You’ll struggle to find anguished Luke Donald backers on the betting forums. Barely a ripple of angst greeted his dramatic slump around the turn Sunday, when a three-stroke lead became a one-stroke deficit in the space of three holes. Donald has something of a reputation as a last round lightweight, despite his one-and-a-half victories, and I assume most had already laid him off. It wasn’t difficult - having gone as low as 1.3 his price hovered around the 2 mark for a long period after the rot had clearly set in. It’s not “bottle” as such that’s the problem, though. He showed ...

Looks a two-man race Sunday. This tournament’s history is not littered with great last round comeback tales. Nobody has ever won from more than four back, which already narrows it down to the top four. Only seven have ever come back from more than two shots behind, the last being Jesper Parnevik in 2000. Ian Poulter put in a nifty 65 on Saturday with some accurate driving and superb putting, but he’d have to repeat that just to get ahead of where leader Luke Donald sits now. And surely Michael Allen, this week’s surprise package, won’t repeat his striking 64 on ...

Anthony Kim and Vijay Singh, his playing partner Saturday, should be thankful for the peculiar law of golf that dictates the field stalls and bunches up on day two. It means they are still very much in with a shout when they might just as easily be dead and buried. It looked like they were when Sean O’Hair hit that eagle on the fifth. ‘Here we go,’ I thought. Instead, there he went, undoing all the good work with a couple of bogeys down the back nine. It leaves Luke Donald with a one stroke lead after posting, along with Kim ...

Bolshie bunch these Aussies. Guess who’s leading the charge against the inclusion of Phil Mickelson? Robert Allenby and Rod Pampling, who say he should have been disqualified for failing to turn up for Wednesday’s pro-am. Mickelson squeaked in on the ‘extenuating circumstance’ that storms prevented him from flying back in time from an outing to Arkansas. The naysayers allege he was aware of storm trouble before he made the trip in the first place. So is there one law for the rich and one for the poor? The point is made that Retief Goosen was disqualified in similar circumstances at the ...

There’s this piece of poetry going round in my mind (yes, I went to school once) about not losing your head when all about you are losing theirs. This column being nothing if not educational, you can read it here, although its echoes of long-distant days of empire might leave some a bit queasy. It’s the kind of advice Anthony Kim needs at the Byron Nelson this week - keep your head son and you’re a shoe-in. Very rarely has a potential winner stood out so starkly, so much that I had to go back over the stats three times to make ...

What a gifted golfer Nick Watney is. But what an oddly diffident guy too. After that amazing eagle on the fifth he half-heartedly raised his arms as if to say, “Mmmm, guess I should celebrate now huh?” Same thing after his victory putt on the 18th: you’d have thought he’d just won a night for two at the local cinema rather than a ticket to the Masters. How very un-American. The Zurich Classic finale, though, was very American - nine out of the top ten sported the stars and stripes and the top of the pile was also very much a ...

Memo to David Toms: if you have to trot out excuses for your poor showing at the Zurich Classic you need to do a lot better than blame a “bomber’s paradise". The stats just don’t back you up old boy. Sure there are bombers in the leading pack. Top dog Nick Watney, for instance, has been hitting it around the 300-yard mark, as has Scott Gutschewski in third place. But second-placed Ken Duke is not the heaviest of hitters, struggling to make 280 yards, much the same as Mark Calcavecchia. Know what David, you’ve actually driven it better than them and ...

This has a back to the future feel about it, and not only because the man currently most likely to succeed is old enough to have fathered some of his rivals. Like Lucas Glover in second place, Mark Calcavecchia went backwards to go forward Friday, making only three birdies against six the day before. The market gives the edge to Glover, a point or two under 6 against Calc’s 6.2. That’s surprising, given Calcavecchia’s greater experience and the fact that he beat off Glover for his PODS win earlier this year - and the small matter of being a shot better ...

David Toms was moaning about the length of the course after his modest first round effort Thursday. If he glanced at the stats he would see he’s in good company. Our two leaders were barely able to get their measured drives over 270 yards and third-placed Tim Petrovic couldn’t even make that - he ended up just a few feet better off than Toms. Hitting greens and fairways looked to be the vital ingredients, although Toms should spend some time on the putting green. Kyle Reifers hit 11 of 14 fairways and 17 of 18 greens in regulation to take ...

This week’s question, is simple: how many times has the favourite won on the PGA Tour this year? Answer twice and no prizes for guessing who it was both times. Other than Tiger Woods it’s been a big flat zero through 14 competitions. Unfortunately punters and tipsters alike are not head-over-heels in love with David Toms as the man to break the duck in this less than stellar affair. Did I say stellar? First off, correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought this whole new exciting FedEx Cup concept was meant to make the season more, well, exciting, more top flight? ...

It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone out there whose heart is still thumping from watching Ernie Els’s amazing second shot at the 18th edge closer and closer to the hole before lipping out. I’m thinking of the punter or punters who wagered £36 ($72) on Ernie at 1,000-1 when his cause looked dead and buried somewhere around the television tower on the 17th hole. They were just a smidgin from at least a playoff and the possibility of a small fortune. Their hearts must already have been aflutter from seeing Boo Weekley sink his second chip in a row on ...

You’d think someone called Slugger White would either change name of change sport. He sounds more Mike Tyson than Tiger Woods to me. The PGA Tour tournament director certainly had the fight taken out of him by Sunday’s howling winds. He put up a solid enough struggle, but lost on points in the late afternoon. Contrary to the suggestion of a fellow scribe or two, play was not just called off on safety grounds (or the related insurance nightmare in ’sue your ass’ America). Balls were racing across greens like bullet trains without a shot being played. It was becoming less ...

Sometimes I just can’t resist it when people say something really stupid. They’re always out there, of course, the fools who help the gambling world go round. But it’s hard to fathom the naivety of the forum scribe who wrote on Friday: “[Els] is 5 shots clear ffs [I’m not translating that one] and who is behind him? Leaney and Kelly. Not exactly what you would call intimidating players. Ernie has this sown up already!” And so it came to pass that Ernie Els lost his way on the Saturday and fell from three shots ahead to one behind. He can ...

There’s a wonderful picture of Ernie Els on the front of the PGA Tour website Saturday morning (Hurry these pictures don’t stay there too long). Taken from his smooth, bogey-free second round, it has the look of a man very much at ease with himself, as he should be, you might think, with a three-shot lead at the half-way stage. This is a more important smile than that. This weekend is all about Ernie getting his career seriously back on track. Victory at the Verizon Heritage has become a vital milestone. Or maybe it is that defeat now could prove a ...

Score one for Lanny Bassham, the Dallas-based “mental coach” Jerry Kelly credits for turning his game around. In fact, score two, because Bassham also mentors Fred Funk, who is having one heck of a season and sits in fifth place at the Verizon Heritage. It was Funk who put Kelly Bassham’s way and the mentor’s website carries a quote from Fred to the effect that “if you want to find the missing ingredient for the mental game of golf, see Lanny.” It’s obviously made a difference. Kelly saw Bassham, a 1976 Olympic gold medallist in pistol shooting who teaches athletes ...

Metal fatigue is what happens to Tiger’s irons when he whacks them against trees. Mental fatigue is what happens to everyone else after having their noses rubbed in the dirt by Augusta. And I reckon that’s a key ingredient at Hilton Head Island this week as the Masters’ walking wounded take a bit of golfing R&R. Having said that, the short, tight Harbour Town course with its dinky lighthouse may not be such a benign place to follow the horrors of Augusta as you think. A hot tip from the weatherman Thursday is to steer clear of the those going out ...

For a few brief minutes I really thought he was going to do it. Justin Rose was on a roll and looked to have the momentum to swoop past Zach Johnson at the finish. His putting was blinding. But the warning signs were there. “Slow down, Justin, slow down,” pleaded the BBC’s Peter Alliss as Rose raced to the 16th green for his putt. Was it nerves, the excitement of his position, or a bit of both? He seemed to be rushing into things too fast for his own good. And so it came to pass that, on the 17th hole ...

So the fat lady’s already on the 18th green and, if she isn’t singing, is certainly clearing her throat. There’s barely a blog or a column that hasn’t put the green jacket on Tiger Woods. It’s hardly surprising: he played awful enough golf Saturday to go into the clubhouse four off the pace, yet ended the day just a shot back. That’s the wonder of Tiger. When not bigging him up in press conferences, his opponents did their best to clear the way for him on the field of battle. They can’t complain. Conditions are excruciatingly tough, even farcical at times, ...

Urgent message to the Augusta authorities. Lighten up guys. Okay, you’ve made your point about stopping the bombers from creaming your course. Tim Clark on top of the leaderboard sets that one to rights. And you’ve certainly made the best golfers in the land sweat for their place in the sun. But that’s just it, it’s been a sweat, a desperate battle to survive rather than an exuberant display of attacking golf. Always on the verge of turning silly was how Henrik Stenson described it. Frankly, I’d rather see a bit of a birdie chase this weekend. So please, maybe with a ...

Devotees of Monty Python, and there are quite a few out there still, will know where I’m coming from when I describe the Augusta course as “cruel but fair". Maybe those deceptive greens didn’t nail golfer’s heads to the floor like the mythical hoodlum Dinsdale Piranha, but like him they meted out their brand of cruelty without fear or favour. There was some brave talk afterwards, much of it I suspect induced by shock. “Tomorrow’s goal is to shoot in the 60s and I can get right back in it,” declared Phil Mickelson after stumbling home in four over, seven shots ...

Okay, it’s a bit late for an April Fool, but here’s mine anyway. PGA Commissioner Tim Finchem yesterday announced the inauguration of National Hate Tiger Week in a desperate last-ditch bid to promote real competition at PGA events. The man who brought you the FedUp Cup told a press conference attended by one (me in my dreams) that NHTW would actually be a rolling programme of weeks occurring whenever Tiger Woods was playing a PGA Tour event. On other weeks, he added, it was perfectly okay to hold National I Love Tiger Weeks instead. Hate Tiger Weeks would involve mandatory retraining ...

Thank goodness I’m not the only golfer (ish) to have trouble with water. Why is it that the merest drop has such a magnetic effect on my golf balls? You’d expect professionals to have learned how to beat it though, so the water on Redstone’s 18th must have a particularly strong magnetic field. Splish, splash, splosh, all three of the leading group went in Sunday to produce a rather comical finale to the last round. But what a great round it was, as memorable a duel as you could hope for. Give me this over a Tiger procession any day. Stuart ...

Just a quick glance at the third round stats tells the story of Saturday’s dramatic shift in fortunes. No, it wasn’t the course playing longer after Saturday’s storm to create a bomber’s paradise. Second-placed Jeff Maggert’s no B52. It was the softened greens wot dunnit, enabling players to attack them and transforming ordinary Joes into hot putters - Bubba Watson 20 putts per round and 1.3 putts per GIR (against 28 and 1.6 Friday), Maggert 20 and 1.36 (32 and 2.0); Johnson Wagner 26 and 1.5 (33 and 1.9), and so it goes on. There’s much more to it, though, for Watson ...