After watching him go down in such ignominious fashion to Thomas Bjorn in the first round of the Accenture Match Play Championship, I think it is time we all downgrade our expectations of Tiger Woods.

No longer does it appear to be an inevitable foregone conclusion that he will break Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major championship.  It’s not even clear that he will ever win again, never mind add to his current total of 14 majors.

We all wanted to believe it when his close pal John Cook played a recent round with Tiger and pronounced him to be thisclose to being back to his old self.  Of course, then came Match Play, letting the air our of that balloon.

The thing is, besides lacking confidence in his new swing, Tiger seems to also lack confidence in himself – an assertion that I cannot believe I just typed.  For so long, Tiger was the most confident athlete in any sport in the world – and justifiably so.  Now, at 35, he has lost his swing, lost his swagger and lost his way.

Tiger didn’t win a tournament at all last year, for the first time in his career.  In three tournaments so far this year, he finished tied for 44^th at Torrey Pines, a course he virtually owns, shooting 74-75 on the weekend;  he finished 20^th at the Dubai Desert Classic, stumbling to 75.  And then there Match Play.

This once invincible athlete suddenly appears so...vincible.  If it is hard for us to watch, imagine what it must be like for Tiger, unable to recapture the magic, no longer able to wow us with ease.

Who ever thought in a million years this is what would become to Tiger Woods.

To everyone who stopped by our booth at the Philadelphia Golf Show, thank you.

It was a great weekend, even if I did talk about MyPhillyGolf.com until my lips hurt and my voice was pretty much gone.  That’s okay – anything for the cause.

I spend so much time working on and thinking about this website, I forget that plenty of golfers in the region still don’t know about us.    There was no end to the stream of golfers who walked by our booth, checked out our 9-foot wide banner, glanced at the computer screen showing off the home page, then paused long enough for me to give them a tour of all that resides on MyPhillyGolf.

The reaction we heard time and again was just what he wanted: Wow, it looks good and there is a ton of information.

Aside from the fresh content we upload daily, the biggest hits with show-goers were the discounted tee times available via Golfnow.com, the Discussion Boards and the Bausch Collection, the amazing cache of photo course galleries on by Villanova chemistry professor and golf addict Joe Bausch.

We passed out 1,200 MyPhillyGolf pencils (with erasers) and collected several hundred more email addresses for our new monthly e-newsletter.  (If you signed up at the show and haven’t received an e-newsletter by tomorrow, it’s probably because we couldn’t read your handwriting.  You can sign up again on the home page.)

If you missed the Philadelphia show, or if you simply can’t get enough of golf shows, there is another one is coming up this weekend, the first-ever the Reading Golf Show.    The Reading show is part of the larger Sports and Fitness EXPO.  One admission get gets you into everything.

Vance Diezel, who is running the Reading show, tells me in an email that they expect 8,000-10,000 people, and they’ve got "big retailers selling golf equipment, bags, shoes, balls and probably around 50 other vendors."  "Basically a smaller version of the North Coast type show but with different unique things added in."  They’ve also got raffles and a silent auction.

Enjoy.

Every year at this time, it is fashionable among many golf fans and pretty much all of the golf media that doesn’t work for CBS Sports to turn up their noses the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.

The big complaint, of course, is that CBS devotes entirely too much air time to the pro-am luminaries and lame-o celebrities.  For years, the stars of the pro-am show have been the same: Bill Murray, followed by Kevin Costner, Craig T. Nelson, Michael Bolton, Ray Romano and the one and only Kenny G. Full list.

While I am in full agreement that even a glimpse of ESPN blowhard Chris "Boomer" Berman is too much, the AT&T Pebble Beach is actually one of my favorite tournaments of the year – or at least it’s in the top 50 percent – for all the reasons other people mock it.

First, what is not to like about watching golf going on at Pebble Beach when we have a foot of snow on the ground in Philadelphia.  Second, if watching George Lopez and Tom Dreesen hack it around and ham it up drives you nuts, either your intolerance meter is set too low or your life is too good by half.

If you ask me, there is something almost pleasurable about witnessing millionaire celebs failing spectacularly at golf.  I find it rather gratifying to see them just as humbled by the game as I am. 

I don’t even mind watching the occasional ruthless and egomaniacal corporate titan – there are plenty of those also in the AT&T pro-am field – as they slap it around.  Golf seems to be the one thing in life they can’t conquer.

The whole celeb scene is really only borderline too much for one day, on Saturday, since I no longer watch the early rounds of golf tournaments because...well, they don’t matter.   By Sunday, when I truly pay attention, the cut has eliminated most of the amateurs and celebs and we are down to the usual suspects – a few big-name stars and a field filled out by journeymen Tour players who most of us couldn’t identify if they were standing on the front stoop ringing the doorbell.

Sadly, the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am doesn’t have the cache it once had, back when it was the Bing Crosby Clambake and the European Tour was a joke.  Nowadays, in golf, the AT&T is overshadowed by the Dubai Desert Classic, where this week Nos. 1, 2 and 3 in the World Golf Rankings – Lee Westwood, Martin Kaymer and Tiger Woods – are grouped for the first two rounds.

That’s a shame and too bad for the AT&T and too bad for the PGA Tour.  Personally, I can’t wait to hear Kenny G’s thoughts on the whole situation.

Whoa, did I just see what I thought I saw at Torrey Pines?

Just as we all settled in to watch the final two rounds of the Farmers Insurance Open – Tiger Woods’ first tournament of 2011, at one of his favorite courses, where he has won six times, plus his herculean victory at the 2008 U.S. Open – what we saw was more or less an unmitigated disaster.

Forget exploding out of the blocks.  Forget Tiger serving notice that the Tiger Of Old is back, with a reliable swing he retooled under Sean Foley.  Forget him even doing anything of note.

After putting himself in decent position with a pair of 69s on Thursday and Friday, Tiger shot 74-75 on the weekend and fell 20 spots to finish T-44^th, leaving more than a few golf fans with their jaws on the floor.  It was an unexpected embarrassment.

It was so bad that his playing partner in the final round, a rookie named Brendan Steele, told Sports Illustrated afterward that he thought Tiger essentially mailed it in.

"I don’t think he gave it everything today," said Steele.  "Once it started going in the wrong direction, I don’t think it had his full attention."

There was a time not so long ago that no golfer alive would dare say such a thing about Tiger – nor would there ever be reason to.  

We are left wondering if the air has already gone out of Tiger’s season, and maybe even his career?  Does he have the desire required to get back to any semblance of what he was? 

Joe Posnanski, in his Sports Illustrated blog, notes that the circle of folks who think Tiger will go back in time keeps getting smaller and smaller, that the "Tiger will be great again" school is shrinking.

Steve Elling of CBSSports.com, in his Pond Scrum blog with John Huggan, was even tougher: "Blunt assessment time.  I saw a I guy who still can’t string together four good rounds.  He barely pieced together two good nines.  Right now, Tiger Woods isn’t one of the world’s 40 best players.  Last night in the San Diego airport, a bunch of scribes were actually discussing what would happen if he never made it back to anything close to his former levels at all.  All of a sudden, it didn’t sound like heresy."

Unfortunately, no it doesn’t.

Is it more than mere coincidence that the very same week that MyPhillyGolf is unveiling a new, improved version of itself, so is Tiger Woods.

Me, I think new beginnings are usually a good thing.

What to expect when Tiger tees it up for the first time in Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines GC, a course where he has dominated since boyhood, most recently at the 2008 U.S. Open?

If you’re like me, you’ve had it up to your coccyx with all of the unseemly, salacious details about the personal problems that crashed Tiger’s life in late 2009.  Most of us will never look at Tiger the way we did pre-scandal, when he wasn’t merely the most dominant golfer in the game, he was husband, father and role model who seemed too good to be true.  Turns out it was all too good to be true.

Still, I for one, will rooting for Tiger to have a big year.  He needs it if he is ever going to achieve his ultimate goal in the game of eclipsing Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major championship titles.  More to the point, golf needs Tiger to be back. Without him in top form, golf loses much of it’s sizzle.

Even if he starts winning again, don’t expect him to ever own the game again, and he will never leave the other pros quaking in their FootJoys when he strides onto the practice range.

Tiger has been brought down a notch, by himself and by his fellow gunslinger pros.  Did you see what U.S. Open champion Graeme McDowell did to him at the final event of the year, the Chevron World Challenge, rolling in 20-footers to beat Tiger, just the way he used to roll them in on everyone else?  There is also the fact that Tiger is now 35.  If you check the stats on who has won majors after 35, they do not bode well for beating Nicklaus’ record.

But Tiger far from done. In the old days, when he was one of the most awe-inspiring athletes in the world in any sport, Tiger had to search for, and often create, motivation for himself.

Not any more.  Not only did he go winless last year for the first time in his career, just yesterday, he fell to No. 3 in the World Golf Rankings, behind Lee Westwood and Martin Kaymer, the up-and-coming German who served notice by winning the PGA Championship last summer at Whistling Straits.

While he disgraced himself, in some ways this whole embarrassing mess has made Tiger a more compelling figure.  He is human and quite flawed after all, and nothing is better than a come-back story.  You can talk all you want about the rise of the Europeans and the exciting array of young guns, but if you ask me, 2011 is still all about Tiger.

If you’re a regular visitor to MyPhillyGolf, you might notice that our home page looks a little different.  Please bear with us as we make some design changes that are intended to better organize and display our content and make the website more user-friendly.  The tweaks are likely to be on-going for another week or two, until we are satisfied.

Change can be difficult, but it can also be necessary and exciting.  Our first full year at MyPhillyGolf has been good, very good.

Without any advertising, marketing or promotion golfers across the region have discovered MyPhillyGolf and, in many cases, become regular, even daily, visitors.  Through word-of-mouth alone, we’ve had 1.2 million page views this year

Our quest for 2011 is to build on that good start to make for an even better sophomore year.  The new look is only one of the improvements and enhancements we have in mind.  I’ll tell you more as they get closer to fruition.

In the meantime, all the features you’ve come to enjoy on MyPhillyGolf are still there – just maybe in a different place and with a different look.

Only four months til spring...

Thanks,

Joe Logan

As David Fay prepares to retire as executive director of the U. S. Golf Association, it should not go unacknowledged that Philadelphia owes him a debt of gratitude.

If not for Fay’s adamant support, Merion GC would not be preparing to host the 2013 U.S. Open, a sporting spectacle that will put the city in the national spotlight and pump millions of dollars into the economy.

Of course, even Fay had to be convinced that Merion, supposedly a classic from a bygone era in golf, was up to hosting its fifth Open.  That happened in 2002, after Fay had dispatched Mike Davis, senior director of rules and competitions, to Merion to break the news that from here on out, the club would only host smaller events, such as the 2005 U.S. Amateur and the 2009 Walker Cup.

Once he got a closer look at the restoration project at Merion, Davis thought otherwise, and he returned to USGA headquarters in Far Hills, N.J. and pitched his boss with the idea of bringing the Open back to Merion.  Only after Fay was on board did Merion truly become a serious candidate for ’13.

Here’s a passage from a story I wrote for Golf World in August 2009, headlined Resurrecting Merion.

"I remember it like it was yesterday, walking into David Fay's office when I got back, saying, 'We can do this, we can hold an Open at Merion,' " Davis recalls. Fay listened but was not convinced. That soon changed, too, in September 2002, when Fay was invited to be the keynote speaker at Merion's annual celebration of Jones' Slam, a day that included golf and a black-tie gala.

During his round Fay began to grasp all that Davis had been telling him. "You would have had to be blind not to appreciate the changes that had been made," says Fay, who suddenly was also in Merion's corner. Ultimately, though, the prospects hinged on whether the logistics could be overcome and if Merion could stand up to the longest hitters in the game.

As the 2005 U.S. Amateur approached, it was clear the event, filled with college-aged bombers, would be a make-or-break test for the Open. By the second day of stroke-play qualifying, the results were in—Merion had passed with flying colors. Of 312 players, only six broke par, and none of them had better than 69. The scoring average on the East Course was 78.2.

"By Tuesday night, we were high-fiving," says Iredale, general chairman of the Amateur, knowing the verdict was unofficially in.

The rest is history yet to be made.