It is appropo of nothing, but I found a neat site called The Candy Blog. I had a lot of fun reading it.

It’s golf show season here in Michigan (and, I suspect, in many other places, too).  And these shows are often a great place to get good clubs at a tremendous discount.

Unfortunately, the reason some of these clubs are so inexpensive is that they’re cheap knockoffs. But how can you tell?

Here’s a tip: if you’re shopping for clubs at one of these shows, carry a small magnet with you. It’ll be useful for determining whether a club really is what it says. Magnets won’t stick to titanium, so if a driver says that it’s got a titanium face and a magnet sticks to it, be suspicious. Magnets also won’t stick to zinc or aluminum. So if an iron claims to be steel, and a magnet won’t stick to it, be suspicious.

Zinc-Aluminum alloys often are used in beginner clubs and in knockoffs.

A post on Hooked On Golf led me to the new In Golf We Trust site.

I wish I’d thought of that name.

I just heard Kelly Tilghman on The Golf Channel say:

“One of the best things about the state of Florida is that you can watch the sun rise and the sun set all in the same day.”

Uh ... Kelly .... We can do that in Michigan, too. And just about everywhere else on the planet, too.

Golf Ball Dowser

Ridiculous Golf Item of The Week

ESPN’s Jason Sobel asks the question: “Who Are Some Pro Athletes Turned Golfers?”

I’m sure he didn’t mean it, but isn’t the implication of that headline that golfers aren’t athletes.

I recently finished a couple of biographies of golf great Walter Hagen. Hagen is one of the pivotal figures in the history of golf, and is rightly credited with creating the concept of the “playing” (as opposed to the “club” or “teaching”) professional. He is probably the first professional athlete to have reached the $1 million mark in career earnings (approximately $12 million in 2007 dollars).

Hagen currently is credited with eleven major victories: the 1914 and 1919 US Open, the 1922, 1924, 1928 and 1929 British Open Championship and the 1921, 1924, 1925, 1926 and 1927 PGA Championships.

Hagen played in just three Masters tournaments, and these were when he was well beyond his prime. In those, he finished T13, T15 and T11.

But after reading the biographies, I believe that Hagen has been short changed. For while the fourth modern major—the Masters—did not exist during most of his playing career, there was a tournament that could (and was in its time) rightly be considered a major: The Western Open.