The Wire -- Golf's only weekday transaction newsletter

The Wire for Friday, March 29, 2002

A Look Back: Mar. 29

1919: Jim Barnes wins his second North and South Open at Pinehurst (N.C.) Country Club.

1934: Henry Picard wins his first North and South Open title by three shots over Horton Smith at Pinehurst (N.C.) Country Club.

1936: Henry Picard wins the North and South Open for a second time at Pinehurst (N.C.) Country Club.

1970: Lee Trevino beats Bob Menne in a playoff to win the National Airlines Open.

1981: Bill Rogers wins the Sea Pines Heritage Classic by one stroke over Bruce Devlin, Hale Irwin, Gil Morgan, and Craig Stadler.

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Courses
Play on the 600-year-old Old Course at St. Andrews will go backwards on Monday, April 1. Golfers will play the course as it was played over 100 years ago, starting on the first tee and playing to the 17th green and continuing around the course in a clockwise direction.
For more...

Sponsorship
Softspikes, Inc., agrees to become the official cleat of the 2002 Optimist International Junior Golf Championships.
For more...

Events
The U.S. Better Ball Championship has extended the club registration deadline to May 1. The deadline has been moved back a month to accommodate those courses in cold weather climates as well as other courses that needed additional time to include this event in their tournament schedules.
For more...

Media
The Sunshine Network premieres the April edition of Mercedes-Benz Florida Golf Scene on Sunday, April 7, at 7 p.m. (South Florida only) and statewide on Monday, April 8, at 3:30 p.m. (ET). This month's show takes viewers on a "magical mystery tour," starting with the host course, Mystic Dunes Golf Club at The Palms Resort in Orlando.
For more...

Tournaments
The Japan Golf Tour announces that it will joint-sanction the Okinawa Open with the Asian PGA-run Davidoff Tour. This marks the first time in the Japan Golf Tour's history that it was joint-sanctioned one of its events.
For more...

The CVS/pharmacy Charity Classic, hosted by PGA Tour professionals Brad Faxon and Billy Andrade, announces its 2002 field of players. The tournament, featuring 20 PGA pros, will be held June 23-25 at Rhode Island Country Club in Barrington, R.I.
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People
Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. announces that Olin Lancaster joins the company as Senior Vice President of Sales for Polo Brands. Lancaster will be responsible for sales, retail development and customer service for Polo brands.
For more...

Travel
The Spa at Pinehurst, a $12 million, state-of-the-art facility, opened Wednesday with a gala and ribbon cutting ceremony officiated by Pinehurst President Patrick A. Corso.
For more...

Business
Textron, Inc., will release its first quarter 2002 financial results on Thursday, April 18. The company will host a conference call at 10 a.m. ET, which will be available via webcast at www.textron.com.
For more...

Reader's Forum
What are the LPGA's main issues? How should it go about addressing those issues? And is the LPGA Tour being realistic in thinking it can raise TV viewership by 10 percent each year and increase tournament attendance by 15 percent each year?
Let us know what you think and send your responses to stuart@gpagolf.com with the subject line RE: LPGA. Also include your first name and last initial.

Casual Friday
Read Suspenseful for Wrong Reasons

Casual Friday admits to a great fondness for golf books of all types. If we can't play golf, what's better than settling in with a good book on the ancient game.

(Actually, a good golf book is sometimes more enjoyable. Bobby Jones also would be unfamiliar with the game Casual Friday plays.)

It's a rarity when we stumble across a really bad golf book. Unfortunately, we have stumbled.

Final Round, by William Bernhardt and published by Ballantine Books, is to golf literature what the Sunday comics are to Shakespeare.

Final Round is a mystery that takes place during Master's week.

Unfortunately, Bernhardt took a decent idea for a story and made it comical through his lack of knowledge about the game. At least his editors should have known better, but apparently no one at Ballantine plays golf.

Here are a few examples of the most glaring errors:

In the opening pages of the novel, one of the players refers to a pond at Augusta National as a "water trap." We were willing to overlook this as a simple, but regrettable goof chalked up to an inattentive editor.

During the par-3 tournament, the players face a 450-yard dogleg with a pond. We knew Augusta National had beefed up the yardages, but this is wicked. The main character, a free spirit named Conner Cross, uses a 9-iron from the tee on this hole.

"There was a water trap about two thirds of the way up the fairway," Bernhardt writes. "But if he hit it (the 9-iron) hard, shot over it, avoided the rough ..."

Somebody check the loft on that club.

Another of the characters is killed by a blow to the head with a 9-iron. The police think it's Cross' club until his caddie lays all the clubs on the ground and declares that it can't be because the 9-iron in Cross' bag is shorter than the rest of his clubs. (Look in Tiger's bag; we're betting his 9-iron is shorter than everything but his wedges.)

When Cross tees off in the tournament proper, his drive lands five feet from the No. 1 green. Augusta's first hole will play at better than 400 yards this year. Obviously, this was either one prodigious poke or the ball hit a golf writer's noggin and bounded toward the green.

When Cross comes to the 17th, his caddie instructs him to lay up to avoid the Eisenhower pine. Cross does so and proceeds to eagle the par-4 hole. Exactly how he did this is left to the reader's imagination. Actually Bernhardt doesn't say "eagle." He says Cross played the hole 2-under-par.

The mistakes roll on. We won't even get into the use of improper terminology (the 11th tee-off instead of tee or tee box), and fact (a field of 60 players, a Champion's Dinner that is attended by everyone, all the players staying in cabins at the course, confusion over what the "sweet spot" is -- it's not a place in the fairway.)

The dust jacket says that Final Round is a "novel of suspense." In a way, it is. We couldn't wait to turn the page and see what the next screw-up would be.

FIRST CUT: Everyone suspected that life on the PGA Tour might be difficult for Ty Tryon.

Afterall, he's only 17 years old and hasn't finished high school. He's not even finished growing, a fact that certainly will affect his swing over the next couple of years.

Tryon's instructor, David Leadbetter, has added another twist on the difficulty of being a young phenom.

"Ty was going to play in the BellSouth, but he's not now because he has to have his tonsils out," Leadbetter said. "He might be the first Tour player ever to have surgery at Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital."

DOUBLE CLICK:
www.tytryon.com

Ty Tryon might be the only PGA Tour player to have never made a professional cut, yet has his own Web site. Classic. This futuristic site has a photo gallery, Ty's tournament schedule and Ty's Journal, plus wraps from each tournament he plays -- which are pretty short given he has not made a cut.
There is even a poll section. When Casual Friday checked in, the question was: Who has been the nicest player to Ty since he joined the Tour?
What's next? Ty's Tiger Beat section with rumors that Ty and Brittany Spears are an item.