The Securities and Exchange Commission has chickened out on reforming implementation of one of the most costly and misdirected forms of business regulation in recent memory, the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. The SEC press release is here and previous posts on SOX are here.
Larry Ribstein has followed closely and written extensively on this issue, and his post on the SEC’s most recent punt is here.
This weekend is the 60th anniversary of the Bank of America Colonial Invitational Golf Tournament in Ft. Worth, so the sponsors have invited a number of the tournament’s former champions to this year’s event to celebrate the venerable tournament. One of those past champions is Austin’s Ben Crenshaw, who passed along a funny story about the lengendary Ben Hogan, as reported in this Steve Campbell/Chronicle article.
Hogan, of course, was one of the best ball-strikers of all-time. A self-taught player who quit school as a youth to earn money as a caddie to supplement his impoverished family’s income, Hogan was a taciturn and serious man who literally outworked his competitors by refining his skills on the driving range. Hogan lived in Ft. Worth most of his life, and ended up dominating his hometown tournament during the immediate post-WW II era, winning it five times (1946, 1947, 1952, 1953 and 1959) and coming in third as a 54 year-old in his second-to-last Colonial tournament in 1967. But for developing a case of the “yips” while putting in his later years, Hogan was such an extraordinary ball-striker that he likely would have continued to win golf tournaments well into his 50’s.
Crenshaw, on the other hand, was a product of the post-WW II boom in wealth in the United States. Growing up in a relatively wealthy family during the 1950’s and 60’s, Crenshaw developed his game on the country club circuit of Austin and then as a collegiate golfer on the University of Texas’ outstanding golf teams of the early 1970’s. Although Crenshaw developed into one of the best putters in PGA Tour history and was a gifted natural athlete, he was never considered a particularly good ball-striker and often struggled with his golf swing during extended periods of his career.