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People
Billy Casper Golf announces Christopher Martin as General Manager of the BCG-managed McCullough's Emerald Golf Links, the new, public, championship 18-hole golf course near Atlantic City, N.J.
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Terry McCabe, Senior Vice President of Research and Development for Titleist Golf Clubs, announces his resignation effective April 5, after more than six years with the company. He cited personal reasons for his decision.
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Spalding Sports Worldwide appoints Lynn Luczkowski as director of public relations, effective April 1. Luczkowski replaces Jackie Beck, who held the job for 13 years.
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Tournaments
New LPGA Tour event, The Michelob Light Open at Kingsmill, is to be held April 28-May 4, 2003. The tournament features a purse of $1.6 million with a $240,000 winner's share.
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Equipment
OGIO announces that the U.S Patent Office has awarded its "Test Tube" golf ball dispenser with No. 6,357,586. The "Test Tube" first appeared on OGIO's 2001 Stinger SKV cart bag and is still incorporated into the 2002 model.
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With Retief Goosen's win at the BellSouth Classic, Softspikes brand cleats have been worn in seven PGA Tour victories in the 2002 season. Eighty-one percent of the BellSouth field wore Softspikes' Black Widow cleats.
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Office Depot Championship winner Se Ri Pak wore CHAMP metal spikes and runner-up Annika Sorenstam used CHAMP's plastic ScorpionSpikes. According to the Darrell Survey, 67 LPGA Tour players in the Office Depot field wore CHAMP-brand spikes.
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Courses
Independence Golf Club, located in Midlothian, Va., will host 36-hole sectional qualifying for the 2002 U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship on Monday, June 17 and 18-hole qualifying for the 2002 U.S. Senior Amateur Championship on Tuesday, Sept. 10.
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Events
The Athletes In Action's Ironmen of Golf event will be held on Thursday, June 6, at Royce Brook Golf Club's 36-hole facility in Hillsborough, N.J. The 54-hole golf challenge features team scramble and best-ball play, as well as an individual medal play tournament.
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Senior PGA Tour player Doug Tewell's second victory of the season, at the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf, moves him into second place behind Hale Irwin in the Charles Schwab Cup points race. Tewell earned 306 points to more from fifth to second and now trails Irwin by 113 points.
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Colleges
The 13th Intercollegiate Golf Tournament will be played April 13-14 at Finley Golf Course in Chapel Hill, N.C. North Carolina and N.C. State will host the 54-hole event that features nine teams ranked in the nation's top 50.
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Associations
Logo golf ball collectors Steve Scott and Clint Wood create the World Logo Ball Association, an online organization dedicated to the development of logo golf ball collecting into an organized hobby.
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Members of the Seattle Chapter of the Executive Women's Golf Association will provide assistance and information to women attending the Interbay Golf Center's "Women's Golf Day" on April 20.
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Media
The final round of the LPGA's Office Depot Championship on ESPN2 was the highest performing LPGA telecast on ESPN2. Sunday's telecast was seen in 533,000 households, marking a 144-percent increase over 2001's final-round numbers and the first time the LPGA was viewed in more than 500,000 households on ESPN2.
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Tours
The United America Senior Tour heads to South Carolina for an eight-week series of events in the Myrtle Beach area.
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Commentary
Walking in the Shadows at Augusta

Some of the legends of the game will walk the fairways of Augusta National this week. A few of them will be mere shadows of what they once were.

Seve Ballesteros is one of those shadow men.

Ballesteros, who in the 1980s and early '90s was a threat to win nearly every time he teed it up, hasn't won a tournament since 1995. He hasn't made the cut in the Masters since finishing 43rd in 1996. And he hasn't had a round under par at Augusta since a second-round 68 in 1995.

Disarray best describes his game today. Although he led the European PGA Tour in putting last year, he made just three cuts and shot only one round n the 60s. His best finish in a stroke play event was a tie for 47th in the Madeira Island Open.

Ballesteros' problem is that he's all over the course off the tee. The opinions on what happened to him are numerous, but the two favorites are a bad back and the fact that Ballesteros will listen to almost anyone who claims to have idea about how to swing a golf club.

He played well in 1996, coming close to victory a couple of times, then the bottom fell out of his game in '97. That, of course, was the year he captained the European side to a dramatic victory over the U.S. in the Ryder Cup at Valderrama.

His game might be in tatters, but the 45-year-old (his birthday was April 9), apparently still carries some of that fire that drove him to two Masters titles and three British Open championships.

In a recent interview, Ballesteros predicted he could win the Masters.

"I think I can win the Masters. Yes. There is no doubt I can play," he told Mark Reason of Sport Telegraph.

Naturally, this prompted a fair number of derisive comments.

Then Ballesteros said of Tiger Woods: "He has tremendous concentration, tremendous focus on the golf course. It's like he's on a mission, he's fighting a war in Vietnam. But I don't see anything very special. He's light years away from me as an artist. Sergio Garcia has a bit of artistry. He reminds me of myself on the golf course."

In a way, Ballesteros is right about his game as opposed to Woods. Ballesteros was, and remains, an artist around the greens. However, he needed that artistry to compensate for his erratic driving. Even when he was winning, Ballesteros visited the wayward places of many a golf course.

Woods and Ballesteros are different in their artistry. Ballesteros makes soft strokes in oils; Woods is a modern sculptor in metal.

Ballesteros arguably looms as the defining personality in European golf in the last half of the 20th century. He has inspired a generation of European golfers to excellence. It is painful to those who remember his greatness to see him now from tee to green.

As disappointing as his game is, Ballesteros, in one of the great descriptions of what it's like to play golf, certainly knew calamity could strike.

"Sometimes you nearly believe you are a God out there and all of a sudden you feel...  useless," he once said. "That is the way it is. So this is the game of humbled people. And if you are not humble, the game will show you how to be humble sooner or later."

Can he win the Masters? The state of his game says no. Does he believe he can win? Who knows? Jack Nicklaus certainly thought he could win -- and said so -- four years ago when he placed in a tie for sixth behind Mark O'Meara.

Of course, Ballesteros, who named one of his companies Amen Corner, is not Nicklaus, but what a win that would be. Will it happen? Not likely. But as Jake Barnes said to Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so."

Reader's Forum With the arrival of the year's first major, the winner of the Masters will become the only player with the chance to win the coveted Grand Slam -- or will he? Open for debate is whether the Grand Slam is confined to the calendar year or can a player, like Tiger Woods in 2000-01, be entitled to the Grand Slam by winning the four major titles over two calendar years? Let us know your opinions by sending your responses to stuart@gpagolf.com with the subject line RE: Grand Slam. Also include your first name and last initial.