golf on the Island next month.

Barely one week after the inaugural one-day tournament at Mid Ocean wraps up on October 7, more than two dozen other overseas pros will hit Port Royal to take part in the annual Bermuda Open.

Deadline for entries into the 72-hole event isn't until next Wednesday but already organisers have compiled a field of 62 golfers, including PGA Tour veteran Ken Green and defending champion Andrew Pitts.

Green will be joined by another PGA regular, Mike Donald, in the hunt for the $50,000 purse. But money is almost secondary to the automatic entry into the World Championship that goes with victory.

Last year Pitts, from North Carolina, surprised a field that included Billy Andrade, Dan Halldorson and Donald. This year, he'll have to contend with the Green, who won five PGA tournaments in the 1980s and was a member of the 1989 US Ryder Cup team.

Green, 39, has over $3.5 million in career earnings but had only one top-ten finish a year ago, when he was seventh in the US Open, and slumped to 133rd on the PGA Tour money list.

His best year was 1988, when he won the Canadian Open and the Greater Milwaukee Open.

Donald, 42, has won just $13,000 on the tour over the last two years and entered only 17 tournaments a year ago. His claim to fame stems from the 1989 US Open, when he lost to Hale Irwin in the first sudden-death play-off hole in the tournament's history.

Donald's lone PGA Tour victory came that year, in the Anheuser Busch Classic.

He, Andrade and Pitts went to a play-off in last year's Bermuda Open, with the latter winning when Donald and Andrade bogeyed on the first hole in a driving rain storm.

Eleven Island professionals have also confirmed their appearance, including Dwayne Pearman -- fourth a year ago -- and Kim Swan.

The tournament runs from October 16-19.

Ken Green