"These guys can thrill thousands with their shot-making -- and don't need to squirt vintage champagne over nightclub revellers to make themselves appear 'interesting'."

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A very nice column by Karl MacGinty makes a simple case that the need for more colorful characters is ultimately not a product of their off-course life, as in Anthony Kim's case, but what happens on the course and how the emotions, strategy and beauty of the game will bring out the color.
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“Next year when we go there, if it's not good, it'll get beat up because the other one was so good."

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Richard Oliver details the textbook PGA Tour move from classy old course near a population base to a new TPC course away from civilization. In this case it's the Champions Tour's 2011 AT&T Championship moving from classy old Oak Hills after this week, in favor of a new Pete Dye design outside of town at the TPC San Antonio. The players are besides themselves, but of course, they'll show up no matter where the suits send them.
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"Wild Green Yonder"

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Thanks to all the readers who emailed the link to Alastair Gordon's WSJ Magazine story on just how far the game has drifted from the kind of golf many of us love. He also touches on the surge in cross-country golf.

As we were starting to get a feel for the raw conditions, the back nine opened with a series of surreal encounters as I climbed over a barbed-wire fence and faced an enormous bull who seemed aggravated that I’d sliced my ball into his paddock. The 12th green was completely hidden within a mysteriously bowl-shaped depression within a hillock (cnoc in Scottish Gaelic) and I had to shoot blindly over a jagged ridge and scamper up to the top of the cnoc, where I found that my ball had landed in this secret little valley and rolled within a few feet of the pin. By this point we had torn up our scorecards in a moment of giddy liberation, and Iain turned to me with a bright expression and said: “This is the only way that golf should ever be played. No status, no fancy pants.” And he was right. We could have played stark naked and putted with stale baguettes and no one would have cared or known.

Gordon also lists some of his favorite remote golf experiences.

"This sounds a little like getting an award for merely showing up."

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Count John Paul Newport as another dissenting voice on the George Bush nomination to the World Golf Hall of Fame. I penned my take a few weeks ago, as did Adam Schupak of Golfweek. No one has come forward in favor of the move, which as Newport points out, came from a committee whose votes and deliberations are a secret.
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"Bearing more guilt is IMG, Kim’s management company, which in return for its commission concocts shore stories to hide unpalatable truths."

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Tough words from Robert Lusetich aimed at the PGA Tour and IMG for their "enabling" of Anthony

It’s his life and if he wants to piss it away with all that money Nike gave him last year, then so be it. He’s only really hurting himself.

But what I object to, in advance, is the inevitable in-depth profile that is bound to appear in some publication of note on the heels of this latest debacle claiming that Kim’s had another come-to-Jesus moment. That he’s suddenly re-dedicated himself to his game and has seen the error of his ways.

These fairytales have appeared throughout his career and I’m calling B.S. right now on the next one. So, please, IMG, spare us the heartfelt story of how AK’s grown up and come to see that he’s throwing away a very special talent.

Until he has.