Sigel, 64, from Berwyn, the erstwhile amateur legend now playing the Champions Tour, is out of action these days, sidelined since April 18 by arthroscopic surgery on his left shoulder.

If you're keeping track, that's five arthroscopic surgeries since 2001: one on Sigel's left knee, one on his right knee, one on his right shoulder and two on his left shoulder.

Don't even bother to count the hip problem that gave him fits last year because the worst of the pain finally went away without surgery.

How long will Sigel be out this time? Or, let's be honest here, considering he faces months of rehab ahead of him, does he give any thought to calling it a career?

"I've always said I would play as long as I was healthy and having fun," said Sigel. "Right now, I'm not having fun because I'm not healthy."

He's hoping that will change. He expects to start light rehab next week, but he won't touch a club to so much as chip and putt for at least six weeks. Last time he had shoulder surgery, he was out five months and still wondered later if he hadn't rushed his return.

If Sigel sits out five months this time, that would mean a return in mid-September at the earliest, leaving only about a month's worth of the Champions Tour season in 2008. That being the case, Sigel knows he might be wise to write off the rest of this year and return fully healed in 2009.

Either way, Sigel is grateful to have options. While plenty of his brethren on the Champions Tour have never had anything but golf as a career, Sigel, who didn't turn pro until he was 50, never closed his insurance business.

In the off-season, or when he's not playing in a tournament, chances are Sigel is in behind the desk in his office or out somewhere with a longtime client.

"I left the house at 7:15 this morning and drove 100-plus miles," he said, after a meeting with a client in Allentown. I've always told my clients that when I retire [from golf], I will retire to my business. I'm not looking to the day I want to retire, but one of these days I'm going to have to."

Even then, Sigel said, he doesn't plan to quit the Champions Tour cold-turkey. He just cut back from 20 to 25 tournaments to 15 or 10.

Meanwhile, as he gives the shoulder a rest, Sigel follows all the Philadelphia sports teams and tunes in golf on TV, mostly the regular Tour so as not to get wistful about what he's missing on the Champions Tour.

"I've enjoyed the Sixers and the Flyers, and the Phillies are having a great April," he said. "The Eagles draft was something, too."

Who's the boob?

During the annual players meeting at the Players Championship last week, PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem felt compelled to stress the need for maintaining a "professional appearance."

Finchem apparently didn't mention Daly by name and, afterward, he declined to say whether he had spoken to Daly, who is not in the field at the Players. But who's kidding whom here?

Daly, if you missed it, wore nothing but jeans, shades and a cap as he did a TV interview at a golf course that bears his name in Branson, Mo., John Daly's Murder Rock Golf and Country Club.

O'Hair watch

In the days and weeks after, O'Hair insisted he would make the same aggressive play all over again, never mind the quadruple-bogey 7 and, in the end, about $750,000, it cost him.

A year later, O'Hair, 25, from West Chester, has a slightly different perspective.

"I would absolutely still try and win the golf tournament," O'Hair said during his pre-tournament interview at the Players Championship. "You know, I think, the right intention was there. It's just maybe the inexperience played into it a little bit. You know, I think if I was a little bit more experienced, I might have played it five paces left of the pin with maybe a wedge that is guaranteed not to get me over the green."

As costly as that mistake was, O'Hair said it has already paid off as a learning experience, helping him win this year's PODS Championship in a showdown with a collapsing Stewart Cink.

"I wasn't paying too much attention to what Stewart was doing, but there was a lot of times where I could have gotten too aggressive on some shots coming in," said O'Hair. "When I was playing the proper shots, I was hitting to the proper targets, and I was just parring the golf course to death and letting everybody else make the mistakes. And sometimes that's what it takes to win a championship."