khandor’s sports blog

Bradley wins 1st major tournament

If you happened to miss this weekend’s PGA tournament, well …

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Keegan Bradley’s PGA CHampionship win ‘a dream’

Your winner of the 2011 PGA Championship left his rented townhouse Sunday with a batch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made fresh by his mother, Kay. Just before he drove away, Keegan Bradley told her, “I’m gonna do it, Mom.”

“I know,” she said. “Yes, you are.”

And then he drove to the Atlanta Athletic Club, teed off at 2:30 p.m. local time, overcame a five-stroke deficit with just three holes left to play, somehow squeezed his way into a playoff and made the kind of golf history that lasts forever.

Bradley not only won the PGA Championship, but he won it in his first majors appearance. That’s not too big of a deal, except for the part where it’s only the third time in nearly the last 100 years that someone has done that.

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you missed dramatic golf history in the making.

Stirring stuff, to be sure! … even without names like Rory, Tiger, or Phil in the mix at all.

From 13 years ago …

When the Legend was cemented, forever …

Yes, sir!

Concerning the tragic fall of Eldrick …

Tiger Woods was the best golfer of all-time, for a period of 10+ years, because of THE WAY HE COULD WILL HIS WAY around a golf course in fewer strokes than anyone else in the game, based on his sheer mental strength and his almost inhuman capacity to DO ANYTHING HE WILLED HIMSELF TO DO, in any area of his life, not just on the golf course.

Once that WILL has been broken, it can never ever be put back together again, in the same way.

Woods will win again, if and when the time is right; but, he will never ever be the player he once was … when he had a supreme belief in his own ability to do the near impossible, time after time again.

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PS. The current time is 3:45 PM EST … and, Mr. Woods is -5 for the day, -10 overall, and just 1 stroke behind the present leader during the 4th Round of the Masters golf tournament, as he is putting for Par at the 9th Hole. Could it possibly be …

PPS. Yours truly sincerely hopes that it is.

PPPS. The Masters only begins, however, on the back nine, Sunday, at Augusta National Golf Club … the most theatrical 2+ hours in the history of sport.

Real Housewives of the PGA Tour … Headed to A Reality Show?

Well, maybe.

If a certain group of Tour pro wives can make it happen, a reality show based on their lives of golf watching, spa hopping and fundraising could be coming to a flat screen near you. Heck, you might even catch the ladies posing in swimwear, as they did during a recent photo shoot.

See photos of the PGA Tour wives who are looking to launch their own reality show.

“We’re the bad girls, I don’t know what else to say,” Liz Estes, Bob’s wife and one of the women pursuing the show, said half-jokingly in a phone interview.

Joining Estes in her quest for reality-TV stardom are Melissa Weber Jones, wife of Matt Jones and a former Miss Idaho, and Alli MacKenzie, Will’s wife and a model who has been featured in a pictorial in the men’s magazine FHM. (Leot Chen, Vaughn Taylor’s fiancée, and Erin Walker, Jimmy’s wife, who writes a blog about traveling on Tour, also partook in the photo shoot, but they said they have no interest in appearing on a reality show.)

The women have partnered with a Los Angeles marketing firm, Reverb Collective, and in its first major play to generate some buzz, Reverb has released some edgy photos of the girls.

“We were so careful not to do anything that would be offensive to anybody,” Alli MacKenzie says of the shoot. “We got a bunch of old Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues and looked at athletes and athletes’ wives in them and made sure we didn’t do anything that was more provocative than what they did.”

Liz Estes, an aspiring pop musician, is hopeful that the PR push will work and that the show will find a home given that production companies have shown interest in her and the other wives in the past. “We were approached by the guys who did Pawn Stars,” Estes says of the History Channel show about pawnbrokers. “We talked to them three times, but they never called us back. And then this guy from VH1 asked me to put a show together with the other girls, and I’m like, ‘Well, I’m not putting it together.’ ”

If a show materializes it would be golf’s answer to Bravo’s popular Real Housewives series, “but with a cool twist,” says Amir Amiri, Reverb’s chief executive officer. Amiri believes the time is ripe for a program about Tour wives given the swell of attention the Tiger Woods scandal brought to the personal lives of pro golfers.

“We’ve talked to a lot of [television] bigwigs, and they’re all interested,” Amiri says. “I definitely think this could work out.”

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From the perspective of someone who was reared in the halcyon days of Barbara [and some guy named Jack] Nicklaus …

Nuff said.

The highlight of a very busy weekend in the world of professional sports?

… which included:

* The 136th running of the Kentucky Derby
* The beginning of the 2nd Round in the NHL Playoffs
* The beginning of the 2nd Round in the NBA Playoffs

What this fine young player from Northern Ireland accomplished Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoon, on the PGA Tour:

Best get accustomed to seeing his face.

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Golf’s changing of the guard

To see Irishman Padraig Harrington, grinning wider than an Augusta fairway, in his civilian clothes, waiting for McIlroy after the round, throwing a paternal arm around the lad, telling him he’d just crafted “a good bit of stuff”; to see stoic Jim Furyk give him an earnest soul shake by the scorer’s table; to see Phil Mickelson’s caddie, Jim (Bones) Mackay, interrupt a McIlroy press session outside to congratulate the winner; to see Rory himself give the Euro-styled “hands over head” appreciation clap to the crowd … to see all that was to see a golf world embrace the new kid in town, and to read into that the existence of a little Tiger Fatigue would not be the wrong call at all.

Throw in a springtime rebirth for Mickelson – he followed his win at Augusta by beating everyone at Quail Hollow not named “Rory McIlroy,” then gushed about McIlroy to CBS afterward, trumping Tiger’s post-Masters pout – and you have Tiger wondering where he fits in at this party.

When you read the details …

Yang’s story captivates golf-mad South Koreans
Yang’s mother, Ko Hee-soon, said he was determined to leave their tough life behind. “When we urged him to go into farming, he would say, `I’m not going to live like my father,’” she recalled, beaming.

… it becomes an even more amazing tale of rags-to-riches.

With 2 of the most remarkable pressure shots in the history of golf …

Virtual unknown, Mr. Yang, proves that Y.E.S. he can!

It had to happen sometime.

There is only one story of interest in the world of sport today and it is being played out gloriously, thus far, in the birthplace of Golf, in Scotland, on the Ailsa Course at Turnberry.

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Day Two Leaderboard

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Old Tom Watson [59 years young], 5-time British Open Champion, 26 years after his last victory in a major, is tied for the 36-hole!

32 years ago, Tom played the finest match of golf these eyes have ever witness, head-to-head on this same course, against the greatest golfer of All-Time, The Duel in the Sun, with four rounds of 68-70-65-65, to win by 1 stroke over the Golden Bear.

Beginning at 10:00 AM ET … when the final pairing of the day is set to tee off … there’s no other place in the world yours truly would rather be than: A. In Scotland, at Turnberry, in Mr. Watson’s gallery, or B. ”Watching on the telie” along with the thousands-to-millions around the world, neary a dry eye to be found, if he can … someone … just hang on, one last time.

There is no greater test of a man’s heart and soul and skill and will … tested against the elements and his fellow man … than the competition of the Open Championship with 36 holes left to be played, on a links course, in Scotland.

Aye, so say, I.

Bring it home, Mr. Watson … 

“Would you give your heart to a friend,
Think of me as your friend,
And, I think we can make it, make it,
One more time, if we try.
One more time for all of the old, old times.”

Oh, what a weekend it just might be, afterall.

Related:

The Open Championship at Turnberry, 1977
Day One of the Open Championship: Turning back the hands of time

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Day One Belongs To Watson [and us getting older folks who remember when]

History, including history no older than Greg Norman a year ago, suggests Old Tom Watson won’t last with the lead pack at the 138th Open Championship.Watson isn’t sure himself, but this is not about some angst-driven crusade to win majors; leave all that to Tiger Woods, who began poorly, throwing clubs and small fits in his latest attempt to track down Jack Nicklaus.

No, Watson is here to smell the flowers, or at least the sea breezes, and enjoy a game at which he was best in the world 30 years ago. He’s here to fit right in to Scotland, in other words, and loving every minute of an opening-round 65 that put him a shot behind Miguel Angel Jimenez.

“There was some spirituality out there today. Just the serenity of it was pretty neat,” said Watson, a five-time Open champion who clearly gets it about links golf and what it means here.

“Golf is part of the fabric of life over here, in Scotland in particular. Wherever you go, Tiger’s recognized. In the States, they don’t know who the heck I am. But over here – and I don’t get a big head about it – people come up to me.” Here he lapsed into a brogue, saying, “`Tom, Tom, nice to meet you, Tom.’ And it’s much appreciated.

“I did not like links golf. I did not like the way I was playing,” he said of the early days of his career. “I didn’t like the way you had to play it on the ground, the luck of the bounces or the bad luck of the bounces. But I took it in stride finally and made a pretty good success of it.”

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