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Tuesday just might be the quintessential day at the Toshiba Classic.

The pros start arriving in force and fill the putting green throughout the day as they try to perfect their strokes.

Representatives from golf companies ? putters, clubs, you name it ? hang out near the clubhouse and first tee.

Sponsors arrive and begin setting up their stations in the tournament’s entryway.

Golf carts filled with pros and their caddies trammel across the course. Pros drop balls and take several shots, if they want, as they walk up to the Newport Beach Country Club’s greens.

On the driving range, the pros groove their swings. There’s joking. There’s cigar smoking.

There’s a relaxed atmosphere to the club unique to Tuesday that gives the place the feel of a golf tournament.

It’s a day when it seems hard to argue that it’s good to be a golf pro.

Of course, underlying that comfortable veneer is a lot of serious business. The pros need to get those swings in shape. Impressing the right golfer can make a new golf company when he goes on to use its equipment.

On Tuesday, though, you would have had to scratch fairly deep to find much inner turmoil.

That is one of the beauties of the PGA Senior Tour, in which the competition is fierce ? witness last week’s 12-under par win for legend Tom Kite at the AT&T; Classic in bitter Southland weather ? but the competitors are friendly to fans and each other.

That friendliness was on display at the annual Breakfast with a Champion on Tuesday morning. Or, as guest Peter Jacobsen put it, the game’s “humanity.”

“That warmth,” he said at one point of how Arnold Palmer treated people and the game ? a warmth particular to the game he loves. “That’s what you feel when you’re around Arnold.”

And there was the humanity implicit in tournament chairman and breakfast emcee Hank Adler’s admonition.

“If you could just thank two of ? [the 1,000 tournament volunteers], that would be great,” he said.

That humanity, said Newport Beach Country Club president and chief operating officer Jerry Anderson, is the enjoyable part of the tournament for club members and staffers.

“The fun part of it from our standpoint is the community support,” he said. “The fact that it’s done so much for the hospital and that people are feeling like they are a part of it.”

Anderson predicted a good course for the weekend ? once it has passed the gauntlet that is the multi-start Classic Pro-Am ? with greens approaching 11 on the Stimpmeter, which is a basic measure of how fast greens are.

Translation for those not well-versed in golf lingo: That’s fast. Medium greens tend to top out at about nine, and U.S. Opens, when the greens are as difficult as they come, start at about 12.

Still, the great unknown on Tuesday remained the weather.

“If we have good weather, I think we’ll have a good crowd,” Anderson said, noting that each day the forecasts get a little bit better.dpt.15-news-toshiba-1-d-CPhotoInfoPK1OUTUG20060315iw5bv6knDON LEACH / DAILY PILOT(LA)Peter Jacobsen swings for the second-hole pin from the roof of the Marriott at Fashion Island. Jacobsen placed second in Tuesday’s Shot from the Top contest. For more, turn to Page A7.