This tournament will be remembered for the one that got in - Jim Furyk’s ace on the 4th - but it’s the ones that got away that really sealed the deal. Hunter Mahan had enough 10-15ft opportunities to hold the balance of power by the turn and Vijay Singh flopped from even closer range, although he can be excused the last 23-footer he needed for a playoff. With Singh going backwards and Mahan misfiring it looked all over when Furyk sank his tee shot on the 4th, although it was the birdies around the turn that really sealed the deal on ...

There’s trickery afoot at Angus Glen, or so say a number players this weekend. They believe the course has been “tricked up” in an attempt to turn a pussy cat into a Tiger. It’s pretty much agreed the pin positions are the only thing making this course anything like an “Open” challenge. Stephen Ames is adamant that because the greens were over-watered the powers that be tried to compensate by putting the pins on sloping parts of many greens to make them hard to hit. If the greens had been firm, he says, the pins would have been unplayable. Third round leader ...

There was plenty of buzz at Angus Glen Friday, some of it decidedly troublesome. Tripp Isenhour had just a little over 6 inches for par on the 17th when an insect took a fancy to him. Instead of backing away he misfired and lost out on a three-way tie for the lead by a single shot. Instead we have a couple of rookies staring fortune in the face this weekend. Unfortunately for Steve Allan and John Mallinger, they are also staring down the golfing barrels of Vijay Singh, sitting with Isenhour just a shot behind, and Jim Furyk, far from out ...

I’ve heard some really stupid questions in my time, but there’s few beat the interviewer Thursday who asked Hunter Mahan: “Would you say this course fits your game?” Of course it doesn’t, you oaf! You do the maths - 18 holes and only three eagles. Clearly that leaves huge room for improvement. Almost as daft was Mahan’s “I think so” answer. What more does he want as he continues his impression of golf’s Duracell bunny. Another continent, another hot performance. It doesn’t end here either. Mahan’s not taking a break while he’s this hot and will be playing at Firestone next week. His ...

Pity the poor Canadian Open. No title sponsor, facing the first loss in its history, and precious few big names this year thanks to its Cinderella status on the PGA Tour, moved from its usual September slot to slap-bang after the Open Championship. There’s an interesting tale of the costly lengths the Royal Canadian Golf Association has gone to ensure at least a few stars turned up. But its their own fault for letting the PGA walk all over them. To use a phrase seemingly in vogue across the pond, they need to ‘man up’ and think outside the box. Why ...

So history does not repeat itself, the third-round leader loses the plot, and instead Joe Ogilvie breaks his 229-event duck. If patience is a virtue Joe must be at God’s right hand. Mind you, in the end it came down to a fluke: Ogilvie was as surprised as anyone with the eagle on the 16th that effectively killed off the opposition. He deserved it though for raising his game in round four both off the tee and with the putter. And did I say opposition? With just three bogeys to show for his first 10 holes, it was clearly going to end ...

How gutting that the one vital weak spot Sergio Garcia worked feverishly to get right after Hoylake let him down at the last. That missed putt on the final hole of regulation was so unlucky (not to mention the ace that turned into a par in the playoff), but so many had already lipped out to suggest this was not to be his day. Was it a “choke” as so many are feverishly arguing? Yes. He was nervous, tightened up, lost the dashing fluidity that had dazzled the world over the previous three days, and let slip an effective six-shot lead. ...

Tubby Tim or Tiny Tim? It’s Herron versus Clark in Sunday’s final pairing and the omens strongly favour of one of them. Ominously for Clark, history is firmly on the side of the third round leader - Shigeki Maruyama in 2001 being the only exception in the last seven years. For all his lardiness, four-time winner Herron is a mean player when he’s on song and says he has worked on a new putting stroke that seems to be bringing home the bacon. Only a single bogey and a double bogey blemish his card and his putting has been on a ...

If you just happen to bump into Sergio Garcia Sunday morning, be sure not to say the word Wachovia. And any casual discussion of Greg Norman is also strictly out of bounds. The Spaniard bidding to take on the mantle of Seve Ballasteros does not need to be reminded that six-shot leads can disappear of a Sunday afternoon as easily as storms can evaporate into nothing. If our weathermen had any shame, the papers would be full of adverts for met officer vacancies this weekend. Whatever happened to all that wind and rain Saturday? I suspect it turned round to dump ...

Nondescript is the word that comes to mind about Joe Ogilvie. There was the odd occasion last season when he warranted a mention - most particularly when he came third at the the Reno Tahoe Open in August. But this season he’s been off the radar, not doing particularly badly, but hardly frightening many flagsticks. It’s certainly a rarity to see him among those in with a chance of breaking their PGA ducks this week. Maybe this is just his time of the year. Ogilvie got on top of his putter well Friday to match Jeff Maggert’s opening 63. It’s long ...

Friday the winner was the golf course. But Saturday’s victor looks like it might be the weather. The clouds that dumped an inch of rain on me in an hour in London Friday have now crossed the Scottish border and are swirling their way to Carnoustie. The players may well escape the worst, with the heaviest rain not due until the evening. But the wind is likely to be into the mid-teens for most of the day. “It looks like it will be a a pretty tough day,” says Tiger Woods, who should know having struggled round in a howler in ...

Crumbs. Looks as if the foul weather I predicted for Carnoustie struck a day early and missed. It decided instead to dump on me as I went to fetch a transatlantic traveller from London’s Gatwick airport. Six hours struggling through floods of near biblical proportions is no joke, but it does have a sunny side - it saved me from myself on the US Bank Championship. I had been tempted to follow the market and espouse the virtues of Jay Williamson, enthroned overnight as joint favourite with leader Jeff Maggert even though he was two shots behind. I don’t know if that ...

A little piece of history took place on the 16th green at Carnoustie Thursday. Tiger Woods’s massive birdie putt now stands as the world’s longest televised putt. Mind you I rely for this piece of useless information on the BBC and, given that organisation’s current problems telling fact from fiction, maybe a tiny pinch of salt is required. The record was held by one of their own, Irish radio and TV broadcaster Sir Terence Wogan (you can call him Terry), who holed a 33-yarder in a televised pro-celebrity match at Gleneagles in 1981. His radio buddies, who phoned him up to ...

You’d think Milwaukee was behind the old Iron curtain for all the news that’s coming out about the US Bank Championship. Either the poor hacks who drew the short straws and didn’t go to Carnoustie are drowning their sorrows in a local bar or they’re glued to the tele watching events in Scotland anyway (maybe both). You can’t blame them. There’s precious little punter interest in this second string event. The cash being thrown at it is about 1% of the mountain of dosh chasing Tiger and his pals. Which is a shame because this does have a bit of golfing ...

They say you can’t keep a good man down. Certainly not John Philp, the head greenkeeper notorious for Carnoustie’s ‘99 course, which earned him the opprobrium of the world’s top golfers and an MBE from the Queen. Philp maintains robust views about the comments of his critics ("crap” being the one I remember best). So the powers that be at Carnoustie found ways of ensuring he, er, took a bit of “gardening leave” during this year’s build-up. And when he was eventually allowed to slip ever so quietly back the other day, requests for interviews were politely turned away - all ...

Few at the start of last week would have put Jonathan Byrd’s name in the box for the last Open Championship spot. Even his caddie didn’t think he was up to it, persuading Byrd to skip the Open qualifier and concentrate instead on some confidence-boosting PGA events like the Congressional, John Deere and the upcoming US Bank Championship. Defeatist thinking or clever psychology from Mike Hicks, the caddie probably better known from his days as bagman for the late Payne Stewart? The latter, it seems, taking the pressure off Byrd to the point where, after four straight missed cuts, his game ...

Tim Clark says it’ll be a shootout. Troy Matteson likens it to a horse race. Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into a funeral procession Sunday instead as nerves tighten the muscles and resolve of our leaders. Putters really are proving the key weapon - the top five, based on putts per greens in regulation, are in the top six on the leaderboard. The wind that made things so tricky Saturday now looks like behaving itself, putting even more pressure on the flat stick to master faster greens. The conditions look ripe for more low rounds and who’s to say we won’t ...

They should entitle this competition Blazing Putters. The top five on the leaderboard are all in the top 10 for performance with the flatstick. But it was a sharp improvement in hitting fairways and greens and that allowed Nathan Green to sneak into the lead at the end of Friday’s play. Hard cheese for Carl Pettersson, in the lead in the clubhouse after firing a round of seven under, to see Green go one better with a career-low 63. Even that was not unique - Brian Gay also hit eight under to sneak into contention. But so many are still well ...

Score another for Butch Harmon. No, not Phil Mickelson’s hot round in the Scottisah Open, although that was a very welcome sight. It’s Neal Lancaster at the John Deere, who says he owes his birdies to the man nominated yet again by his peers as the best coach in America. I missed Harmon’s little homily on what he says is the increasing tendency for players to be too mechanical with their putting. But Lancaster’s ears pricked up as Harmon urged golfers to return to a more natural putting stroke and he decided Thursday was the perfect day to put it to ...

An advertisement on the John Deere website invites you to “reach for the stars", which is a trifle unfortunate given the company’s inability to snare many of them for their big bash in Illinois this weekend. It’s not the firm’s fault of course, it’s that pesky Open Championship sucking players to my neck of the woods across the pond ("More tea, Tiger?"). I don’t suppose it’s also got anything to do with the fact that they don’t have shiny black 4x4s to give their golfing heroes? Do they have a bright green tractor parked next to the 17th tee instead? Maybe ...

Something’s not right. Either K J Choi is telling porkies or the world’s press have been repeating a myth. The oft-repeated story goes that Choi earned his “Tank” nickname as an up-and-coming teenage professional weightlifter back in Korea. But that’s not how the Congressional winner now wants us to remember it. Nope. It was Ian Baker-Finch on television four years ago who described him as going along like a tank. “You could confirm it with him. But that’s what we know of.” So is Korea’s finest golfer being economical with the truth to gloss over his humble beginnings? He says the nickname ...

How can you not know you’ve hit a hole in one? It was pointed out to me in a reply to my blog Saturday that CBS missed Kevin Stadler’s ace at the 13th. But then so did Stadler himself, and his playing partner Tiger Woods. “We didn’t know it,” Tiger said later. “We both walked off the tee and he was talking to his caddie … All of a sudden the crowd erupted and he looked around and said ‘What happened?’ ” Oh, not a lot really Kevin, just a hole in one is all. Not that it did our Kevin a ...

Amazing the difference a bit of lead tape can make. Tiger Woods stuck it on his putter Friday and hey presto, a round of four under. It was his answer to greens playing a bit slow and sticky. So Tiger’s back in contention, albeit six shots back, to put that special gloss on his new tournament’s first weekend (put a nice gloss on yesterday’s little bet on the cut too!). He might consider taking the tape off now. It’s looking to be pretty warm and sunny from here on and if so those greens are going to dry out and speed ...

A small bit of history was witnessed at the Congressional on Thursday - Tiger Woods messed up a 2ft tap-in. Kind of sums up how much his mind was on the day’s play rather than the responsibilities of the competition he sponsors. So now people are wondering whether another piece of mini-history is about to happen with the great man missing the cut. That’s definitely something Tiger doesn’t do too often. The last time was the US Open last year in circumstances that are all too understandable. The market is welling with confidence he’ll pull things back on a traditional catchup ...

Okay, that’s enough baby talk. I’m in a desperate rush this week so I’ll cut to the chase - Kent Jones. He has just about the most perfect set of stats you could imagine for this week’s event: his best this season is a hard-fought 29th at the Byron Nelson, he’s missed the cut 12 times and he doesn’t rank higher that 41st in any of the key disciplines. Admittedly he hasn’t been quite as regular a visitor to Q-school as last week’s winner, whose name escapes me for the moment, but since almost everyone seems to have missed his potential ...

“Whoever said this week was one to leave alone … well done!” Not an entirely fair forum reflection on Sunday’s debacle perhaps, but it summed up the mood of many punters about Brian Bateman’s shock(ing) victory. Actually, I thought the Buick Open provided some excellent betting opportunities. Jim Furyk was a gift lay for the moderately brave all week and, had you had just half your betting wits about you, any pre-tournament punts on the likes of Scott Verplank, Woody Austin, Kenny Perry and Tom Pernice Jr would have reaped rewards over the weekend. Sunday’s shootout was a layer’s paradise. But I’m ...

Today’s quick question is far simpler than it looks. Unravel the message in the following code: 69 69 67 67. Okay, pens down now. The answer? “Jim Furyk really has his work cut out to win the Buick Open today.” See, I told you it was simple. There is some debate among cryptologists on the precise interpretation; some go for the more direct “There’s no way in hell Furyk can win on Sunday", but I’ve opted for a more conservative version. The numbers represent the four lowest rounds Furyk has shot on a Sunday this year. They average less than 3 shots ...