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MI Golf Holidays

MI Golf Holidays / Events

Events

Upcoming Events

18

Dec
Tue

Interview with Angela Stanford

The Wise One: LPGA journeywoman Angela Stanford, 35, on longevity, growing up in Texas and learning to relax.

18

Dec
Tue

4 Keys To Shoot In The 80s

From tee to green, try these ways to shave some strokes.

17

Dec
Mon

NCAA golf returns to TV with Golf Channel

By Ryan HerringtonWhy isn't the NCAA Championship on TV? It's a question I'd get asked more often than any other from casual golf fans with a curiosity about the college game. It was generally posed...

17

Dec
Mon

Callaway gets in the speed game with X Hot irons

By Stephen Hennessey Reengineering the face of an iron to make it behave with the same flexibility idea seen in drivers has been a big story with some of the introductions we've already seen this fall,...

17

Dec
Mon

My Shot: Rocco At 50

He beat the school bullies and bargained with Ely Callaway and Evel Knievel, but even as Mr. Mediate is hitting a milestone birthday, he's afraid to greet Arnold Palmer without shaving first.

14

Dec
Fri

How Tom Watson's Ryder Cup captaincy really took shape

By Tim Rosaforte Breaking the mold on American Ryder Cup captaincy, as the PGA of America did with a blockbuster announcement Thursday in New York, all began with the writings of Jim Huber. When a copy of the essayist's book, "Four Days In July," on Tom Watson's mythical run at the Open Championship in 2009, was placed in the hands of Ted Bishop at last year's PGA Grand Slam of Golf, the then-PGA vice president was moved. So was Huber when Bishop called to pitch his idea of Watson in a return engagement as captain, 21 years after leading the United States to its last Cup victory on foreign soil. "The idea is absolutely brilliant," Huber said. The idea was not only brilliant, so was the execution. Three months after the longtime writer and broadcaster died suddenly and tragically of acute leukemia, 13 months after Bishop presented his idea, Tom Watson stood on the sidewalk outside 30 Rockefeller Center, announced to the world by Matt Lauer on the "Today" show as the next American Ryder Cup captain. Before our eyes, "Four Days in July" became "Three Days in Scotland" with a September 2014 run date. Photo by Getty ImagesAt 65 and 22 days when the matches begin, Watson will be the oldest Ryder Cup captain ever, but as Luke Donald the artist painted the word picture on a tweet, we all can't wait to see the Young Tom "rocking his flat cap" once more. Something that Bishop first thought was off the wall has stuck. Turns out, this was a conversation we'd be having even if Justin Rose didn't make his putt on the 17th green at Medinah, or if Martin Kaymer didn't bury the game winner in the 18th green for Team Europe. For Bishop, it was all about the fit of Watson and Scotland, where he is a kindred spirit, where the people call him "Our Tom." Maybe Watson, the favorite son, adopted with the four claret jugs he won on their sod, will add a Ryder Cup to his treasure chest and go off into the mist with the bagpipes playing and everybody crying with him. Maybe he won't and it will be like Turnberry, but there's not a better ambassador, a better man for the job at this point in history, than the man selected. Related: Ron Sirak on why Watson is the right choice Even Larry Nelson and David Toms would have to admit that. The love Watson has for Scotland shows in his eyes and the corners of his mouth simply when he hears the accent. He is a romantic when it comes to the game and the idea of him going back to the site where Walter Hagen played Ted Ray in the 1921 Ryder Cup simply turned him on. At his news conference in the Empire State Building, he quoted the history, waxed about returning to Pershire, and did everything but sing "Scotland The Brave" during his big reveal. I remembered what he said at Turnberry about the game "being a fabric of life over here." Keep in mind this is more than a feel-good story. Bishop didn't orchestrate this simply as a nostalgia trip or to create a storyline that would keep the audience over here in America for those 4 a.m. wakeup calls to watch golf. Nor did he do it as a knee-jerk reaction to the latest loss by a PGA-generated Ryder Cup team. This had been in the pipeline 11 months before Davis Love's team couldn't hold a four-point Sunday lead in Chicago. Selling the idea to the PGA's officers and rolling it out before Christmas was a game changer without a shot being struck. If this is anything like 1993, Watson will not lead by committee the way Love did, nor will he shut himself off to feedback and rule like Hogan did in '67. "He won't walk in the (team) room and say, 'Here's the lineup," said his caddie, Neil Oxman. "He won't be a dictator." At the same time, Watson made it clear it's his team, and that "the ultimate decision is mine." Watson is expected to have the chops Tony Jacklin had with Seve Ballesteros and Bernhard Langer, when he had to cajole them into playing matches when they were tired, as was the case with Phil Mickelson Saturday at Medinah. It's doubtful whether he will bow to Tiger Woods' wishes about moving down on the lineup card to 12th -- as was the case in this year's singles. As Jacklin told me Thursday, "At the end of the day, the captains captain and the players play." Related: A look back at recent U.S. Ryder Cup captains As for being in touch with the young kids, Watson will be playing the Masters, the Open Championship, and the Greenbrier, where he will be bumping into Tiger and all the other superstars on a regular basis over the next two years. If there was a potential friction point to this announcement, it was the Watson-Woods relationship after Tom's critical comments of Tiger's on-course behavior in 2010. That was smoothed over when the Woods camp issued a statement before Watson walked into the Empire State Building. Watson said he stood by his words but that they've both moved on, which appears to be the case. "If he's not on the team for any unforeseen reason, and I'm sure he will be, you can bet that he's going to be No. 1 on my pick list," Watson said. "I want him on my team." Always a fan of the gentleman's game, Jim Huber was indirectly a peacemaker, too. Follow @TimRosaforte !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");

14

Dec
Fri

Ryder Cup captaincy has eluded Irwin, too

By Dave Shedloski ORLANDO - Larry Nelson is getting a lot of ink - and receiving plenty of sympathy - after getting passed over again for the job of Ryder Cup captain. But Nelson isn't the only three-time major winner to have never led a U.S. Ryder Cup team. True, Hale Irwin did lead the first U.S. Presidents Cup team as a player-captain in 1994, which perhaps explains why he doesn't garner the same support as Nelson is getting after the PGA of America on Thursday selected Tom Watson as the 2014 U.S. captain. Nevertheless, Irwin, a three-time U.S. Open champion and five-time Ryder Cup player, admits he's disappointed to have never gotten the call. "I would love to have been a Ryder Cup captain. It's one of those things every player who values the traditions we have in our game would want to do," Irwin, 67, said at the PNC Father-Son Challenge, where he is competing with his son, Steve. "Certainly if you're a member of the PGA Tour and have been around the game as long as some of us have and who have played in the Ryder Cup, absolutely I would have loved to have done it. It's not my choice. I never politicked for it. Would I have accepted it? With glee I would have done it. "Anybody can make an argument for any name player to be a candidate and would think that player would be a capable captain," he added. "I have played with some of the best players in the history of the game. I have played for some of the best captains. I feel honored to have been on those teams. But I think for any of us to go wading into the quicksand of should someone be a captain and do they have the qualifications, I think produces negative results and conversation that takes away from our task of getting 12 players prepared to win back the Ryder Cup for the United States." Irwin, who won 20 PGA Tour titles and a record 45 times on the Champions Tour (including four Senior PGA Championships), compiled a 13-5-2 record in his five Ryder Cup appearances. He was involved in one of the most consequential and pressure-packed singles matches in Ryder Cup history when he earned a half-point against Bernhard Langer in the 1991 matches at Kiawah Island, S.C. Langer missed a six-foot putt that allowed America to escape with a 14 ¿-13 ¿ victory. "To think that a Ryder Cup could come down to one six-foot putt on the last hole of the last match ... the last possible stroke, it doesn't get any better than that," Irwin said. Irwin qualified for that '91 team on the strength of his third U.S. Open victory the previous summer at Medinah CC, where he beat Mike Donald in a playoff. "In the span of 15 months, I had probably two of the biggest adrenaline rushes I could ever have," Irwin said of his playoff against Donald and his singles match against Langer. "Those were two far different events, and yet the pressure was something that, let's just say it was something I still think about. On the anxiety meter, they both were off the charts. But it was fun. Regardless of the outcome, I could say I was there. I was in the very heat of it. I could feel it. "Even today when I look back, I get chills thinking about it. Even today, there is an element of shock that all of us felt, on both sides of just how emotionally draining it all was. And you wouldn't trade that for anything to have been there." (Getty Images photo)

14

Dec
Fri

Fitness Friday: Get your cuffs primed for action

By Ron Kaspriske When you hear the words rotator cuff, you might think about baseball pitchers sitting on the bench with their throwing shoulders wrapped in big bags of ice. But the four muscles that...

14

Dec
Fri

Photos: PGA Tour Wives And Girlfriends

You've seen them on TV. Maybe you've even seen them on the course. They're the better -- and often the better-looking -- halves of the PGA Tour stars you like to follow. Now here's your chance to get to know them better.

13

Dec
Thu

Puma Golf introduces earphones

By John Strege Professional golfers have been taking their music to work for awhile now, at least to the practice tee and putting green, so it was inevitable perhaps that a golf company would...