TIGER'S EVENT HAS OLDIES BUT GOODIES.

Byline: DAVE SHELBURNE Golf

Tiger Woods will bring his annual fund-raising tournament to Sherwood Country Club for a fifth consecutive year, Dec. 11-14, with a field notable for its groundbreaking graybeards.

Of the 16 players entries in the 72-hole, stroke-play event at the par-72, 7,025-yard Jack Nicklaus-designed Sherwood layout in Thousand Oaks, three are players who won on tour this year at age 40 or older.

And though 40-year-old Vijay Singh, 43-year-old Kenny Perry and Fred Couples, who turned 44 two weeks ago, have combined for seven victories this season, they will not be the only super-successful forty-somethings competing at Woods' Target World Challenge presented by Williams.

Jay Haas, who will be eligible for the 50-and-over Champions Tour in two months, already has secured full playing privileges on the 2004 PGA Tour by virtue of a $2,328,752 earnings year - 12th best on a money list that qualifies its top 125 for the next year.

Nick Price did nearly as well at age 46 and ranks 16th on the money list, with $2,171,591. Each finished second twice this year, Haas sharing that spot at the Players Championship, which annually attracts one of the strongest fields in the world and is considered by many to be the unofficial fifth major.

And four-time 2003 tour winner Davis Love III, another Target World Challenge participant, is just six months shy of turning 40. So it went this season, when many older players not only survived but thrived in the face of a youth boom that has brought outstanding young talent to the tour.

Going into this week's Chrysler Classic of Greensboro, 10 players 40 or older have accounted for 14 PGA Tour victories in 2003, including John Huston (42), J.L. Lewis (43), Bob Tway and Tommy Armour III (both 44), Scott Hoch (47) and Peter Jacobsen (49).

So has 50-year-old Craig Stadler, who also is a Rookie of the Year and Player of the Year candidate on the Champions Tour, where he has won twice, including a major at the Ford Senior Players Championship.

These guys have turned graceful aging into grateful aging, and Couples, for one, is inclined to give some of the credit to better tools and better working conditions.

``I would think it's a little bit of the equipment,'' said the 1992 Masters champion, who has won 15 times on tour but had gone more than five years without a victory before prevailing in the Shell Houston Open in April.

``I just think the equipment is so forgiving that - if you're 20 or 46 and you're playing well, it's not a big thing,'' Couples said Monday at Sherwood.

He also thought course conditions have improved so much since he joined the tour in 1981 that greater length off the tee plays an role than when he was younger. Lies on today's tour-venue fairways are so often so good, Couples said, that golfers don't need to improvise as much as they used to on second shots.

When he started playing, Couples said, tour courses weren't in as good a shape, ``so you would drive the ball down and have a fairly mediocre lie and you actually had to design a shot. It would be like nowadays driving in a divot.''

With improved agronomy, most current tour fairway lies are ``basically on a tee,'' Couples said. ``And it's one speed and it's full bore, and I think shot-making is gone because of the equipment. And, so for myself, I can drive it out there as far as most guys and I've always been long, and if I putt well I should do well a lot of times.''

--If you're going: Tickets, priced at $25 for the Pro-Am and first two rounds, $35 for the weekend or $75 for a weekly gallery badge, are available at www.ticketmaster.com, www.targetworldchallenge.com or at [phone].

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