Bob Rosberg has a good column on the lost art of shotmaking in golf. As he points out, the new balls and clubs have nearly eliminated the kind of golf we saw in the fifties, sixties and seventies.

One of the things that I think has gone away in the modern game on Tour is shotmaking, the ability to hit different shots. The main reason is that you don’t need it anymore because, with the new dimple configurations, the ball gets up in the air so much easier.

When the ball gets up in the air, it tends not to curve as much. In fact, it’s kind of hard to curve the ball when you try to do it. That’s why you see so many guys just hit it straight and high. There are no low shots. You don’t see shots like Lee Trevino used to play.

In the Miami Herald, Jeff Shain writes that:

Ten years ago, prize money on the Tour—including the four major championships—averaged $1.4 million per event. Today, the average is $5.25 million and rising. The way the purse breaks down, approximately $1 million of that $5.25 million goes to the winner.

This is true whether Tiger shows up or doesn’t—which he didn’t at this year’s Honda, the last event of the Tour’s two-week swing through South Florida. He won the first South Florida event, the Ford Championship at Doral, last week, earning $990,000.

Shain credits the incredible popularity of Tiger Woods with the increase, but also writes of the sponsors’ very high level of satisfaction with the Tour in general:

In a 2003 Sports Business Journal survey of sponsor satisfaction, the PGA Tour ranked at the top of the list, ahead of both NASCAR and the NFL.

‘’Corporate America is behind our sport and we have a good TV product,’’ said Stewart Cink, a two-time winner last year. ``Even with those kinds of purses, it makes business sense.’’

In a column in the Salt Lake Tribune, Kirk Kragthorpe writes that the PGA Tour could learn a lot from NASCAR. He writes that with NASCAR,

Viewers can tune in every weekend, resuming a continuing story of the season. Fans can buy a ticket to next year’s UAW-Daimler Chrysler 400, knowing that Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the rest will all be back at LVMS.
That’s just not true with golf. The occasional convergence of stars is what makes major tournaments the majors, but the side effect is that too many weekly tournaments lose appeal because the top players are missing. Thanks to a combination of wanting to pursue points and please their sponsors, the walking billboards of NASCAR hit the road every week.

The NASCAR season is just as long as the PGA’s, but NASCAR’s top guns appear in nearly every race. Kragthorpe says that’s due to the weekly rewards of the points system and the demands of sponsors.

It’s food for thought. Could the PGA demand a minimum number of events to avoid a trip to Q School? 

One of the things that I find most unbelievable about the PGA Tour is how many of the players don’t know the rules. If I was out there playing on tour, you can bet I’d know the rules backward and forward. As I tell the players on my team: knowledge of the game can win matches.

It can also lose them. Briny Baird was DQ’d from the Honda Classic because he did not fully understand the new rules on lift, clean and place.

I think the most important rule for the hacker to remember has to do with your options when a ball goes into a hazard. Most people just drop the ball on the edge of the hazard where it went in.

But there are two other options: You can drop the ball anywhere behind that point keeping a straight line between the hole, the point where the ball crossed the margin of the water hazard; or, you can play again from where you hit the ball into the hazard.

These last two are useful if you have a preferred distance. Lets say that the water hazard is 60 yards from the green. Your shot from the edge of the hazard would be a tough three quarters swing from rough.

Instead, you could take the ball back along the line to a distance that you are sure of—say 100 yards. You might even be in the fairway.

If you already hit the ball from a preferred distance, you might just want to hit it again from that spot.

If its a lateral hazard, you also could drop within two club-lengths of the point where the ball crossed the margin of the hazard or a point on the opposite side of the hazard equidistant from the hole.

Again, you want to take the option that leaves you with the best lie at a distance that you are sure of.

Fifty years ago, on a handshake deal with Arnold Palmer, the late Mark McCormack launched IMG, the first of the super sports agencies. So what does Palmer think of IMG’s thinly-disguised appearance fee plan?

“They said that in the letter?” Palmer said Thursday. “Who wrote the letter? That’s a surprise. That is unreal. That’s terrible.”

A story on the King’s reaction appeared in the Orlando Sentinel.