Fore!

I love this Tiger Woods story that came out early in the week. For those of you who may not have heard about it, here's the quick recap: On Sunday Tiger and Padraig Harrington were in the last group playing with the lead. Harrington was -11, Woods was -10 and the next closest guy was at -8. Baring two major collapses, the winner was coming from the final group. On the 16th tee Woods and Harrington were told they were being put on the clock for slow play. Harrington, clearly a little bit rattled and thus off his normal rhythm triple bogey for an 8. Woods birdied the hole. Tournament over.

Afterwards, Woods said that the rules official "got in the way" of a good match and shouldn't have said anything. That night there was a story that Tiger was being fined for criticizing a Tour official. The next day Tiger said that no one told him that and he wasn't being fine. I can only imagine that it was because the conversation went something like this:

PGA Official: Tiger, we can't have you criticizing our officials on TV. We're going to fine you for that.
Tiger: No, you're not.
PGA Official: Good call. But, don't do it again.
Tiger, staring a hole through him: ...
PGA Official: Then again, if you see something that could be corrected, feel free to speak up.

Now, on the one hand the rule is the rule so I can see why they put Harrington and Woods on the clock. There is no point to have rules if you're not going to enforce them. Frankly, I wish they would do this more on the local muny courses and maybe a round wouldn't take me four and half hours. But, these were the only two guys on the course so they weren't holding anyone else up and clearly, at this point, the winner was going to be one of these two guys. Every now and again you can let some stuff slide. Plus, it's not like they were going to be way over - 5 minutes tops. I can't imagine that the ratings for the evening news would suffer that much. It was the equivalent of pulling someone over for speeding when they're going 47 in a 45. Sometimes you can look the other way, is the point.

-Tiger's win was his second in a row and the 4th time this year that he's won the tournament before a Major. Seeing as how he hasn't won a Major this year, I'm not picking him for the PGA Championship. Hazeltine National is stupidly long this year (7,600+ yards) so you need to be a big hitter with accuracy. Sounds just like Tiger. But, I'm still not falling for it and instead I'm going with Hunter Mahan. Hunter, I apologize in advance.

-Not that I had any pressing urge to go there anyway, but now that Venezuela has seen an increase in the anti-golf push across the country, I'm really not adding it to my travel destination wish list.