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Golf News November 16th, 2008

Daly show to make it a memorable Masters

FORMER US PGA and British Open champion John Daly has been given a late invite to next week’s 30th anniversary Australian Masters – but will he remember his one previous visit to Melbourne’s Huntingdale layout?

Daly, who is playing this week’s Hong Kong Open, which is co-sanctioned by the Asian and European tours, contacted Masters organisers at the weekend seeking a start at the tournament.

IMG Australasian vice-president David Rollo said yesterday: “I had no hesitation in giving John a sponsor invite. He is a major winner and will add to our field.”

Daly has expressed an interest in joining the European Tour, which started its 2009 schedule with last week’s Singapore Open, and is looking for a swift start in the Race to Dubai, the Tour’s season-long, $US10 million ($15.5m) competition which concludes with the Dubai World Championship next November.

“I’ve enjoyed all my previous trips to Australia,” Daly said in a statement.

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Golf Swing

Jeev breaks into top 50

Jeev Milkha Singh is back among the elites again with the latest world golf rankings putting the Indian pro on the 46th place after his sensational triumph at the Singapore Open.

Jeev claimed a thrilling one-stroke victory over multiple Major winners Padraig Harrington and Ernie Els at the Singapore Open on the Asian Tour at Sentosa Golf Club’s Serapong course on Sunday.

The Chandigarh-pro went to the last hole with a one stroke lead and his par was enough for the win as Harrington and Els missed good birdie chances on the 18th.

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Golf Swing Lessons

Woods-Obama parallel includes some pitfalls
Racial breakthroughs don’t always bring progress.

Orin Starn

is a cultural anthropology professor at Duke University

It’s not that far-fetched to argue that Tiger Woods’ popularity helped pave the way for Barack Obama’s smashing victory. That legions of golfing white businessmen already idolized Woods may well have made it less of a stretch for them and others to imagine a black man as the country’s president.

For that matter, Woods, much like Obama, presents himself as something of a “post-racial” figure, crossing old color lines by virtue of his mixed ancestry.

But whether or not Woods helped some vote for Obama, the superstar golfer’s effect on his sport offers a cautionary lesson about the effect of an Obama presidency: There’s no necessary correlation between the feel-good symbolism of a racial breakthrough and actual, on-the-ground progress toward a race-blind America.

Many observers predicted that Woods’ example would revolutionize the sociology of golf. They thought many more minority kids would be encouraged to take up the old Scottish pastime, and that the sport would shed its ugly racial past once and for all. (The Professional Golfers’ Association Tour had a Caucasians-only clause until 1961.)

The golf establishment promotes its youth-golf programs with “Kumbaya”-style TV ads showing smiling inner-city kids, as if the game had indeed put the messy matters of race and money in the rearview mirror.

Lessons for Golf

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