• Hate to be Rude: Erik Compton
Jeff Rude’s “I Hate To Be Rude” column appears on Golfweek.com on Friday, the same day as his video show of the same name.PGA of America CEO Joe Steranka said more than two people are on the list of candidates for 2010 U.S. Ryder Cup captain that will be announced late this year or early next year.
He said the PGA wants someone still connected to today’s PGA Tour players and who has recent Ryder Cup experience because the event has grown exponentially.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the PGA already has Corey Pavin in mind for next time, with Davis Love III on deck. Steranka said his association is “looking two, three, four Ryder Cups down the line.”
PGA policy wouldn’t preclude bringing back victorious 2008 U.S. captain Paul Azinger, but word is Azinger hasn’t heard from the PGA recently. What’s more, Steranka said, “We wrestle with the idea that we don’t appear to have enough Ryder Cups to take care of deserving candidates.”
• Erik Compton just didn’t have a second heart transplant in May; he had such a difficult one that he said he almost bled to death on the operating table. Some five months later, he made the cut at a PGA Tour event last week and this week was inside the number midway through Q-School second stage.
If he’s not the inspirational story of the year, he’s certainly in the conversation.
• The FedEx Cup format appears on the verge of improving entering its third year. The Policy Board is in the process of tweaking a proposal that would add sizzle to the season-ending Tour Championship. The proposal, under which points would reset after the third of four playoff events, would give all 30 players a mathematical chance to win the season-long points chase at the TC.
This is a step in the right direction. Anything beats the anticlimax of the last two events at East Lake.
• Tour commissioner Tim Finchem has asked Tommy Armour III to address and teach the ropes to Q-School and Nationwide Tour graduates this December in La Quinta, Calif.
In other words, the Tour is about to become hipper and cooler.
• After winning the HSBC Champions tournament in China Monday, Sergio Garcia moved past Phil Mickelson and is now No. 2 in the Official World Golf Ranking.
Stuff like this tends to raise the blond eyebrows of
Golfweek numbers-crunching extraordinaire, Lance Ringler. Ringler, whose effervescence runs contrary to the hard, cold numbers his computer spits out, points out that Mickelson has a 19-12-3 edge against Garcia over the last two years, the time frame on which the OWGR is computed.
In addition, Mickelson leads Garcia 8-7-2 over the past 52 weeks, the window used for the
Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index. It follows that Mickelson is slightly ahead of the improving Spaniard in the
Golfweek/Sagarin rankings.
• PGA Tour drug testing, which began this summer, is supposedly random. But up to this point, some players have been tested twice and others not at all.
That’s curious.
The take here is no different than it was at year’s start. This is an image-conscious Tour that hasn’t announced fines and suspensions and supposedly hasn’t penalized slow play with strokes since the early 1990s. In other words, I’d be shocked if the Tour ever announces someone violates their drug policy.
On top of that, as sports go, this one appears clean.
• I attended a concert the other day in which a men’s chorus sang Medieval Gloria, arranged by someone named Vijay Singh. He would not be the Hall of Famer known in golf circles at the Big Fijian. In this musical, Vijay Singh is a famous composer-conductor-professor from Washington state.
It is not known whether the choral arranger works 16 hours a day in the music studio. I am fairly certain that he didn’t earn $14 million in August-September as the FedEx Cup champion did.
Vijay Singh, of course, isn’t as common of a name as, say, Bob Jones. But you should know that yet another Vijay Singh is an Indian film-maker and literary writer who won the Prix Villa Medicis award for foreign literature in 1990 and the Bourse Léonardo de Vinci in 1994.
That’s different from 22 PGA Tour victories in your 40s but it’s success nonetheless.
• In case you missed it, after John Daly spent a night in a North Carolina jail recently to sober up, he told the Associated Press, “Anybody who knows me ... when I’m tired, I sleep with my eyes open.”
That eye-opening feat might be more impressive than his two majors.
Posted: 11/14/2008
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