There’s been a lot of speculation these past few weeks about the Tiger Woods in a spacesuit photos that have been surfacing. It turns out that they’re from the upcoming Gatorade advertising campaign. If you’ll recall, Tiger signed a $100 million deal to endorse Gatorade and develop his own Tigerade product.

You can see a clip of the ad below. I don’t have high hopes for the campaign. He looks incredibly silly in that suit.

It’s sort of a dream of mine to play golf on a course that has a well-run caddie program. Or actually, on a course that has any sort of caddies at all. Every course I’ve played eschews caddies in favor of golf carts. And from a financial standpoint, I don’t blame them. When you take on caddies as employees, you assume a massive obligation, including payroll taxes, workman’s compensation, and other liabilities.

Golf carts, on the other hand, are simply a revenue stream.

But I recently ran across a company called CaddieMaster that may help to alleviate some of that burden. CaddieMaster basically allows a course to “outsource” its caddie program. Caddiemaster handles recruitment, training, and management of caddies and caddie masters. It’s sort of like a caddie Administaff (a company which offers off-site human resources management for small busineses, and which Arnold Palmer endorses).

I love the idea, and hope that it brings caddies back to many, many courses. If there was a public course in my area that offered a good caddie program, I’d go out of my way to play.

Brandweek has an intriguing article on the new TaylorMade-Adidas television and print ad campaigns:

It’s all about performance. That is the driving message behind TaylorMade-adidas Golf’s multifaceted $35 million-plus ad push teeing off this month. The largest spend in company history, ads tout the performance aspect of new products from all golf product divisions: clubs, balls, footwear and apparel.

The article tells you a lot about the new spots, what TaylorMade-Adidas is pushing and the sort of image that the company wants to project.

The Player Who Is Without Peer says that the pace of play on the PGA Tour is too slow:

In a recent newsletter, Tiger Woods said: “It’s been an ongoing problem on the PGA Tour for some time. I honestly believe the pace of play is faster in Europe and Japan.”

Woods’ comments may have been prompted after he played against JB Holmes, who is known as one of the slower players on the PGA Tour. These comments also come in the wake of media reports blaming the decline in the number of golf rounds played on slow play.

I frankly don’t know why the US government has through several administrations put up with the Chinese government’s tolerance—even encouragement—of massive counterfeiting of intellectual property. They steal software, music, movies, books (there actually was a Chinese Harry Potter counterfeit), and yes, golf equipment.

An article in GolfWorld puts the value of the counterfeit golf products at $240 million or so, but the actual cost is more. Companies suffer from damaged reputations, and have to expend piles of cash protecting their name.

Legitimate sellers also take a hit on these. When counterfeiting becomes prevalent enough, the second hand market will entirely come under suspicion and dry up.

If the problem were just in golf, I might be able to understand why the US government chooses to ignore it. But every industry has been hit by these (primarily Chinese) criminals. And the economic damage is probably incalculable. Someone in Washington needs to develop a backbone and start standing up against the Chinese for US companies and citizens.