Golf Central

Lost in all the hubbub of Tiger Woods' smashing victory at the WGC-Match Play Championship in Arizona is the fact that Paula Creamer has really nice legs.

(Sorry, we digressed there, for a minute. But try looking at nothing but pictures of Tiger Woods for five straight days, and then you see a picture of Paula Creamer's legs, and it makes you realise that there's more to golf than the Big Cat. Sorry, Tiger).

And not only that, Paula's victory in Kapolei, Hawaii at the Fields Open was dramatic in its own right. The 21-year-old starlet has a streak of her own going: Creamer has now won twice in her last four starts, and that's LPGA Tour victory No. 5 for the chirpy little daughter of an airline pilot from California. Using her trademark pink ball in the final round, Creamer shot 66 for a 16-under total of 200, with four birdies on the final five holes to beat Jeong Jang of South Korea.

"I'll always remember this finish," said Paula. So will we. Thanks, Paula ... and look out, Lorena Ochoa ...

PGA Tour
Mayakoba Golf Classic: About the only scenery more stunning than Paula Creamer's pins this weekend were the gorgeous vistas of El Camaleon Golf Club in Playa del Carmen, on Mexico's tropical Yucatan peninsula. This is where the PGA Tour kindly sent the rest of its players not qualified for the elite-only world match play field in Arizona, and what a nice trip it was for the "opposite-field" boys.

It was especially so for Brian Gay, who won his first PGA Tour title by two shots over Steve Marino after closing with a 1-under 69. It was Gay's 293rd career PGA Tour start (only 12 active players had entered more events on the tour without a win than the 36-year-old Texan). Gay had notched a pair of second-place finishes, at the 2001 Colonial and the 2002 Buick Open ...

Champions Tour
Champions Skins Game: There was another rally in Kaanapali, Hawaii, where the old-timers were battling it out in the alternate-shot team skins event. Fuzzy Zoeller and Peter Jacobsen teamed up to win six skins and $320,000, knocking off defending champs, the legends Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus. One of these days, we want to turn 50, go to Hawaii, smoke stogies, and win a lot of money for a skins game. We just need a little more time to practice the old golf game, though ...

Nationwide Tour
Moonah Classic: In the co-sanctioned Australasian-Nationwide Tour event in Melbourne, Australia, 25-year-old Aussie Ewan Porter waltzed to victory with a final-round 66 for a 13-under winning total, enough for a seven-shot win over DJ Brigman and Tee McCabe from the States.

Hawaii was the place to be this past weekend, when Annika Sorenstam got back to doing what she does best (winning golf tournaments if you were wondering), after her three shot victory at the SBS Open at Turtle Bay as the LPGA held its 2008 curtain-raiser.

Sorenstam had not won a single event since the State Farm Classic back in September 2006, a long drought by her standards, but just two months into the New Year, she won her 70th career title, in her very first appearance at the SBS Open. Finishing 10-under par, she was ahead of the field by two shots and claimed a cool $165,000 in the process.

Champions Tour
Number One Hoch: The senior circuit meandered its way to Naples in Florida this past weekend and it was a top three days for Scott Hoch, who made it two out of two, with victory in the ACE Group Classic, following up his win last week at the Allianz Championship.  In a four-way playoff, Hoch beat a pair of Toms - Jenkins and Kite - as well as Brad Bryant on the first extra hole and picked up a cool $240,000 in the process, while also moving up to No. 1 in the rankings. Not a bad weekend really then.

Nationwide Tour
It Keeps Raining And Raining: The weather was atrocious, the rain just wouldn’t stop falling, but American Darron Stiles didn’t care a jot as he won the shortened HSBC Championship as the PGA Tour's junior circuit tried to play in Christchurch, New Zealand. Beginning the day tied for first place with David Hearn and Matt Bettencourt, Stiles birdied five of his first six holes, then parred nine straight to win the trophy with a score of 4-under. The 36-hole total was all Stiles needed for his fifth tour title. This one will go down as an "unofficial" win, but the earnings of £117,000 certainly were official and probably quite handy for a guy who has been in 182 Nationwide Tour events throughout his career.

It may have been blowing a gale in Hawaii yesterday but it was Jerry Pate that breezed to victory in the Turtle Bay Championship (I see what you did there. And I didn’t like it – Ed). The 54-year-old started the day four shots behind the overnight leader Gil Morgan but closed with a 70 for a 5-under total of 211 and a two shots win over Jim Thorpe and Fulton Allem. Irritatingly for Thorpe, it was his putting tip that helped Pate cope with the conditions and take the $240,000 winners cheque. "I'm going to call him and make sure he gives me a little piece of that," said Thorpe, who told pate to shorten his back swing in the 35mph winds.
 
The defending champion Fred Funk, meanwhile, had the kind of final day that makes you want to sell your clubs for scrap, run amok in the locker room and then turn the gun on yourself. Having cantered to an 11-stroke victory last year, the Funkster came home in 81 shots to finish, which is the kind of score that makes us normal golfers feel much better but probably makes Fred pretty damn bad. Mind you, he's been called worse in classical fashion (be mindful of young ears) ... and he no longer has the silliest name in golf. So there ...

US Nationwide Tour: The times we’ve wanted to write a ‘Dunlap Green Flash’ headline and now, just as we get our chance, our search engine optimisation ‘experts’ step in and tell us we can’t. Great. Still, hats off to Scott Dunlap who pipped the field at the Panama Movistar Championship, the opening tournament of the 2008 Nationwide Tour schedule. The Pennsylvanian’s final-round 1-over-par 71 was enough to give him a one stroke victory over Jeff Klauk and Arjun Atwal and a nice cheque for $108,000 which should come in handy for keeping the wolf from the door. Not as handy as a shotgun, mind…

On this day in 1959, a little-known golf pro named David McCampbell was born in Marshall, Indiana. Sadly, he died only 45 years later from cancer, which is probably the only reason you haven't heard of him.

While McCampbell remains obscure to all but the most eagle-eyed of golf watchers, it's a shame that his story isn't better known. So while we tend to relate the stories of all the big names in this space, from the old-timers like Vardon and Hagen to Mickelson and Woods today, January 2nd is David McCampbell's day.

His story is an amazing one ...

1) The US seniors have turned out the lights on their porches, so to speak ... they've put on their slippers, and it's pipes, cigars and a nice port for a much-needed winter break (they're old, you know). With Jim Thorpe winning the weekend's Charles Schwab Championship Cup in Sonoma, Calif., the Champions Tour finished at the weekend with Jay Haas atop the money list ($2,581,001), and Loren "Boss of the Moss" Roberts winning the Schwab overall points series title.
     The over-50s won't move from rocking chair to garage (to grab their clubs) until the Three-Tour Challenge and the Father-Son Challenge over the winter Silly Season. But that doesn't mean these old fellers are resting easy. Not yet, oh, no.
     Bernhard Langer, Mark O'Meara, Nick Price and John Cook made brief debuts in on the Champions Tour this year. In the next two seasons, guys by the names of Tom Lehman, Fred Couples, Corey Pavin, Hal Sutton and Joey Sindelar hit the senior ranks. Hale Irwin and Tom Watson (and Denis, for that matter) can still kick butt. Nick Faldo and Greg Norman are eligible but much too busy - but if they jumped into the heat of battle, the Champions Tour would be the most competitive of all three US top-flight pro circuits.
     Roberts, 52, is far too steady on the greens still to sound like he's quaking in his spikes, but he said it all when he said: "With a lot of the new guys that are coming on, I'm glad to be able to get one now instead of having to wait a few more years."
2) The focus will be on the PGA Tour's dim lights at Disney as Nos. 110-150 fight it out for tour cards, but the best competition of the weekend - bar the Volvo Masters in Spain, of course, will be on the Nationwide Tour. The Top 60 on the junior circuit are squaring off in the Nationwide Tour Championship at Barona, and the top 25 on the tour's money list move on to the 2008 PGA Tour. The competition - like the California wildfires that almost forced cancellation or movement of the event - will be fierce.
3) It takes luck to win a major championship, as they say. Well, major winners Phil Mickelson and Scott Simpson were lucky last week when their houses were spared by the wildfires in California. Both were evacuated however (Simpson twice), and can count their lucky stars.
4) The Turnesa family -- once described as "to golf what the Kennedys are to politics" are back with a vengeance. Marc Turnesa, winner on the Nationwide Tour in Miami at the weekend, is a scion of one of the most famous family names in golf. His grandfather, Mike Turnesa, was second to Ben Hogan in the '48 PGA Championship and won six PGA Tour titles. And despite careers interrupted by the Second World War, Mike Turnesa's six brothers did themselves proud - Jim (won the '52 PGA Championship), Joe (15 PGA Tour titles from 1940-50) and Willie ('38 and '48 US Amateurs, '47 British Amateur). Sadly, none of the immortal clan of Turnesa brothers lived to see their grandson win - Willie was the last of seven golfing Turnesa brothers to pass away, in 2001.
5) Keeping it in the family, you were not seeing double at the Ginn sur Mer this past week. Those were identical twins, Derek and Daryl Fathauer, seniors at the University of Louisville and local boys, playing in the first two rounds, and both missing the cut (Derek was 1-over and Derek was 5-over). Strangely enough, the Fathauer twins are not the first pair of identical twins to play in the same PGA Tour event ... the Strange brothers, Curtis and Alan, both teed it up in the Texas Open in 1981.
6) You can feel sorry for Laura Davies, an unlucky also-ran to the red-hot Suzann Pettersen by a stroke in the LPGA's Honda Thailand event, because she remains stuck on the two regular-tour wins (or one major) she needs to qualify for the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame automatically on "points". But don't worry too much ... even if Liverpool-loving Laura never notches those wins, she's a shoe-in in to be voted in to the LPGA Hall via Veteran's Category status. Judy Rankin, Donna Caponi and Marlene Hagge are three others who reached the milestone as "veterans" without the requisite victory milestones.
7) Qualifying School tournaments are a crapshoot - but then we already knew that. How else to describe the fact that Tommy "Two Gloves" Gainey" - a former Big Break IV contestant and whose swing would make your eyes bleed, cruised through the First Stage of PGA Tour Q-School in Florence, South Carolina with four rounds in the 60s. In the same qualifier, Wales' Rhys Davies, whose Hoganesque swing promises Ryder Cups and many future titles, missed the cut by a stroke in the same event - thanks to a first-round 74, leaving the marvellously gifted Davies to fight it out in European Tour Q-School to find a place to play in 2008.
8) You've got to admire Dicky Pride's work ethic. At the weather-delayed Ginn sur Mer Classic, Pride was sitting in the clubhouse on 16-under on Sunday night, with six players left on the course. But he stayed overnight just in case there was a playoff. "I didn't want my wife to drive home alone, but I had to stay." ... It didn't matter, as Daniel "Exploding Divots" Chopra made quick work of the victory on Monday morning, but at least Pride stuck around to pick up his $216,000 paycheck. Which is a heck of a lot more than you can say for John Daly.
9) The British elite who once snapped up massive estates and old castles in Scotland for hunting grouse and have now turned to golf for their Highland holiday homes. Shooting birdies, as it were, has turned to shooting birdies of a different kind, as the price tags ranging from £800,000 and £1.3m (that's pounds, folks, not dollars) for new developments around Gleneagles in central Scotland prove. These pads come equipped with fairway views and underground swimming pools. And we want one.
10) Tim Finchem and his PGA Tour Machine may not win every battle. All around the US, in airports and posh shopping malls, you can find PGA Tour superstores, selling all manner of golf tat at exhorbitant prices. And they're easy to spot - most of them have giant American flags flying outside. However, the developer in PGA Tour-friendly Scottsdale, Arizona, has run into unexpected trouble, because the local authority won't allow a flagpole higher than 65 feet. And they don't call it Snotsdale for no reason ...