"It has been sobering in recent weeks to see confidence drain out of the golf game which won three Majors in 13 months"

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Karl MacGinty offers a sobering Padraig Harrington asessment and though he calls it a "ludicrous" comparison to Ian Baker Finch's swing tinkering, is it really that far off?

Meanwhile Padraig offered this assessment of Turnberry in his website diary:

it was definitely a worthwhile trip as the course had changed dramatically since I had played it 6 weeks ago. The rough has grown substantially which now makes it a very tough course; there is definitely a premium for hitting fairways.

Monty Probably Won't Be Talking To Gary Player About His Experiences As President's Cup Captain

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It's nice that Player at least soft-pedaled the part about the 2006 U.S. Open.

Asked which Scot had made the most impact on him during his career, Player replied: "I'm a great believer in looking at the record book. It doesn't lie. And Colin Montgomerie was the leading money winner on the European Tour eight times. That was phenomenal and for me it was a tragedy he never won either the Open or the US Open.

"If ever someone threw the US Open away, though, it was him at Winged Foot. He needed a par on the last hole to win, a bogey to tie and made double. It's a great shame he didn't win one. You have to be careful what you say, but (at 46] I think it's too late for him now.

"Who goes down in history as the better player – Sandy Lyle or Colin Montgomerie? It's a very debatable issue. But if you said to me personally, whose record would you rather have, Montgomerie's or Lyle's, then I'd take Lyle's."

"It seems the days of preparing by visiting Irish courses are a thing of the past"

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Phillip Reid with some details about Tiger's pre-Open Championship preparation:

It seems the days of preparing by visiting Irish courses are a thing of the past, though this probably has more to do with his increased family commitments.

Instead, Woods intends to travel to the Scottish links on Saturday to get acquainted with the course. But he won’t be waiting until then before practising the type of shots he believes will be required if he is to reclaim the Claret Jug he last won in 2006.

To that end, his coach, Hank Haney, has been summoned to Woods’ home in Florida. What type of shots would they work on?

“Just making sure that you can flight your ball and making sure you can manoeuvre it both ways efficiently, because over there you don’t know what kind of weather you’re going to get,” Woods said.

“You’re going to get years like we had at St Andrews where it’s perfect, or you can get like a Muirfield day or what they had last year at Birkdale. You just don’t know, and you have to be able to be confident in controlling your golf ball and manoeuvring it all around and feel like you can do it efficiently.”

"The problem seems to be that Bivens has stuck to her hard-line negotiating even as the economy has imploded."

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Someone sent me a less than nice email about the Bivens-mutiny post below. I started to write back an explanation, but Alan Shipnuck summed it up better in the lastest SI/golf.com roundtable:

Shipnuck: It's clear Bivens's hard-charging personal style has rubbed a lot of players and corporate types the wrong way, but you can't fault her original vision: raise purses, improve the pension and retirement benefits, and expand the tour's TV presence. The problem seems to be that Bivens has stuck to her hard-line negotiating even as the economy has imploded. Sponsors are hard-pressed to maintain their current commitments, and she's asking for them to pour in more money for next year and beyond. Something had to give, and it's being reflected by the tour's contracting schedule.

There has been no sign that Bivens called an audible after the economic collapse and postponed her vision to get them through these tough times and save some of these mom-and-pop events that are dropping like flies. That will ultimately be her undoing.