Golf Central

On this day in 1959, a golfer who personifies the grind of the PGA Tour and who really just needs to catch a break for once was born in San Mateo, California - career tour hanger-on Michael Allen. Happy 49th, Michael.

You see Allen has always been just good enough to hang around ... most of the time. Allen turned pro way back in 1984 when Tiger Woods was only 9, and amazingly, he has made 296 starts on the PGA Tour ... but he has never won a tournament ...

Not like he really should complain. Allen was planning to be a stockbroker or horticulturalist out of the University of Nevada but instead has had a lifetime of playing a game for a handsome living, and he's earned $3.7 million in his off-an-on PGA Tour career. He quit for three years in the mid-1980s but returned to the tour after realising he liked it better than selling medical supplies.

Allen has been to the tour's gruelling Qualifying School 13 times and has holds the tour record for making it through nine times successfully. But once he's out on the Tour, it's a different story: although he has made slightly more than 50 per cent of cuts in his career, it's the W that eludes him. He must wonder what the feeling is like that Tiger Woods has now experienced 62 times.

(Strangely enough, Allen's futility streak isn't even close to the Tour's record. Jay Delsing has played in 546 PGA Tour events without a win).

Allen's best PGA Tour finishes have been three second-place finishes (the most recent last year at Turning Stone) and one third. But it's not like he doesn't know how to win. In 1989, Allen shot 8-under to win the Bell's Scottish Open at Gleneagles, beating Olazabal and Ian Woosnam by two strokes and winning £301,770. Allen's only other win came when he had been dumped off the PGA Tour (again) onto the Nike Tour, and he captured the Greater Austin Open title for a more modest sum of $40,500 (he made far more, $648,000, for being runner up at Turning Stone.

Allen's running out of time, but we're rooting for the wily veteran to find a way into the winners' circle this year. Otherwise, he can beat up on the old fogeys on the Champions Tour beginning in 2009 ...

Speaking of futility, it was also on this day in 1606 that the nefarious traitor Guy Fawkes got his due for conspiring to blow up the English Parliament and King James I in the Gunpowder Plot - suffering a rather nasty execution at St Paul's Yard, London ... However, Britons traditionally burn effigies of Guy on November 5 on Bonfire Night (otherwise a good excuse for fireworks, a cuddle on a cold night, and getting tanked on mulled wine). While this may seem like jumping the gun to many Americans, who actually hold their Independence Day on the day independence was declared, consider how difficult it would be to have a "Drawn, Hung And Quartered Night" on Jan. 31 instead to celebrate Guy's demise ... Indeed.

And in the department of Big Macs, it was on this day in 1990 that the first McDonald's restaurant was opened in Moscow, then the Soviet Union. The golden arches in Pushkin Square remains the largest and busiest McDonald's in the world, with 700 seats and 27 cash tills. There are now 103 McDonald's in the Russian capital, most serving the same fare you get worldwide with the exception of cabbage pies and "country-style potatoes". ... The country-style potatoes sound quite nice, actually, but we'll say nyet to the cabbage pies ...

That said, it's s dniom razhdjenia!, as they say in Pushkin Square, to the legendary baseball pitcher Nolan Ryan (61), who threw seven no-hitters (email us if you don't know what that is); to the provocative lead singer John Lydon (Johnny Rotten, 52) of the punk pioneers the Sex Pistols; and to dishy English actress Minnie Driver (38) of Good Will Hunting fame, and former squeeze of Matt Damon, John Cusack and Josh Brolin.

It's also birthdays to a pair of celebs who are also pretty handy with the sticks: Keen golfer Lloyd Cole (moody English singer/songwriter of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions), boasts a 5.3 index, is 47; and crummy musician but decent golfer Justin Timberlake (6.0 index), and new host of the PGA Tour's Las Vegas event, is 27.

It also would have been a birthday for the iconic Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (b. 1881), had she not portrayed The Dying Swan a bit too realistically in 1931. ... 'Til tomorrow ...