If you watched the Golf Channel’s coverage of the Mercedes over the past weekend, you couldn’t have missed their gushing over Will MacKenzie. An excellent junior amateur, he quit golf to take up kayacking, rock climbing, heliboarding, surfing and other outdoor pursuits. Then, inspired by Payne Stewart, he returned to golf and worked his way up the ladder, playing the Canadian Tour, the Golden Bear Tour, the Hooters Tour and, finally, the Nationwide Tour, before making it through Qualifying School prior to the 2005 season.

He’s a real original, and is the kind of guy that the Tour needs to promote. I had to laugh when he practically invited people to come and party with him when he gave his hotel room number during a live television interview.

There’s a great profile on ESPN.Com.

You have to give Top Flite points for trying. In spite of (or perhaps becuase of) what HAS to be a steadily delining market share, they keep churning out new ball designs. Last year it was the XL line. This year, it’s the D2.

The D2 apparently stands for dimple-in-dimple. There’s nothing official on the Top Flite website yet, but it seems that the ball has slightly larger dimples, with a raised “o” area in the center of each.

There’s a rumor floating around that the dimple in dimple design originally was slated to appear in Callaway balls because it was superior to the current hex system.My insider told me that he thought Callaway had invested so much in the hex design that they didn’t want to lose their identity.

On another, only slightly related not, I wonder about the fate of the Ben Hogan balls. It would be nuts for Callaway to give up on Top Flite (and with this new technology, I dont’ think they will), but can they manage three different golf ball lines at once?

Golf Digest has compiled a list of golf’s top earners for 2006. The figures include both on- and off- the course income. I find the top six fascinating:

Tiger Woods - $98,941,827
Phil Mickelson - $44,256,505
Arnold Palmer - $27,542,850
Vijay Singh - $24,811,026
Greg Norman - $22,627,202
Michelle Wie - $20,235,234

Tiger, of course, is first, and with his lifetime earnings now of more than $640 million, is well on his way to becoming sports’ first Billion Dollar Man. Wow.

Phil Mickelson, the second place player, earns less than half of what Tiger does. And Phil made fifteen times what the fiftieth player on the list made (David Howell, who made $3,861,140.)

There’s a real difference between the haves and have-nots. Golf Digest estimates that of the 998 players listed on the World Money List , 527 won less than $100,000 last year.

Two of the guys in the top six aren’t even really playing anymore. Palmer earned $42,000 on the course, while Norman took home just over $127,000. Both of them are incredibly shrewd businessmen. Heck, Palmer hasn’t bean a real player in a couple of decades.  It shows, I think, the power of golf. How many NFL or NBA players, four decades removed from their prime are still earning income from their sport.

Vijay earned more on the course than anyone other than Tiger and Jim Furyk (who clocked in at number 8 on the list). Like Furyk, however, Vijay doesn’t appear to be earning endorsements equal to his status as a player. Vijay—other than Tiger, the only player in recent memory to hold the number one position—earns a quarter of what Tiger does in endorsements, and half of what Phil does. Furyk earns half of what Vijay does. Both Singh and Furyk should consider firing their agents.

I wonder, however, what Phil’s earnigns will look like in 2007, now that he has been dropped by Ford.

Does anyone find it odd that Michelle Wie—who is not a member of the LPGA, has yet to win a tournament, and hasn’t fulfilled her goal of makng a PGA Tour cut—is sixth overall? It shows that Team Wie is shrewd, indeed.

The overall list appears remarkably stable. Golf Digest says that 28 of the fifty have been on the list for the past four years including 15 of the top 16 in this year’s ranking. There’s just not a lot of turnover there.

Callaway kicks off the new year with its new line of X-20 irons, which Callaway says “is a combination of the best features of previous generations of X-Pro Series Irons and X-Tour Irons wrapped into one great all around iron for better players.”

The club has quite a few game-improvement features, while avoiding the Volkswagen-On-A-Stick look that that has characterized some of Callaway’s past efforts.

In the game improvement column are a longer hosel, a 360 undercut channel and a notch weighting system, all fo which are designed to redistribute weight to the golden triangle of gold clubhead design: down, back and out. The idea, of course, is that weight directed toward the perimeter stabilizes the head through impact, while weight directed down and back improves the launch angle.

In the looks category, Callaway has catered more to the look better players prefer (and not so good players also), with a more narrow sole, shorter head and a thinner-looking topline. The thinner look is achieved with a beveled edge.

This is one I’d really like to try.

Golf Heaven is a blog that apparently has been around since August 2006. It claims to be “the ultimate blog for all of your golf needs. “

Wow.

I thought that was GolfBlogger. Or Hooked On Golf. Or The Bogey Lounge. Or The Sand Trap. Or Eat Golf. Or Even Par Round. Or ...

Snide remarks aside, it’s worth a visit.

I’m not sure exactly what you do with it, but a site called Image Chef has a page where you can type in a phrase and get a jpg image showing it imprinted on a golf ball.

I guess you do what I’m going. Save the photo and embed it in a page of your own.

I had to laugh a bit yesterday at the PGA Tour’s self-important posing at the Fed Ex Cup’s inaugural event. As they finished their round, each player signed a ball, and put it into the Cup. According to the announcers, the signed balls were then going to be whisked away to the golf hall of fame to be enshrined for posterity.

Geeze. My prediction is that the FedEx Cup doesn’t last long enough for these balls to even acquire the veneer of a historical curiosity. The entire operation depends upon Tiger, Phil and a few other stars being willing to play along. And while they might participate for the first couple of years, these guys generally hate playing in back-to-back-to-back-to-back tournaments. The $10 million is impressive, but Tiger and Phil don’t need it.

Three years from now, the finals for the Fedex Cup will consist mostly of guys you’ve never heard of, plus a few troopers like Furyk, and Vijay.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea. But I don’t see it working for the log haul.