- It’s Early Yet…:  …In both his career and this week’s season-opening Token Homemate Cup, but 16-year-old Ryo Ishikawa is certainly making a splash on the Japan Golf Tour.  Ishikawa first came to worldwide attention last year when he won the J Tour’s Munsingwear Open as a 15-year-old amateur.  He then turned professional later in the year but did not compete again on his homeland tour until this week.  Now, with rounds of 68-67, he holds the partial 36-hole lead in the rain-delayed Token Homemate opener – though this lead could be fleeting with 64 players unable to complete their Friday rounds before darkness.  Still, all in all, it’s shaping up into a nice debut…

- A Course Which Changed The World:  It is no coincidence that despite being scheduled in the week following the Masters, the Verizon Heritage manages to draw a strong enough field that nine of the world top 25 are in attendance.  The reason for so many of the elite electing not to take an immediate vacation?  The site of the Heritage, Pete Dye’s seminal Harbour Town Golf Links.  Opened in 1969, Harbour Town was built by Dye with a bit of help from Jack Nicklaus, and though not the famed designer’s first modern-traditionalist design (it was preceded by both Crooked Stick and The Golf Club), Harbour Town’s immediate hosting of the PGA Tour’s Heritage Classic gave it overnight fame worldwide.  Originally a builder of more “standard” courses, Dye (along with wife Alice) was hugely influenced by a 1963 visit to Scotland, which ultimately led him to incorporate such Old World touches as pot bunkers, blind shots and, of course, those much-copied railroad ties into his bag of tricks.  At Harbour Town, he further bucked period design trends by creating a layout which measured only 6,655 yards from the back tees, an unconventional move in an era when Robert Trent Jones had hoodwinked the world into believing that anything under 7,000 yards was a pitch and putt.  Nearly 40 years later, Harbour Town’s architectural significance may be at least somewhat forgotten; its then-groundbreaking stylings have been copied hundreds of times since (often by Dye himself) and with the game’s governing bodies failing to meaningfully regulate modern equipment, we are once again back to building courses of absurd length.  But even at its current, expanded length of 6,973 yards, Harbour Town remains a wonderfully idiosyncratic test, particularly in its four unique par 3s and, of course, its famous 452-yard waterside finisher.  It was, once upon a time, the golf course which single-handedly reversed the tide of oversized, uninteresting, loutish architecture, and it is well worth observing still.

- Overnight Update: None of the late second-round finishers in Japan were able to overtake Ryo Ishikawa, nor has anyone done so mid-way through the third round, as he continues to lead by two through 47 holes.