Golf Spelled Backwards

Every year the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am includes celebrities in the PGA Tour event, and every year the most popular celebrity is, by far, Bill Murray. And Murray has a lot of fun, and gets a lot of laughs (and along the way plays some pretty good golf). The fans love him, the PGA Tour pros appear to love him, the television network cameras certainly love him. James Garner hates him. Rather, Garner hates Murray's often-silly, attention-grabbing antics during the tournament. You know Garner, right? The veteran actor of many, many movies, but probably best-known as private detective Jim Rockford from the classic 1970s series The Rockford Files . Garner is (or was, until his health and advancing age got in the way) an avid golfer, and played in the PGA Tour's celebrity pro-ams for many years himself. His love of golf and experiences in the game play a big enough part in Garner's memoir, The Garner Files , that Golf Digest excerpts the book in its December 20...

Augusta National banned Gary McCord from Masters broadcasts after McCord suggested, among other things, that there might be bodies buried under the sundry humps and bumps of Augusta. Now, a Seattle-area funeral home and cemetery plans to literally bury deceased golfers under a golf course. Or a golf hole, anyway. Sunset Hills Memorial Park and Funeral Home in Bellevue, Wash., has created the Memorial Golf Park, which Sunset Hills says is "the nation's first golf-themed memorial park." If you're one of those people who is always dying to play golf, this might be for you. The Memorial Golf Park consists of one golf hole, complete with tee box, fairway, bunker and putting green. Including both full-casket burial plots and cremation placements, 1,281 golfers can be buried on the hole. Or, to put it another way, 320 fourballs plus one single. That poor single. He's always going to be waiting, and always asking to play through. (No fivesomes allowed in heaven!) ...

The U.S. Women's Open is being played at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo., nestled right up against the Rockies. And there are plenty of peaks right next to the golf course. And you know what they say about golf courses right next to a mountain: Putts break toward the mountain. But is it true? Well, sure, it could be true - if the contours of the part of the green your ball is rolling on take the ball toward the mountain. During ESPN2's second-round broadcast, the broadcast team of Terry Gannon, Judy Rankin and Dottie Pepper discussed the breaks-toward-the-mountain axiom, and endorsed it. Rankin even said that she's seen putts break uphill because of the "pull" of the mountain. That's 100-percent, Grade A nonsense. Putts do not break uphill, ever, mountain or no mountain. There's no mysterious or magical "pull" involved in putting - not from the Rocky Mountains, not from the city of Indio (the so-called Indio effect at the Kraf...

It was a dark and stormy night ... or maybe not. Either way, Ian Poulter was spooked by the rental house he was staying at during The Heritage in Hilton Head, S.C. Poulter wrote on Twitter: "Check this out, we have a ghost in our house this week & I'm not joking we have had some very strange goings on every night." Strange goings-on in the Poulter house? Was Ian laying out his next day's outfit? No. He quickly added: "We have a dead bolted door in the house & every morning that door is unlocked & slightly open. It's happened 7 times already." Yes, I can see how that would be disconcerting. Although my thoughts wouldn't turn to spirits, but to someone playing a trick on me. Or a squatter living in the attic. But hopefully just the former. Poulter then updated: "No joke for real, very bizarre the door is pretty solid with a dead bolt & number of times it's been unlocked & open. Calling home owner now" Alas, n...

I've been to golf courses where alligators were present in water hazards. I imagine there are lots of courses were larger crocodiles lurk. But I've never heard of a course that has sharks in its water hazards. Sharks! Until now. Carbrook Golf Club in Brisbane, Australia, has at least one (probably more) sharks in its many ponds, lakes and waterways. They've been caught on camera: They've been there since the "early '90s," according to the golf course's Web site , when "the Logan River burst its banks, resulting in large volumes of water covering the course for an extended period of time." The floodwaters eventually went away, but at least one shark (probably more) didn't. The Logan is a large river that flows into Moreton Bay (beyond which is the Coral Sea). It seems incredible to me that a shark as large as the one in the videos above could survive in a golf course lake without having frequent access to the river itself. But mayb...

So Tiger Woods' fourth-round partner at the Farmers Insurance Open, PGA Tour rookie Brendan Steele, said Tiger mailed it in on Sunday: "I don't think he gave it ­everything today," Steele told SI. "Once it started going in the wrong direction, I don't think it had his full attention." That is one accusation Tiger's ho's never made against him. Say what you want about Tiger, but when it comes ot ho's, he always gives 100 percent. Whether he's playing their front nine or back nine.

From Win McMurry's Twitter feed: Uh ... ummm ... Win, are you sure that "shag" means the same thing to you as it means to Rory? I assume you were talking about the dance and not, well, shagging. But either way - can I cut in? (With you, not with Rory.) Wouldn't it be great if the Golf Channel replaced every one its announcers with a clone of Win McMurry? She's delicious! Make that, shagadelic, baby!

Here's a video originally posted to TwitVid by Ian Poulter. Ben Crane and Ryan Palmer will want to thank him. Or club him over the head. Crane and Poulter sing (if it can be called that) and dance (if it can be called that) to Wham's Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go at a karaoke bar somewhere in Hawaii. The combination of smartphone video capability and social media is truly a dangerous thing.

Tour golfers putting with their eyes closed isn't a new thing. It's been done before — Suzann Pettersen was doing it a few years ago on the LPGA Tour. But the practice is rare enough that it gets noticed when someone else tries it. That someone else this month is Australian veteran Peter O'Malley, who started putting with his eyes closed in practice as a way of dealing with the yips. O'Malley only does it on short putts, and it felt good enough in practice to take it into tournament play. "I've tried different grips and all sorts of different things but I started practising with my eyes closed to get some good feel," O'Malley told the Web site sportal.com.au, "and then I thought I'd just try it on the short putts just to take away a bit of the visual anxiety." He'll probably be sticking with it for a while, too, since O'Malley won last week's New South Wales Open, his first victory in five years. O'Malley guessed...

Tiger Woods' website, tigerwoods.com, has a "Did You Know" page that I stumbled across today. For example: Perfect day Did you know Tiger's perfect day is to surf, ski, play golf and go spear-fishing in the same day? How trite. Biggest challenge Did you know that Tiger's biggest challenge is to become a better person tomorrow? C'mon Tiger, stop procrastinating and become a better person today! Retreat Did you know that Tiger's retreat is to go underwater shooting fish? I'm not even sure what joke to make about that one. Indulgence Did you know that Tiger's indulgence is to spend his time on his boat? Hmmm. I thought Tiger's indulgence was skanks.