Category: Thrash Talk

The 2008 LPGA Tour season is in full swing, and things are off to a great start. There have only been five events so far, and Lorena Ochoa, Annika Sorenstam, and Paula Creamer each have at least one win already. That’s a great sign for the LPGA Tour because all three are among the most marketable in the women’s game.

The season’s first major championship, the Kraft Nabisco, starts today. This event was very exciting the past two seasons, and it should be highly competitive again this year. With the first major on the horizon, it’s time to ask a few LPGA Tour questions for 2008. Keep reading to find out what I have to say about Lorena Ochoa, Paula Creamer, Michelle Wie, and more.

Continue reading “LPGA Tour Questions for 2008”

As I reckon most of you already know, The Streak (the latest one, anyway) is officially over. Someone beat Tiger Woods, finally, by two whole strokes, at last week’s CA Championship at Doral, ending his run of official PGA Tour victories at five. Past Tiger streaks have ignited fiery discussions over Sir Eldrick’s historical standing in golf, so to extend the Tiger theme of last week’s Thrash Talk, I’d like to give you a few additional things to chew on. Read on to get my take on the matter.

Continue reading “The Streak is Over, but the Beat(ing) Goes On”

Tiger Woods is taking the golf world by storm yet again. To put things in perspective, Woods hasn’t lost a tournament he has entered since the Deutsche Bank Championship last September. Phil Mickelson outlasted the world’s number one golfer that day, but nobody has been able to stop him since. That’s a win streak in excess of six months for crying out loud!

With The Masters on the horizon, the talk of Tiger’s win streak is dominating the golf headlines for good reason. It’s a pretty safe bet Woods won’t win every tournament he enters for the rest of his career, so the win streak has to end at some point. When and where that happens is worth looking into, and that’s what I’ll attempt to do in this week’s article.

Continue reading “Tiger’s Still Streaking”

In his February 8 Globe and Mail Column, virtuoso golf writer Lorne Rubenstein makes an interesting observation about televised golf: there is very little attention paid to architecture.

While I am not sure this characterization is accurate in the literal sense – every telecast of big tournaments I can remember has at least some segment on the course, either with flyovers and commentary, or the omnipresent telestrator commentary – I would certainly agree that compared to, say, swing analysis, golf viewers are indeed starved for good content on architecture. Is there anything to be learned from this sort of thing, other than the difference between tifdwarf bermuda and zoysia? I think there is, although I suspect the expert commentators would reach different conclusions than would I.

Read on to learn what I think you’d be missing.

Continue reading “Modern Marvels”

While I’m sure most people would be happy to have heard the last of the Kelly Tilghman Affair, after mulling the situation over for several weeks I’ve decided I would be remiss not to give it the once over in The Sand Trap‘s op/ed space. Let’s face it, January is a slow news month in golf (Tiger romps at Torrey Pines… why am I not surprised?), and this is a political issue in an election year (here in the U.S., anyway). Pass up reading this and just visit the forum if you will, but if you read on I can promise to give you a thing or two to chew on.

To briefly review, Golf Channel‘s team of Kelly Tilghman and Nick Faldo were engaged in some light-hearted repartee on the subject of Tiger’s dominance of professional golf. Faldo asked rhetorically what other players might do to possibly compete with golf’s version of a Superhero, said “gang up on him for awhile.” In the joking vein of their exchange, Tilghman suggested that other top players “lynch him in a back alley.” The racist overtones of this comment were too much for Golf Channel executives, who suspended Tilghman for two weeks, after which the anchor issued a public apology and resumed her duties as lead anchor.

Continue reading “Kelly Tilghmangate: A Seventy-Eighth Look”

At the risk of alienating those readers from tropical climates (lousy, spoiled, warm-weather wussies playing golf on 70° January days…), I thought this week’s Thrash would be a good place to give you an update on how the long, dark winter is progressing. If you’re similarly frozen out of golf, perhaps the following can give you a constructive suggestion or two on how to survive the final few months before the spring thaw.

Continue reading “Golf on Ice, 2008”

Other than maybe Byron Nelson or Gene Sarazen after their 90th birthdays, can you think of a professional golfer with a double-digit handicap index? Well, I know one.

Me. Sort of, anyway.

It may well prove to be the high water mark of my life in golf. It was a cool, rainy Sunday in February, 2005. The location was the Dallas Convention Center. Perhaps the good karma was foreshadowed by how easily I obtained the Kitchen Pass from my wonderful wife to leave the house, the unfinished homework projects, and the bulk of my “honey-do” list to attend the Dallas Golf Expo. I figured it would be a way to kill a few hours, maybe check out some new equipment, and otherwise obtain a much-needed winter golf fix. It turned out to be much more than that.

Continue reading “Pros and Cons of Amateurism”