The U.S. Open begins this week at historic Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh. As noted in this Matthew Rudy/Golf Digest article after last year’s Open, the tricked-up nature of the famed Winged Foot course undermined much of the enjoyment of that event for both the competitors and viewers. According to this E.M. Swift/Golf Digest article, we can expect more of the same this year at Oakmont.
When is the United States Golf Association going to realize that setting up a course so that shooting a good score is a crapshoot is neither a good way to determine the nation’s golf champion for the year nor particularly interesting to watch?

Don’t expect Jack Burke, owner of Houston’s venerable Champions Golf Club, to be taking out any new subscriptions of Golf Magazine any time soon after this Golf.com article rates Champions’ Cypress Creek Golf Course as the fifth most overrated course in the U.S.:

Champions was founded as an Augusta Nationalóstyle retreat 50 years ago by Texas golf legends Jimmy Demaret and Jackie Burke, but the only thing this Ralph Plummer design shares with its Georgia counterpart is that Tiger Woods has won at both. The grand historyóa U.S. Open, a Ryder Cup and multiple Tour Championshipsódoesn’t compensate for the flat fairways, shapeless bunkers and overgrown ditches masquerading as water hazards.

At least Burke and his Champions members can take solace in the fact that Augusta National, Pebble Beach, the Country Club, and Pinehurst No. 2, among others, also made the list.

Anyone who follows professional golf even casually knows about the recent travails of teenage phenom, MIchelle Wie, who Butch Harmon thinks is playing worse now at the age of 17 than she was as a 14 year-old. The latest golfing embarrassment for Wie was withdrawing this past Thursday from her first LPGA tournament of the season after posting a 16 over par score on her first 16 holes of the tournament. As Geoff Shackelford reports, most folks think Wie withdrew to avoid the LPGA’s “88 and over rule,” which bans a non-LPGA member from playing in an LPGA event for a year if the non-LPGA member shoots 88 or over in any tournament round.
Juxaposed against Wie’s golf problems, however, is this annual Sports Illustrated list of the 50 highest earning athletes for 2007. Tiger Woods laps the field with his prodigious $100 million in endorsement income, but the only female on the list is Wie, who comes in at no. 22. Interestingly, Wie has the higest ratio of endorsement income to income derived directly from competition at 26-to-1 (she earned about $750,000 in golf earnings last year). And she hasn’t even entered Stanford University yet!
Is American a great country or what? ;^)

In this GolfWorld op-ed on why Clear Thinkers favorite Dan Jenkins should be in the World Golf Hall of Fame, John Hawkins sums up Jenkins’ remarkable writing talent well:

Knowing Jenkins as I do–he’s far more of an idol to me than a confidant–I don’t suppose for a minute he cares all that much either way. In what might serve as a crummy imitation of his prose, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an avid golf fan who has become engrossed in his work. Like the Merry Mex himself, Jenkins has all the shots and has never backed away from anyone. A bust in St. Augustine would be a nice touch, a fitting end to a stellar career, but then, the old man would probably write another novel, this one about some warhorse wordsmith who missed his Hall of Fame induction because he was canoodling some broad named Mimi Whatnot.
Either way, Jenkins is a 15-time major champion in my profession, a guy other writers love because he keeps it simple but takes it deep. When you’re one of the best who ever lived at what you do, when you make people laugh and get them to think, you’ve earned a spot on the ballot. From there, let the votes fall where they will.

The Tiger Chasm has had an extremely detrimental effect on the Texas PGA Tour events (see here and here). Texas golf writer Art Stricklin picks up on that theme in this Golf.com op-ed in which he points out that the PGA Tour has forsaken the four Texas events that contribute more to charity than virtually any other Tour events:

There used to be something on Tour called the Texas swing, during which three of the four events in the Lone Star State ó the Houston Open, the Byron Nelson and the Colonial ó were played in near succession. (The Texas Open was usually held later in the year.)
The proximity in dates and distance of the tournaments added to their appeal because a pro could stay in a single state, albeit a big one, for almost a month. The events also had long traditions and famous frontmen. Jack Burke Jr. remains Houston’s Mr. Golf, an honorific bestowed in Dallas on the late Byron Nelson (who personally rounded up player commitments) and in Fort Worth (home of the Colonial) on the legendary Ben Hogan.
Further, all of the Texas tournaments have been good to charity. According to several tournament directors, in 2006 the Texas Open ranked first on Tour in charitable contributions with $7 million, while the Nelson was third ($6.3 million), Houston fifth ($4.5 million), and the Colonial kicked in $2.6 million. That’s $20 million from Texas. [. . .]
The Tour applauded itself for taking Texas’s money but returned the favor with four lousy spots on the schedule.
The Houston Open, which has never been graced by Tiger Woods, was moved to the week before the Masters, always a dark period for the No. 1 player in the world. The Nelson, with its prime mid-May date reassigned to the Tour-owned Players Championship, was stuck in a late-April pit, and the results were predictable: Of the top 15 players only Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh, Luke Donald and Sergio Garcia showed up ó especially lamentable because this was the first Nelson since the death of its namesake.
This week’s Colonial was cast into the late-May lull between the Players and Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial, and at press time only one top 10 player had committed.
But these events are prime compared with the Texas Open, consigned to the worst fate of all: the irrelevance of the post-FedEx Cup fall season.
Maybe the commissioner really believes that what a tournament gives away matters, and that on the PGA Tour doing good is as important as doing well. No one in Texas does anymore.

The PGA Tour is in real trouble in Texas. Is anyone in the PGA Tour office listening?

Yesterday morning, Golf.com blogger Josh Sanburn provided this remarkable piece of information about PGA Tour professional Tom Lehman and the devilish 17th island hole at the TPC at Sawgrass (picture on the golf post from yesterday):
Lehman has 55 straight safe landings at 17

Who’s the master of the par-3 17th? That honor goes to Tom Lehman, who, through 55 rounds at the Players Championship, has never hit his tee shot in the water and is 13-under overall on the hole. He parred the 17th on Thursday.
“You catch the wrong gust on that one, you’re in huge trouble,” Lehman said after his two-under first round, which put him among the leaders. Lehman hit an 8-iron to the left side of the green Thursday, good enough for a two-putt par. We’ll see if he can keep the streak alive through the rest of the week.

So, what did Lehman do when he played the 17th later in the day on Friday? Of course, he dunked his tee shot in the drink.

The Players Championship is underway over in Ponte Vedra, Florida near Jacksonville on the renovated Tournament Players Course at Sawgrass. Each year, The Players has the strongest field of any golf tournament — 48 of the top 50 players in the World Rankings are playing this week. For some reason, the PGA Tour continues to believe that it must attempt to persuade everyone that the tournament should be considered a the fifth “major” tournament along with The Masters, the U.S. and British Opens and the PGA Tournament, and the Tour has moved the tournament to May this year in an effort to facilitate that goal. But regardless of whether it’s characterized as a major, The Players is a terrific tournament with the best golfers competing on a great golf course. From a pure golfing standpoint, what more can you ask for?
Sal Johnson provides this excellent Golf Observer overview of the tournament, and the Golf Challenge is providing extensive coverage of the tournament today and during the morning hours on the weekend, while NBC takes over coverage during the afternoons on the weekend. Golf Digest provides this handy interactive overview of the TPC at Sawgrass, while The Players website includes about halfway down the page The 17th hole “Pipeline”, which provides a really slick telecast of the famous island green par 3. When the wind blows as it did on Thursday (and probably will through the tournament given that a tropical storm is swirling off the northeastern Florida coast), watching the players play the 17th is a real blast. Check it out.

So, you think the competition on the PGA Tour is intense? According to this John Huggan/Scotsman article, the intensity of that competition is nothing compared to what goes on between the golf instructors of the top PGA Tour players:

Especially at the top level, the teaching of golf is a bitchy business. Typical was the vitriolic reception that Hank Haney received from many of his peers in the wake of his assuming the role of coach to Tiger Woods, replacing the aforementioned Harmon. For a while there, things were neither hunky nor dory.
The last word in that particular skirmish, however, belonged to Haney. In the immediate aftermath of the 2005 Masters Tournament – Woods’s first of four major victories under the tutelage of his new coach – the Dallas-based instructor lifted a leaf out of Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, and took dead aim at one of his biggest critics, wannabe star teacher Jim McLean, describing him as “the biggest asshole I have ever met” – a label that left little room for misinterpretation.
“As for other teachers who have been critical [most notably and ironically, Harmon and Smith], it was obvious where they were coming from,” Haney declared. “I viewed them speaking out as a form of pre-emptive strike. They wanted Tiger to lose patience with me before we even got started, so I wasn’t surprised by the crap they were talking. Those other instructors never wanted to give us a chance. The result was never going to make them look better.”

Read the entire piece.

Phil Mickelson has had quite a year already — one PGA Tour win, blowing another one on the 18th hole, replacing swing coaches. But none of that compared to the firestorm that Philly Mick provoked last week when he got a pass from the PGA Tour brass on playing in the Byron Nelson Golf Tournament Pro-Am because bad weather prevented him from flying into Dallas the night before the Pro-Am. Normally, missing a Pro-Am — which is considered a necessary nuisance by most PGA Tour players — means that the offending Tour player is not allowed to play in the tournament. However, an exception was made in Mickelson’s case, even though it is pretty clear than Mickelson could have made his tee time if he had been willing to get up early enough and fly into Dallas on the morning of the Pro-Am. PGA Tour member Robert Allenby spoke for the vast majority of players:

“He came here, was on site and he elected to go somewhere else, knowing the weather was going to be crappy. He took the risk. Take the risk and you pay the penalty.”

And Doug Ferguson chimes in with this piece about the Tour’s double-standard with regard to playing in Pro-Am’s:

In 2005, Chad Campbell wanted to play the 84 Lumber Classic ñ the tournament even had his wife sing at one of its functions ñ but he asked out of the pro-am Wednesday to attend his grandmotherís funeral. The Tour made him choose between the pro-am and the funeral, and Campbell withdrew from the tournament. [. . .]
Wes Short Jr. wanted to skip out on a pro-am because his father was about to have quadruple bypass surgery, but he had to choose between the pro-am and spending time with his father.

But leave it to a Houstonian — the always entertaining Steve Elkington — to bring a sense of perspective to the situation:

“They’ve opened themselves up to a dangerous precedent,” Elkington said of the tour. “Next time it’s raining in Houston, I might call and say I can’t get there.”
“That being said, this tournament needs Phil Mickelson. Look at the crowds. You’ve got to give the guys who carry the tour a bit of slack. That’s always been there. We’re in the business of entertaining people.”
As Elkington spoke, thousands of spectators swarmed along the 18th hole, trying to catch a glimpse of Mickelson, . . .

By the way, Geoff Shackleford — the best golf blogger around in my book — has put together an entire category of blog posts attempting to keep up with Philly Mick.