As a girls golf coach, I’m in favor of anything that promotes girls golf. Golfer Girl magazine is a new publication aimed at junior players. The 72 page first issue has a print run of 10,000.

Hayley Milbourn, on her way to winning her third straight Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association title, turned herself in for hitting a wrong ball and finished out of the competition.

She had a nine shot lead when finished her second and final round and did not discover the mistake until she was putting here equipment away.

“I could have [gotten away with it],” Milbourn said in a Baltimore Sun article. “But I would have been disgusted with myself if I would have just put the ball back in my bag and taken the trophy.”

I teach high school students and sometimes get frustrated with their general lack of morals. But stories like this give me hope for the future. Ms. Milbourn exemplifies the honor and integrity of the game of golf.

“I have a lot more golf to play,” Milbourn said. “This is not my last tournament in my life. It was just one tournament. It doesn’t define the rest of my life. I have a pretty heavy conscience, and that’s what led me to make the decision I did. It’s always good to do what your conscience tells you to do.”

I’m going to give that girl a GolfBlogger Good Golfing Award.

I missed this earlier, but Tom Lehman has been awarded the first Byron Nelson Prize. According to the prize’s website, the Byron Nelson Prize, will be presented to a person or organization in the golf world who exemplifies the ideals of “giving back” that Nelson personified. The Byron Nelson Prize recipient will receive a $100,000 contribution to the charity of their choice.

Lehman and his wife have raised millions for the Children’s Cancer Research Fund at the University of Minnesota.

A second program, the Byron Nelson International Junior Golf Awards, will start in 2008 and will focus on encouraging young golfers. Nelson was famous for his encouragement of juniors and young professionals. It’s been said that he wrote more than forty letters to a young Scott Verplank, who this year won Byron Nelson’s namesake tournament.  Nelson also brought Woods to this tournament as a 17-year-old amateur in 1993, Sergio Garcia made his U.S. professional debut in the 1999 tournament and Justin Leonard played twice as an amateur.

With the Byron Nelson Junior Golf Awards, junior golfers from around the world will be identified by an international panel of professional golfers and golf officials with the finalists invited to Dallas each year for the EDS Byron Nelson Championship.

There’s also a Byron Nelson Award which goes to top collegiate golfers for their success on the course, in the classroom and in the community.

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. 

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.