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Ryder Cup Team
Posted On 2010-02-28 , 10:38 AM
 Ryder Cup assistant is title Goydos can enjoy. His team won't be finalized for another 6 months, but U.S. Ryder Cup captain Cory Pavin has set his roster of assistants to help him at Celtic Manor in Whales this October. The foursome includes three predictable names-Tom Lehman, Davis Love III and Jeff Sluman-and one unusual choice: Paul Goydos.
"It came down to me and Brett Farve," quipped Goydos, offering a glimpse of the dry wit that Pavin believes can help the American squad win overseas for the first time since 1993. Goydos' joke emanated from Fred Couples' selection of Michael Jordon as an assistant when he captioned last year's U.S. Presidents Cup experience, he noted:"I have as much as Michael Jordan."
He is unconventional, thinks outside the box and is an excellent judge of character and talent," Pavin said of Goydos.
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New Groves a Problem for Tour
Posted On 2010-02-24 , 2:24 PM
When the USGA's new groove rule changes were first announced, some people assumed that every PGA Tour player would immediately start carrying a 64° wedge. The thinking was that if players were not going to be able to spin the ball as much with the new grooves, they'd need more loft in order to stop the ball with trajectory. Right?
Wrong—at least in the mind of defending WGC-Accenture Match Play champion Geoff Ogilvy.
"I think the way that things were going, with grooves getting so sharp and company's getting so good at making them, a lot of guys were grabbing a 64° wedge," he told me Tuesday evening. "But when I was younger, the idea of a 64° wedge was laughable. I mean, you just wouldn't use it. But it became usable."
But the smaller, duller grooves that players must compete with today have made using a super-high lofted wedge tricky again. In fact, Ogilvy feels that he can't get enough spin out of his 60° any more.
"If I think back to when I was a kid, I never liked hitting pitch shots with a lob wedge off short grass because the ball seemed to roll up the face and create a loopy flight," he said. "But hitting with my 56 sand wedge, or a stronger wedge, it would grab onto the face and spin."
This year, at the season's first event in Hawaii, the ball started rolling up the face of Ogilvy's lob wedge, just as it did when he was a junior player.
"I had probably not done enough practicing with it," he admitted. "But you can practice on the range but there is no substitute for being in a tournament. Then, in Abu Dhabi, I was just like, 'This is not right.' I was shying away from playing this club, and you don't want to have a club in the bag that you don't want to hit. And arguably, for a lot of guys out here, it's the most important club in the bag."
A loft difference of two is almost impossible to see, but the difference allows the top grooves on the club to grab more of the ball and impart more of the spin that he needs around the greens. And for Ogilv, it makes all the difference.
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Mayhan Troubles With Ping Eye2 Lob Wedge
Posted On 2010-02-22 , 12:37 PM
 The controversy sparked by Phil Mickelson, John Daly and other golfers who recently started using Ping Eye2 wedges made before 1990 has created a problem for Hunter Mahan.
Mahan has been using a pre-1990 58° Ping Eye2 lob wedge for years. He likes the look and feel of the club, but this week at the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship he would be the only player in the field using an "old groove" Eye2.
That doesn't sit well with Mahan, because he knows that if he does well using the old wedge some people might question whether his success was due to his skill or the grooves.
So this week Mahan has been practicing with an Eye2 lob wedge that is identical to his old club except that it contains grooves that conform to the new USGA standards. Tuesday morning on the range he had three Eye2 wedges in his bag. The two copper-colored clubs in the photo have the old grooves. The silver-colored wedge that you can partially see has the new grooves.
"I don't want the focus to be on the grooves," he told me. "It's really kind of unfortunate, but right now the players are taking the blame for all of this."
Mahan said he has not made up his mind which club he is going to use in his match Wednesday against South Africa's Charl Schwartzel. But from his tone and body language, I sensed that he really wants to avoid any controversy.
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Tiger Needs To Play
Posted On 2010-02-18 , 3:25 PM
— First came photos of Tiger Woods jogging. Far more compelling will be the sound of his voice.
Woods has not been heard in the 78 days since a magazine released a voicemail that he allegedly left one of the women to whom he has been romantically linked, pleading with her to remove his number from her cell phone.
That changes at 11 a.m. EST Friday when Woods makes his first public appearance since crashing his car into a tree outside his Florida home Nov. 27, sparking sordid revelations of infidelity.
The big question is what will he say? The topic was intriguing Americans - Woods was a trendy subject on Twitter a full day before his appearance.
Almost as intriguing is which "friends, colleagues and close associates" will be in the Sunset Room on the second floor of the Mediterranean-style clubhouse at the TPC Sawgrass.
PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, who made the clubhouse available and is offering logistical help, has said he would attend, and as many as four other members of his executive staff will be in the room.
A British bookmaker has set odds at 4-to-7 that Woods wife, Elin, will be with him. William Hill didn't stop there, however. It offers 8-to-1 odds that Woods will announce he is getting a divorce, 12-to-1 odds that his wife is pregnant and 100-to-1 odds that he is retiring.
"While Tiger feels that what happened is fundamentally a matter between he and his wife, he also recognizes that he has hurt and let down a lot of other people who were close to him," his agent, Mark Steinberg, said in an e-mail Wednesday. "He also let down his fans. He wants to begin the process of making amends and that's what he's going to discuss."
Instead of going on "Oprah" or another national television show to break the ice, Woods essentially will be speaking to the lone camera allowed in the room. It will be televised live via satellite.
Three networks - ABC, CBS and NBC - will carry the statement live. ESPN will have it live on all its platforms, including Internet streaming, radio and mobile. The Golf Channel will start coverage at 10:30 a.m. - call it a 30-minute pregame show.
Steinberg invited three reporters from wire services - The Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg - and he turned to the Golf Writers Association of America to come up with a pool of three reporters.
GWAA president Vartan Kupelian, who is retired from The Detroit News and now contributes to pgatour.com, asked the group's officers. That means Kupelian is going, along with second vice president Bob Harig of espn.com. Kupelian said the first vice president, Mark Soltau, declined. Along with working for Golf Digest, Soltau is the editor of tigerwoods.com.
Kupelian said he still does not have a third GWAA member, and he is lobbying Woods' camp for a larger pool. A large faction of the GWAA board wants to boycott the appearance because of Steinberg's rules - no questions are allowed.
"This is not a press conference," Steinberg said Wednesday, the same day photos of Woods jogging in Florida were released.
Woods has always been about control, even in better times. He refused to go into the media center before a PGA Tour event if he was not the defending champion. If he agreed to a 10-minute interview to pitch a product he endorses, it was common for a company employee to be in the room making sure it didn't go one second beyond that.
But having not heard from Woods - except for three statements on his Web site - in three months, this event has taken on a life of its own.
Conversation raged online, as many took glee in speculating on what Woods will say Friday.
The golfer was the hottest topic on Google Trends. On Twitter, Tiger Woods was a dominant topic.
One of the most popular threads were tweets with the tag "tigershouldsay." Suggestions were predominantly sarcastic, such as: "At least I didn't use steroids."
Live events during work hours on weekdays have traditionally meant for robust traffic on the Web, since many viewers will be at work in front of computers, rather than home in front of TVs.
The PGA Tour will have two tournaments in progress Friday, including the third round of the Accenture Match Play Championship, the first title sponsor to drop Woods during this sex scandal. Some players did not think it was a coincidence.
Most of them, however, will be just like everyone else - curious what Woods has to say, and how he says it.
"It has to be held at some stage," Padraig Harrington said. "The sooner he makes a statement, the better. And the sooner he's back to playing golf - he's pretty good at playing golf - the better."
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Nike Victory Red STR8-Fit Tour Fairway Woods
Posted On 2010-02-17 , 12:03 PM
Nike Victory Red STR8-Fit Tour Fairway Woods available Jan. 28
Lucas Glover Nike VR FW Lucas Glover used a new Nike 15-degree Victory Red STR8-Fit Tour fairway wood at the season-opening SBS Championship last week in Hawaii (right). Nike has just announced that those clubs will be available to everyone starting Jan. 28.
Like the Victory Red STR8-Fit Tour driver, the steel-faced fairway woods allow golfers to pre-set the face of the club into one of 32 different positions to help create the desired ball flight.
The sole of the Victory Red STR8-Fit Tour fairway woods also features a red channel running behind the leading edge of the club. In the Victory Red driver, this channel goes all the way across the club, but in the fairway woods it is only runs along the heel and toe.
In a media release, Tom Stites, Nike Golf's director of club creation, said, "Our athletes prefer a smooth sole design for optimized playability on tight fairway lies. In order to achieve that, we split the compression channel on the sole to provide improved performance from every lie."
Another technology imported from Nike's drivers to these fairway woods is the Powerbow, which is essentially a weighted area running along the back section of the club that lowers the center of gravity and helps golfers get the ball into the air more easily.
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