It's that time of year again.  Time to shake off the cobwebs of winter , pull out the big stick and head for the course.  That means it's also time to renew the sad commentary about the pitiful competition Tiger Woods faces each year on the PGA tour.  Until someone, ANYONE can rise to the challenge I'll keep posting this each April.

There are many things people agree upon regarding the phenomenal career of Tiger Woods: his dominance in golf, his high "Q" rating for TV and especially his work ethic. However, the claim he's "the best golfer ever" always begs the question: Is he that good, or is his competition that weak?

Golf legend Jack Nicklaus, always gracious in his comments about Tiger, said, "Somebody is going to dust my records. It might as well be Tiger, because he's such a great kid." However, when Tiger broke Jack's 1965 Masters record by a mere one stroke in 1997 he did it using all the new fangled high tech equipment Nicklaus couldn't even dream of in his day. Also, something few people realize, the Augusta National course was longer when Jack set the mark than when Tiger broke it.

But more to the point, if Tiger is today's Nicklaus, then who is today's Gary Player (9 majors); Tom Watson (8); Lee Trevino (6); Seve Ballesteros (5) Ray Floyd (4)? They all fearlessly stalked Nicklaus throughout his career. How many of Jack's incredible 19 second place finishes in the majors would have been firsts if they were not around?

Take Tom Watson. Tom beat Jack in a classic head-to-head British Open duel at Turnberry in 1977, only sealing the win with a must make birdie putt on the final hole. Watson beat him again winning the 1982 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach when he chipped in for birdie on the 17th hole in the final round. Consider at the height of Nicklaus' dominance in 1971 Lee Trevino won the U.S. Open, Canadian Open and British Open championships in a four-week span. At that U.S. Open Trevino defeated Nicklaus in an 18-hole playoff and was named Sports Illustrated "Sportsman of the Year". Who compares to Trevino, the "Merry Mex", on today's PGA tour?

Now you have Phil Mickelson, with 3 majors, Ernie Els with 3 and Vijay Singh with 3. And the only players to push Woods in a major have been Bob May and Chris DiMarco. Anyone seen those two lately? Gary Player, a regular Nicklaus nemesis, has more major tournament wins than Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Sergio Garcia, Jim Furyk and Davis Love III combined. Yet they were considered at one point or another serious competition for Woods. Now their careers are winding down without ever mounting a serious challenge.

With todays seemingly uninspired competitors it's very possible that Tiger will win 25 or 30 major tournaments before he's done. Unfortunately he will have won them against a cast of Lilliputians unable to challenge him like the talented players of the past challenged Nicklaus. It's a shame for the game really and certainly no fault of Tiger's. Many of today's golfers can shoot low scores on Thursday, but when they collapse on Sunday, they blame it on Tiger's game, and not their own.

When the powers that be change the rules of the game, are they in fact creating a new game?

Many a pugilistic endeavor at the local pub began from a perceived knowledge of a game at a certain point in time and the memory (or lack thereof) of participants in that game at that particular point in time establishing marks of achievement. Most home runs, most points, most goals, most touchdowns and the like are quintessential examples of marks of achievement for those games. In the vast universe of knowledge these are some of the easiest things to know.  Just add them up.

But what happens when the rules for that game, those ironclad definitions of what is acceptable and what is not during the competition, change?  Should that close the books on records for that sport, if players from here on out no longer play by the same rules? To be fair to one set of players before, and the next generation of players after a significant rule change, should there not be a clear demarcation of the great divide between the two?

In 1978 a basketball player at Baylor could make 10 shots from the floor and record 20 points. Today that same player could record 30 for the same number of shots. It's a different game today.  Should there be a different set of records?

Used to be you had to play a position in the field to bat in the major leagues.  Not any more. In the American League there is now a Designated Hitter, someone who does not play except to hit.  When looking at all the records prior to that monumental shift in rules does one not see the galactic inequity of comparing the before's with the after's?

What if horse racing allowed cheetahs to run with a gibbon strapped to it's back?  Provided you could keep the cat from eating the monkey on it's back (pun intended), I dare say we would see fewer and fewer horses and more and more felidae at the track.  Maybe make the field goal in football worth 10 points. Any doubt there would be a scrum over signing English soccer players to the NFL and attempts from 70 yards commonplace? Scoring records? Sky's the limit.

Of course there is the mewling of those who have not lived under the dramatic shifts in the game as the rules have changed.  But at some point rule changes have had such a dramatic affect on the sport, that it may not actually be the same sport anymore.

 

So tonight barry bonds hit the "historic" home run many have been waiting for.  Waiting for the record to be set, waiting for the complaints to be over, waiting to continue ignoring MLB.  Tonight we got our wish.

I did not see it, don't care about it, and for the most part will amble on my merry way ignoring the game I used to so love.

Thanks Sammy, Raffy, Marky and Barry. You've returned a generous portion of my life that I would have frivolously spent at the ball park.  Now I'll spend those hours at another sort of park;  the kind that prohibits the likes of you smashing a ball about.

Many may want to speak only of the bonds dilemma. But the fish stinks ffrom the head down.  Start with Selig and work your way all the way down the tight spiral forming at the base of the loo.

 Hasta la vista b!tch...

 

With the 136th Open Championship, known in the United States as the "British Open" , ending in a playoff between the three day leader Sergio Garcia and final round challenger Padrig Harrington, it has become apparent to most of the golf world that the comet known as "Woods", who miraculously streaked across the sky for the better part of 10 years, has dimmed and the era of the random wanderer is coming to fruition.

Certainly Sergio and Padrig played as well as any  casual observer could hope to do, but once again we were witness to a rather severe bout of hack as the curtain came tumbling  down. Padrig took the Claret Jug for his first major victory simply because he puked less than Sergio.

Besides the painful stumbling down the stretch by the eventual winner, this tournament included near misses from an Argentinean named Romero, a resurgent American named Striker, and a still resolute South African named Els. Today the world was treated to yet another exciting but futile stab at the heart of the Nicklaus legacy by the Greek tragedy known as the Royal and Ancient, or with a more full throat, the 18th at Carnustie.

Time and again sports writers wax poetic about the skill and savvy of the current crop of pretenders to the throne as they jump into the limelight for a day, only to evaporate like so much haze in the mid-July sun of whatever stop the PGA tour resides. Thursday's 65 by most of the tour players is likely to be followed by a 78 on Friday, with very little difference in the conditions of the turf, fairway, rough or green. Certainly today's field can go low, but when you need to go four in a row, they generally got no.

For most of past 50 years we have been blessed to see men take the game by the "Spauldings" and choke the best out of it. Players like Nelson, Hogan, Snead, Palmer, Player, Trevino, Ballesteros, Watson and Faldo all stood against the wind week after week as they amassed multiple Major victories. The wind they stood against was Jack. Unlike the past, no player has been able to consistently shoot the scores needed to compete with Woods at the championship level.

At Carnustie, as the world's best player receded into the background, the rest of the golf world applauded the determination of Padrig Harrington and wept for the continued frustration of Sergio Garcia. Sergio may yet have his day, but collapses like today and the effect it surely will have on his psyche will prevent him from ever being the equal to his compatriot Seve Ballesteros.

As for the rest of the PGA tour, we can only hope that there may someday soon be a player with the skill to do today, and tomorrow, and the day after, what he is capable of doing next week and the week after that. Not for a day, or a tournament, but for a career.

Tiger is doing it. Is there someone else?

Don't bet on it.

I keep reading this lunacy of "short porch" where Babe Ruth is concerned. In every media published, printed or filmed, Ruth is widely heralded as the most powerful hitter to ever play the game.  Yet when presented with facts, those facts are ignored and yet another incredible sentence appears about the "short porch" in Yankee stadium.  This is beginning to look like a mental disorder and not a debate. Maybe it's like Bush Derangement Syndrome, only it has to do with the dimensions of Yankee stadium?  When someone is presented with facts about unrivaled performance and they respond with the dimensions of a single field as the focus of accomplishment, you begin to wonder.

Fact: Ruth hit 198 documented baseballs over 450 feet in official games. Modern day players McGwire had 74, and Bonds 36. But according to the "field" Meister, he really hit "half" of his career homers over that short porch, down the right field line and the writers of the day were confused. And contrary to the silly assertion that because Ruth was a left handed hitter, that he was a dead pull hitter, facts prove that he went deeper to the opposite field than anyone, including today's hitters. And when he did pull one, it went about 450 feet, not 287.

But let's not rely on one fans opinion, from the Baseball Almanac,  http://www.baseball-almanac.com/feats/art_hr.shtml, we get this:

Babe Ruth, it can be said defies rational analysis. Not only did he set distance records in every major league ballpark (including National League stadiums where he played only infrequently), he also set similar standards in hundreds of other fields, where he made exhibition and barnstorming appearances. Amazingly, many of those records remain unequaled, which is to say that Ruth is a true athletic anachronism. In virtually every other field of endeavor in which physical performance can be measured, there are no Ruthian equivalents. In 1921 alone, which was Ruth's best tape measure season, he hit at least one 500 foot home run in all eight American League cities.

There should be no doubt about the authentication of these conclusions. Despite the scarcity of film on Ruth, we can still make definitive evaluations of the approximate landing points of all of his 714 career home runs.

Ruth played during the height of American's newspaper culture, when approximately 10 New York papers gave first hand accounts of each Yankee game. When you consider that the other baseball town's average about five comparable publications, it is clear that we can draw upon approximately 15 descriptions of most of the hundreds of four-base blows struck during his career. A suitable example can be identified in Ruth's classic Comiskey Park roof topper on August 16, 1927. Fifteen writers from New York, Chicago, and other places emphatically stated that Ruth's fifth-inning drive cleared the 52-foot-wide grandstand roof by a considerable margin.

Although other sluggers occasionally reached the rooftops during Comiskey's long lifetime, the only other left-handed batter known to have flown the right-field roof was Detroit's Kirk Gibson in 1985. That magnitude of Ruth's accomplishment can be understood with the knowledge that, because home plate had been moved, the distance to the grandstand for Gibson was 341 feet, while for Ruth it was 365 feet. Similarly, Comiskey's left-field roof was also visited by many batted balls, but only one is confirmed to have cleared it on the fly. That homeric deed was performed by the powerful Jimmie Foxx on June 16, 1936. As Ruth's talents waned in the early 1930s, Foxx began his ascendancy. In 1932, the muscular "Double X" almost equaled Ruth's season record of 60 home runs. Many of them even rivaled the Babe's for distance.

It was heresy to suggest that Ruth's accomplishments could be surpassed, but for a few seasons it appeared that Foxx might do just that. One of the greatest quirks in baseball history is that Jimmie Foxx, following immediately in the footsteps of Babe Ruth, was to establish the second-greatest distance legacy in the annals of the game. Foxx never quite measured up to Ruth, but it is remarkable that no once since Foxx has measured up to him. The other great distance hitters of that period were Lou Gehrig and Hank Greenberg, but their optimum drives fell about 50 feet short of those struck by Ruth and Foxx.

But what do those guys at the Baseball Almanac know.  Yankee Stadium had a short porch so Ruth was a pipsqueak hitter, right?

This from the Scranton/Wilkes Barr newspaper.

It's one thing to prefer another player or condone drug use or like to eat cheese dogs.  But to just keep refusing the delivery of facts and continue to write inanities, well, some people will NEVER know right from wrong.

For those who are capable of learning, and some obviously are not, I strongly suggest Bill Jenkinson's "The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs". It's a rather starry eyed look at Ruth, but the documentation is absolute, complete with photos of the titanic shots he hit,  footnoted to death and an overall great read. The conclusions are factual and any suggestions that he was seriously aided by the "short porch" are dispelled. Every player sneaks one over the fence sometime. But for Babe Ruth that was the exception to the Sultan of Swat's rule: GO DEEP!