During the long, cold Michigan winters, I have a lot of fun building golf clubs. It’s relazing, and keeps me looking forward to arrival of spring. some, I build for myself; some for others. I generally build a set to be auctioned off in my kid’s elementary school auction fundraiser; and I sometimes will repair a club brought to me by a friend.

If you’ve never built a golf club, I suggest you give it a try. It’s not terribly expensive to get started (although it can be quite expensive if you buy all of the optional tools). And it’s not terribly difficult at the basic level. The tricky part of golf club making is not the assembly, but in the choosing of which parts to assemble it with.

Golfsmith has a number of convenient kits to get you started in clubmaking. Teh Viper Ti 464 driver kit gives you a 460cc titanium clubhead with a moveble weight system, a matched Proforce graphite shart, a velvet grip, ferrule (the plastic slip that goes above the clubhead and offers stability and reinforcement to the shaft) and a matching clubhead cover.

You’ll also need to get the clubmaking supply pack, which comes with the proper epoxy (superglue will NOT work), grip tape and solvent, a vise clamp and a step-by-step instructional DVD.

What you’ll need to have on your own is a vice, some sandpaper and a fine toothed saw—all stuff the average homeowner already has.

Give it a shot. It’s fun.

I don’t get XM radio, but have been getting emails saying that the site got a good mention on the PGA coverage today. It apparently involved satellite photos of the Gallery Course. You can find them here.

Welcome to those who are following up on the XM mention.  I hope you like the site. I started GolfBlogger four years ago when blogging was a relatively new thing because I wanted to see what blogging was all about. At that point, it seemed to me that most of the blogs were about politics and technology, so I decided to stay away from those topics. I loved golf— I play and have coached golf— so I decided to write about that.

I think of GolfBlogger as a cross between two more well-known blogs—http://www.instapundit.com and http://www.gizmodo.com. Instapundit offers a series of short, pithy comments on political news; Gizmodo writes about new tech products. Combining these two with a golf twist led me to Golfblogger’s general format, which is to offer short, pithy comments on golf news, and links to new golf products.

The signature post for Golfblogger is each Friday’s Ridiculous Item of the Week, in which I highlight a stupid, tacky, or silly golf product. But there much, much more here. Take a look around.

And if someone could PLEASE fill me in on the XM details, I would really appreciate it. What was the show? Who said what? What was the context of the mention?

Thanks and welcome.

I have been watching the Match Play Championships today on The Golf Channel, and just saw an ad for the Big Break. And at that moment, it occurred to me that the fix for that insipid show is right under TGC’s nose.

The problem for me has always been that the interpersonal drama that the producers of The Big Break so desperately want is completely absent in the current format.  Because elimination is determined by individual skill challenges, there is no reason for any of the golfers to even talk TO each other, let alone talk about each other. They can love each other or hate each other, and it has no effect on the outcome.  That’s why, to me, the entire production seems so contrived.

What they need to do is to restructure the Big Break as a series of team events—sort of like a mini Ryder Cup each week. They could base it all on nine holes, if they wanted to speed it up and keep production costs down. The golfers would (as with Survivor) be initially divided into two squads. And each week, the losing team would be forced to vote out one of its members. Presumably, the team would vote out its weakest link. But they might also vote out someone who simply irritates the others, regardless of skill.

And that’s where, finally, the interpersonal drama would have some meaning.

If the teams were uneven because of attrition, the larger team would have someone sit out. The same person couldn’t sit out twice.

The show would be made more interesting as the show highlighted the various types of golf games available: match, twosomes, scramble. They could even come up with some original ones.

Each week would begin, however, with a skills challenge. The winner would get a “mulligan” (immunity), regardless of whether he ultimately on the winning or losing team. That would create some additional interpersonal conflict. If a player already has the mulligan, and doesn’t play up to the team’s expectations, she’d be under a lot of fire from the others. Imagine the comments: “We would have won, but she already had a mulligan and didn’t earn her share of the points. She’s a quitter and I hate her.”

At some point, the teams would be small enough that they’d be merged. Then, the players would be reassigned in different (random) pairs each week. The winning pair would get immunity. The others would be on the chopping block.

Of course, every other week, there wold be an uneven number of players. In that case, the player with the Skills Challenge mulligan would sit out. She would be immune from expulsion anyway.

When down to the last three, it would become a straight match play event.

Hippo Hex Driver

Ridiculous Golf Item of the Week

Golf great Fuzzy Zoeller is suing to track down the author of a Wikipedia article that accused him of substance abuse, and of abusing his family. Under the law, Zoeller can’t sue Wikipedia itself, but he’s traced the ip address of the author to that of a Miami education consulting firm called Josef Silny & Associates. So he apparently is going after them.

It has always been my understanding that Fuzzy’s problems have been well documented—and that he has talked about many of them. I can’t recall the month or issue, but I’m sure that he was fairly open about his issues in a relatively recent issue of one of the major golf magazines.

It may be that this is just one of the things you have to deal with when you’re a celebrity in the information age. And even if he finds the author, he’s going to have a very hard time collecting damages. Fuzzy is a public figure, and to get restitution, he has to prove not only that the information was wrong, but also that it was done with malice.

A little civics lesson here: In the Case of New York Times Co V Sulivan (1964), the Supreme Court ruled that only when a statement is made with malice could a public official collect damages. The case involved a full page ad in the New York Times, which was taken out by defenders of Martin Luther King, Jr. The ad contained a number of inaccuracies in criticizing the police of Montgomery, Alabama. L.B. Sullivan, the Commissioner who supervised the Police Department, said that the criticisms of the department were defaming to him personally.

The court rejected Sullivan’s claim, ruling that damages could not be awarded to public officials unless they prove “actual malice”—that the statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.

That standard has since been applied to public figures in general. It has also been ruled that public figures have a greater burden of proof than private figures because they have access to media in which they can defend themselves.

I don’t see how Fuzzy wins this one if he’s looking for damages. He may have an easier time if he’s just looking for an injunction against further publication of the information, but I don’t know.  Maybe a lawyer out there can elaborate.

At any rate, no matter what happens in the courts, the information is out there forever. It’s gone from Wikipeida, but it’s still up on Answers.Com, and probably a large number of servers and internet caching sites.

With the Bloc, Pinemeadow Golf gets into the square headed driver sweepstakes. As with others of this design, the intent is to move the weight as far from the center as possible. Weight moved to the back edge of the club improves the launch angle, while weight moved to the outside increases the moment of intertia, thus improving distance on off center hits. The titanium clubhead comes in at a massive 455 ccs.

As with all PineMeadow products, this one comes with a 30 day playability guarantee, so there’s virtually no risk to you to try it.

I’m a big fan of the Nick Hotchkiss Collection ties. They’ve got a variety of fun designs—including some golf themes—but unlike most novelty ties, these are subtle. The designs are such that you have to take a second look before realizing what it is.

Their latest is the Hedge Fund Tie—patterned with cute little hedgehogs.

As a complete aside, I have a friend who once had a pet hedgehog. Cute little thing. Not at all like the porcupine I expected. His German wife said that the beasts have completely overrun peoples’ gardens in Germany—sort of like squirrels here, I suppose.