As I was watching the Phoenix Open this past week, I realized that there has never been a better time to be a professional golf fan. Even as CBS and NBC were otherwise occupied, there still was more than enough coverage to satisfy the die hard aficionado.

The Golf Channel was of course the primary spear carrier for the week. As they do with nearly every tournament now, the cable network provided coverage of the Thursday and Friday rounds, once live and once on a replay later in the evening. Then, in the absence of regular network PGA Tour late round coverage, the Golf Channel stepped into the gap and covered the Phoenix Open on the weekend, too.

There’s been a lot of grousing about the quality of Golf Channel broadcasts (including more than a little by this writer), but they’re either getting better, or I’m getting used to it. I suppose it takes a while for any performer to find his “voice.” Whatever your opinion of The Golf Channel’s work, it’s worth remembering that just a couple of years ago, there was no coverage of the early rounds on any station. Nor would we likely have enjoyed full coverage in the face of a conflicting premiere sporting event.

ESPN also has stepped up its game, offering extended coverage of the Masters, the US Open and the Open Championship. TNT takes up the slack with the PGA Championship. Live streaming means that you can watch anywhere you have an internet connection (and that’s practically anywhere these days). Add to that TGC’s European Tour and LPGA coverage, and there has never been more golf on television.

Television is only half the story, though. PGA radio is available on Sirius/XM at all times of the day and night. The PGA Tour website offers a nifty shot tracker application which gives a graphical play-by-play of individual players and groups. Dozens of websites offer live leaderboard updates. Mobile apps bring scores and updates directly to my Blackberry.

Thanks to the web, I have access to the golf coverage of many hundreds of newspapers and “old media” columnists. I get to read Jim Bohannon or Doug Ferguson’s columns whenenever I wish, and not just when my local paper (actually, there is no local daily in Detroit any more) decides to syndicate one. I can read about golf in the New York Times, The Scotsman or The Hindu. Type “golf” in the search box on the Google News Page, and it returns thousands of up-to-date articles from around the globe.

And then there’s the “new” media. Twitter and Facebook let me get updates directly from players. The Tour broadcasts daily tournament highlights from YouTube. And that’s not to mention the opinion pieces written on the tens of thousands of golf blogs around the net.

It’s professional Tour overload. And I’m really enjoying it.

Donald Trump will host six half-hour episodes of a celebrity golf show on the Golf Channel starting April 16. The show will feature a variety of celebrities competing against each other on Trump courses for charity.

It’ll be called Donald J. Trump’s Fabulous World of Golf.

Not interested in celebrities. Not even if the Golf Channel somehow manages to improve its otherwise horrible production values.

What I would be interested in, on the other hand, is a return of something like Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, featuring pairings of stars from all the Tours. And maybe even some LPGA v PGA Tour or Euro matchups. Stick them on some beautifully classic courses, with some tight editing and a good announcer, and you’ve got a good show.

I like these messin’ with Sasquatch commercials.

Funnyman Steve Carell is set to appear in a film version of Rick Reilly’s Missing Links , a novel about a group of working class Bostonians who scheme to play at a tony country club.

There doesn’t appear to be any projected date.

This one has promise. At any rate, it has to be better than reruns of Happy Gilmore.

I was just enjoying the latest online edition of The Sporting News Today and thought I’d pass on a recommendation. With the demise of the daily papers in Detroit and Ann Arbor, TSNT has become the source of my daily sports fix. The online magazine covers all of the major sports, including golf and auto racing. Today’s edition has 37 pages on each of the BCS conferences, coverage of individual baseball and hockey games, college football and basketball, the NBA, the NHL, NASCAR, golf, soccer, boxing; plus stats, fantasy sports data and tips, interviews with players, and more.

The big golf story is about the struggles of last year’s FedEx Cup contenders in this year’s series.

Not a blog, or a website, TSNT is an actual magazine, rendered on the computer screen as a single page image. The Sporting News has done a good job adapting the magazine for the computer screen. It’s wider than it is tall, so an entire page fits on the computer screen—no scrolling. There also are no jumps, so readers don’t have to follow links back and forth. I can read the pages fine on my 20 inch monitor, but if you need to make it bigger, there’s a magnifying glass tool that very quickly blows up any section of the page.

The only downside is you need high bandwidth to download the pages in a reasonable time. You can also download an offline version for reading either as a pdf, or as an executable file that contains its own custom reader. And it’s available for both MAC and PC.

All in all, well done.

I just got home from my appearance on the Internet Advisor on The Great Voice of the Great Lakes - WJR 760 in Detroit. I talked about using the internet to turn a passion into a business. It was lots of fun, and I hope to get invited back at some point in the future. Here are a couple of photos. The first is of the studio, the second, an interior of the Fisher Building in Detroit.

It has nothing to do with golf, but as a political science/economics/history teacher, I just can’t let this one pass by. It’s being reported that Obama court nominee Sonia Sotomayer, if confirmed, would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice.

But the media is forgetting about Justice Benjamin Cardozo, who was on the court from 1932 to 1938. Depending upon your definition, Cardozo may very well have been the first Hispanic on the court

Cardozo was of Portuguese descent; his Jewish ancestors left the Iberian peninsula in the 1700s, presumably to escape persecution.

But are people of Portuguese descent Hispanic? That depends upon who you ask.

Historically, Hispanic refers to anyone from the Roman province of Hispania, which includes modern day Spain and Portugal.

The Census Bureau is not helpful in this definition, noting that people can self-identify themselves as Hispanic if their origin was ” Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or some other Hispanic origin.” In other words, you’re Hispanic if you say you are.

The Small Business Administration, the Department of Transportation and others are more specific: persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central or South American, or other Spanish or Portuguese culture or origin, regardless of race.

The independent Latin American Trade Council includes Portuguese in its definition of Hispanic.

Note that none of this is intended to diminish Sotomayer ... only the dimwitted and uninformed who report the “news.”