It’s a wonder no one has thought of this before: TaylorMade has turned one of the foul poles at the Padres’ Petco Field into a massive R11 driver. It’s 88 feet tall, and weights 950 pounds.

Natalie Gulbis was on hand for the ceremonies, and took some batting practice. Here’s what the Padres had to say:

The Padres announced Wednesday a partnership with the Carlsbad-based TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company, a unique enterprise that will be visibly present when the team begins a series against the Phillies on Thursday.

How unique and how visible?

Fans attending games at PETCO Park will see an 80-foot-high structure of TaylorMade’s new R11 driver affixed to the right-field foul pole, the first structure of its kind in the Major Leagues.

“I remember looking at the photograph thinking, ‘I don’t know how they’re going to pull this off,’” said Padres COO and team president Tom Garfinkel.

They did, though it took some work.

The two parties worked with Major League Baseball’s baseball operations team to ensure the design and installation of the R11 driver are in accordance with MLB guidelines—the foul pole is, of course, actually considered fair territory.

Also, Garfinkel said, all safety measures were taken as well to protect fans.

The structure, which is the first of its kind in Major League Baseball, weighs 950 pounds and the process of installation started on Monday and finished Wednesday with a total of 250 man hours needed to complete the project.

The redesigned foul pole will make its debut during the first game of a four-game series against the Phillies at 7:05 p.m. PT.

The shaft and grip of the R11 driver will run parallel to the existing foul pole. A 14-foot-wide by eight-foot-tall image of the R11’s white head will be displayed on the outfield wall.

“TaylorMade is a leading national brand, a thought leader based right here in San Diego,” Padres CEO and vice chairman Jeff Moorad said in a statement. “The Padres are proud to partner with yet another strong local company, and we are excited to showcase its presence at PETCO Park in such an innovative way.”

The three-year partnership between the Padres and TaylorMade will extend beyond the structure on the foul pole.

For every “drive”—when a Padres player hits a ball over the fence for a home run—TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company will donate $600 to a local charity.

“When we look at these new partnerships, we want to have an aspect of it that gives back to the community,” Garfinkel said. “We want something new for the fans ... and for it to have an element of San Diego in it, to celebrate San Diego.

“We also want to build awareness for the project and accomplish the business objective.”

For the Padres, projects like this add to their continued objective of building partnerships with local companies.

The Padres have added new local partners this season that include Frazee Paint, Torrey Pines Bank and Filippi’s Pizza Grotto to a roster of previously established local partners including PETCO, Sycuan, Jack-in-the-Box, San Diego County Credit Union and several others.

“We need the support of San Diego companies, and TaylorMade is a great example of that,” Garfinkel said.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again in case anyone is listening: I want to be the first teacher with a major sponsorship. Just imagine it. I’d wear Nike (or Adidas—or whomever) apparel every day, and put the company logo in the corner of every one of my powerpoint notes slides. It’s the new frontier of advertising.

In one of the stranger stories I’ve seen, Cleveland Golf has won a trademark infringement case against a website that blatantly advertised the fact that it was offering counterfeit clubs: http://www.copycatclubs.com. Cleveland also named and won a judgment against the web host and seo company, Bright Builders.

The site openly boasted: “Your one stop shop for the best copied golf clubs on the Internet.

The judgment included $770,750 in damages against Bright Builders and $28,250 in damages against the owner of copycatclubs, Christopher Prince. Note that the web host was ordered to pay far more than the guy who actually ran the site.

It seems unusual to me that the web host would be sued—after all, an office building owner typically is not responsible if one of the tenants commits a crime. The jury, however, apparently agreed with Cleveland lawyer Christopher Finnerty.

“The jury found that web hosts and SEO’s cannot rely solely on third parties to police their web sites and provide actual notice of counterfeit sales from the brand owners. Even prior to notification from a third party, Internet intermediaries must be proactive to stop infringing sales when they knew or should have known that these illegal sales were occurring through one of the web sites they host.”

Bright Builders apparently exposed themselves to liability because they helped Prince build the site, providing SEO services and helping him to get set up.

In any case, I think the precedent will be a bit of a game changer for web hosts. HostGator, for example, hosts five million sites. It’s inconceivable to me that they could monitor the activities of every site. I fear that the end result of this won’t be to discourage counterfeiting—there’s plenty of that beyond the reach of the US court system—but to drive up the costs of web hosting—and perhaps even drive more of them offshore.

Offers are in for Titleist and Footjoy—Fortune Brands’ golf units—but the identities of the bidders is as of yet unknown, according to a Reuters report. Speculation, however, names Adidas, Nike and perhaps Roger Cleveland Golf as well as several equity companies.

Srixon has been mentioned in previous reports as a possible bidder.

My money always has been on an out-of-the-box pick: Under Armour.

Loyal reader Martin has pointed out a story which he correctly says is so wrong that no one could possibly find for the complainants.

A group of investors who were bilked by the Stanford Financial Group’s ponzi scheme is suing the St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital to recover $7.5 million that Stanford donated to the institution. The same investors and their court-appointed receiver are also suing the PGA Tour for the $12.9 million that Stanford paid in 2007 and 2008 to sponsor a golf tournament to benefit the St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Further, the investors’ suit reserves the right to adjust the amount in the event that Stanford had donated money they don’t currently know about.

I find this absolutely unbelievable. I’m sorry that the investors didn’t do due diligence and, blinded by greed, invested in a financial firm which for a short while produced suspiciously outsized investment returns. But the act of suing the St. Jude Children’s Hospital proves that they are not only stupid enough to invest in such a firm, but also lacking anything resembling a soul. St. Jude’s is a world renowned institution which treats children with cancer at no cost to the families. It costs $1.6 million a day to do this. There’s no doubt in my mind that the $7.5 million has already been spent to save a child’s life.

Further, if a group of investors failed to see the Stanford fraud, then I don’t see how St. Jude’s could know any better. St. Jude’s accepted the money thinking the same thing the investors did: that Stanford was legit.

The investors group and receiver are claiming that the PGA received the money from Stanford without providing any services or anything of equivalent value. I suppose they think the same thing about St. Jude’s. But they’re wrong. The money bought good will and did a good deed, and in the end, that’s the only thing about Stanford worth remembering.

In 2010, the venerable Wilson Golf reported a double digit increase in sales. Golfweek has a nice short article on how they did it.

The Golf Blogging cognoscenti are abuzz with the news that Tiger’s Al Ruwaya design has been abandoned by its Dubai backers, and that the whole thing will be returned to the desert. If you follow the party line, its another sign of Tiger’s reversal of fortune.

But this one, at least, has nothing to do with Tiger. Instead, it has everything to do with the global recession and real estate metldown. Al Ruwaya, with its planned 100 villas, 75 mansions, 22 palaces, hotel, golf academy and 139,000 square foot clubhouse is not the only project that ambitions and oil rich nation has abandoned. More than two hundred real estate deals were cancelled last year. A planned one kilometer tall skyscraper lies half completed. Real estate prices, already 60% off peak, are expected to fall another ten percent in the next two years. Workers, engineers and architects are fleeing country so fast that at one point, more than 3,000 abandoned automobiles littered the Dubai airport.

Tiger may have at one point had magic powers on the golf course, but he doesn’t have that kind of apocalyptic voodoo.

I ran across an interesting article from Golf Course Industry Magazine reviewing the golfing weather from 2010. The upshot seems to be that we experienced some pretty wild effects of the periodic El Nino / La Nina cycle. But I found the most interesting bit at the end. In spite of a growing notion (at least among my acquaintances) that weather patterns have been more erratic of late, it actually seems that it’s calming down:

The Climate Extreme Index (CEI) is a value that accounts for extreme variation in weather from year to year and has been measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 1996. In 2010, the index value was 9 percent above normal, a confirmation that yes, the weather during the year did produce more extremes. The good news is that CEI values have been as high as 20 percent above normal back as recently as the late 90s and have been in a decline since.

Interesting.