Stormy Weather Golf Magazine - January 1997 Crickets chirped soothingly during the first round of the 1996 PGA Championship, on a sultry summer day in Kentucky, Overhead, the Budweiser blimp traced lazy circles, its motor droning through the humid air. Several spectators reclining on the grassy banks by Valhalla Golf Club's 13th hole tilted their hat brims down onto their noses. Yet the atmosphere was anything but sleepy in a corner room of a little green trailer less than 100 yards away. Stewart Williams, 27, and David Knollhoff, 24, sat erect at a table, their eyes darting back and forth between two laptop computers and a device that looked like a microwave and was called Thor Guard. "Twelve miles," Williams said into a walkie-talkie at two o'clock. Williams and Knollhoff are meteorologists employed by Mobile Weather Team, Inc., a company that predicts dangerous weather. The PGA TOUR hired MWT, headquartered in Martin, Ill., in 1996 to run its Storm Alert Program at all of its "weather sensitive events," which includes anyplace lightning might strike. The program is sponsored by Keller Manufacturing Company making it possible for MWT to provide early warning at 60 events on the PGA TOUR and Senior PGA TOUR combined. "One computer is always connected to the National Weather Service Doppler radar, and the other one to the National Lightning Detection Network," Williams explained. He gestured toward a U-shaped band of red and green on one of the screens. "That's a cold front coming in from the northeast, over the Ohio River from Indiana. It's going to rain here in about 45 minutes. "The hardest situation is what we call 'pop-up thunderstorms,' which can happen on any normal summer afternoon. That hurricane that came up at Williamsburg this year was much more predictable because hurricanes are so big." While explaining the readouts on Thor Guard, which predicts lightning by measuring the static electricity in the air, Knollhoff repeatedly referred to someone named Bob. Who's that? "B.O.B., Bolt Out of the Blue," he replied. "Lightning can strike 15 miles from a storm. It doesn't always come out of a cloud." The device's sensor ---it looked like four upside-down mixing bowls on a stick---stuck up from the roof of the trailer. "Eleven miles," Williams said into his radio at 2:39. "And the Thor Guard is up to four, and rising." Translation: Lightning had struck 11 miles away, and the chance of lightning occurring at the golf course had increased to 40 percent. At 2:43, air horns sounded and everyone cleared the course. The center of the horseshoe-shaped storm collapsed around the course 32 minutes later. The light faded to dusk, rain crashed, thunder rolled, and strobing lightning bolts lit the sky. But the Storm Alert Program had worked: No one was hurt. And play resumed at 6:39. -C.S.