Please excuse the all-sports day here today, but newly-crowned Master’s champion Zach Johnson has seemingly been everywhere over the past couple of days and he is proving to be a refreshingly normal fellow amidst all the attention. Here is the Damon Hack/NY Times profile, but this Joe Posnanski/Kansas City Star profile captures how Johnson’s Midwestern roots define the man. And if you are really into Johnson, check out the Des Moines Register’s wall-to-wall coverage of Johnson’s Masters victory and the aftermath.
Meanwhile, Geoff Shackelford passes along the following interesting thoughts about the mindset of those who enjoy watching professional golfers struggle on tricked-up courses:

On the news that ratings were actually up for this hardly satisfying 2007 Masters, I’ve heard from a number of people that they argued with friends over the weekend about the setup and the joys of watching great players suffer.
There is a sizeable audience of the viewing public that enjoys watching the best players struggle. They like seeing them humiliated and brought down to a lower level of skill.
“They know how I feel now.”
This mentality has been around a long time and many of the games lesser-informed writers have celebrated the notion of pro golfers serving as modern day gladiators served up for the people to devour in humiliating spectacles.
So I’m wondering if championship golf is going to go the way of everything else in our society. Will it have to become “relatable” (as the marketing folks like to say) for big-time golf to succeed? In other words, will professional golfers eventually serve at the pleasure of the people, with major events played to publicly humiliate millionaire golfers on overcooked layouts in order to make the average man feel better about his lousy game?
Personally, I find it to be an incredibly selfish way to view golf. It’s a lot more fun to see the talent of these great players exposed, celebrated and savored. But maybe that’s old school?

By the way, a number of folks have asked me about my observation in an earlier post that Zach is a classic one-plane swinger along the lines that Houston-based teaching professional Jim Hardy (see also here) has written extensively about over the past several years. Here is a short video clip of Johnson working with his teaching pro, Mike Bender:

Finally, in case you didn’t catch it on Sunday, make sure you catch the video below of Rory Sabbatini’s incredible putt on Augusta National’s 8th hole. Sabbatini — who has been a jerk at times while on the Tour — has a fun-loving response to the crowd’s reaction:

The television numbers are in on the just-completed Masters Golf Tournament. CBS Sportsí coverage of the tournament on Easter Sunday earned an average overnight household rating/share of 9.1/21 (meaning that 9.1% of households on average were tuned in at any given moment and 21% of all televisions in use at the time were tuned into the Masters). This yearís final-round rating/share was up 1% from last yearís 9.0/19 when Phil Mickelson won his second Masters title and it was also up 25% from the last time the final round was played on Easter Sunday (7.3/18), when Mickelson won his first green jacket and first career major title in the 2004 event.
Meanwhile, the Shell Houston Open, which was played just a week ago, had a 1.7 share for its NBC telecast on Sunday compared with 2.2 share for the SHO’s May date last year on CBS. Even the BellSouth Classic — the tournament that that the SHO replaced this season on the PGA Tour calendar — was able to generate a 2.5 share on Sunday last year.
So much for the thought that the SHO’s new date a week before the Masters would increase viewership of the tournament. The Shell Houston Open has now officially entered the Tiger chasm.

It’s not every day that a fellow born in my hometown of Iowa City and raised in Eastern Iowa wins a professional golf tournament, much less the the Masters Golf Tournament. But Zach Johnson pulled it off in dramatic fashion on Sunday, holding up wonderfully under the enormous pressure of a draconian Augusta National Golf Course and the challenges of several other contenders, including Tiger Woods, who has now played nine consecutive rounds at The Masters without shooting in the 60’s.
Despite Johnson’s splendid play, the Guardian’s Lawrence Donegan summed up the view of most toward the changes that have been made at Augusta National:

The stunning climax came after three days peppered with double bogeys and broken spirits. Fortunately, the gentlemen in green blazers remembered their tournament has earned its place in folklore because it has long been a byword for excitement. But there are precious few thrills to be mined from the sight of the world’s best players fearfully plotting their way round the course as if walking to their own funeral party.
So when play began yesterday morning it quickly became clear everything possible had been done to bring the scoring down. Tees had been pushed forward, the greens had been heavily watered and the pin positions were about as friendly as a Labrador puppy. The overnight changes had the desired effect. For the first time all week cheers echoed along the alleyways and canyons of Alister Mackenzie’s classic links.

By the way, Johnson uses a pure one-plane swing, much like Ben Hogan‘s classic swing that defined quality ball-striking in the modern era of golf. Thus, as with last year’s U.S. Open, the player with the purest one-plane swing held up the best under the intense pressure of the final round of The Masters. As usual, there is a Houston connection to the understanding and teaching of that swing.