Texas Slammin’
Let’s start with Brian Harman, who began his final round at the Colonial one shot off the lead at -6. He was one of ten players teeing off at -7 or -6, and because there’s a new rule on the PGA Tour this year that you can’t win a tournament unless you graduated from the University of Georgia or were born in Australia, I thought the pairing of Harman (UGA, ’09) and Marc Leishman (Australia, ’83) was bound to produce the champion.
Texas slammer
Adam Scott became the no. 1 golfer in the Official World Golf Rankings on Monday, and lived up to his first test with a dramatic playoff victory against Jason Dufner at the Crowne Plaza Invitational. Scott showed why he is a deserving number one by making three birdies on the back nine on Friday to make the cut, and then playing the best golf on the weekend with consecutive 66s to get into a playoff.
Tiger hitting balls before his press conference
Tiger Woods went through his usual warm-up routine on the driving range on Merion’s West Course (the tournament is played on the East Course) on Tuesday morning. Just before noon, he wiped his face with the towel and said, “Alright, let’s go talk to the (slight pause) people.”
He hopped in a van and headed for the media center, which is a few miles down the road.
I’m out the door and headed to Merion right now, so I figured I’d post this for your viewing pleasure.
Plus, you’re going to hear a lot about Merion’s storied history of hosting U.S. Opens this week, so why don’t you get started now? You can drop all sorts of knowledge on your friends and/or significant others to impress them.
Athletes: Hogan, Snead, Middlecoff and Nelson.
Pottering about on the interwebs, I came across this pretty amusing article from a 1943 issue of the Telegraph-Herald highlighting the extent to which recreational golf could aid the domestic war effort.
A missive from the dawn of sports science, it also includes rare documentary evidence of a PGA Tour executive engaging in an act of selflessness:
When you reach the 12th hole in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12, the wind gauge arrow thingy starts spinning around like the minute hand on a broken clock in a Twilight Zone episode.
And after reading a couple of accounts of how the 12th hole plays (scooped up by Geoff Shackelford), it sounds like the game has it down just about right.
I sat down with Dan Jenkins for an interview in the media center at Whistling Straits last Sunday — his 206th major, a record that will never be broken because “among other things, there won’t be golf writers someday!” — as play was getting underway. When I showed up, he was looking at the giant leaderboard in the front of the room and rifling through the names, deciding who would make the best winning story to write. “Rory [McIlroy] and Dustin [Johnson]. I guess Nick Watney. That’s about it,” he said. In other words, we didn’t want to write about anyone else.
Before I walked away, Mr. Jenkins imparted some words with me I’ll never forget, including a few pieces of advice. First, meet his daughter, Sally (pictured above). Then, he encouraged me to keep pushing through the industry and hoped I continued to cover golf. He said I needed to do two things: Listen to those who have been doing this for a long time (and know what they’re doing — in other words, be very discriminatory), and read — and not just his books.
Live Chat
