Tallying Up the Scorecard

They’re in the home stretch of the 2001 professional golf season, which makes this a good time to take a look back, try to figure out what happened and then proudly hand out some well-deserved awards. It would probably be too much of a stretch to say the honors being bestowed on the freshest flowers of pro golf are highly coveted, because they certainly are not.

This is because these players have rich and full lives, there is no cash award involved and few (if any) of them would walk across the street if there wasn’t a fee involved.

But that’s beside the point. It’s a time to celebrate the best and acknowledge the worst and skip everything else in between. Feel free to play along at home.

Male player of the year: Tiger Woods. He won the Masters and held the championships of all four major titles at the same time. He also won five times, more than anyone else, won more money than anyone else and shot lower. Even more important, he remains the standard by which all other players are judged.

Female player of the year: Annika Sorenstam. She shot the first 59 in LPGA competition, won four of her first six times out, won the year’s first major and has six victories in all.

Best tournament: The Masters. It might not have been the most closely contested, but when you have Woods making history on Bobby Jones’ home turf, you can’t ignore it.

Worst tournament: Battle III at Bighorn on ABC. For something that was under the lights, there was zero electricity.

Best shot of the year: David Toms’ hole in one in the third round of the PGA Championship.

Worst shot of the year: Any putt in the last two groups on the 72nd hole of the U.S. Open at Southern Hills.

Comeback player of the year: John Daly. He’s had four top-10 finishes, earned a career-high $828,914, and has a first and a second on the European Tour, both in Germany, in the past two months. Worst decision of the year: Florida 12-year-old changes his first name to Lion because he hopes he can beat Tiger in the future.

Best advice of the year: To Florida 12-year-old, stick to video games, like everybody else your age, kid.

Honesty award (self-appraisal division): Senior PGA Tour rookie Roger Maltbie: “Look at me, I’m a mess.”

Hat of the year: Shingo Katayama, wearing that cowboy number, at the PGA Championship.

Silly criticism of the year: Tom Kite chastising reporters at the U.S. Open for writing too much about Tiger.

Actually, you can’t write enough about Tiger.

Former caddie of the year: Myles Byrne. And, yes, he wins by Myles.

Wedding of the year: Daly tries No. 4.

Supreme Court ruling of the year: Casey Martin wins his cart case. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Best reaction of the year: Martin, after being told the PGA Tour is obligated to defray a portion of his legal fees: “Hey, party at my house!”

Best packing job: Jesper Parnevik brought 20 pairs of pants to the Memorial.

Best Sam Snead quote of the year: Of Woods, Snead said, “I predict he’s going to be around for a while.”

Best TV review of the year: Karrie Webb said she didn’t think the “Survivor” television series was actually taped in the outback of her native Australia.

Said Webb: “Even in the bush, no one just camps on the side of the river unless you want to wake up next to a crocodile.”

Duh! award of the year: Researchers at the Mayo Clinic’s sports psychology and medicine center said the yips are most likely the result of anxiety.

Best overall quote of the year: Lee Westwood, who missed the cut four times in a stretch of six tournaments and then was asked if he had any gremlins: “I don’t have any gremlins. I have two dogs and a cat.”

New Listing

News item: Parnevik has put his 5,000-square-foot house in Admiral’s Cove, Fla., on the market for $2.15 million.

Reaction: Closets come complete with dozens of Popsicle-purple, flamingo-pink and Elvis-black pants.

Tiger Update

According to an ESPN poll asking which athlete respondents would choose to endorse any product, Woods was No. 2 with 13.2% and Michael Jordan was first with 21.5%. Kobe Bryant was a distant third with 3.1%.

Duck Soup

News item: University of Oregon die-hard Peter Jacobsen and his Jacobsen-Hardy design firm build a golf course for Baylor University.

Reaction: Next, Jacobsen will design square golf balls for Oregon State golfers just in time for the match against Oregon.

Nick Knack

News item: Nick Faldo, who hasn’t played a PGA Tour event in seven weeks, needs two more to reach the required level of 15 to keep his card, but wonders if he really wants to. Reaction: Yes, you want to, since you’ve made about $3.1 million on the tour since you joined in 1995 ... and you have two ex-wives.

Birdies, Bogeys, Pars

A full-size bronze statue of Payne Stewart will be unveiled Nov. 6 at Pinehurst, where Stewart won the 1999 U.S. Open. Stewart died in a plane crash four months later.

For the first time in its 101-year history, the U.S. Open will be played off two tees in 2002, taking advantage of two more hours of daylight.

The U.S. Women’s Open moved to a two-tee start in 2000 and the U.S. Senior Open used it for the first time this year.

The USGA and NBC extended their contract through 2008.