Graphite Design International won the manufacturer and brand counts for the 79th straight week at the Nippon Series JP Cup on the Japan PGA Tour, an unprecedented streak that dates back to the 2002 season, according to the Darrell Survey.

The 2005 Esteban Toledo PGA Tour Pro-Am, benefiting the Get A Grip Foundation and featuring a number of yet to be announced PGA Tour players, will be held Monday, Feb. 14 at the Cresta Verde Golf Course in Corona, Calif.

The First Tee Greater Atlantic City receives a $30,000 grant over the next three years from the U.S. Golf Association and a $3,400 grant from The First Tee national organization.

If the Ryder Cup is one of the great sports spectacles in the world, then the recently completed PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament has to be regarded as one of the most compelling for the raw and visceral emotions it elicits from the competitors.

For all those who subject themselves to what must seem like quite a sadistic golf examination after first surviving up to two preliminary tiers of tears Q-School isn't a tournament. It's bamboo shoots under the fingernails. It's six days of heavy metal music for symphony lovers, gallstones, a week's vacation in Siberia in your under shorts. It's a creation of Beelzebub, who was never a golfer. It's Haagen Dazs ice cream topped with liver and onions sweet underneath if you can just get past piles of misery. You get all this for the low, low cost of a $12,000 entry fee (based on a three-stage trip).

A fascinating component of Q-School is that it continues to produce some of the game's finest golfers at a time when the Nationwide Tour's status looms large as a better preparatory arm for the PGA TOUR. The top 20 money winners on the Nationwide Tour now graduate to the big tour because statistics prove that the rigors of that competition gird the participants for bigger challenges down the road.

Q-School still tends to be a lightning-in-a-bottle proposition that reveals talent, nerve, character and guts over 108 holes. What it can't indicate is sustainable skill level from those who leap through its fires.

Having said that, Q-School is far from an academic exercise. The last two British Open champions, Todd Hamilton and Ben Curtis, came from its ranks. The 2001 class included veteran Tommy Armour III, who holds the PGA Tour's 72-hole scoring record. Mike Weir, the 2003 Masters champion, was medalist in 1998, and U.S. Ryder Cup player Scott Verplank was medalist the year before that.

The Qualifying Tournament is about as egalitarian as you can get in sports. Sure, there exists open qualifying for the U.S. Open and British Open, but those are for single tournaments. Q-School is for entry into a league, if you will, and a very tough league at that.

While Nationwide Tour players have outpaced Q-Schoolers in recent years in retaining their exempt status on the PGA Tour, the Qualifying Tournament remains a worthwhile process. The only downside to it is the dearth of coverage on television it receives. It deserves more, much more.

Q-School is a lab experiment where the participants all are placed in virtual test tubes for six days. We should get more of an opportunity to see which men emerge as Jekylls and which as Hydes. Then we'll have a better understanding of how some become major champions and stars.