After losing the Ryder Cup over the weekend for the fifth time in the last six competitions, the United States team is certainly an easy target for criticism and the golf writers are taking dead aim:
The Houston Chronicle’s golf columnist Steve Campbell channels Dan Jenkins and Jack Burke in this tongue-in-cheek column that preceded the final day’s matches. Campbell follows that column with this fine article on the emotional performance of Euro team member, Darren Clarke.
Lawrence Donegan of the Guardian pretty well summed up the U.S. squad’s effort:

[S]o one-sided was the contest that at times during yesterday’s session of 12 singles matches it seemed the impossible was on the cards – a Ryder Cup without drama.

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Damon Hack of the NY Times reports on the boys’ road trip of the U.S. Ryder Cup team a couple of weeks ago “to bond” before this week’s matches (and to try and figure out why the U.S. has gotten creamed four out of the last five matches). However, as Hack (what a great name for a golf writer!) notes in the article, Houston’s Jack Burke, a former Ryder Cup member and one of Hal Sutton’s assistant captains on the U.S. Ryder Cup that got scorched two years ago, suggested in his recent book Itís Only a Game that the reason the U.S squad is getting beaten so regularly is really quite simple — the U.S. team members have made so much money through the years that they have become soft.
In this GolfforWoman.com article, Clear Thinkers favorite Dan Jenkins expands on Burke’s thought in explaining why so many PGA Tour sponsors want Michelle Wie to play in their tournament:

As a sponsor, the tour says, it’s okay if I sell tickets, but my main job is to help 200 guys I’ve never heard of make a lot of money. They need to make all this money so they can live in one of those tract mansions, probably on the water hole of a golf course in a gated community where it’ll be safe to let their urchins run loose and annoy people.
Near as I can tell, they deserve to be rich because they know how to hit a golf ball. Doesn’t matter that they’ve never read a book that didn’t have a cure for the slice in it, and they resist thinking about anything beyond the next Marriott.

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Houston has a rich tradition in both golf and business, so it’s no surprise that a Houston resident has been named the best CEO-golfer by Golf Digest magazine. In its October print edition (no web link available), Golf Digest rates the top 200 CEO-golfers of all the Fortune 1000 companies and Jim Crane, CEO of Houston-based air freight and logistics company, EGL (“Eagle Global Logistics”), comes away with the no. 1 rating. As the article notes:

Crane, who grew up caddieing at Norwood Hills Country Club in St. Louis, gratefully recalls getting to play for free on caddie day. Price isn’t an issue for him now. With homes in Houston, Nantucket and Pebble Beach, and with 400 offices in locations from Shanghai to Istanbul to Santiago, he admits to having two identical sets of clubs — one that he keeps in Houston, where he plays near his office at Lochinvar Golf Club, and the other — “Oh, this will sound bad,” he says, “but it’s a personal one, not the company’s” — on his plane. “It makes it easy to get from Point A to Point B,” he says.
When working at his London office, Crane stays at Queenswood . . . because it’s convenient, and he can sometimes hit balls after work. Even though Crane enjoys tournaments and plays in many fund-raisers, more of his golf is business than social. “If you can’t close in four hours, you can’t sell,” he says of opportunites offered by the game.

As noted here earlier, there is something about the upcoming Ryder Cup matches next week in Ireland (perhaps that the American squad has lost four of the last five matches?) that provokes some entertaining reactions.
In this IdahoStatesman.com article, NBC golf color man and former PGA Tour player Johnny Miller rips the American Ryder Cup team:

“This is probably on paper the worst Ryder Cup team we’ve ever fielded,” Miller said during [a] press conference . . .
Miller also expressed reservations about captain Tom Lehman, who will decide how to use his 12 players. He will create four two-man teams for each of the first four rounds.
Miller says it’s imperative that Lehman pair Tiger Woods with Jim Furyk, and Phil Mickelson with Chris DiMarco, because those pairings have worked in the past.
That could leave the team’s inexperienced players, including four Ryder Cup rookies, paired together.
“I believe if he divides those up we’re going to get creamed,” Miller said of the Woods-Furyk and Mickelson-DiMarco teams. “I’m really concerned that Lehman uses the theory that we’ve got to use a good player with a not-so-experienced player.” [. . .]
Miller, a former Ryder Cup player, will call the action for NBC.
“It’s going to be tough to win with the team (Europe has) got,” he said.

I don’t think Miller will be the one pursuing interviews from the American squad members for NBC during the matches. Meanwhile, this blog post of senior GolfWorld writer John Hawkins, an excellent golfer himself, provides a more balanced analysis of the American squad’s prospects.

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The start of the college football season over the Labor Day weekend tends to overwhelm all other sports news, but it’s hard to overlook the fact that Tiger Woods shot a 63 yesterday to win his fifth straight golf tournament, a streak that includes two major championships. Doug Ferguson puts it in perspective:

Byron Nelson won 11 straight tournaments in 1945, a streak regarded as one of the most untouchable in sports. Woods won six straight at the end of 1999 and the start of 2000, and Ben Hogan won six in a row in 1948.
Woods now takes a week off before heading to England for the HSBC World Match Play Championship, followed by the Ryder Cup. His next PGA Tour start will be the American Express Championship outside London at the end of September.
He still isnít even halfway home to Nelsonís hallowed mark, but he surpassed Lord Byron in one category with his 53rd victory, moving into fifth place alone on the career list. Woods, who finished at 16-under 268, won for the seventh time this year. No other player has won more than twice.

By the way, only Hogan has had a streak similar to Woods’ current one where more than one major was involved. Hogan won four straight in 1953, including three majors.

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The United States has lost four out of the last five Ryder Cup competitions, so it’s not particularly surprising that some U.S. golf fans are viewing the 2006 Ryder Cup competition next month at the K Club in Ireland with some trepidation. However, former Houstonian and noted teaching professional Butch Harmon is already gripping particularly hard in anticipation of the competition, and Brett Wetterich — who will be playing in his first Ryder Cup competition for the American team — is the target of Harmon’s nervousness:

Brett Wetterich, who squeezed into the US Ryder Cup team in the last available qualifying spot, will have to greatly improve his attitude at next month’s Ryder Cup match at the K Club.
At least that’s the way widely-respected US swing coach and Sky Sports analyst Butch Harmon sees it.
Harmon told Sky Sports he was “appalled” by what he saw on day two at the 9th hole at last week’s PGA Championship where Wetterich, destined to miss the cut by nine shots after shooting a 2nd-round 77, took four shots to get out of some greenside rough.
Harmon says he was infuriated by Wetterich’s attitude.
“I was appalled by what I saw with Brett Wetterich,” he told Sky Sports. [. . .]
“This isn’t the kind of guy you want on your Ryder Cup team,” Harmon said of Wetterich.

H’mm. I guess Wetterich will at least have something to talk about with Tiger Woods during the Ryder Cup competition.

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As Tiger Woods strolled to his 12th victory in a major golf championship yesterday (second now only to Jack Nicklaus’ 18 major wins), the big news out of Medinah was the confirmation of the ten players who earned a spot on this year’s American Ryder Cup team, which will compete against the European team on September 22-24 at the K Club in Straffan, Ireland, about 25 miles west of Dublin:
1. Tiger Woods
2. Phil Mickelson
3. Jim Furyk
4. Chad Campbell
5. David Toms
6. Chris DiMarco
7. Vaughn Taylor
8. J.J. Henry
9. Zach Johnson
10. Brett Wetterich

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The fourth and final major professional golf tournament of the year begins today in the western suburbs of Chicago as the PGA Championship returns to Medinah Country Club. Golf World’s Tim Rosaforte provides ten reasons why the PGA is not only the most improved major golf championship, but in some ways the best. Geoff Shackelford has the scoop on Medinah.
This year’s PGA Championship has the additional intrigue of the game within the game — the competition for a spot on the US Ryder Cup team — and that pairing for the first two rounds of Master’s champ Phil Mickelson, US Open champ Geoff Ogilvy and British Open champ Tiger Woods doesn’t hurt the marquee value of the tournament, either.
Finally, don’t miss this entertaining Boston Globe story on Houstonian and Champions Golf Club owner Jack Burke‘s victory at the 1956 PGA Championship. At that very different time and during a much less lucrative stage of professional golf, Burke played 155 holes over five days to beat seven opponents (the PGA Championship was match play back in those days) and win the 38th PGA Championship. For his trouble, Burke received a check for $5,000, which turned out to be hot. By the way, the article passes along Burke’s following analysis of why Woods is the top professional golfer in the world right now:

“He’s the only one who understands how to play the game, how to make shots. The other guys? They’re all out there plumb-bobbing the world, worrying about their launch angle and their ball speed. But Woods is like the great pool player — he doesn’t see the cue, doesn’t see the ball, he just sees the whole game.”

Larry Dierker thinks that some of baseball’s rules are absurd, but even the most arcane of baseball’s rules don’t hold a candle to several of golf’s rules. This James Achenbach/Golf Week column describes the byzantine manner in which U.S. Golf Association officials penalized 17-year old Esther Choe of the Scottsdale, Arizona in her recent third-round match during the U.S. Women’s Amateur over — you guessed it — a divot:

After winning her first two matches over the Witch Hollow course at Pumpkin Ridge, Choe was bidding for a third-round victory and a spot in the quarterfinal round. Suddenly and decisively, she was derailed by a divot.

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The University of Texas has a storied golf program, and another chapter was written in that story yesterday as Sherri Steinhauer won the Women’s British Open yesterday at Royal Lytham. It was Steinhauer’s third Women’s British Open victory, but the first since 2001 when the tournament became a major on the LPGA circuit.
Steinhauer is a native of Wisconsin who attended the University of Texas, where she was an All-American in 1985. She was the MVP of the UT women’s golf team in 1983 and ’85.