritz-Carlton Golf Club in Marana, Ariz., starting Wednesday. “There are no easy draws in this event,” said Lee Westwood, the second seed this week, who will play countryman Chris Wood in the first round. “[These are the] top players in the world. So everybody’s quite capable of shooting a 63 or 62 out there.”

The Accenture will mark the first truly global gathering of the year, a season in which one of the biggest stories has been the shift in the balance of power between the U.S. and Europe. While fields on the PGA Tour’s West Coast Swing have been largely unremarkable and at times dismal, the European Tour has flourished. That’s only partly because of American players traveling overseas for appearance fees. More importantly it owes to a new look atop the World Ranking that’s been years in the making. Of the top 20 players in the ranking, only six are Americans, and two (Woods and the vacationing Phil Mickelson) are not in the field this week.

Nine years after he won the tournament as the 55 seed, Stricker takes the top seed into the Accenture, but the prohibitive favorite is Ogilvy, a two-time Accenture winner and three-time finalist who has racked up an incredible 17-2 career record in this event.

Then again, perhaps the favorite is England’s Ross Fisher, who advanced to the tournament’s final four last season and later won the Volvo World Match Play.

The favorite certainly wouldn’t seem to be Westwood, who has never advanced past the second round in nine Accenture starts, many of his losses coming in extra holes. Unlike those years, though, he is coming into this week on a good note, having won the Race to Dubai to end 2009 and notched two top-three finishes in his last two starts.

When Westwood left home Sunday, and his 5-year-old daughter Poppy asked him when he would return, he wasn’t sure what to tell her and her older brother Samuel. “I said, ‘Historically, Thursday; optimistically, Monday,’ ” he said at his press conference at Dove Mountain, prompting laughter. “They looked at me quizzically.”

Theories on match play run the gamut. Do you play the man or the course? Is gamesmanship important, and how is it best and most subtly deployed?

Johnson, coming off his victory at Pebble Beach, said on Tuesday that he didn’t know and didn’t much care who he’s playing beyond Camilo Villegas in the first round. The assembled media were incredulous; hadn’t he bothered to look at a bracket? “If one is sitting next to me at breakfast, of course I’ll look at it,” Johnson said. “But I’m not going to go out of my way to find the bracket to see who is in it. Everyone here is good. They don’t make it here because of a fluke. So it really doesn’t matter who you’re playing, it’s going to be a tough match and you’re going to have to play well.”

The winner of the Johnson-Villegas match will play either Alexander Noren of Sweden or the one guy everyone would just as soon avoid in Tucson: Ogilvy. That said, it’s conceivable that Ogilvy hasn’t been getting much quality sleep or practice time. His wife Juli delivered the couple’s third child, Harvey Jack Ogilvy, last Thursday.

Most intriguing at the Accenture are the rookies, who will show soon enough what they think of the quirky format. Ishikawa and Sim play each other for the right to face Stricker or Ross McGowan in the second round. Ryan Moore, a match-play terror as an amateur, will face Ernie Els, a match-play terror in Wentworth, England.

As always in this format, someone will shoot 66 and lose, and someone will card a 73 and win. “I think you need more luck in match play than in stroke play,” Westwood said. “You can’t ease your way around-you have to come out all guns blazing.”

• In other action on the PGA Tour, David Duval tries to maintain momentum from last week’s runner-up finish at the Mayakoba Classic in Cancun, Mexico, golf’s version of the NIT. The Mayakoba, played at one of the sweetest spots if not the sweetest spot on the Tour schedule, is famous for reviving careers, most notably that of 2008 champion Brian Gay, who went on to win twice on Tour in 2009 and is in the field for this week’s Accenture.

• Speaking of coming out with guns blazing, the LPGA Tour kicks off at the Honda PTT LPGA Thailand this week. Number one-ranked Lorena Ochoa, the defending champion, headlines a strong field that also includes No. 2 Jiyai Shin, Michelle Wie, Paula Creamer, Morgan Pressel and Christina Kim. The Honda PTT will mark the beginning of the LPGA’s new agreement with the Golf Channel, which will give the circuit a much-needed permanent home.

• On the Champions Tour, Tommy Armour III will try to stay hot at the Allianz Championship, starting Friday at The Old Course at Broken Sound in Boca Raton, Fla. Armour shot a final-round 61 to finish runner-up in his Champions debut at the ACE Group Classic last week. Michael Allen, who tied for fifth place at the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open last month, and Bernhard Langer are also in the field.

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.”

If you want to experience PGA
Tour-grade pressure, enter a pro-am.
If you want to indulge in Tour-caliber
pampering, visit Reynolds Plantation
in Greensboro, Ga., and treat yourself to
the Tour Experience at the Kingdom,
a TaylorMade-run orgy of clubfitting,
instruction and mingling with A-list pros.

If it sounds pricey, that’s because it
is—nearly $9,000 for three days (for less
lavish options, see below). But this is the
Vatican for gear geeks, offering access to
the game’s most advanced swing-analysis
and custom-fitting technology.

The fitting process begins with you
rigged head to toe in reflective markers that
allow nine high-speed cameras to capture
your every movement. The result is a
3-D rendering of your swing and putting
stroke that is at once enlightening and
alarming. Those metrics are married to the
stats gathered during an extensive hitting
session, and club by club, your dream set
materializes, with shaft flexes, lofts and lie
angles handpicked for your swing.

The coolest perk comes after the fitting.
You’ll have dinner with a TaylorMade
pro—Sean O’Hair, say, or Corey Pavin—retire to your room at the Ritz, then wake
up to play 18 holes with your spanking-new
clubs, built overnight by technicians.
Now that’s the Tour life we could all enjoy.

The Kingdom Experience
• 3 nights at the Ritz-Carlton Lodge
• An expert 14-club fitting via MATT
(Motion Analysis Technology by TaylorMade)
• A custom set built on-site and
overnight by TaylorMade technicians
• Mingling, playing and dining with a
TaylorMade Tour pro
• Full-swing and short-game instruction
by Top 100 Teacher Charlie King
• 18 holes with your new sticks
• A Tour bag, Adidas clothing, shoes,
and other goodies

Fittings Without the Frills
Humbler fitting options are also available,
starting at $100 for a single-club session
(driver, putter, etc.). You’ll still enjoy
all the benefits of motion-capture
technology, but you’ll demo fewer
sticks than you would during a Kingdom
session. The Kingdom itself also offers
less elaborate fittings, ranging from $695
for a single club to $4,095 for a full set, a
night at the Ritz and a round of golf. The
downside: You won’t get to talk golf with
Hale Irwin over Carolina mountain trout.

Where You’ll Play
The five excellent public courses at
Reynolds Plantation force golfers to make
some tough scheduling calls. The most
critically acclaimed of the quintet is Jack Nicklaus’s Great Waters (No. 42 on
our Top 100 You Can Play list), with Rees Jones’s Oconee Course (No. 58) close
behind. The front side of Great Waters
snakes through towering dogwoods, while
six holes on the back skirt Lake Oconee.
The Oconee, built in 2002, is the newest of
Reynolds’ public tracks (a private course,
the Creek Club by Jim Engh, opened in ’07).
Its finishing kick, Nos. 14-18, may be the
best five-hole stretch on the complex. For
now, anyway—a seventh course, a private
routing by Pete Dye, is underway.

Where You’ll Stay
Most guests bunk at the Ritz-Carlton
Lodge, a sumptuous retreat on the
shore of Lake Oconee. The 251-room hotel
offers all you’d expect from a Ritz (private
terraces and 400-thread-count linens)
and a couple of things you might not (a
car-detailing service and a separate 5,400-
square-foot house where two U.S. presidents
have slept; it starts at $2,500/night). The six
cozy golf cottages are also a great option.

What You’ll Pay
The Oconee Course $155-$265
Great Waters Course $135-$205
(closed for remodeling until April)
Plantation Course $115-$175
The National Course $115-$175
The Landing Course $105-$145
Ritz-Carlton Lodge From $239/night
Lakeside Cottages From $759/night

Info 888-298-3119; reynoldsplantation.com