The final major golf tournament of the season — the PGA — is being played this week at Whistling Straits Golf Club on the windy shores of Lake Michigan in Kohler, Wisconsin. Whistling Straits is a relatively new golf course that has a reputation of being a monster. However, it has never hosted a major golf tournament and thus, is not that well known to the general golfing public.
I was taking a look at some pictures and video of the golf course last night and came across this picture of the incredible 223 yard 17th hole. Check out video flyover that reflects that the hole is even tougher than the picture suggests. I think I would use my “block right” swing on this one.

The Open begins today at Royal Troon in Scotland, and Quin Hillyer provides this excellent overview of this year’s tournament.

Sally Jenkins is the daughter of Dan Jenkins, who is simply the best golf writer of all-time. However, Sally is currently writing on golf for the Washington Post, and she is fast joining her father as one of the best commentators on the golf scene. In this piece, Ms. Jenkins takes Tiger Woods down a notch or two over Woods’ behavior during this past weekend’s U.S. Open golf tournament. The following is a tidbit:

The Woods who played in the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills this week was not an especially great player, nor was he a very good guy. Among the things that Woods blamed for his final round of 76, his worst final round in an Open since turning pro, and 10-over-par finish: the weather, the United States Golf Association, modern photography, the press and his former coach, Butch Harmon.
My first suggestion for Woods’s immediate and long-term recovery is that he spend four years in the Peace Corps. Planting crops in Ethiopia or Zaire while teaching children to read and write would have a salutary effect on his attitude, which at the moment resembles that of a spoiled Venetian princess.

Read the entire piece. Good stuff.

ABC’s coverage of golf tournaments is the worst of any television network, primarily because of commentator Steve Melnyk‘s compulsion to say something regardless of whether it makes any sense. However, on Sunday, ABC really outdid themselves in providing bad coverage when they switched from a three man playoff for the Buick Open Tournament to that television classic that simply cannot be delayed, “America’s Funniest Videos.” Absolutely incredible bad judgment.
I do hope that ABC on course commentator Billy Ray Brown can find a job with a real golf television crew, such as the CBS crew. Billy Ray is quite good.

Whenever the subject of a discussion is great Texas golf courses, two courses should always be included in the discussion — Jack Burke, Jr. and the late Jimmy Demaret‘s Champions Golf Club in Houston and Colonial Country Club in Ft. Worth, nicknamed “Hogan’s Alley” after the late Ben Hogan, a Ft. Worth native and arguably the best ball-striker in golf history.
Both of these golf courses are steeped in history and are phenomenal challenges. Champions is long and relatively wide open off the tee, but has huge greens that place a premium on getting the ball close to the hole on approach shots. Colonial is short and tight, with postage stamp greens.
Chad Campbell is a 30 year old West Texan from Andrews, Texas. After graduating from UNLV in 1996, Campbell worked his way through the mini-tours for five years before getting his Tour card in 2001 and, since that time, has established himself as one of the best ball-strikers on the Tour.
Last October, Campbell shot one of the best rounds of the year on the Tour when he shot an incredible 61 (10 under par) at Champions during the third round of the Tour Championship, which he went on to win the following day for his first Tour victory. Campbell won his second Tour victory earlier this year at Bay Hill.
Yesterday, in 25 mph wind conditions (i.e., extremely difficult for most golfers; no big deal for a West Texas boy), Campbell shot an equally incredible 61 (nine under par) at Colonial to bolt into a third round tie for the lead.
Campbell’s 61’s on these two great golf courses is the equivalent of pitching two perfect games in baseball. Campbell is now firmly established as one of the Tour’s rising stars and may now be the best Tour player who has not yet won a major golf tournament. The only flaw in his game at this point is inconsistent putting, but if he gets that part of his game to a more consistent level, watch out. Chad Campbell has serious game.

As noted here earlier, Dan Jenkins is American’s finest sportswriter on golf. He has covered an incredible 53 Masters Golf Tournaments in a row, and here is his Golf Digest article on this year’s spectacular tournament that Phil Mickelson won in dramatic fashion. The entire article is a a must read for any golf fan, and here are a few tidbits of Jenkins’ wit and wisdom to give you a flavor for the piece. First, on the questionable ruling that allowed Ernie Els to take a drop out of a horrible lie in some debris:

Now all I have to do is try to avoid hooking a sentence into some cut-and-paste neighborhood that will closely resemble the spot where Ernie Els’ golf ball wound up on Saturday.
I mean that time in the third round when Ernie’s ball came to rest among the roots, twigs, leaves, sticks, rocks and limbs of a place that looked so strange and far away you’d have had a hard time getting a National Geographic photographer to go in there. This was after he’d hit a soaring golf writer’s hook off the 11th tee.
I fear there’s no silly rules official around who can rescue my sentence the way this guy did Ernie’s golf ball. It could have been the free drop that won the Masters. Els got out of the “ice storm debris” with a bogey 5 when a double or a triple was what he deserved.
The rules official who permitted the incomprehensible relief — and I shall withhold his name out of kindness to his family — must pardon me if I say it looked like a lift out of Uganda and onto I-20 near Augusta.

And what about Mickelson, the man who Jenkins had previously criticized for not having what it takes to win one of golf’s major championships?:

It was my 53rd Masters in a row, and I must confess that in all of those years I have never seen anything as thrilling, exciting or dramatic as Phil Mickelson’s victory.
Yeah, that Phil Mickelson. The guy with the enormous promise tainted by a record of failures in majors. He went out in the Big Heat on Sunday, and first he survived it, then he courageously stood up to the Big Easy coming down the stretch and sensationally won with golf shots instead of the mistakes of others, and thereby buried all of his past nightmares and, I hope, all of our bad jokes about him.

Masters Sunday was a feast of brilliant golf shots and clutch putting strokes, to be sure, and it was obviously the confirmation of Mickelson, but it needs to be said that the public couldn’t have lost no matter who won, Phil or Ernie. Which is why it was so memorable, so historic.
It came down to a battle between the other two best players in the world today. The battle of the anti-Tigers.

Jenkins goes on to put Mickelson’s performance on the back nine of Augusta National in the context of other great final day performances in past Masters Tournaments, and then points out what he likes about Mickelson in comparison to another top golfer:

To me, one of the nicest things about Mickelson’s victory is that he’s a guy who’s loyal, unlike another star we know. Phil’s caddie, Bones Mackay, and business manager, Steve Loy, go back more than a dozen years.
Other nice things about Phil are that he’s accessible, unlike another star we know, plus he’s talkative, he’s interested in other sports, and despite his fame and wealth, which were already in evidence, he was hard at work to trim his physique and improve his game long before he arrived in Augusta a week early, Hogan style.
Incidentally, Phil didn’t ask Mark O’Meara how to do any of that.

Then, Jenkins provides his theory on what might be going wrong with Tiger Woods’ game:

Nicklaus is the exception to the “window theory” on putts, having been the only guy to make them for 20 years. Every great the game has known, except for Jack, has enjoyed a period, a window, of making darn near every big putt for eight, nine, 10 years — then the door slams.
Tiger may have hit that wall. Forget the “swing plane.” Surely every good golfer realizes that when you start missing putts, it eats away at the rest of your game like a poison. Tiger was tied for 35th in putting at Augusta.
The only thing wrong with Tiger is, he’s gotten so bogged down in mechanics that he’s lost his intuition. It’ll be interesting to see if Tiger sticks with what he’s doing, whatever that is, or goes back and rediscovers what he did to become great.

Finally, in his inimitable style, Jenkins asks and answers the age-old question:

Meanwhile, here’s another question: Now that Phil Mickelson has done it, who’s the best current American player who has never won a major?
I look around the dismal landscape and see only one answer.
Michelle Wie.

Rim shot!

Vijay Singh — the second-ranked golfer in the World Rankings — won the rain-delayed Shell Houston Open today by two strokes with a 72 hole total of 277, 11 under par. Singh shot a 69 in the final round to hold off 48 year old Scott Hoch, who shot a 68 and finished in second place at 279. Here is the final leaderboard.

As noted here earlier, it appeared that Tour pro Stewart Cink improved his lie on the shot that set up his winning birdie putt to beat Ted Purdy on the fifth playoff hole of the MCI Heritage Class Golf Tournament last Sunday. Although several television viewers called in to report Cink’s apparent rules violattion, Tour officials quickly denied the alleged rules violation after Cink sunk his birdie putt and delared the popular Cink the tournament champ.
Now, it appears that ruling went over about as well as a turd in the punchbowl with a number of Tour players. Today, the Chronicle reports that Purdy in particular is not pleased:

“Every player that’s come up to me said `I got robbed,’ and everybody around the world is saying the same thing,” said Purdy upon completion of his first round Thursday at the Shell Houston Open.
“I bet the founders (of golf) in Scotland, our forefathers, are rolling over in their graves.”

Inasmuch as it was clear from the telecast that, in sweeping away loose impediments, Cink created an indentation behind his ball to lessen the risk that his wedge would bounce off the surface of the waste bunker before striking his ball, Purdy is not buying the Tour rules officials’ reasoning on the dispute. Purdy had a phone conversation with Slugger White, the PGA Tour tournament director and referee in chief, on Wednesday about the controversy. After shooting an even-par 72 in the first round of the Shell Houston Open at Redstone Golf Club, Purdy expressed continued skepticism about the ruling and the message it sends. According to Purdy, White felt everything in the waste area was movable.

“Why Stewart was being so careful, I don’t know,” Purdy said.
Because Cink was in a waste area and not a bunker, he could ground his club, take practice swings and remove loose impediments.
“But it’s still sand, it’s still crushed shells,” Purdy said. “I think the rule needs to say you can’t move the sand.
“Apparently Slugger doesn’t believe in sand.”

In fact, the rules are already clear that what Cink did was wrong. Rule 13.2 of the Rules of Golf states in relevant part as follows:

13-2. Improving Lie, Area of Intended Stance or Swing, or Line of Play A player must not improve or allow to be improved: ? the position or lie of his ball, by any of the following actions: ? creating or eliminating irregularities of surface, [or] ? removing or pressing down sand, loose soil, replaced divots or other cut turf placed in position . . .

Cink improved his lie and should have been called on it. Purdy should have won that golf tournament.

Tour professional golfer Stewart Cink won the MCI Heritage Golf Tournament last Sunday at Hilton Head over Ted Purdy by making a birdie on the fifth playoff hole. However, on his approach shot to the green on that hole, it appeared that Cink improved the lie of his ball in a waste bunker by creating an indentation behind the ball so that his sand wedge would be less likely to bounce off the surface before striking the ball. Cink proceeded to hit the shot stiff to within six feet of the pin and sunk the birdie putt for the win.
Rule 13.2 of the Rules of Golf provides in relevant part as follows:

13-2. Improving Lie, Area of Intended Stance or Swing, or Line of Play
A player must not improve or allow to be improved:
? the position or lie of his ball,
by any of the following actions:
? creating or eliminating irregularities of surface, [or]
? removing or pressing down sand, loose soil, replaced divots or other cut turf placed in position . . .

Television showed Cink removing loose impediments behind his ball (which he is allowed to do) and then, on a close up, a clear indentation behind the ball where Cink was removing the loose impediments. Accordingly, several television viewers called in to Tournament officials and reported the apparent rules violation, which would have resulted in a penalty to Cink that would awarded the victory to Purdy. Upon reviewing the matter immediately after Cink’s birdie putt, Tournament officials ruled that no violation had occurred and confirmed Cink’s victory.
Here is the explanation of the Tournament officials’ ruling on the matter, which I find less than convincing. Hat tip to Mr. Poon (the low handicap blogger) for the link.