At some point in the past decade or so, Golf Digest became a lifestyle magazine. With reviews of $100,000 cars and style columns featuring $250 belts, Golf Digest morphed from golf magazine and something more like an off-shoot of the Robb Report. At best, it’s become a great way to scoff at the elite members of society who happen to play golf while reading through the same re-trodden tips you read a few years ago. At worst, it’s a coffee table flipbook for top-tier country clubs – completely worthless to the 98% of golfers who don’t need to spend a hundred grand to drive to their local muni or $250 to hold up their pants.
The latest evidence – not counting the belts and cars, of course – comes in the form of Editor in Chief Jerry Tarde’s “Golf’s Five Sacred Rules.” This week in Trap Five we take a quick look at Tarde’s “rules” and come up with a real list of five sacred rules – if, that is, we’re sufficiently pretentious enough to think that golf is religious enough to warrant calling anything “sacred.”
The eminent Tim Finchem announced last week that the PGA Tour “could lose a couple more events” in the coming years. Obviously, this news isn’t a proclamation of imminent disaster, or an LPGA-esqe “we may not even have a Tour next year” scenario. As the PGA Tour isn’t a publicly traded corporation, it isn’t obligated to continually grow in order to return profits to its shareholders. My point here is that downsizing, and potentially losing money in the process, ought not to be a terrible prospect.
Tiger and Phil both win on the same day (but Tiger wins a bit more). Also, trouble in the LPGA and PGA Tours – what will their schedules look like in 2010 and beyond? Who will be the commish of the women? That and a whole lot more in this episode of Golf Talk.
For you 
Welcome golf fans to another issue of Hittin’ the Links. Well there you have it, what better way to end the FedExCup playoffs than to have golf’s biggest names go one-two? It’s like Tim Finchem wrote the script himself.