Hey, Kobe! I'm open!

One of the many disappointments of Tiger Woods missing the next several tournaments is that we won't get to see a rematch of last year's Tiger Woods-Michael Jordan pairing that filled grandstands during the Wachovia pro-am as if it were a major and included gems like Jordan's mock fist-pump.

But really, is there any weirder event in pro sports than the pro-am?

I see the entertainment appeal of Bill Murray teeing it up with PGA Tour stars, and I get that pro-ams make a lot of money for the Tour, but Phil Mickelson playing with a couple of rich locals the Wednesday before a tournament is just bizarre. Imagine if Kobe Bryant had to play two-on-two with some fans before a Lakers game, or if the NFL asked Brett Favre to throw passes to a Green Bay bank president in a touch-football game at Lambeau Field.

Not that I'm against them—pro-ams are a good reminder that the pre-corporate Tour was more like a traveling carnival than the sober, solemn grind that plays out on my TV each weekend. But one thing is clear: a lot of pros don’t like playing in them. Watch the pros' faces as their amateur partners tee off: some of them could be extras in Day of the Living Dead.

So what do you think? Ban the pro-am and let players prepare for the main event, or save the pro-am as a vestige of a more laid-back (and maybe more fun) PGA Tour? Join the debate below.

(Photo: Chuck Burton/AP)

Grueling research on new shaft technology

I've been out doing research the last few days. You might call it playing golf, but I call it research. (That looks so much better on an expense report, trust me.)

I've wanted to follow up on what I thought was the most exciting innovation at this year's PGA Merchandise Show -- interchangeable shafts. TaylorMade sent me their Tour Van in a Box to try out. It came with the new r7 CGB Max driver head (9 degrees), three different shafts and a valuables pouch that includes assorted movable weights and a tool that is used to change the weights and shafts.

We've seen some pretty garish driver heads in the last two years, but the CGB Max isn't one of them. It does have a stretched triangular look, which doesn't seem nearly as outlandish now as it did a year ago, and the head is painted in a sparkling burgundy color -- really good looking.

I haven't been a big fan of the wave of big-headed, big-MOI drivers that came out in '07. At least, I haven't found anything I liked better than what I had been using. And club evaluation, of course, is all about how it affects me and my game. Now I have to change my mind. It's a loaner that I have to send back, otherwise the CGB Max would likely be finding a permanent home in my bag. I was surprised how well I hit it (all those bad memories from last year's big-headed driver show still lingered).

I was also surprised by the shafts. The three choices are a 65-gram Mitsubishi Diamana, a 55-gram Matrix Ozik and a 75-gram Fujikura Rombax. The different shafts are supposed to produce different ball flights for different playing conditions or courses.

I was really looking forward to trying them out on the range at my home course near Pittsburgh, Treesdale. The funny thing was, I didn't see much difference in my shots. I hit all three shafts well and with more or less similar flight trajectories. FYI, I'm close to a scratch golfer but I do it with what could best be called a caddie-yard swing. My point is, I was expecting to see dramatic differences between the three and I didn't.

I'm not even sure which shaft I hit the best. They were all pretty good. The shaft on my previous driver was a 55-gram model, and the one I'm using right now has a 65-gram shaft. I could use any of these three shafts and be happy. Now, I'm sure if I'd been hooked up to a launch monitor, the numbers would be different and it would be easier to figure out which shaft is optimal for my game.

But I didn't have a chance to do that, and it's time to put it all in the box and send it back to TaylorMade. I still love the concept, and just so you know, I'll be going back to Treesdale, bumming a demo model off my pro and doing further, ahem, research for you.

20-somethings raid Ryder rankings

Conventional wisdom has it that experience trumps youth when it comes time to make up a Ryder Cup roster, but it may be time to rethink that old chestnut given recent Cup mismatches and the current streak of solid play by American 20-somethings

Ryan Moore, 25, did most everything right in losing a three-hole playoff to Adam Scott at the EDS Byron Nelson on Sunday. At 23rd on the Ryder Cup points list, Moore still has a way to go to make the team on points (top eight) or as one of captain Paul Azinger's wildcard picks, but he's got plenty of time to keep rising up the ranks. What's more, a handful of his contemporaries are also knocking on the door.

Sean O'Hair, 25, won the PODS Championship last month and is at 10th on the points list.

J.B. Holmes, who turned 26 last weekend, won the FBR Open and nearly beat Tiger Woods at the WGC-Accenture and has risen to 13th. (A Kentuckian, he's the most likely to get a captain's pick for Valhalla.)

Brandt Snedeker (above), 27, fought bravely at the Masters and is at 9th. D.J. Trahan, also 27, won the Hope and is at 14th. Hunter Mahan, 25, played well in last fall's Presidents Cup and is at 15th. Johnson Wagner, 28, nabbed his first Tour win in Houston and is at 18th.

Not long ago we were decrying the paucity of good young American golfers. There were no players in their 20s on the 2006 squad, and only one, Woods, made the 2004 lineup (with, ahem, mid-century clubbers Fred Funk and Jay Haas). Given that both of those outfits lost by the same score, 18 1/2 to 9 1/2, Azinger should take comfort in selecting from the current crop of untested, untamed youth. He can't do much worse.

(Photo: Harry How/Getty Images)

Who needs golf instruction? Not Ryan Moore

A compelling subplot of yesterday’s sudden-death playoff between Adam Scott (he of Burberry-styled perfection) and Ryan Moore (he of guerilla-militant chic) was the dichotomy of the players’ swings. Scott’s is a thing of beauty—pure, powerful, straight off the factory line. Moore’s is a thing of, well, intrigue—upright, a little jerky, the kind of move you might find at your muni, only with better results.

God bless Moore for that. He gives us all hope. I met Moore early in 2006, his rookie season, and he explained his homespun swing like this:

“I’ve talked to swing coaches, but I don’t know if working with one is something I ever want to do. I know how to fix my swing for the most part, even in the middle of a round. That’s why I think it can be so good. I can think of multiple tournaments in the last few years where in the first four or five holes, my swing just hasn’t felt right. If I had gone to an instructor and been put into all these positions and shown this or that, I don’t know if I would’ve known how to fix it after five holes.”

Moore’s take on putting was even more refreshing:

“I rarely ever crouch down and read a putt. I usually stand up and read it because I can make putts all day long on the putting green by just looking at it and hitting it. It’s just kind of my theory. I’d say 90 percent of people make more putts on the putting green than they do on the golf course. On the course, they’re out there reading it from six different directions and crouching down, but, me, I just look at it and knock it in.”

Camilo, you listening?

(Photo: Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)

Arboreal Top Ten

AVENTURA, Fla. -- I promised yesterday to come up with a Top Ten list of my favorite golf trees, so here goes:

10. Coconut palms. How can you not love a course lined with the snowbird's favorite tree? Even better: they're so skinny that they're hard to hit.

9. Redwoods. You don't want more than a few of these forest titans on your golf course, because turfgrass needs sunlight to grow. But if you want a Hansel-and-Gretel golfing experience, check out the Alister MacKenzie-designed 9-hole Northwood Golf Course in Monte Rio, Calif.

8.  Figs. The fruit cookies may be tiny, but these trees are immense with above-ground roots that resemble poured concrete. The figs I've seen on Australian courses are so big you could build fairway condos in their branches.

7.  Lombardy poplars. Well, it's a poplarity contest, isn't it? These tall, column-shaped trees are tres European, and they're typically planted in rows to separate fairways or decorate course boundaries. I like the lombardies at Saint-Nom-La-Breteche, outside Paris.

6.  Eucalypti. Tall, elegant, and they've got that cool, shaggy bark. Don't call them "junk trees" in my presence.

5.  Hospitality oaks. That's my name for those big-ass trees that people gather under at major championships. The best example is the giant oak behind the clubhouse at Augusta National -- known to Masters-goers as "The Tree" -- but I'm just as fond of the venerable oak behind the 18th green at Sunningdale, outside London.

4. Cottonwoods. These big shade trees grow along rivers and streams in Kansas. At Prairie Dunes, one of my favorite courses, sprawling cottonwoods provide stunning backdrops to the links-style holes.

3. Corks. I thought "put a cork in it" was just an expression until I walked the fairways of Valderrama in San Roque, Spain. The big, twisted trees and tumbling terrain made the 2002 Ryder Cup an aesthetic, if not an American, triumph.

2. Banyans. They're actually a variety of fig -- see No. 8 above and my previous posting. Banyans are safe climbing trees, which gives your kids something to do if you've dragged them to the Stanford International Pro-Am against their will.

1. Cypresses. If the most beautiful golf course in the world is called Cypress Point, doesn't that say it all? These trees are so dramatic that they look just as good DEAD.

If you want my pick for Lifetime Achievement Award, tree division, it's the giant mango tree on the Nadi Airport Golf Course in Nadi, Fiji. That's the tree that Vijay Singh practiced under as a boy.

Unfortunately, Vijay's mango couldn't be here today, but accepting the award on its behalf ….

No, I guess not.

LPGA caught in slow motion

AVENTURA, FLA. -- I have been asked by viewers of the Stanford Invitational Pro-Am to explain why it is taking the ladies and their amateur partners six hours or more to get around the two courses at the Turnberry Isle Resort.

The answer is simple: The courses are too hard.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the Fairmont hotel chain gave Hall of Fame golfer Raymond Floyd $30 million to completely rebuild the resort’s two Robert Trent Jones Sr. courses. Floyd spent most of the money well -- the new Soffer and Miller courses are challenging, visually appealing and beautifully groomed –- and he spent some of it foolishly. (A 64-foot waterfall in Florida?) But in plowing up Jones’s wide fairways and big greens, Floyd might as well have drawn a line through the word “resort.” The new holes have enough water on them to keep Venice in gondolas for a decade, and the greens are Donald Ross specials –- tiny, humpbacked, and ball-a-phobic.

Throw in the gusty winds of the last two days –- Wind! In Florida! –- and you have conditions that only a handful of pros can cope with, much less the amateurs. Balls land on the rock-hard greens and roll off into shaved chipping areas, leaving the yippy ams to negotiate their least-favorite shot.

The pros, I might add, are more to blame than the amateurs for the snail-like pace. But who can blame them? Annika & Company are playing for a $2 million purse. So, yeah, they’re going to fuss over every downhill chip and two-foot putt like a mother cat with a litter of kittens.

Next year they might want to play the first two rounds at Melreese, the daily-fee course out by Miami International Airport. Melreese isn’t as pretty as Turnberry Isle, but you can usually complete a round in five hours or less.

I’d say more, but I’ve got to go. There’s a rumor that Stephanie Louden just gave birth on the 13th tee.   

Arbor Day Alert -- Tree Sighting at Aventura

AVENTURA, FLA. – I’ve found a new tree.

A few weeks ago, I extolled the virtues of the eucalyptus trees that line the fairways of the Mission Hills Tournament Course in Rancho Mirage, Calif. I even let slip that I sometimes lie down under a certain tree during the Kraft Nabisco Championship, let my cap slip down over my eyes, and practice rhythmic breathing to a mantra taught me by a Coachella Valley mystic. (It goes, “Zzzzzzzzz … Zzzzzzzz …,” etc.)

Anyway, I was out this afternoon walking the Soffer Course at the Turnberry Isle Resort & Club, when a banyan tree to the side of the 18th fairway caught my eye. Banyan trees, if you’re not from Florida (or Maui or India) are the craziest, most wonderful shade trees in the world. They grow by dropping new roots from their limbs to the ground, and over time those root bundles become new trunks, so that after a century or so you’ve got a tree as wide as a football field with cave-like spaces between the trunks and horizontal limbs big enough to host parties on.

The banyan tree on 18 is still a pup, but it’s already 20 feet high, and its canopy is impenetrable; I’m guessing it can shade 50 adults at a time. Best of all, my tree is directly behind the lay-up area on the island-green par-5, affording spectators at the Stanford Invitational Pro-Am a perfect view of Annika Sorenstam and Paula Creamer as they hit their wedges to the flag. (Or the amateurs as they skull their fairway woods into the water.)

The only shortcoming of banyan trees, aside from the fact that they soak up water like a sponge, is that you can’t grow grass under them. The greenskeeper at Turnberry Isle has dealt with this by putting a waste bunker around my tree. It looks good. But if I wanted to sleep on packed sand and gravel, I’d go to the beach.

Tomorrow, in continued observance of Arbor Day, I’ll share my Top 10 list of golf course trees.

French accent on Ryder Cup team could help U.S.

American golf fans are looking forward to this year’s Ryder Cup the same way a PETA supporter looks forward to a pig roast: that is, we know it’s going to make us sick.

After the Dublin drubbing in 2006, the Michigan mauling in 2004, and the Belfry bell-ringing in 2002, the Ryder Cup is not even a contest anymore. We are the Cubs. We are the Washington Generals. We are Charlie Brown.

This year, Valhalla looks like more of the same. Sure, U.S. captain Paul Azinger will add a little edge to this year’s proceedings (he’s already called Europe captain Nick Faldo a “p---k”—he later said he meant it in a good way). But unless Sergio Garcia has a hair-styling accident or the Europeans do something incredibly stupid like leave Colin Montgomerie off the team, it’s hard to imagine any other result than blue flags across the leaderboard.

But take heart, American golf fans, we may have a secret weapon this year: the French.

That’s right, according to a story in the Welsh newspaper The Western Mail, this year’s European team may include a Frenchman:

France’s Raphael Jacquelin, in Shanghai this week to defend his BMW Asian Open title, believes that the French boys are again making waves following victories by Thomas Levet at last month’s Andalucia Open and Gregory Bourdy in the Portuguese Open the following week.

“It is not a big surprise as the French group is improving a lot. We are all working hard to compete at the top in Europe and maybe later the top of the world,” said Jacquelin. “Maybe we will see a French player in the Ryder Cup team at the end of the year.”

Hmmmmm. So the unbeatable Euros who make so much of their camaraderie may add a player from a country known mainly for mime and British Open collapses. Sounds like a surrender monkey wrench in the works.

Will Faldo pick Monty? Cue the Ryder Cup drama

At Colin Montgomerie’s wedding last weekend, a story surfaced about the day Monty asked his bride-to-be, Gaynor Knowles, if she’d like to attend the Ryder Cup. “This Ryder Cup,” replied Knowles, who reportedly didn’t know Monty was a golfer when the two first met. “Is it a big thing?”

Cute story. But the hard truth facing Sir Monty, the most dominant Ryder Cupper of his era, is much grimmer. Winless since last July and with just two top 10s in 2008, Monty has slipped to 30th on the European Ryder Cup Points List and 47th on the European Ryder Cup World Points List (the top five from each ranking get automatic bids).

If Monty’s listless play continues, he will leave European captain Nick Faldo in a pickle: select the slumping, aging Montgomerie as one his two captain’s picks or pass on a guy who in eight straight Ryder Cup appearances is 20-9-7 with a sparkling 6-0-2 singles record.

There are a couple other delicious dynamics at work here:

First, with 23.5 career Ryder Cup points, Monty is just 1.5 points behind the all-time mark of—wait for it—Capt. Faldo. Which means if Faldo wants to preserve his record (and we can assume this is Monty’s last realistic shot at making the team as a player), Faldo’s in position to do just that.

Second, Monty and Faldo have had their moments, most recently at last fall’s Seve Trophy, where Faldo captained the Great Britain and Ireland squad. “Monty’s a tough one,” Faldo told the London Times. “He was the only one whose emotions I had to deal with. He only came to two of the five team meetings, so that was disappointing.

"Then he had to be teased out on to the 18th green to support his team. The bottom line was he hadn’t won a point."

Whatever happens, the pending episode promises more drama than a David Caruso cameo on Desperate Housewives. Monty and Faldo are both prickly, iron-willed egoists who are quick to speak their minds—and you can bet they will as Faldo prepares to announce his picks on Aug. 31.

Cue the fireworks.

(Photo: Kieran Dodds/AFP/Getty Images)

Will the Nelson ever be full again?

Time was you couldn't walk two steps at the EDS Byron Nelson Championship without bumping into a big name. Tiger Woods. Phil Mickelson. Vijay Singh. Ernie Els. They all came to bow at the altar of Lord Byron, even if the greens were crusty. Now Byron is gone, and so are the PGA Tour's headliners, giving a once-powerhouse tournament a second-class feel. Only one player ranked in the top 10 (Adam Scott) is taking divots this week at the TPC Four Seasons at Las Colinas, and he decided to enter the tournament at the last minute. The Salesmanship Club of Dallas, which puts on the event, is doing everything it can to lure the big names back -- a $10 million course redesign that was spearheaded by D.A. Weibring, a Cadillac for the winning caddie, concerts at the course in the evenings -- but will it be enough in a PGA Tour calendar rife with top flight events?

There are several points working against the Nelson. The event's patriarch, who once picked up Retief Goosen at the airport and who liked to scribble notes to players, is gone. The tournament is in a tough part of the year, two weeks after the Masters and a week before the popular double of Wachovia and the Players Championship. Then there's Woods, who has a tendency not to return to events once he's eliminated them from his personal rota (see Beach, Pebble).

In reaching a long-term deal with its title sponsor, the tournament hopes to move its dates in future years, which could ultimately help bring back the game's top players. But perks and dates and prize money can only do so much. The bottom line for most players is, do they like the golf course? Does it test them? Is it pretty? The early reviews of Weibring's handiwork have been positive. The greens roll nicer and the course looks better. To finicky independent contractors, that matters. After all, while the players enjoy the Mercedes courtesy cars and the shopping excursions at the Wachovia, it is the challenge, purity and beauty of the Quail Hollow Club that keeps them coming back.