Golf’s greatest showman shows he is ready to compete against all odds after a solid if mostly unspectacular start There were about 50,000 people at Augusta National for the start of the Masters: fans, media, members, stewards, caddies, cooks, camera crew and all the other support staff, and on Thursday morning almost every last one of them was asking the same sort of question. Plenty had come along to the 1st tee at 11am to find out the answer, too. The dogged ones had staked a front-row spot first thing that morning. Everyone else was craning their necks and popping up on their tiptoes, jockeying to try to find a line of sight that would allow them to catch a...
The Saudi-backed 10-event international series will change the game if stars from the PGA and DP World Tours take partThe Saudi International may draw glances at present but it is not really a major problem for golf’s ecosystem. It is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Saudi Arabia’s ongoing, ultimate disruption plan.On Tuesday morning Greg Norman, the frontman for the golf operation of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, promised that the 10-event international series on the Asian Tour was “just the beginning”. Norman will believe this, even if the general tone of his carefully controlled press conference was uninspiring. Plenty of rhetoric, very little substance. “The most compelling indicator for me is the number of calls we...
We don’t have a right to know what happened in that car crash last February. Sifting through the wreckage doesn’t helpPress conferences will not define the career of Tiger Woods save, perhaps, the reference point provided by “Hello world” on the eve of his professional debut in 1996. For so many years thereafter, appearances by Woods before the media felt like an ordeal. Great moments arrived inside ropes, not via soundbite.That tetchiness has long since evaporated. The later stages of his career have witnessed a more relatable and amenable side. Even if, it must be said, the 15-times major winner never has any apparent interest in being a journalist’s friend. Woods is just willing or able to play the game...
Sports psychologists might not like it, but Steve Stricker’s ‘cut the fluff’ mentality let his team enjoy themselves, and winThe way Justin Thomas tells it, Dustin Johnson’s one frustration was that he didn’t win even more points in the Ryder Cup. “Poor guy went out there, tried to get six points, but all he could do was five,” Thomas joked. Of course there are only five points available, but Johnson is a man who once missed a key putt by six feet because he was holding the green-reading book upside down, and who blew a one-shot lead at the US PGA in 2010 because he didn’t realise he was standing in a bunker.One anonymous fellow pro was repeatedly quoted describing...
Home side had the better players but Pádraig Harrington didn’t help himself with his wildcards or partnershipsThe most fundamental and important, if boring, point. On paper, USA had the stronger Ryder Cup team by a considerable margin. If they played to their full potential, Europe would not have enough strength in depth to compete with them. And so it proved; there was not a single failure in the home team, justifying their heavy favouritism before a ball was struck. Sport would be a terribly dull place if expected outcomes based on talent level was the outcome all the time but in this case it was precisely what happened. Every USA player returned at least a point, three Europeans won none....