JJ’s profile

Latest ruling in history, but if anyone's still checking, the hole in one stands. Rule 1-1 states that the game is played from the teeing ground to hole, so once your ball is in the hole, it doesn't matter what else you do. In the R&A decisions book, it's Decision 1-1/3: Player Discovers Original Ball in Hole After Searching Five Minutes and Then Continuing Play with Provisional Ball.

Q - At a par-3 hole, a player, believing his original ball may be lost, plays a provisional ball. He searches five minutes for the original ball and then plays the provisional ball onto the green. At that point, the original ball is found in the hole.

What is the ruling?

A - The player's score is 1. The play of the hole was completed when the player holed the original ball (Rule 1-1).

(In the USGA decisions book, it's decision 1-1/2)

posted at 01:10 PM on November 16

I have been golfing for more than 20 years. My handicap is 6 and I have never had a hole in one,or has anyone I have golfed with.I can not believe this story.

Nearly every week, someone wins the Lotto in the face of odds close to 14 million to one. I never have, and neither has anyone I know, but I'm fairly sure I still believe it happens.

It is a pretty short course (card here) with only three holes longer than 364 yards off the yellow tees. If he's a long hitter, he's probably having a go at the green at most of those other 15 holes. It's still incredibly unlikely, but far from impossible.

At university, we would practice as a team three times a week during the winter on a nine-hole par-three course. Ten of us would play 54 holes a week each, with hole length varying from about 100 yards to almost 200, and it would be a very odd week if we didn't have at least one hole in one between us. The most we ever managed in a week was four.

posted at 07:28 AM on November 11

The won't get the Pope. Not without rcade's signing a release anyway.

posted at 02:45 PM on October 27

I've twice asked two different surgeons to cut the top two joints of mine off, but they won't do it.

My sports career was ended by a severed tendon in the right pinkie. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't a lineman, but a professional typist of the letter P. No, wait, golfer.

The surgeons tried to put it together again: the frustration of spending months without doing anything that might have caused me to try and close my hand - no drinking, no driving, no drink driving - only to then go for the weekly check-up and be told the tendon had snapped again despite my caution. The surgery itself failed, but the time it took (about 15 months in total) alone would have been enough to set me too far behind the curve to catch up again, so I jacked it in and got a real job.

The middle joint of my finger is now bent at 90 degrees and I can't straighten it. I shake hands with strangers and they think I'm a Freemason.

Twice I've had a notion to try and get back into golf, and both times it has seemed to me that the only way to do that would be to have the top two joints of the finger removed - just to get it out of the way. Both times, the surgeons have refused to do it with some reasonably compelling arguments. The best argument is that there's no certainty that having half a finger would serve my golf swing any better than having the mangled digit I have now.

Given a time machine that could take me back to the emergency room (but that was somehow not good enough to take me back half an hour further to tell myself to stop using the dodgy knife to cut grips off clubs), I'd tell myself to decline the surgeon's kind offer to reconstruct my tendon.

If they'd just stitched the wound (two stitches, max) and left the tendon in two pieces, the only loss of movement would have been in the top joint, which, let's face it, unless you're a concert violinist (and a left-handed one at that), isn't exactly vital. I could have taken the flight to Australia I was booked on and played on the Australasian Tour as planned.

And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.

Fair play and good luck to Trevor Wikre. He told the surgeons what he wanted and he got it. I hope he doesn't ever regret the decision, but from what I've just read about him, I can't believe that he ever will.

posted at 05:34 AM on October 20

The guy on the BBC played some of the audio with beeps.

"Sounds more like Morse code than English at times."

posted at 06:37 PM on October 03

"... and celebrated like if it was 1999."

Thankfully not. They celebrated perfectly appropriately this time, and not until they'd actually won.

My only experience of actually being at a Ryder Cup was pretty similar - 40,000 people trying to watch four games of golf makes it a bit tough to get a decent view.

posted at 09:47 AM on September 23

Drood, seriously, how many times do you need to be told that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to the course changes?

The better team won and it was the best Ryder Cup for years. The course changes partly made it so - we didn't have to watch people hacking it out of tall grass all day, but instead we got to watch them demolish the place in very entertaining style.

For all Zinger's disappointment that he wasn't playing, I think Tiger's absence made the biggest difference. It's the first time the US has looked like a team since 1991.

posted at 03:45 AM on September 23

I'd like to say that too, but it would be a lie.

I'm on Setanta Sports...

posted at 07:45 AM on September 17

Me too, bprek. As Phil Liggett said: "You've just ruined my life."

posted at 09:33 AM on September 10

Calling all steroid experts - what benefit, if any, could be derived from three years away from testing? Could he have loaded up on something, put the miles in his legs, then cleaned up and come back? Or am I reading too many conspiracy theories again?

It's odd that this was the first thing I wondered when I heard about the comeback, given that I'm a big fan of Lance and the kind of thing Drood just said used to send me off on rants about how he was the most tested son of a bitch on the planet (Armstrong, not Drood) and never got caught, so the most likely explination is that he wasn't doping.

It was bad enough to discover that "the look" wasn't a look at all. I'm not sure I want to see him either flog himself to pieces and fail (anything less than victory would be failure), turn up to make up the numbers and bleat on about how he "beat" cancer (or, as most people would have it, "got lucky"), or, worst of all, turn up, do well, then test positive and ruin all my sporting recollections of him.

What a story it will make if he wins it though...

posted at 06:03 AM on September 10

Plus, JJ, they are not going to throw a player out of the LPGA.

Sorry, Bo. I was using the word "out" in the sense that it is antonymical to the word "in", which is what a suspension would stop you from being as far as I can gather.

I suspect the lact of outspoken players has a lot to do with the fact that although the foreign ones might not speaka dee England good enough for the sponsors, they're mostly smart enough to know that being publically critical of your sport's organising body - no matter how discriminatory and ridiculous that organising body is being - isn't going to land you any new deals either.

"For an athlete to be successful in the sports entertainment world we live in, they need to be great performers on and off the course, and being able to communicate effectively with sponsors and fans is a big part of this," said the LPGA's deputy commissioner Libba Galloway.

The monkey has strangled the organ grinder and is now dancing around on the top of the piano in a panic wondering why it won't play. This whole thing is fucktardedness of the highest order. No player is bigger than the game, and neither is an organising body.

posted at 06:36 AM on August 29

I blame Sandra Post.

I understand the organiser's desire for players to do press conferences in English, but the LPGA needs to keep in mind just how international an organisation it has become.

In the 2008 season, more than 30% of the events on the LPGA Tour will be played outside the US. Of the 185 playing members of the tour who have so far made a cheque in 2008, 121 of them are "international" players [list of them here - .pdf]. Even if you discount the 27 players from Australia, South Africa, Canada and the UK, that's still more than half the players on the tour for whom English is not their mother tongue.

The money list hasn't been topped by an American since Betsy King in 1993. Julie Inkster is the only American in the top five of the all time money winners on the tour.

It's an international tour now, and it's only going to become more so. I'd be interested to see how the legal battle would pan out if the LPGA ever did try to implement this and throw someone out because they couldn't speak English.

posted at 05:43 AM on August 28

Will the requirement extend to those players for whom English is allegedly their mother tongue? Will they stop telling me that they "played real good"? Will they learn how to form a sentence without using the word "like"? I like totally doubt it.

posted at 06:53 PM on August 27

Had he:

1) Tied both shoelaces
2) Kept pumping his arms
3) Not beaten his chest, and
4) Leaned

He could have knocked two tenths off that.

He said afterwards he hadn't really noticed the time until he finished his victory lap and that the world record wasn't important to him, just the gold medal.

TV broadcasters couldn't fit in any commercials

Loving the BBC's lack of any commercials whatsoever!

posted at 07:54 AM on August 18

bperk, I think the award is to compensate Chelsea for the fee they paid for him in the first place. They paid Parma 22.4 million EURO for him. Caveat emptor would seem not to apply.

posted at 03:40 AM on August 15