In 2009, Lee Westwood made waves when he topped the European Tour's money list and was named European Tour Golfer of the Year. In 2010, he finished runner-up twice at major tournaments and overtook Tiger Woods's ranking as number one golfer in the world. Following that trend, 2011 looked to be a big year for Britain's biggest talent, but he has since dropped to third in the world. Speaking with John Huggan, Westwood aired out some of his frustrations with his play this season.

“It’s been a pretty good season, but not in comparison with the previous two. My major championship performances, for example, were generally OK this year. But I never really had a chance of victory. In 2009 and 2010 I had chances to win nearly all of them. So following that was always going to be tough."

"Away from the majors I’ve won three times this year. That’s not an unsuccessful year. But I have to acknowledge the fact that I’ve gone from number one in the world to number three. So that’s a step back even if my game is, all around, better than it was a year ago. The common theme to my putting this year was that they weren’t going in. I had a poor pace and direction to my stroke, both of which I’ve been working on with Phil Kenyon.”

Taking up PGA Tour membership for the first time since 2008, the former world No. 1 believes playing more in America will increase his chances to grab that elusive major title.

“Playing more in America can only help me get used to that style of golf. With three of the majors over there, that could be important.”

“The majors are obviously a big motivation for me. I haven’t won one yet and I would like to. They are the starting points for my schedule. Everything else has to fit in with what I think will be the best preparation for them. I’ve played in more than 50 of them so I know what to do in order not to put extra pressure on myself."

Another thing Westwood knows how to do? Dance. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until his playing days are over before you see him cut a rug on "Strictly Come Dancing" (the original BBC show that spawned "Dancing With the Stars").

“In retirement I’d love to have a go,” confirms the man from Worksop. “My Nan and Grandad used to run an old-time dance school, so I did do a bit when I was a little boy. I was even ‘highly commended’ in a couple of dances: the Lilac Waltz and the Boston Two-Step. And I’ve still got the medals to prove it.

“We’re talking 30 years ago mind. So it’s been a while since I slipped on my patent dancing shoes. I’m a bit out of practice. But I’d have a fair idea going in. Although I’m not too sure how I’d look in those tight sequined outfits. I think I’d have to lose some weight. And the fake tan? I’d have to get the hair-removing cream out first!”

Tseng wins—again

Yani Tseng once again showed us that she is the most dominant force in golf right now, notching win number 12 at the Swinging Skirts Invitational in her home country of Taiwan.  According to the Taipei Times, Tseng posted a final round four-under 68 in cold and rainy conditions to win the tournament by seven strokes, besting the likes of Na Yeon Choi, Suzann Pettersen, Paula Creamer, Cristie Kerr and Stacy Lewis.

“I’m very satisfied and happy,” Tseng said after winning the title. “I played steadily and I felt really great.”

“Seeing so many people to cheer for me in such poor weather really touched me. The fans’ support means a lot to me, pushing me forward.”

To express her gratitude, Tseng handed out “hot hands” to fans during the tournament’s final two days to help them keep their hands warm.

Yani’s win pushes her winnings this year to more than $3.4 million, though she said she was happier with the number of wins than the prize money she earned.

Tweet of the Day

Just finished my history final...this is how i feel right now --> youtube.com/watch?v=rnI0mH… #pandadougie

— Michelle Wie (@themichellewie) December 12, 2011

Thanksgiving Tweets
Plenty of golfers gave thanks via Twitter for their blessings on Thursday. Here are three of the most unique messages.

The Prince's New Clothes
Chubby Chandler (@chubby6665) is Darren Clarke's (@DarrenClarke60) agent and close friend. Why he chose to take a photo of Clarke, whose nickname is The Prince, we don't know, but Christina Kim (@TheCristinaKim) seemed to like it.

Johnson fishes big too
Dustin Johnson (@DJohnsonPGA) is known for being one of the biggest hitters in golf. Looks like he's a big hitter on the high seas too. 

Ian's injury
Luckily for Ian Poulter (@IanJamesPoulter), his sunglasses will probably hide his shaving mishap. 

Major opportunity
When it's off-season for golfers, they tend to hit the slopes or the beaches, but when tennis star Andy Roddick's season is over, he heads to the course. A very nice course.  

After stealing a stash of Rolexes from a Long Island jewelry store and crashing a Cadillac Escalade into a guardrail on the Long Island Expressway, three of the five armed thieves took their getaway chase to the Village Club of Lake Success. Selim Algar and Kieran Crowley have the story:

As one golfer was preparing his fifth hole tee shot, one of the desperados suddenly hopped into his golf cart. 

The carjacker coyly delivered the line “enjoy the show” before puttering away, according to witness George Shores.

Unwilling to let the thug get away with his clubs, the golfer flagged down another hacker who was cruising by—and the duffers set off on a low-speed chase across the links.

The cart-thief eventually made his escape after abandoning the golf cart near the fifth hole where he hopped a fence. His two accomplices were not so lucky.

The golfers then watched in disbelief as another man in a white tank top suddenly emerged from the aptly named Lake Surprise at the course’s periphery.

“We asked the guy what he was doing,” Shores said. “He told us he was going for a swim and then took off running.”

The golfers gave chase to the second culprit who was apprehended by police shortly thereafter.

“There were three cartfuls of people chasing him at one point,” Shores said.

The third burglar was caught by police near the eighth hole and two others were arrested in Queens. Witness Shores said he was happy to aid in the capture of the thieves, but the timing of the incident was less than ideal.

“I was two under at the time,” he said.

Documentary on Trump's Scotland golf course wins award

Scottish filmmaker Anthony Baxter's documentary "You've Been Trumped" made its stateside premier over the weekend at the Hamptons International Film Festival, where it received the Victor Rabinowitz and Joanne Grant Award for Special Justice. According to IMDB, the documentary chronicles “a group of proud Scottish homeowners” as they “take on celebrity tycoon Donald Trump as he buys up one of Scotland’s last wilderness areas to a build a golf resort." 

Jeff Quinney critical of Luke Donald and Webb Simpson's Disney money grab

The majority of the golf world has reveled in the Luke Donald and Webb Simpson race for the PGA Tour money title, which will be decided at the season-ending Children's Miracle Network Classic in Orlando this week. However, tour player Jeff Quinney, speaking from the 204th spot on the money list, is less than thrilled with the inclusion of the world's No. 1 and No. 12 at Disney, tweeting his displeasure:

“5 million is not enough? Do you guys really need to play?”

Tweet of the Day

Special Delivery
Before the start of the Solheim Cup last week, Suzann Pettersen (@suzannpettersen) and Michelle Wie (@themichellewie) showed how they were putting their faces on the event.

Azinger still believes in Tiger
In an interview with Golf Magazine, Greg Norman said he thinks Tiger Woods will not win another major championship. Paul Azinger (@PaulAzinger) clearly disagrees.

Woods and Westy banter on footwear
Since he was not playing in the Tour Championship last week at East Lake, Tiger Woods (@TigerWoods) had a chance to be filmed wearing his prototype Nike footwear. Lee Westwood (@WestwoodLee) couldn't resist needling the former top-ranked player ... who surprisingly answered Westwood's wit with some of his own!

Basking in the glow
Ian Poulter (@ianjamespoulter), another player who didn't qualify for the Tour Championship, took his family on a vacation to the Bahamas last weekend. It didn't appear he was too heartbroken about not being in Atlanta.

Let him rephrase that
Stewart Cink (@stewartcink) loves his barbecue and last week helped the Women's Club of Sugarloaf prepare for a charity cookoff. Apparently there was an awkward moment during a meeting.

Faldo's instant course
Nick Faldo (@TheSirNickFaldo) spent most of last week in Vietnam and shared many of the sights with his followers on Twitter, including these before-and-after photos that show the work his golf course design company had done.

Reactions to Haas's amazing shot
It seems like golfer writers aren't the only ones who watch tournaments and tweet. After Bill Haas pitched his ball from the lake on the 17th hole to within three feet in his playoff against Hunter Mahan, golf tweeters started typing.

It must be tough getting in 18 when you’re president of the United States. President Obama, who famously went directly from the golf course to the White House situation room the day Osama Bin Laden was killed, didn’t finish his vacation round on Martha’s Vineyard on Sunday either, according to CBS News.

Next stop: the Vineyard Golf Club, a private course whose website boasts it to be "the most environmentally sensitive golf club in the world." Joining the President were White House Trip Director Marvin Nicholson, long-time friend Dr. Eric Whitaker, and UBS America Chairman Robert Wolf.

The foursome played "more than 9 holes, but less than 18" in under 4 hours, falling short of a full round on what is described as a "completely organic" course.

Michelle Wie defends college decision against Sorenstam, Cal students  
Not many Stanford students are put in the position of having to defend their choice of college, but Michelle Wie has always been a special case.

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Wie responded to criticism from Annika Sorenstem, who recently questioned her focus, and talked about her decision to choose school over full-time professional golf.

"I'm making my own decisions, though, and going to Stanford was something I needed to do for myself. It was not a decision made for my golf career, it was really solely a decision I made. It's been one of the first things in my life I did for myself."

Wie added that college also helped the one-time phenom have a sense of normalcy in her life.

"Growing up in the spotlight, playing tournaments when I was 12, I grew up a lot faster than maybe I had to," Wie said. "Going to college helped me be a normal 18-year-old and that was something I needed. I could keep training, but I needed something more to help me be well-rounded.

"I dreamed all my life about going to Stanford. My grandpa was a visiting professor; both my aunt and uncle went to Stanford. My dad, he didn't get into Stanford so that was kind of a competitive thing for me. I've been obsessing about going there since I was 4. It was never an option for me to not go to school."

Who is the best player to have only won one major?
Forget the best player without a major. Scott Michaux of The Augusta Chronicle came up with a creative idea for a column in the post-PGA Championship, pre-FedEx Cup doldrums last weekend: Who is the player with one major who is most likely to become a multiple major winner?

After noting that Tiger Woods is the only multiple major winner under 40 (save for Padraig Harrington, who turns 40 on August 31), Michaux divides the contenders into probables, possibles, improbables and impossibles. Rory McIlroy is the leader, of course. I don’t want to give too much away, but Keegan Bradley is six spots ahead of Louis Oosthuizen. What a difference a year makes.

Tweet of the Day
From Steve Elkington’s entertaining series of Old School/New School tweets...

Who wins first? Mickelson or Woods?
—Mark Potts

Will either Vijay Singh or David Duval win a regular PGA event before Tiger Woods?
—Mike

So it has come to this: Tiger has now sunk to David Duval territory. Maybe lower; Duval's swing actually looks pretty good these days. Mickelson played beautifully in San Diego and was pretty solid in Pebble. I expect him to win before Woods. I also expect the big Fijian to get a W before either of them. Vijay's a Florida guy and his game appears to be peaking. Yes, these are crazy times in golf.

Going off last year's British Open and the recent event in Dubai, it seems that high winds disproportionately punish the very best players. Tiger's best round was when he had an 8 a.m. tee time. McIlroy's best round was when he teed off even earlier — yet when they rose to the top of the leaderboard the late tee times put them right in the face of the worst of the wind. This allowed the rest of the pack — who now had the benefit of an earlier tee time — to catch up. It seems fitting that Quiros — the guy who knows least about where his ball is going — should get lucky and win. However I don't believe it makes for good golf.
— David Crowe

Unless pro golf goes to shotgun starts, the early starts are usually going to have better conditions: smoother greens, less wind, fairways with fewer divots, more sober fans. Playing late on Sunday afternoon is full of challenges and hassles. That's why winning is so difficult, and venerated.

It's been my contention that Michelle Wie would benefit from getting just a little pissed off. With so much talent, she just comes across as so willing to accept her top 5s over and over again. Sure, she looks whiny and put-upon sometimes when things don't go her way, but that's not the same as getting angry, and I swear she would benefit from that. What do you think?
—Mark Limbaugh

Yes, I too would like to see Wie play with more passion and emotion. It was a joy to watch her at the last Solheim Cup when she let it all hang out, and it's not a coincidence that she played some of the best golf of her career that week. I don't think Wie is a natural competitor, like a Juli Inkster or Karrie Webb. Those players don't just want to win, they want to beat you, too. Wie is almost too smart for her own good. She's a perfectionist for whom golf is an intellectual exercise. She wants to hit every shot perfectly, and a lot of her satisfaction comes from mastering the execution, not necessarily the ensuing result. I'd like to see her more focused on getting the ball in the hole and taking down the other players. A little anger might help.

Why does every single article that refers to Vijay Singh inevitably refer to him as "the big Fijian" in the second paragraph? It's not a particularly clever nickname — is it laziness on the part of the writers or is that just the nicest thing they can think of to call him?
—Joe

You mean like in my answer to the first question? No, it's not clever, but it is fun to type. And let's face it, it's hard to come up with colorful things to write about Vijay.

The 17th of May, we'll know where the Ryder Cup 2018 will take place. Your choice among candidates and why?
—Yannick Cochennec

Six countries ostensibly are in the running: France, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. None of the would-be host courses are anything like classics. (Madrid would be the host city, a long way from Valderrama.) Anyway, I'm not too worried about the course. In stroke play, the playing field is paramount. Match play is all about beating the other guy and the nuances of the course recede into the background. After the rain-soaked debacle in Wales weather has to be a factor. As much as I like blondes, that's a strike against Holland, Sweden and Germany. Portugal and France are swell places to visit but they don't have strong golfing traditions. The '97 Ryder Cup was probably the most spirited I've ever attended. Seve and Jose Maria defined the European team's duende for two decades. And Madrid is one of my favorite cities in the world. So, Spain gets my highly idiosyncratic vote.

Why, when discussing Tiger's swing change(s), don't the SI, Golf.com analysts and others report that one of the main reasons for the swing changes may be the four operations on his left knee? It seems there is a strong effort to relieve the pressure on the knee, especially when the swing speed is about 120 miles an hour.
— Fran Fanucci

I think Tiger has made this point himself a number of times. But in general I don't feel like there is enough focus on the wear and tear on Tiger's body. I was the ghost-writer for Harrison Frazar's piece in the recent Golf Plus standalone. Harrison is 39 and after four surgeries and dozens of cortisone shots he's contemplating retirement in part because of the physical toll of playing golf for a living. Tiger is an old 35, a range rat since the days of "The Mike Douglas Show." After four surgeries on his knee and a blown-out Achilles you have to wonder how much more his body can take. Woods is too talented and too dedicated not to master his recent swing changes. But I think whether he makes it to the top of Mt. Nicklaus depends largely on how healthy he is going forward.

(Photo: Fred Vuich/SI)

Tweet

Steve Marino fell just short of his first PGA Tour win on Sunday, but Ferd Lewis at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser said Marino has Michelle Wie to thank for helping him settle into the pressures of playing golf at the highest level. Back in 2007, Marino, a rookie just out of Q-school, was paired with Wie at the Sony Open.

It was an experience that, at the time, he had compared to being "kind of thrown into the lion's den."

But for all his trepidation and taut nerves, Marino not only survived it, finishing in a tie for 34th, but won points with the gallery for the aplomb with which he handled the pairing. He joked with her, encouraged her and, in the process, steadied his own nerves.

Looking back, Marino was able to say, "In a way I think that actually helped me, my first event on the PGA Tour, getting paired with Michelle Wie. There were so many people around, I think it was good for me to experience something like that right off the bat, and it gave me some confidence to realize that I handled it well and I made the cut and I didn't get overwhelmed by the situation. So, yeah, I think it was definitely a good thing for me. That was a big confidence booster for me."

Harrington keeps tinkering
This week's European Tour event in Abu Dhabi marks the debut for most of the top players in the world. It also marks the debut of Padraig Harrington's new swing, according to Brendan O’Brien at the Irish Examiner.

By his own reckoning, the man from Stackstown has made anything up to 20 nips and tucks over the last four weeks. Most of them are minor alterations and he couldn’t quite remember them all but he gave it a hell of a good old rattle.

Here’s just a taster…

He has changed his choice of grips, weakened his grip, lowered his hands on the club, altered his routine for practising putts and changed his ‘trigger’ which, for him, was two big ‘waggles’ before he hit his shot.

Of all his latest experiments, the trigger is the big one — a mental nuance rather than a physical one — a tricky procedure which other players have addressed with varying degrees of success in the past.

I'm not going to be an armchair swing instructor, but at 39, Harrington better hope his swing changes take hold fast. He's quickly running out of time while trying to fix a swing that was good enough to win three majors in two seasons.

But this little nugget from O’Brien should give Harrington fans hope that he can regain his major-championship form:

It was also interesting to hear Harrington say that, contrary to popular belief, he first began to pick at his game five years ago and not just after he won his third major in the space of 18 months, the 2008 US PGA Championship at Oakland Hills.

Clark on the DL?
We're only two weeks into the PGA Tour season and there are already several players dealing with injuries. Geoff Ogilvy cut his finger on a piece of coral and withdrew from Kapalua. Zach Johnson smashed his toe before the season opener. Now Golfweek's Alex Miceli reports Tim Clark, who tied for second at the Sony Open, might be out for this week's Bob Hope after dealing with a painful blister on his toe during Sunday's 36-hole marathon finish.

Clark, who shot 66-64 in the 36-hole finish at Waialae Country Club, was limping with a blister on his left little toe late Sunday while practicing on the range for a possible playoff. That didn’t happen, as Mark Wilson sealed his third PGA Tour victory with a 16-under 264 score in the rain-delayed Sony.

Clark plans to fly to La Quinta, Calif., site of the Hope, and then decide whether he can play.

Tweet of the Day

IanJamesPoulter: Just watching the Pats vs the Jets in the bar. I need to get into this football.

President Barack Obama is an enthusiastic golfer, playing close to 60 rounds since becoming president. However, he does not appear to be an especially fast-playing one. According to ABC News, Obama’s foursome played golf Sunday for more than five hours, but were not able to finish their round before sundown.

The president started his day as he has nearly everyday this vacation with an early morning workout at the Marine Corps Base close to his Kailua rental home.

Afterward the president played another round of golf at Luana Hills country club in Kailua. His golfing companions were friends from Hawaii and Chicago, Bobby Titcomb, Mike Ramos, and Marty Nesbitt.

The president did not get in 18 holes today, due to darkness setting in at sunset, although the group played for over five hours.

Michelle Wie heckled at car show
Jill Painter of The Los Angeles Daily News shares a telling anecdote of Michelle Wie’s graceful response to some gentle heckling at a recent autograph signing at a Los Angeles car show.

Michelle Wie was signing autographs for a recent car show with an ever-present smile for a never-ending line.

Some folks made small talk and offered congratulations on a fine season, some asked quick golf questions and others made bold moves by walking behind her table for photos. Parents pushed their shy children close to Wie for a picture.

Then one man deadpanned: "Shouldn't you be working on your putting?"

He wasn't joking at all, and Wie didn't reply in words. She simply responded by signing with a wry smile. He didn't rattle the LPGA star.

Remembering Billy Joe Patton
Ron Green Sr. of The Charlotte Observer files a colorful and loving obituary of amateur player and nearly 1954 Masters winner Billy Joe Patton, who died Saturday at age 88.

He came down out of the foothills of North Carolina, where he sold lumber for a living and played golf for fun. He had a name out of a country song, Billy Joe. He talked like Sheriff Andy Taylor. He played to a gallery like he was on a stage, gabbing away with the people between shots, and he was not above milking a little extra drama out of a trouble shot.

He had a homemade game with a backswing so fast it was nothing more than a steel blur. (Later in life, he said, "You can tell I'm gettin' old: You can see my backswing now.") It was a swing that often put him in close touch with the creatures of the forest, but he was a magical escape artist and he had a putter that was as good to him as a doting mother.

Tweet of the Day

@GaryVanSickle Caught last 15 of Golf Channel's new morning show. OMG. 2 reverential mentions of FedEx Cup chase. no such thing, especially on Jan. 3.

For Course and Country

Lee Westwood is the face of the European Tour, to the point that no one was surprised when he (yet again) turned down a PGA Tour card to continue playing across the pond in 2011. But the relationship between the Euro Tour and the world's newest No. 1 player is not all peaches and cream.

The Open and the BMW PGA Championship are the only two events being staged in England in 2011. Why?

“I can’t get my head around it. English golf has never been so strong, we have 10 world-class Englishmen and we should all be getting together and playing an English Open or a European Open in England, even if the European Tour has to fund it.

“If the Tour want me to be an ambassador for an English Open then I am quite happy to do that.”

To a certain extent I can understand Westwood's frustration. Between him, Paul Casey, Ian Poulter and Luke Donald, the English are having a major resurgence on the world stage, and there are very few tournaments to showcase them on their home soil. At the same time, Westwood is clearly barking up the wrong tree. Like any other business, the European Tour cares only about one thing: The Almighty Dollar Euro. Hopefully comments like this will get the attention of some of the island's heavy-hitting businesses--when the Tour hears the cash registers opening, that's when you'll see more golf in England.

Now on the tee: You

Have you ever had that dream where you step up to the first tee and find Tiger Woods waiting for you? It sounds like tournament organizers in the UAE are apparently ready to make that fantasy a reality for a very, very lucky golfer. From the European Tour:

"Organizers of the Omega Dubai Desert Classic are offering amateur golfers the chance of a lifetime to play alongside Tiger Woods during the Pro Am tournament at the Emirates Golf Club on February 9, 2011.

Amateur golfers holding a valid handicap may visit the tournament website – www.golfindubai.org – to register online for free. A draw will be held two weeks before the start of the European Tour event to pick the lucky winner, who will join Woods and two other amateurs in the Pro Am, the traditional curtain-raiser a day before the main competition. The winner will also receive two season ‘golf in DUBAI’ hospitality tickets."

I usually hate the phrase "chance of a lifetime," but I can't fault them for using it here. Obviously, Woods plays the pro am at every event he enters, but how often do John and Jane Doe have a chance to tee it up with one of the best players in the world?

There's no way to say how much control Woods or the tourney will exert over the contest, but it's hard to believe that "almost any" amateur is eligible. For example, are they going to let a golf writer like me go out there and pepper Tiger with questions for 3 hours? I guess there's only one way to find out...

Top Tweets

With the possible exceptions of V-groove wedges and that awesome fake golf club that you can pee into, Twitter has been the most surprisingly popular golf technology in ages. Sure it's popular with non-golfers too (or so I've heard), but it's amazing how PGA pros from Ian Poulter to Stewart Cink to Tiger Woods (OMG!) have taken to the internet's newest toy in order to stay in touch with their fans. To celebrate, Golf World has put together some of the best Tweets of the year. There's plenty of great ones, but for me nothing can beat the moment that Michelle Wie finally figured out why she left the entire press room chuckling at this year's U.S. Women's Open.

"sooooo i just found out phi beta kappa is an academic society NOT a sorority...oops."

The date is not yet settled for the 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles in Scotland, however, it will end in September, according to European Tour chief executive George O’Grady.

“It won't be later in the last week of September, anyway; in September, or earlier,” O’Grady said Sunday at the Euro Tour’s season-ending Dubai World Championship.

European Ryder Cup director Richard Hills said that the date was still being negotiated with the PGA of America, but that the rain-soaked 2010 Ryder Cup in Wales, which took place in early October, was a factor in getting an earlier date.

“That's still a work in progress with the PGA of America and the PGA Tour to try and secure an earlier date for the match,” Hills said. “I think they all saw what happened, and the request is being listened to, but it is still a work-in-progress as TV schedules are agreed on that side of the pond.”

The 2012 Ryder Cup will take place at Medinah Golf Club outside Chicago from Sept. 28-30.

Even God can’t hit John Daly’s 1-iron
John Daly had a good reason for his no-show during a practice round at the Australian Open on Monday: he didn’t have the right clubs. Peter Stone of The Sydney Morning Herald has the details:

...the reason Daly decided to stay in his hotel room was the delayed arrival of his favored one and two irons from the United States. Those two clubs are almost as extinct as the dodo for most tour pros, replaced by rescue/hybrid clubs that do pretty much the same job when it comes to distance without the skill required to play the one and two irons.

Australian Open organizer Tony Roosenburg was asked to explain why the slimmed-down American made an urgent call to TaylorMade in the US to provide him with the two required clubs. On Wednesday, Daly played just nine holes - the back nine, which a redesign of the course by Mike Clayton has left most exposed to the elements.

''The wind was brutal here on Wednesday and by the 12th hole [their third] he'd already decided that hybrid wasn't suited for this golf course and, after the game, he immediately organized for the one and two irons to be sent from the US," Roosenburg explained.

Tiger’s proposed Dubai course is bigger bomb than Ishtar
Tiger Woods announced his first course design in Dubai with great fanfare in 2008, but with the economic boomtown gone bust, Woods’s project is literally nowhere, according to The Guardian’s Lawrence Donegan, who took a drive out to the site last week:

Read the three-year-old press releases and gasp at the numbers. Fifty-five million square feet. Two hundred "residences" – £7m villas, £10m mansions and "palaces". A boutique hotel, a spa and a Michelin-starred restaurant. And then the centerpiece: the Al Ruwaya Golf Club. Eleven thousand imported trees; 22m cubic meters of earth to be moved; and 3m square feet of water. An 18-hole masterpiece hewn from the sand. All hail the winner of "best golf development" at the 2008 Arabian Properties Awards. Estimated total cost on completion: $1.1bn.

Now gasp at the tumbleweed reality on the morning of 27 November 2010, the first anniversary of the car crash that led to the world's richest and most famous athlete falling to earth. The Tiger Woods Dubai: a dust-bowl, an empty car park, an "Arabian palace" as real as a Hollywood film set.

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

Michelle Wie has turkey, back rehab for Thanksgiving
Michelle Wie spent her Thanksgiving holiday with her family in Palm Springs, Calif., and she hopes her injured back is well enough to play in the Omega Dubai World Masters, which begins Dec. 6, according to Larry Bohannan of The Desert Sun newspaper.

“This week is good, just being here, being away from all of the distractions,” said Wie in an exclusive interview with The Desert Sun at Bighorn Golf Club, her desert home. “I finished a nine-page paper. I'm finishing up a 20-page paper now. I have finals during Dubai. So I will be going home and then going to school, then to Dubai.”

Wie enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with her family (“I ate so much. I'm stuffed.”) during her week at Bighorn. But she also started some work trying to get back on the golf course after having to withdraw from her last event because of a bulging disc in her back.

The disc, along with some cysts along her spine, have pushed the 21-year-old Wie off the course and out of next week's LPGA Tour Championship. But she believes her rehab work has her on track to play Dubai the following week.

“The one thing I want to do is just slam a driver right now, but there is no way,” Wie said. “I pulled my driver out of my bag and my parents were like, ‘Nooo.'”

Stray Shots: Stories we saw while wishing noted duffer Leslie Nielsen had made a golf movie...

Jack Nicklaus played Augusta National a couple months ago and holed out for eagle on 17. (Via The Palm Beach Post)

Lee Westwood's brother-in-law and fellow pro golfer Andrew Coltart is looking forward to some nice wine at the Westwood home this Christmas. “After the year Lee has had I'm expecting the red wine will be a cut above the £5 bottles he got from Sainsbury's last Christmas!” Coltart joked. (Via The Scottish Daily Record)

Tiger Woods can rest easy about making the Presidents Cup team this year. Captain Fred Couples says he’s a shoe-in. (Via The Hartford Courant)