2. Sergio. A second-straight win on the Euro tour is a big deal. We can now upgrade him from cute comeback story to legit contendah.

3. Asia. This time of year it’s the only place that matters. Someday soon that continent will own a much bigger piece of the golf calendar.

4. Rory. Yeah, the Shanghai Masters was a mostly meaningless exhibition, but the kid badly needed another victory, and he showed some admirable grit in getting it done. A strong finish to the year is just what he (and golf) needs.

5. AK. With back-to-back near-misses he’s playing his best golf in a year and a half. The Dom’s on me.

NOT

1. Mark Lye. I enjoyed the Golf Channels attempts to incorporate more social media into its Nationwide telecast, but it sure would help if the key guy in the booth had a freakin’ clue what Twitter is. #MissedOpportunity

2. Luke. He’s everybody’s player of the yearexcept for the one that really counts: Golf Magazine.

3. Yani’s PGA Tour ambitions. She’s now making noise about wanting to tee it up against the boys. Been there, done that, and it’s not particularly interesting. Making history on your own tour is more than enough, girlfriend.

4. James Nitties. He finished 26th on the Nationwide money list, earning a card to golf purgatory.

5. Olympic golf. Word is the LPGA is planning an “Olympic-style” tourney, with four-woman teams from eight nations. Sounds awesome! And it’s a reminder of how utterly milquetoast the real Olympic golf is going to be: a 72-hole, stroke-play event, just like we see every week. Yawn.

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HOT
1. Luke. Now that’s how you put an exclamation point on a monster season. And now he can add a historic footnote at the Race to Dubai.

2. Yani. The massive crowds in Taiwan were a vivid reminder that in much of the world women’s golf is a really big deal. That Yani came through with the weight of her homeland on her shoulders is testament to her determination. Ten wins in one year? There’s only one word for that: Tigeresque.

3. Sergio. Remember the ’99 PGA and Sergio’s scissor-kick? It would be awesome if this much-needed, long-overdue and surprisingly overpowering victory rekindles some of that old passion. Love him or hate him, Sergio makes golf a heckuva lot more interesting.

4. Reno-Tahoe Open. I know, you weren’t even aware they still played this tournament. But that may change now that it’s adopted the zany Stableford scoring system. The PGA Tour could use a lot more variety in its formats, and this is a welcome beginning.

5. Webb. Yeah, he got run over on Sunday, but over the last two weeks he showed a lot of want-to, capping a breakthrough year. I can’t wait to watch Simpson and America’s other exciting new star, Keegan Bradley, at the Presidents Cup.

NOT
1. Chubby. Losing Paul McGinley, the likely 2014 Ryder Cup captain, hurt just a little. Losing Ernie Els stung a bit more. Losing G-Mac was a big blow but the boss man at ISM always said it was a valuable lesson and the same mistakes wouldn’t be repeated. Losing Rory, the game’s most marketable asset right now, and maybe for the next 20 years? That’s getting Chubby-slammed.

2. Bubba Watson. Despite his shameless pandering he lost out in the voting to be on the cover of the new Tiger Woods video game. But at least he did prevail in the prized heavy-chest-hair demographic.

3. Rickie Fowler. He did win the voting, and in a press release enthused, “This is a great moment in my career.” Enough said.

4. Justin Leonard. Trying to protect the 54-hole lead at Disney and win for the first time since ’08, J-Low couldn’t generate any momentum and got blown off the course by Luke. On the bright side, we weren’t subjected to anymore “Justin Time” headlines.

5. Harris English. He won a Nationwide event in July as an amateur, meaning he couldn’t collect the dough or have it count toward the money list. Then he turned pro in September. After missing the cut at last week’s Jacksonville Open he fell to 65th on the money list, meaning English wasn’t among the top 60 who qualified for the Nationwide’s season-ender this week. In other words, hello Q-school.

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The battle between Webb Simpson and Luke Donald for the PGA Tour money title (and probably Player of the Year) at this week’s Children’s Miracle Network Classic at Disney is only compelling if you don’t look too closely.

Having banked $6.2 million this year (plus endorsements and FedEx money), Simpson has long since upgraded from hamburger to steak. Donald, who trails by $363,000 but added Disney to his schedule in an effort to catch Simpson, could buy some high-grade art between what he’s made here ($5.8 million) and in Europe ($5.3 million), where he leads the money list.

No, the other end of the food chain is where the action is as players make their final preparations for Disney, the final official tournament of 2011.

“It’s the bottom of the seventh in game seven,” said William McGirt, who at 138th in earnings needs to make a move this week in order to crack the top 125 and keep his Tour card. “Time to get it done.”

He paused for a moment.

“Well, I mean, maybe bottom of the eighth,” McGirt said, eliciting laughter. “At least I have finals of Q school.”

For all the players who haven’t hit enough fairways, who haven’t gotten into enough tournaments, who haven’t put four rounds together—for all those guys, this week is the last chance to either get it done or fall off the Tour.

“It’s kind of like knowing you might be the CEO of a company, and if you don’t play well you’re going to be the janitor,” said Robert Garrigus, the big hitter with the little putter, who was used to playing for his livelihood until he won Disney last year. Garrigus has been to Q school 10 times. He was such a regular he began to try to trick himself into not loathing it. He told himself it was “an eight-day vacation,” but such reimagining goes only so far. “Being 122 or 123 on the money mist coming in here,” he admitted, “it’s a stressful week.”

“It is a big deal and it’s your job, but it’s such a fluid situation,” said Bobby Gates, No. 124 on the money list, who will be paired with No. 125 James Driscoll.

“You know, one guys makes a birdie on the back nine on Thursday, and everyone wants to make it into the—that that’s the end all be all. It’s not. If it comes down to the last three holes Sunday, then, yeah, it’s pretty important. For now, it’s just have fun, make birdies, and what’s going to be is going to be. You can’t worry about what everyone else is doing.”

Gates called it somewhat “twisted” that he will be paired with Driscoll, but said he knows better than to think they’ll be locked into a zero-sum match. They could both play well and still lose their cards, or both play average and get lucky. At least Gates knows the Magnolia and Palm courses, having played the AJGA Polo All-American tournament there about six years ago.

“I don’t feel like a rookie this week,” he said. “I know not to stay on site. I know where to sleep and eat and how to get around. So it feels good.”

McGirt doesn’t have to go back too far to recall coming through in do-or-die situations. At Greensboro (T52) he played his way into the FedEx Cup playoffs, and acquitted himself so well at the Barclays (T24) he played himself into the second, the Deutsche Bank Championship (T42). He did the math Tuesday night and decided he’s safe to finish inside the top 150 no matter what happens this week, and a top-six would probably get him in the top 125.

“Who knows,” he said. “It’s Disney. Magic happens here.”

Garrigus says he’s hoping to finish the year in the top 30 in earnings. McGirt has the top 125 in his sights. And getting inside the top 150 exempts a player from the dreaded second stage of Q school, where those who fail to advance get nothing, not even Nationwide tour status, for the following year.

“This year is completely different,” said Garrigus, who planned to enjoy a low-stress week of fishing, with some golf mixed in. “Obviously I’ve made my money. I’ve almost made—I’ve made like $1.5 million. I’ve almost won a couple times. You know, I can feel what [Gates, McGirt and others are] feeling, because I’ve felt it. Pretty much every single year I’ve come here I’ve needed to finish in the top five to get my card. … Knowing that I don’t have to go to Q school for quite a while is going to be a nice feeling.”

Simpson: The people’s choice for POY?

Whether it’s because of a pro-American bias or because he’s a nice guy, a few players admitted they’re leaning toward Simpson for Player of the Year.

“I would personally like to see Webb win,” Gates said.

Donald and Webb will be paired together for the first two rounds.

“I’ve made my mind up,” Garrigus said. “I would vote for Webb. I mean, he’s had such an unbelievable year. If you look at how many top-10s he’s made [11], it’s almost more than some guys have played in tournaments. What has he made, $6 million? That’s Tiger money, and that’s pretty special.”

Lunde closes in on $1 million

Bill Lunde is 126th on the money list, but that’s not the only thing that has him on edge at the Disney. He leads the $1 million, winner-take-all Kodak Challenge by two, meaning second-place Cameron Tringale would have to eagle the 485-yard, par-4 17th hole at the Magnolia Course in order to tie Lunde. There have been just two eagles on that hole in the last 13 years.

There have been many important shots for Lunde, but the most memorable may be the eagle he made on the 16th hole at TPC Summerlin, home of the Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children in Las Vegas. The eagle came the day after he made the most deflating birdie of his life.

“I had this like 50-footer, 60-footer, whatever it was, and it looked like it was going to go in,” Lunde said. “It just barely caught low side of the cup and kind of just barely lipped out with no speed. I was just heartbroken. I kicked my putter in the water because I just thought I made it. I make birdie and we’re walking off the green and Rocco [Mediate] goes, ‘Dude, man, you just made birdie. That was a hell of a putt. What are you so mad about?’ I’m like, ‘Dude, Rocco, there is kind of a side thing going on here.’

“I didn’t really want to say it,” Lunde continued. “He kind of thought about it, and he was like, ‘Oh, my god. That was like a million dollar putt!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s why I almost actually kicked my putter in the water.’ He was like, ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll make eagle tomorrow.’ Sure enough, I made eagle the next day.”

English closes in on spot in Nationwide Tour Championship


When he turned pro after the Walker Cup last month, Georgia product Harris English naturally had $0 in 2011 Nationwide earnings. But after his third-place finish at the Miccosukee Championship in Miami last weekend, English—who also lost in a sudden-death playoff since turning pro—is all the way up to 61st on the money list. He trails No. 60 Andrew Buckle by $1,900.

This week’s Winn-Dixie Jacksonville Open at TPC Sawgrass, Dye’s Valley Course, marks the final full-field event of the 2011 Nationwide season. The top 60 on the money list after this week go to next week’s Nationwide Tour Championship in Charleston, S.C., where everyone will have a mathematical chance to finish in the top 25 in money and earn a PGA Tour card for 2012.

English already had secured status on the Nationwide with his victory at the Children’s Hospital Invitational in July, when he was still an amateur.

Jacksonville’s Bud Cauley, who has made $735,150 in eight starts on the PGA Tour since he left Alabama early, becoming the sixth man to go directly from college to the Tour (bypassing Q school), will play in the Winn-Dixie.

With his win in Miami, Jason Kokrak, who leads the Nationwide with 320.6 yards per drive, became the fourth two-time winner in 2011. Mathew Goggin, J.J. Killeen and Ted Potter, Jr., are the others.

Gavin Hall, winner of the Junior Players Championship, not only got into the Winn-Dixie field, he’ll be staying at the home of Fred and Sharon Funk.

Short game: Yani Tseng, who already has been named the LPGA’s player of the year, goes for her seventh victory of 2011 at the inaugural Sunrise LPGA Taiwan Championship at 6,390-yard, par-72 Sunrise Golf & Country Club. The field includes 27 of the top 30 on the money list. … Three Champions Tour pros will tee it up at Disney: Michael Allen, Mark Calcavecchia and Tom Lehman. … Fred Couples’s 54-hole total of 23-under 193 in Houston shattered the previous record on the Champions Tour, Mark McNulty’s 18-under 195, set in 2004. … Hale Irwin, 66, will return to the Schwab Cup Championship for the first time since 2007 after finishing the final full-field event at 26th on the money list with $599,811. He’s the oldest player to qualify for the tournament. Gil Morgan was 63 when he qualified in 2009. … The PGA Tour released its 2012 schedule and Disney will be moved back to Nov. 5-11. … Matteo Manassero, who at 17 became the European tour’s youngest winner last year, will defend his title at the Castello Masters at Sergio Garcia’s home course, Club de Campo del Mediterraneo. Garcia won the ’08 Castello Masters.

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Webb Simpson has earned $5.77 million on the PGA Tour this season, and yet he will tee it up at the McGladrey Classic in Sea Island, Ga., in hopes of finishing the year atop the money list. He is just under $69,000 behind Luke Donald, who would be the first player to win the money title on both sides of the Atlantic. (Donald leads the European Tour money list by a comfortable margin.)

Should Simpson pull ahead, Donald could elect to play Disney next week, which would mean Simpson would have to play it, which would make the Disney less for Charles Howell III fans than Thurston Howell III fans.

At the other end of the money list is Paul Casey, who played well for most of last week’s Frys.com Open before fading to a T7 finish. Casey, whose summer was a casualty of a mysterious foot injury, rose from 135th to 127th on the money list at CordeValle, and has more work to do at Sea Island to crack the top 125.

“It’s not perfect,” Casey said of his right foot after shooting a second-round 64 at the Frys.com at CordeValle, “but now I can walk without limping and I feel like I’m — to be honest it’s probably the best I’ve hit the golf ball all year, and even though the toe isn’t 100 percent, it’s great news.”

Matt Jones, the Australian who played at Arizona State, is 125th, while sometime Golf Channel broadcaster Steve Flesch is 126th. Andres Gonzales, the mutton-chopped, mulleted endomorph who calls himself “half man, half amazing,” and who keeps tweeting Tiger Woods to see if they can hook up for a practice round, is languishing at 213th in earnings. He could use a big week.

Among the most intriguing players at Sea Island will be Bud Cauley, the 21 -year-old who left Alabama after his junior year and turned pro in March, and Rickie Fowler, 22, who won for the first time as a pro in Korea last weekend.

Cauley has no status on the PGA Tour, but qualified for the U.S. Open at Congressional, where he finished in the back of the pack, and has made the most of his sponsor’s exemptions. He finished third at the Frys.com last weekend, which got him into the McGladrey, an event he’d planned to try to Monday-qualify for after a red-eye flight Sunday. “This is definitely a lot easier,” he said at CordeValle.

His $340,000 payday at CordeValle pushed the diminutive Cauley up to $671,150 in earnings after just seven starts, which would put him 114th on the money list. He will almost certainly earn his card for 2012, bypassing Q school and becoming just the sixth player to accomplish the feat, the first since Ryan Moore.

Fowler, who won the Korea Open by six strokes over Rory McIlroy, is perhaps America’s most exciting and marketable young golfer, which is no small thing given how fast Tiger Woods has fallen from grace. If the stylish Fowler can leverage that hard-won breakthrough into a string of Ws, golf may attract some attention even in the midst of the baseball playoffs and the NFL and college football seasons.

There isn’t much left on the 2011 calendar: two Fall Series events, the HSBC Champions (always a strong field), the Aussie Open, PGA and Masters, and the Presidents Cup — that’s about it. Oh, and if you count the Chevron Challenge as a real tournament, there’s that, too. Woods did the Chevron media day Tuesday, and said he was grateful to have barely qualified to play in the event he hosts.

“I had points rolling off from ’09,” Woods said, explaining how he’s fallen to 52nd in the World Ranking. “I had a very good year that year. I won, what, seven times around the world, so all those points are coming off. Unfortunately, I fell quite a bit, and I fell fast. Good news is, by playing next year, I have no points coming off — so I can start rebuilding.”

Seniors down to their last full-field tournament

The Champions Tour’s AT&T Championship at TPC San Antonio is the last chance for the 50-and-overs to climb into the top 30 on the money list and qualify for the season-ending Charles Schwab Cup Championship at TPC Harding Park.

The good news for Tom Pernice Jr. was that he made the cut and finished T36 at the Frys.com Open last weekend. The bad news was he missed the Insperity Championship and fell from 27th to 30th on the senior money list. Brad Faxon, who got his first Champions victory at the Insperity, is 39th on the Schwab Cup points list.

The AT&T Canyons Course, designed by Pete Dye and Bruce Leitzke, is a new venue for the AT&T Championship. (Verizon and Sprint users are presumably still welcome.) This will be San Antonio’s 27th straight year as host city, the longest streak for any metropolitan area on the Champions tour, and TPC San Antonio, which also hosts the PGA Tour’s Valero Texas Open, becomes one of three golf facilities to host two PGA Tour-sanctioned events. The others: TPC Sawgrass, which hosts the Players and the Winn-Dixie Jacksonville Open, and Pebble Beach, home of the AT&T Pro-Am and the Nature Valley First Tee Open.

Short game: Jamie Lovemark, the Nationwide Tour’s player of the year last year, who had back surgery over the summer and hasn’t competed since the Shell Houston Open in May, will play the Nationwide’s Miccosukee Championship in Miami. Daniel Chopra is 25th on the Nationwide money list, with an $11,864 lead over Marco Dawson with two full-field events remaining. The top 25 make it to the PGA Tour next year. In his last three Nationwide starts, Miguel Carballo of Argentina lost in a playoff, tied for seventh, and last weekend won, climbing to fifth on the money list, up from 60th Sept. 18. Martin Kaymer will be the highest-ranked player (No. 6) at the Euro tour’s Portugal Masters at Oceanico Victoria Golf Course. Also in the field are Alvaro Quiros, who won the tournament in ’08, Thomas Bjorn, a three-time winner this year, and Padraig Harrington. Michelle Wie, Paula Creamer, Suzann Pettersen, Cristie Kerr and Christina Kim are among those who will try to stop the juggernaut that is Yani Tseng at the Sime Darby LPGA Malaysia at Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club.

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2. The Fall Series. The Frys was a blockbuster success and now Webb Simpson’s pursuit of the money title transforms Sea Island from a very charming little event into something more relevant. Now, if we can just get Tiger to play Disney.

3. Rickie. Every victory is a big deal when you’re an ambitious 22-year-old trying to live up to massive expectations. And it’s even sweeter when the guy you beat is the 22-year-old who has thoroughly eclipsed you.

4. Brad Faxon. Yeah, he only had to play two rounds, but one of golf’s good guys finally earned his maiden win on the Champions Tour after a decade of injury-related struggles. Unfortunately this means Faxon is likely to spend less time in the broadcast booth. I love his insight and was just getting used to the nasally New England voice.

5. Christina Kim. One continent can no longer contain golf’s liveliest personality as CK won her first Ladies European Tour event, in Sicily. If all the players on the LPGA were this much fun the tour would have a lot more than a dozen domestic events.

NOT
1. Tiger. He played pretty well in spurts but was undone by way too many soft bogeys. Reps, reps, reps, all he needs is more reps, according to the man himself. And yet now Woods goes underground for another month. Baffling.

2. Briny Baird. Nice playing for 72 holes, but in sudden death this winless journeyman had a handful of putts to seize the victory and he couldn’t shake one into the hole. At least he still has the best name in golf.

3. Ernie Els. He had a piece of the lead throughout much of the front nine on Sunday but misfired on a pair of short birdie putts to short-circuit his bid. I thought the belly putter was supposed to put an end to that?

4. The PGA Tour. The lords of Ponte Vedra are still trying to prevent reporters from live-tweeting play-by-play from tournament sites. Because, you know, stimulating fan interest is bad for the game.

5. Lee Westwood. He’s trying to drum up interest in a “major” in Asia. Isn’t that what the WGCs are for?

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ST ANDREWS, Scotland — After the bumper $10 million bonus paid out to Bill Haas last Sunday, it’s all about euros again this week as the Dunhill Links Championship takes center stage at the storied links of St Andrews, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns.

World No. 1 Luke Donald continues his quest to become the first player to lead the money list on both the European Tour and the PGA Tour. His stellar season of two victories and a stack of top 10s that would make Madonna proud means Donald has pretty much won the Race to Dubai — or the Race to the Bank as some call it. He has banked 3.8 million euros ($5.1 million) which sees him 1.6 million euros ($2.2 million) ahead of nearest rival Rory McIlroy with the season-ending Dubai World Championship just two months away. His lead on the PGA Tour is much more precarious. He is just $68,971 ahead of Webb Simpson.

“You always try to achieve things nobody has ever done,” he said. “It will be pretty special. It’s not easy to play on both tours. You spread yourself a little bit thinly.”

Donald said he doesn’t plan to play any more events on the PGA Tour this year, but he might change his mind if Simpson goes on a dollar run in the Fall Series.

“Maybe I’ll be tempted,” Donald said. “I could play Disney. Take my daughter to Disney World. I don’t know how important it is to Webb, but for someone who this time last year was struggling to keep his card that might be very appealing.”

McIlroy was doing his best to convince himself that he still has a chance to catch and pass Donald as they sprint down the final stretch. However, his grin suggested he is more likely to be lapped.

“It seems like every time Luke tees it up, he finishes top five and if he does that he’s going to be very difficult to beat,” McIlroy said. “Obviously I want to try to get closer to him and put a bit of pressure on him with a couple of events to go. I still think it’s possible. I have to think it’s possible.”

All things seem to be possible for McIlroy these days. Including dating Caroline Wozniacki, the World No. 1 in women’s tennis. But since his celebrity status went interstellar after his sensational victory at the U.S. Open in June, some old St Andrews traditions are no longer possible. This time last year, McIlroy went pretty much unnoticed as he sipped on a beer in a local pub watching his beloved Manchester United on TV. This year, he has confined himself to barracks — albeit the luxury of his suite at the Old Course Hotel.

“I’ll go out to dinner with my mum and dad in town but I won’t go into any of the pubs,” he said, adding that he doesn’t go out anymore when he’s at home in Northern Ireland either.

That’s the price of fame for world-beating sports stars. The old lifestyle is inevitably left behind.

“I don’t mind,” McIlroy said. “It’s great that people want to come up and talk to you and have pictures but sometimes you just want to keep it low-key and keep yourself to yourself.”

So while his father Gerry (a Manchester City supporter) was in a St. Andrews pub on Tuesday night watching Manchester United, Rory was stuck in his room and forced to watch Manchester City because his television didn’t have the right channel for the United game. A prisoner of his own success.

Had he ventured into the hotel’s bar overlooking the 17th green, he would have found suitable A-list celebrity company. The Dunhill Links Championship is Europe’s version of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. It even feels like California in Fife this week as the temperature has hit 70 degrees. The amateurs here include Michael Douglas (who partners with Colin Montgomerie), Hugh Grant (David Howell), Huey Lewis (Simon Dyson) and Andy Garcia (Pablo Larrazabal). Five of the world’s top six have jetted into town, only world No. 4 Steve Stricker is missing from that group of Donald, Lee Westwood, McIlroy, Dustin Johnson and Martin Kaymer.

Johnson is making his debut in the tournament with his brother, Austin, as caddie. He turned down requests for a press conference and thus avoided questions about how he lost his caddie, Joe LaCava, to Tiger Woods. Johnson showed his class on the links of Royal St George’s finishing runner-up to Darren Clarke at the British Open in July, and such form will take his name to the top of the leaderboard again. A press conference, then, would be tougher to avoid than a double-bogey at Carnoustie.

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It’s been said that the PGA Tour is like high school, and that’s an especially apt comparison as the Fall Series begins this week.

The kids who have washed out of the popular clique — or never got there in the first place — will tee off at the Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open at TPC Summerlin in Las Vegas. For players like Troy Merritt, who was one of the cool kids of 2010 after he won the Kodak Challenge in a playoff and finished 125th on the money list, the fall is desperation time. Merritt’s fallen to 198th in 2011.

“In the past I’ve played some of my best golf late in the year,” Merritt said at the recent Albertsons-Boise Open, where the Boise State alumnus was in contention until a final-round 71 dropped him into a tie for 11th place. “I’m hoping that’ll be the case again this year.”

The Fall Series is full of guys looking to apply the defib paddles to their moribund careers, including, for the first time, Tiger Woods, who will play next week’s Frys.com Open. In high school terms, it will be like the captain of the football team suddenly dropping in on the “mathletes,” golf’s version of a John Hughes movie. It ought to be good.

Vegas, where Woods won his first of 71 Tour events in 1996, will feature Tour winners like Will MacKenzie (210th on the money list), major winners like David Duval (152nd), and preternaturally young-looking Champions Tour pro Tom Pernice (138th), who, like Fred Funk before him, refuses to leave the PGA Tour without a fight.

Nick Watney will be the highest-ranked player in the field at 11th in the World Ranking. Martin Laird, who lost a sudden-death playoff to Jonathan Byrd’s ace in the dark at last year’s Justin Timberlake, is ranked 33rd. Ryan Moore, who went to UNLV, is 48th. Byrd is 51st.

But the Timberlake, like the rest of the Fall Series, is not about the rankings. It’s about the money list. With the golf season all but over as football takes primacy on the remote, the Tour turns into a Randy Newman song: “It’s Money That Matters.”

Joe Bramlett, who last December became the first African-American to get through the final stage of Q school in 25 years, is 191st on the money list heading into Vegas. He could use a big week. So could Boo Weekley (177th), the 2008 U.S. Ryder Cup team’s playing mascot.

Meanwhile, the popular kids will be either home counting their millions — Bill Haas withdrew from Vegas before being named to the U.S. Presidents Cup team on Tuesday — or playing in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at St. Andrews, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns — the European Tour’s answer to the Crosby Clambake at Pebble.

Five of the top six ranked players in the world will tee it up at the Dunhill, which as usual will showcase not just golfers (Luke Donald, Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, Graeme McDowell, Charl Schwartzel, Lee Westwood), but also actors (Michael Douglas, Andy Garcia, Hugh Grant) and musicians (Huey Lewis, Tico Torres).

As much as Vegas will be about sorting out the back end of the Tour’s money list, the Dunhill, with its strong field, could shift the game’s balance of power at the top. Donald, who leads the money list ($5.84 million ) by less than $70,000 over Webb Simpson in the U.S., also leads the European Tour’s money list with nearly 4 million Euros. That’s more than 1.6 million ahead of second-place Rory McIlroy and about twice Westwood’s total, but Westwood remains undaunted. Now that he’s gone another year without winning a major, his goal has turned to dragging down Donald to win the Race to Dubai.

“I’ve been working with a new putting coach and I think I clicked on something,” Westwood said.
We’ll see.

Short game: Ted Potter Jr., who won the Nationwide Tour’s Soboba Golf Classic in a largely overlooked playoff last weekend for his second W of 2011, missed the cut in 24 of 24 Nationwide starts in 2004. … $575 separates No. 25 Brenden Pappas from No. 26 Garth Mulroy going into this week’s WNB Golf Classic on the Nationwide. The top 25 players on the 2011 money list get their PGA Tour cards for next year. … With his start at this week’s SAS Championship on the Champions Tour, Tom Kite will become the 12th player in history with at least 1,000 combined PGA-Champions tour starts. Hale Irwin hit the 1,000 mark in 2010. … Keegan Bradley’s take of $3.76 million is the new earnings record for Nationwide Tour graduates in their first year on the PGA Tour. Brandt Snedeker made $2.84 million in ’07. … Before he and opposing 2012 Ryder Cup captain Davis Love III threw out the first pitch at Monday’s Chicago White Sox game, Euro captain Jose Maria Olazabal admitted he’d never thrown a baseball.

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HOT
1. The Solheim Cup. It’s right up there with the Masters for the most thrilling event of the season. The Solheim’s virtues — palpable passion, courageous shot-making, touching team spirit — were thrown into sharp relief even more by the ostentatious money grab that followed in Atlanta.

2. Jay, er, Bill Haas. Not only did he bank $11.4 million but he also summoned the shot of the year, an insane wedge out of the muck to stay alive in sudden death. Maybe now we’ll be able to tell him apart from Nick Watney.

3. Suzann Pettersen. With Laura Davies and Juli Inkster having enjoyed their swan song there’s no doubt this Nordic goddess will be the dominant personality for at least the next few Cups. That’s bad news for the Yanks.

4. Frys.com Open. Ernie Els has joined the field, along with Angel Cabrera, Rickie Fowler and, oh yeah, Tiger. With Joe LaCava making his debut on Woods’s bag this upcoming Fall Series event is suddenly must-see.

5. Ryann O’Toole. One of the most controversial captain’s picks ever came through with a star-making performance. Had she held on to a full point in singles to keep the Cup for the U.S. it would have been a little too cinematic.

NOT
1. Freddy. Bill Haas and Keegan Bradley both deserve to be on the Presidents Cup team but Cap. Couples’s blind allegiance to Tiger Woods has left him only one pick. If Freddy has a Steve Stricker voodoo doll you can be sure that right now he’s sticking plenty of needles in its shoulder.

2. Dustin Johnson. Now he knows how Natalie felt.

3. Webb Simpson. He’s had a breakthrough year but with a chance to sew up the bloated FedEx bonus he looked jittery all week at East Lake. He could still be player of the year, but you can’t pay NetJets with accolades.

4. Paula Creamer. Sent out in the first, tone-setting singles match, she got demolished 6 & 5 and afterward was reduced to tears. On the bright side, at least her face-paint didn’t smudge.

5. John Daly. It’s no longer news when Daly acts like a buffoon. It’s news only when he doesn’t.

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