The first thing that struck me when I was watching the premiere episode of Golf Channel's Big Break: Ka'anapali last night was that I'd forgotten the rotten weather we were faced with during the first few days of shooting. The island of Maui usually gets about seven inches of rain per year, but the first week we were there for filming last December, we got 10 inches in five days. It was a miracle that anything got done at all, and it gave me a newfound respect for what the producers and crew of a television series such as this have to grapple with. I have done several smaller shows for Golf Channel and USA Network in the past, but until arriving at Ka'anapali, I had never been exposed to a big-budget production such as Big Break, and I very quickly realized this was going to be a whole different ball game. I was hugely impressed. The 60 crew members -- from prop stylists and jib operators to production assistants and executive producers -- that put together this show are nothing short of a well-oiled machine, and massive flooding, camera malfunctions and cast cat fights don't faze them one bit. There's a job to be done and they get it done, no matter what.

My co-host (and four-time PGA Tour winner) Andrew Magee and I got along great from the get-go and we knew as soon as we met the contestants that we were going to be in for a wild ride. I've been a loyal BB watcher for years and have gotten to know many of the past seasons' contestants as I've traveled with them on Golf With Style: Global Challenge, but this crop of players was unlike any I'd seen before. It was as if the producers had plucked the 12 most Alpha females they could find out of the thousands who applied to get onto the show. (And as the season progresses, you'll learn that even the players who may have seemed meek and sweet in the first episode have some real claws.) On top of that, all of them (okay, all but one) were really good players with impressive golf resumes. I'm a betting girl, so Andrew and I immediately started debating who we thought would end up winning, end up in the top five, etc. Let's just say I was proven wrong time and again as the shooting progressed. I had to buy Andrew lunch more times than I care to remember.

It was evident that all the players were extremely nervous for the golf challenges in the first episode, and the rain and 30 mph winds certainly didn't help. It's hard to describe the pressure these girls find themselves under in a situation like this, with nine cameras fixed on their every move and no do-overs -- every last one of them said it was more nerve-wracking than playing in a big tour event with lots of money on the line. It's not like real golf where you can find a rhythm; it's sit-and-wait-for-two-hours-then-get-up-and-hit-one-shot-for-all-the-marbles-with-
hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-watching kind of golf. And no player in the world has much experience at that, no matter how good she is. (As Andrew said over and over again, it's "sudden death every time they swing.") So naturally, there were some real stink bombs launched at those greens in the first challenges, and some of the players we thought were going to perform well couldn't buy a good shot while others did a lot better than we'd anticipated.

After watching the first episode, you might conclude that the obvious front-runners are Lori, Kim, Adrienne and Courtney, and the bottom of the barrel are Cirbie, Susan and Dana. Well, I'm not at liberty to reveal what happens, but let's just say you'd be pulling out your wallet to pay for Magee's lunch as often as I did...

Speaking of Andrew, one of my fondest memories from shooting Big Break in Hawaii was getting to know his father, a Pearl Harbor vet and retired oil executive who was along for the ride and, at 85, walked the course with us every day and shared hair-raising stories from his globetrotting life with the crew at every meal. Sadly, Mr. Magee passed away last month. He will be greatly missed; the world is a less fascinating place without him.