Golf Central

On this day in the year 2007, your favourite golf website InGolfWeTrust.com was born in a manger alongside some shattered paving stones, some freebie sets of golf clubs handed down from Titleist, flying hair and some hot air in the wind, dreams of Tiger Woods and Natalie Gulbis, lots of cups of coffee, a bit of ping-pong, and some sort of collective genius which had come together down in Brighton, England. A pub or two might have been involved ...

Once in a while somebody twiddled a mouse. And along the way, the hard-working clods in Brighton or the IGWT field office in Scotland have written a few hard-hitting articles, hundreds of lame captions, and one or two winners. InGolfWeTrust is how you see it today, one year old. Stronger stuff has been added since its birth, and better still is yonder down the road as we celebrate our first birthday today with you, going from strength to strength. Thank you for making our first year so memorable! ...

And also on this day, in 1992, Fred Couples beat Davis Love III in a playoff to win the Nissan Open at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, which must be something like beating up your younger brother, or bigger brother, ... or something ...

And it's a happy St David's Day to Welsh folk everywhere!

In the real world:  Nothing really happened, except that everyone was so knackered from the holiday period and the impending Masters Tournament that no-one did much of anything, really. But CIA and Pakistani agents somehow summoned up enough energy on this day in 2003 to lift the suspected September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a raid near Islamabad. Nice one, boys ...

Strangely enough: On this day in 1836, a convention of delegates from 57 communities in Texas got together with the hair-brained scheme of declaring independence from Mexico. The meeting was held in a place called "Washington-on-the-Brazos", meaning the conveners had high ideas of a "capital city" on a dirty old river on the Texas plain ... Again, nice one, boys ... 172 years later, Texas is still not really independent from Mexico, nor are the United States independent from Texas ...

In sport: On this day in 1997, FIFA passed a new law which prohibits goalkeepers from picking up the ball from a team-mates' throw-in. This is as widely ignored as the law in the California state books that states that it is illegal to "set a mousetrap without a hunting license" ...

That said, it's Janma dhin ko Subha kamana! as they say in Kathmandu, to steely voiced Roger Daltry (64), still swinging his mic in the air for The Who; to blow-dried actor Dirk Benedict (63), who played Lieutenant Starbuck on the first Battlestar Galactica series (Christ! Is he really that old?); to the genius football manager Martin O'Neill (56), who is soon to take over for England unless Jose Mourinho does (according to the British press that is); and to freckle-faced actor/director Ron Howard (54), who played Richie Cunningham on Happy Days.

And guess what? It's also the 28th birthday for the Malian footballer Djimi Traoré, a slow-footed "defender" who has bounced between Liverpool, Lens, Charlton, Portsmouth and Rennes in the last 10 years, but without whom the British press would run into a surplus of ink, because it's always big news wherever Djimi Traoré goes, because UK sports journalists, football managers, or punters in the pub just can't live without him.

So print this out, please, one more time ... just to waste some ink: Djimi Traoré.

It also would have been a birthday for the great Franco-Polish composer Frédéric Chopin (b. 1810), had he not heard the last note (as musicians say) "decay" in the year 1849 ... 'Til tomorrow! ...