Golf Central

On this day in 1990, proving that the US Golf Association usually sees things straight after about ... oh, 100 times or so, finally settled a long-running lawsuit with Karsten Manufacturing of Arizona over the legality of the company's PING Eye 2 irons.

The Eye 2 at the time was a very popular iron and was in many a tour player's bag: but the USGA, as it is wont to do, had made a stink about the square grooves on the clubs' faces and the distance between the sides of the grooves. As a settlement, the USGA ruled that PING Eye 2's were legal, but that all future irons had to conform to groove-width measurements ...

Which makes us wonder what the old-time professionals would have made of today's high-tech equipment. For it was on this day in 1900 that Willie Smith won $100 for winning the Tampa tournament at Florida, and the wonderfully named Lancelot Servos won the big $10 long-drive contest with a blast of 230 yards ...

And it was on this day in 1968, that the Shell's Wonderful World of Golf telecast - a staple of golf viewing in the '60s and on Golf Channel re-runs today - featured its first hole-in-one. The ace was struck by Sebastian Miguel in his match against Frank Beard on the 6th hole at the Real Club de Golf "El Prat" near Barcelona, Spain ...

Eric Cantona didn't fare as well as PING in his hearing with the powers-that-be, however, on this day in 1995. That's because the mercurial Manchester United star was fined £20,000 and banned for a year following his kung-fu style attack on a Crystal Palace fan at Selhurst Park.

That said, it's gueter geburtsdaa!, as they say in Alsatian, to a couple of pretty good modern golfers - Mike Hill, who won three times on the PGA Tour and hit the gravy train with 18 Senior Tour wins, is 69; and Woody Austin, two-time tour winner who earned the immortal nickname of "Aquaman" with his plunge into a lake at this year's Presidents Cup, is 44 ... birthdays as well to ballet great Mikhail Baryshnikov (60); pixie-like actress Bridget Fonda (44); and Mark Owen (36), former Manchester United triallist who had to settle for singing with Take That.

It also would have been a birthday for the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (b. 1756), who followed the motto of "live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse" when he kicked reached his coda in 1791 at the age of 35.

'Til tomorrow ...