RHS boys golf team starts off strong
RIDGEWOOD — The Ridgewood High School boys golf team could not have started off the spring any better.

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Golf roundup: Tiger Woods adds Quail Hollow to schedule
Out of golf for five months until the Masters, Tiger Woods is waiting only two weeks to tee it up again.

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Learn the key to hitting a solid pitch shot.

Ah, Augusta National, where saying things that are absurdly illogical and casually racist is just par for the course. Tiger Woods' ill-advised comparison of his troubles to those of Ben Hogan falls into the former category.

"It's very similar to what Hogan went through coming off the accident," Woods said in his press conference yesterday. "He couldn't play that much, and when you can't play, you have to concentrate on your practice."

See, the similarity is that Woods and Hogan both had car accidents! I'm not sure how Woods getting in an accident for still-unexplained reasons, laying low as mistress after mistress told tales of his infidelity, and eventually entering rehab for one reason or another is equal to Hogan throwing himself across his wife's lap during a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus, fracturing his pelvis and collar bone, and returning to golf after spending 59 days in the hospital, but I'll take Tiger at his word. When has he ever spoken anything but precisely-worded, wisdom-soaked truths?

That means legendary golf scribe Dan Jenkins is the one having a tad of trouble with racism. Jenkins tweeted about last year's PGA Championship winner with a joke the 2010 version of Adam Sandler might consider beneath him.

Y.E. Yang is only three shots off the lead. I think we got takeout from him last night.

We don't look to Woods for precision of language, but expect it routinely from Jenkins, whose bon mots from the majors have been the best golf-related thoughts on Twitter since last year. Stooping to something as silly as equating an Asian player to takeout is well off of Jenkins at his peak, but considering the outrage tweeted about his comment, I suspect it's a mistake he won't make again. He's already apologized -- well, sort of -- and I think we probably won't see any more off-color tweets from Jenkins this weekend.

Meanwhile, Tiger has already teed off, and considering the patrons at Augusta have already warmly received him for returning to golf at all, I doubt anyone will care about his indelicate comparison to Hogan if he continues swinging as well as he has been. He birdied the first hole to move within a stroke of the lead.

Words matter. But deeds still matter more.

(HT: Deadspin.)

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This Tiger Woods mess all happened in a vacuum. Think about the timeline of everything. We, as the American public, found out about all of his transgressions between Thanksgiving and…well…there's that girl we're learning about now, so, from Thanksgiving until the present. And probably future.

But for Woods, it all happened in the past (we think). It's impossible for us to keep track of all the women and when he had relationships with each of them. Was the Perkins waitress before or after the porn star? Did that come before the New York socialite? When did he have time to squeeze in the other waitress…and the other porn star? And what about this neighbor the internet has been falling over itself to find photos of today?

Since it was all new to us, it feels like it's new for Tiger. Yet Tiger was winning all the titles he's won – on bad knees and an Achilles tendon in need of surgery – all while stringing along a cavalcade of bimbos on the side. And being a dad to two kids. And, to some morally-indecent extent, being a husband. None of this is new to him. In fact, he may feel liberated from the fact that he was hiding all of this for so long. He doesn't have to worry about the clandestine text messages and having his buddies set up dates on the side after the tournament. It's all out in the open now. He's gone through rehab. He can just focus on golf for the first time in a while.

And that's exactly what he'll face on the first tee Thursday afternoon. At 1:42 p.m., Tiger Woods can get back to golf. But will he be able to focus like he has in the past? Woods mentioned during his press conference that the fans have been great and, by and large, the fans – sorry, sorry, patrons – at the Masters are almost as hand-picked as the media. There's a good chance that Tiger could feel rather protected in his own, private, azalea-lined cathedral. But what if he's not?

What will happen if someone spent a lot of money to get tickets just so they can make a scene? What if someone sneezes in his backswing on the first tee? Or, heck, what if someone waits until Amen Corner to make a scene when Tiger rounds into the holes ESPN will be covering starting at 4 p.m.? Sure, whoever distracts Tiger will be kicked out of Augusta – and probably the state of Georgia – forever, but wouldn't it be worth it for some tabloid or dare-I-say website trying to make a name for itself on the biggest stage? Talk about a news cycle.

Forget about the golf swing. That's like riding a bike to Woods. I spoke with Shane Bacon of Yahoo's Devil Ball Golf this week, and we both think that Woods can spend the first two rounds just leisurely trying to make pars and still be in complete control of the tournament by Saturday afternoon. None of that is an issue – not the layoff, or the knee or the Achilles. It's the 'what if.'

What if someone yells? What if a cameraperson snaps a shot in his backswing? Does he blow up like he has in the past? Does Stevie Williams berate the person? Or can it roll off the new "back-to-Buddha" Tiger's back?

Forget about all the women. That's old news. Tomorrow, we'll see if there really is a new Tiger on the course.

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Golf-Woods feels renewed fervor for family after ordeal
Tiger Woods was guarded about the state of his marriage on Monday but reaffirmed his commitment to his family as he prepared to end a five-month self-imposed exile from golf at the Masters.

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Woods Should ‘Shut Up,’ Play Golf to Fix Image, Consultants Say
Tiger Woods’s golf game will help his image more than any further apologies, media consultants said after Woods’s first public question-and-answer session yesterday.

Read more on BusinessWeek

If you haven't been living under a rock inside a submarine at the bottom of the sea on the planet Snarflax, you've probably heard about this recession thing we've got going on. If you're on the bottom of one of this planet's oceans you've probably added heaping side dishes of financial crisis, jobless recovery, and DOOM to your buzzword checklists. Either that or you're a college football coach:

Between 2006 and 2009, the average pay for a head football coach at the NCAA's 99 big-time public schools rose 46% to $1.4 million.

That's from USA Today's annual survey of college coaches' salaries, and it comes with the requisite muttering about priorities. This is U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:

"But at a time of declining revenues and declining financial aid, the coaches are up 46%? In the insular world of high-stakes, very competitive sports, that might make sense. But if you talk to an average parent or an average 16- or 17-year-old and give them those facts, they'd have a hard time understanding why that's the priority."

With state budgets increasingly pressed by pension obligations, collapsing tax revenue, and the constitutional requirement to remain balanced, higher education spending is being cut dramatically. For instance, a slammed Michigan State University is dropping almost a sixth of their degree programs. In this sort of environment, spending money on collegiate athletics isn't likely to make a profit in the long run – the USA Today article cites a study that shows every one dollar invested in athletics brings one dollar back-is becoming an untenable situation.

Even a powerful institution like California is facing harsh choices. Their athletics programs have been in the red since forever, and that day is coming to an end soon:

"This is meant to be a come-to-Jesus moment for athletics, in which (the department) realizes that it needs to make difficult choices to stay within a sustainable level of resources," said law professor and panelist Christopher Kutz, chairman of UC Berkeley's Academic Senate of tenured instructors.

Cal is supplying the athletic department with $6 million to $8 million a year these days, along with millions of dollars in "loans" that are then forgiven years later when it becomes clear the athletic department can't possibly pay them back. Though slicing teams has not been broached officially, it's not hard to read between the lines:

"We have 27 teams," said panelist Kutz, the law professor. "It's not the highest number, but it's fairly high. I think MIT has more. I'd guess about 23 is about average."

And four teams on campus feel a chill go up their spine. Men's golf, which somehow breaks even at Cal, is not amongst them. Everything else that isn't football or basketball should be jumpy. MIT is a Division III school that isn't paying their coaches six, let alone seven, figures. They're not relevant. "Average" is relevant.

If schools are going to get athletic budgets in line, and it looks like they won't have a choice in the matter, the only way to do it is cutting programs. Even if a program like Cal wanted to get rid of Jeff Tedford and replace him with an amiable local high school coach, they're still on the hook for a massive buyout. That massive buyout would then crush ticket sales and donations, leaving Cal even further behind than they already are. It's not really anyone's fault-raise your hand if you've turned down a million dollars-but the escalating arms race in college sports has left a lot of schools with no choice but to start hacking. Without a Christmas miracle, the programs in the middle ranges of the Directors’ Cup, where athletic departments compete as a whole, are going to be dodging axes over the next few years.

(H/T to Doctor Saturday)

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