FacebookPinterestBettmannJerry Barber holing a putt during the 1961 PGA Championship that he won at Olympia Fields Country Club. (Getty Images)

Course records aren’t necessarily important, but they can provide amusement, to wit Phil Mickelson reliably resorting to gamesmanship to keep brother Tim from breaking one of his course records.
Or Tiger Woods, who still holds four course records in Southern California, one of which will never be broken. He shot a 63 at Cypress Golf Club, a public course in Los Alamitos that no longer is there. He also has course records at Big Canyon Country Club in Newport Beach (a 61), Hacienda Golf Club in La Habra Heights (a 62) and Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, a 62.
This brings us to Wilshire Country Club, site of the new LPGA event, the HUGEL-JTBC LA Open, this week. Its course record of 61 has stood for more than 50 years.
Bu what’s interesting about it is less its endurance than the two men who share it, one of them a member of the Internat..

Changes to the Old Course at St. Andrews that started in the last two decades have become more glaring in recent years, raising questions about the Home of Golf

Jim McIsaac(Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)Got to give it up for the New York Knicks. The playoffs are only two games deep, but somehow they've already ruined next season.
How else can you synthesize the following items that have stumbled out of their unfulfillable bag of sadness this week?
— Franchise cornerstone Kristaps Porzingis—the first homegrown, under-25 superstar the team's had in three decades—may miss all of next year. Owner and adult-only jazz club aficionado James Dolan said Wednesday the forward might not return in 2018-19 as he rehabs from tearing his ACL in February.
— The Knicks fired Jeff Hornacek last Thursday night at 2:00 a.m. in a Westchester County Airport conference room. Hornacek won only 60 games in his two seasons at the Knicks helm, but not sure Red Auerbach could have broken .500 with this roster. He was the 11th coach in the last 16 seasons for the Knicks.
— The team also fired Kurt Rambis. Frankly, we're okay with this. If he wasn&#03..

Donald MiralleListen, we aren’t here to make assumptions or cast aspersions. We aren’t here to judge or adjudicate. Maybe you think weed is the devil’s cobb salad. Maybe you think it cures cancer. Either way, you’re probably wrong. There’s one thing that’s not up for debate, however: The calendar. It’s 4/20 once again—AKA weed day, AKA the day even your mom is going to get high with her hiking friends or whatever—and to commemorate the occasion, we’ve rounded up the craziest potable products we could find in this den of indulgence we call the internet. So whether you’re partaking or just here for the contact high, kick back, relax, and inhale the sweet, sweet vapor of untapped capitalism.
(But first, some shopping music).
Weed Balls and Tees
FacebookPinterestOK, so we should clarify these aren’t tees or balls made from weed, but rather for indulging in it. Stash your supply in the Puffingtons 2 tour ball and then smoke it from the covert tee pipe. Meanwhile, ignore the binocular gaze o..

Sean M. HaffeyWhen I was in Little League there was an umpire notorious for trying to move games along briskly. He was adamant about catchers on the hitting team getting their gear on with two outs. His in-between inning warm-ups were comically short.
Late in games, the tie went to whoever would put him in his car and down the road.
This is all worth noting because according to recent analysis, the bias toward getting baseball games over with quickly extends well beyond Little League umpires paid in beer money, but even at the highest levels of the sport. According to fivethirtyeight.com, Major League umpires have shown a tendency to call balls and strikes in extra innings in favor of the team that will end the game soonest. The analysis looked at 32,000 pitches thrown between 2008 and 2016, and showed that strike zones expanded and shrunk in the bottom half of extra innings based on specific criteria.
Put simply, if the visiting team was ahead and needed to get outs to end the game, t..

The core four of “Seinfield”—and if you need them named, you're reading the wrong article—is what made the show turn, but it was the secondary cast of eccentric characters that put the program over the top. We're talking Frank and Estelle Costanza, J. Peterman, Bania, George Steinbrenner…Newman…and our personal favorite, David Putty.
How can you not be magnetized by Putty's level-headed demeanor and monotone voice, and certainly his affinity for high-fives and Arby's doesn't hurt the cause. But if we're talking Putty, we'd be remiss in forgetting his turn as a hardcore New Jersey Devils fan in “The Face Painter,” his fandom hitting such a fever pitch that it drives a priest insane.
Though “Seinfield” has been off the air for two decades, no story continues to resonate across our cultural landscape like the “show about nothing,” which is why the Internet was delighted to see the following at last night's New Jersey Devils playoff game:
https:/..

A longtime Golf Digest editor returns to the golf course where he fell in love with the game to say goodbye.

photologicaAt some point in recent years you have likely stumbled upon the notion that moderate drinking is in some ways good for you. Something about the heart, and antioxidants—whatever, you didn’t really want to delve into deep. Medical studies that conveniently fit your lifestyle are like $20 bills randomly found on the street. The more questions you ask, the less satisfying the answer.
Anyway, we bring this up because of a new multi-nation study published in the Lancet that says in essence, no, not really. Whereas moderate low-risk drinking for men in the U.S. was defined by doctors as two drinks a day or 14 drinks a week, the new study says anything more than a drink a day has hazardous effects on your life expectancy. A little bit of drinking still has some redeeming benefits in that it lowers the risk of heart attack. But after that, other risks are elevated: stroke, heart failure, random texting of old girlfriends, etc.
Of course this is particularly relevant to us given our o..

Don't look now, but the Las Vegas Golden Knights have thrown their hat in the ring to become one of the greatest stories in the history of sports, if they already aren't. The NHL's newest team swept the L.A. Kings in the first round of the playoffs on Tuesday night, bouncing a franchise that has won two Stanley Cups in the last six years.
Now, the Knights have quickly shifted from fun storyline to Stanley Cup co-favorite after opening the season with 200-1 odds to raise the cup. It lines up perfectly with the theme of Vegas' entire season, one that went from “this is cute”, to “they can't keep this up”, to “they won't be able to do it in the playoffs.” Just ask Kings defenseman Drew Doughty, who played in all four of L.A.'s matchups with the Knights in the regular season. After two losses, Doughty claimed there's no way Vegas would be better than L.A. by the end of the season, which he was right about, as the Kings went on to beat them in the fin..

SAN ANTONIO (AP) Sergio Garcia had a long history with Texas even before he became a part-time resident.

He made his PGA Tour debut as a pro in 1999 at the Byron Nelson Classic and caused an immediate sensation with the gallery outside Dallas when he made eight birdies in 15 holes and had a chance for a 59 when he had a 4-iron into the par-5 16th hole. He finished par-par-bogey for a 62 and tied for third that week.

Two years later, the Spaniard won his first PGA Tour event at Colonial, the first of three victories in the Lone Star State.

Article continues below …

Now, the connection extends to family. He married Angela Akins last summer, and he’s based out of the Austin area when he’s playing in America. That’s where he was last week after missing the cut at the Masters, for a family gathering of both parents and plenty of doting on Azalea, their 5-week-old daughter.

”Changed a lot of nappies,” Garcia said. ”We went to the ranch a couple of times. We practiced a little bit with..