This Week at WorldGolf.com: August 17, 2005

Golf desperately needs a Terrell Owens

Golf needs a Terrell Owens as desperately as TV executives are convinced you think Teri Hatcher needs a boyfriend. Enough of this low-volume indignity already! Here, an exciting down-to-the-last-hole PGA Championship is going on and an NFL wide receiver is dominating the nation's sports pages and TV shows?

Enough is enough. It's time to fight fire with fire. Or in this case, junior high tactics with junior high tactics.

PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem and his right hand man (in waiting), Ty Votaw, need to get with their international counterparts and come up a Sharpie-touting, cell-phone hiding, pom-pom swiping, I'm-not-talking-to-you golfer of their own. Instead, what does pro golf give us in its final major of the year?

A seemingly decent guy beating other seemingly decent guys in the clutch. A champion who jokes about his own battle with nerves, lamenting how he had to go to sleep with the final-round lead twice in a major. Who wrote this goody two shoes fantasy land!? J.K. Rowling?

You call this sports!?

Where's the controversy? (The best anyone could do was get mad at CBS for scheduling Sunday's final tee time too late to reasonably expect to finish. A TV network as your villain, how tritefully uncompelling.) Where oh where are the stare downs?

Oh, Vijay Singh tried as best as he could, breaking into that whole "I'm misunderstood, I don't care what the press thinks about me" rant. "I'm not fake like many guys out there," Singh shot in the ultimate zinger from his pre-tournament press conference. Surely, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods could feel the hair standing up on back of their necks.

But alas, with Singh's putter emerging as a weapon of self destruction, his words came out looking more pitiful than piercing. At one point, I wanted to scream at the TV, "Vijay you need putting lessons from both Paula Creamer and P.B. Dye!"

Which brings up another major impediment to golf's image problem. Nobody's the boss of these guys. How can they be expected to throw temper tantrums when they do not have anyone to answer to? Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson actually talk about as much as TO and Donovan McNabb, but no one realizes this unless some idiot coach pairs them up in the Ryder Cup Matches.

The PGA Championship was enough to leave you feeling hopeless. Instead of a "Take that, Love boy!" there was Phil Mickelson respectfully tapping the Jack Nicklaus plaque before his second shot on 18.

That's the problem with this sport.

Or maybe, that's why we love golf so much.

As always, WorldGolf.com welcomes your comments.

Ballybunion's Old Course:
Historic links punish modern golfers

The Old Course at Ballybunion stands as the epitome of Irish links golf. Laid out along a wild and wooly stretch of linksland in 1893, parts of the track look more like a maze than a golf course. The resulting effect for the uninitiated is one of combined reverence and frustration, of respect tinged with underlying resentment. Tom Watson calls it, "One of the best and most beautiful tests of links golf anywhere in the world."

Full story | Ballybunion's Cashen: A worthy, mischievous little sister

Ron Garl on design: Build
it (correctly), they will come

Building a golf course is one of the most intricate projects you can undertake and it starts with selecting the proper site. There's the old saying: "location, location, location" and nowhere is it more appropriate than choosing the site for a golf course. Here are a few tips from noted architect Ron Garl on the first step towards building your own golf course. Garl has 16 courses listed in Golf Week's list of "America's best golf courses."

Full story | BadGolfer.com's new blog: "Budget Golf by Cheap Bastard

KZG's first oversize irons
deliver forgiveness and performance

Here's my modus operandi in doing equipment reviews: I go hit the clubs myself at the range, then I find a few players and ask them to hit the clubs, finally, I have some local professionals give them a go, writes Kiel Christianson. I will be honest, though: I have not let anyone else hit the new KZG OC-x1 irons I recently received for review. And I ain't gonna, either. These are staying right in my bag.

Full story | Trust and commitment are essential to success