Jack Berry covered golf for over 40 years for the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. He is an inductee to the Michigan Golf Hall of Fame in his home state and was awarded the 2007 PGA of America Lifetime Achievement Award.
Mid-April, 2008 AUGUSTA, Ga. – The week that was the 72nd Masters Tournament started
with the first-ever televised happy-family scene of the Par-3
Tournament, with relaxed players shepherding their toddlers, dressed in
white caddie jumpsuits, swinging wildly, missing putts and hitting
balls into the ponds as their proud parents smiled and the gallery
laughed and applauded.
April, 2008: He’s human! Just
when it appeared Tiger Woods would leap golf’s all-time record book in
a single bound, he…well, hard to call it a collapse when he finished
fifth after opening Doral, one of his favorite courses with rounds of
67-66. But Tiger was passed like he was in an old Model-T instead
of one of his slick Buick rides with his par 72 third round in his last
tuneup before the Masters.
Golf Show, 2008: Tiger
Woods has taken golf to a height of excellence never reached before,
not by Old Tom Morris or his son Tom Jr., not by Byron Nelson, Ben
Hogan, Gary Player, Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus. Think, for a
moment, of the millions of people around the world who play golf and
there is just one who is the best.
Winter, 2008: We saw new
daddy Tiger Woods working hard to pay for new boots for Sam (it’s a
girl, right?). He wasn’t the Tiger of 2000, but he won seven of 16
starts including the Western (aka BMW) at Cog Hill, the PGA at Southern
Hills and the Tour Championship at dart board East Lake; won
$10,867,052, twice as much as runnerup Phil Mickelson; led the scoring
average with a 67.79 mark, a shot and a half better than Ernie Els and
thrilled all of Canada by losing to Mike Weir in the Presidents Cup
singles.
Fall, 2008: Oakand
Hills, host to next summer’s PGA Championship, is closing in on its
100th birthday and never, since it opened in 1916, has it looked better. I drive by the suburban Detroit course almost weekly, but hadn’t driven
in and played there in the three years since the United States Ryder
Cup team went down to its worst defeat. The course sparkled then under
cloudless blue skies, but it was nothing to what it is now thanks to
Rees Jones, who may be doing some of the same magic at Cog Hill.