If you are contemplating a purchase of new golf clubs, make sure that you read this first.
As David Feherty comments:

“Maybe we’re all supposed to stink at this. It’s our punishment for playing this insane game.”

By the way, if you are really interested in improving your golf game and not just hitting longer drives, read this.

Tiger Woods isn’t playing this weekend, but I bet you will want to watch the final round of the Byron Nelson Golf Tournament in Dallas after you read this blog post, anyway.
22 year-old Sean O’Hair — who was born and raised in Lubbock — is leading the tournament going into the final round. O’Hair was a high school student and one of the nation’s top junior players when he turned pro at 17 in September, 1999, one calendar year before fellow teens and future PGA Tour card-holders Ty Tryon and Kevin Na.
However, O’Hair’s journey to the PGA Tour was anything but a smooth one. He languished on the mini-tours for the past five years, traveling over 200,000 miles in the process. O’Hair finally won his Tour card by finishing fourth in the 2004 PGA Tour Qualifying School this past fall, but as this January, 2005 GolfWorld article reports, O’Hair has had to overcome a lot more than just the rigors of travel on the mini-tours in attaining his PGA Tour Card:

Marc O’Hair [Sean O’Hair’s father], 52, signed management contracts with his son, says he invested $2 million in his boy’s professional future and subjected Sean to a physical and psychological regimen that would make most drill sergeants blush. Sean broke free in 2002 and has not spoken to his father since a perfunctory greeting at Sean’s wedding more than two years ago.

Marc O’Hair, a large man who wore dark sunglasses, subjected Sean to a rigorous routine that stood out. He was sometimes brusque to tournament, rules and school officials, event organizers and other parents. His son, by design, was treated as a commodity.
Sean signed his first contract with his dad when he was 17, requiring him to pay his father 10 percent of his professional earnings for life. He signed another when he was 20, Marc says.

“I told him, ‘I can’t blow this kind of money without a return,'” Marc says.” ‘When you make it, there has to be payback someday.'”

Taking a tough-love approach, Marc drove his son hard. While the results speak for themselves, those who watched the duo believe there was madness in the method. As a junior player, Sean was forced to run a mile for making bogeys or finishing over par at tournaments. Marc once claimed he made Sean run eight miles in 93-degree heat after shooting an 80. At a 1998 AJGA tournament in California, Sean shot 79, then spent part of the night logging seven miles on a treadmill, a friend, Christo Greyling, says.

“The next day, he could hardly walk,” remembers Greyling, a former AJGA player and a senior at University of Georgia. “We could hardly believe he [Marc] went through with it.”

Other players . . . say Marc would berate his son in the presence of others. Dad admits slapping his son, but he says he never injured him. Sean declines to discuss the specifics of his father’s behavior, but he missed numerous social activities because he was on the driving range, working out or watching tapes of his swing. “We’d go to the beach, have an outing at Disney, do something social, and he’d be out in the parking lot with his dad doing some crazy crap [drill],” says Erik Compton, who competed in AJGA events with Sean and roomed with him at the 1998 Canon Cup team matches.
In addition to the golf work, Marc awakened his son at 5 a.m., had him run a mile and lift weights. After Sean turned pro, Marc cooked meals on a portable stove in their hotel room so that Sean ate the right foods. Every day was like boot camp, and the military comparisons aren’t by accident.

“What am I supposed to do, say, ‘Oh, Seany boy, you don’t have to get up early today,'” Marc says sarcastically. “The military, they know how to build a champion. Somebody who slacks off, that’s a loser. The typical high-school kid is hanging out at the mall – that’s a loser. You have to have a goal or you are just wasting time. I busted my [butt] on this thing. I thought I was doing him a favor. You would not believe what I did for him.”

How the family dynamic develops from here is anybody’s guess. No question, dad feels a broiling sense of festering betrayal. In fact, Sean is worried that Marc will someday sue him for repayment of the money spent fostering his career. “I hope I don’t have to go through that,” he says of a legal battle, “because that’s been a bit of a concern.” Truth be told, dad has other ideas. Marc says he has placed 25 photocopies of their contracts and a cover letter into envelopes he plans to mail to media outlets when his son makes a splash on tour.

“As soon as he gets famous, I am going to lower the boom,” Marc says. “I am going to show everybody what he did to me. I have no intention of suing him. I intend to crucify him in the media, because what he did to me is not right.”

Read the entire article. Then go watch the tournament and pull for this kid to win it, and for his father never to receive a nickel from him.
Update: Young O’Hair acquitted himself well in the final round, shooting a two under par 68 and finishing in second place, one stroke off Ted Purdy’s 15 under par winning score. O’Hair won $669,600 for his second place finish.

Vijay Singh took advantage of long John Daly‘s hooked drive into the water on the first playoff hole to win his second straight Shell Houston Open golf tournament on Sunday afternoon. Singh and Daly tied at 13 under par after 72 holes, and Singh won the playoff with a par on the first playoff hole, which was the 18th at Redstone Golf Club.
Although the Houston Open is one of those relatively insignificant golf tournaments that take place in the dreaded “down” period between The Masters and the U.S. Open, the entertaining final round probably garnered its share of television viewers who chose it over meaningless first round NBA playoff games and early season baseball games. Daly shot a 5 under 67 on Sunday, including birdies on the difficult 17th and 18th holes to catch Singh, who misread a 5 foot birdie putt on the 18th hole that would have won him the tournament in regulation. Unfortunately, Daly consumed too much caffeine in chugging Diet Cokes while waiting for Singh to finish his round, so he promptly pull-hooked his 3 metal into the water hazard on the left side of the first playoff hole.
As usual, CBS commentator Gary McCord had the crack of the weekend on Sunday. McCord and the other CBS announcers were discussing “golf demons,” those devilish quirks that always seem to torment golfers in the heat of competition. Suddenly, during this “golf demon” discussion, the television screen showed Daly’s haggard face as he prepared to take a shot. Without mentioning any of Daly’s well-chronicled bouts with alcohol abuse, smoking, multiple wives (the latest of which ended up in prison) and overeating, McCord declared:

“Now there is the Mothership of demons!”

So, the Houston Open ends its three year run at the Jacobsen-Hardy Course at Redstone Golf Club and moves across the street next year to the new Rees Jones Course at Redstone that has been specially designed and constructed to host the tournament. The Houston Golf Association is placing its bets that the new course will reach a stature similar to Champions Golf Club‘s Cypress Creek Course among the top PGA Tour members, who will then make an effort to come and elevate the Houston Open to the elite level of non-major PGA Tour golf tournaments. As noted earlier here, I’m not convinced that this is a sound strategy, but I hope that I am wrong. The HGA does a great job of running the tournament, Shell is a fine title sponsor, and the tournament is already among the top PGA Tour events in terms of raising money for charity. Consequently, the tournament definitely has some things going for it, and perhaps a great new course will be answer to the problem of being an afterthought on the PGA Tour.

Given that it is Shell Houston Open week, it seem appropriate to note that Ft. Worth’s Dan Jenkins — whose writings were previously featured in posts here and here — is the best golf writer of our times. An outstanding golfer as a collegian at TCU, Mr. Jenkins has covered golf for various publications (he writes a column for Golf Digest these days) for over 50 years. He writes with an engaging combination of wit and historical perspective (he has covered the past 55 straight Masters golf tournaments), which allows him to compare better than anyone else the accomplishments of Tiger Woods to the other dominant golfers of the past 50 years, Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus. Thankfully, Mr. Jenkins has passed on his talent to his daughter, Sally, who is an excellent sportswriter for the Washington Post.
In connection with the recent Master’s golf tournament, Golf Digest ran this article excerpting pieces of Mr. Jenkins’ writings over the past 20 years and also providing parts of a recent interview with Mr. Jenkins. Don’t miss it. Here are a few gems:

On Ben Crenshaw’s emotional and inspirational 1995 Masters victory the week after the death of this long-time mentor, Harvey Penick:

“Not to bury the lead, but all in all, this Masters was a very bad week for atheists.”

On Greg Norman shooting 78 and blowing a six-shot lead to Nick Faldo on the last day of the Master’s in 1996:

“When Greg Norman self-destructed, Nick Faldo was right there to claim his third green jacket. A strange object slowly bled to death before our very eyes for four hours, and it wasn’t even a shark. Although Norman did it to himself and unleashed every Great White Can of Tuna joke in the book, his undoing also wrought sympathy from his most cynical critics. On the one hand, you could appreciate why Faldo hugged Greg on the final green. Why wouldn’t you hug a guy who’s been that nice to you?”

Which reminds me of Mr. Jenkins’ following joke (not included in the article) about Norman, who is a favorite target of Mr. Jenkins. Upon French golfer Jean Van de Velde’s blow-up on the final hole that cost him the 1999 British Open, Mr. Jenkins observed:

Q: What does “Jean Van de Velde” mean in English?
A: “Greg Norman.”

Again on Norman, this time after he hit a wayward shot on the 18th hole of the 1986 Masters ensuring Jack Nicklaus’ fifth green jacket:

“What do you do if you’re Greg Norman in the 18th fairway of the Masters on Sunday and you’re trying to get Jack Nicklaus into a playoff? You hit a half-shank, push-fade, semi-slice 4-iron that guarantees the proper result for the history books. Oh, well, Greg Norman always has looked like the guy you send out to kill James Bond, not Jack Nicklaus.”

On the proliferation of Tournament Player Courses on the PGA Tour:

“TPC sounds too much like something kids sniff.”

On Ian Baker-Finch’s blow-up round during the 1997 British Open:

“He went out in 44 and came back in 48, which sounded like a man’s service history in World War II.”

And finally, in the interview, Mr. Jenkins is asked whether today’s PGA Tour players are as accessible to the press as the players of bygone eras:

“Not even close. Hell, they’re not even accessible to each other. The old guys hung out, in the locker rooms, bars, restaurants. Players and writers drank together, had dinner together. Back then, smoking wasn’t a felony and cocktails came easier.”

Dan Jenkins is a Texan and American treasure.
Update: I just have to pass along this Jenkins anecdote from Dr. Jim Bob Baker, a reader of this blog who commented:

After years of cigarettes and cream gravy, Jenkins had to face the inevitable Cardiac Bypass surgery, but he managed to joke about even this. His surgeon had said that he was planning to do 4 bypass grafts pre-operatively, but managed to restore good blood flow to Jenkins’ heart with only three, prompting Jenkins to brag that he had “birdied my bypass.”

“Birdied my bypass?” Classic Jenkins!

The 2005 Shell Houston Open is this week at Redstone Golf Club as the no. 2 ranked player in the world — Vijay Singh — returns to defend his 2004 title. Shreveport native David Toms, the ninth-ranked player in the World Golf Rankings, is also in the field, but he is the only other player in the tournament who is in the Top 10 of the World Rankings. Although the tournament’s awkward date two weeks after The Masters — among other problems — continues to hurt the quality of the field, crowd favorites such as John Daly, Steve Elkington, Chad Campbell, Darren Clarke, Charles Howell III, Mark Calcavecchia, and Jose Maria Olazabal make the field good enough to justify making the trek to Redstone for a day or two of the tournament. Here is the Chronicle’s special section on the tournment.
This is the final Shell Houston Open tournament that will be played on the Redstone Golf Club’s Peter Jacobsen-Jim Hardy designed course. Next year, the tournament will move across the steet to the new Rees Jones course that the Houston Golf Association and Redstone have developed specifically to host the golf tournament. The HGA is hoping that the top PGA Tour players will take a liking to the new course and again make an effort to fit the Shell Houston Open into their schedules.
Although I have my doubts that this strategy will prove successful, I hope I’m wrong. The Shell Houston Open is good for Houston, but it is definitely a golf tournament that needs a shot in the arm.