If you missed it in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, here’s a travel story I wrote for them on the emergence of Ocean City, Md., as a golf destination.

 

As the story notes, OCMD is sort of a mini-Myrtle Beach trip.  The city now has 17 courses within a 40 minute drive.  It’s also a very family-oriented resort town.

Just when it looked like the final round of the Masters was as good as it could possibly get, it got better.

 

Could you believe that final round?

 

Thrills, spills, birdies galore, careers being made and, sadly, the heartbreak that was Rory McIlroy’s humiliating moment in the global spotlight.  To his credit, when it was over, young Rory, who is still younger than half the golf shirts in my closet, stood there and faced the media like a man.  He had wilted under the suffocating pressure and there was no denying it.  He didn’t try to.  The good news is, what doesn’t kill him will make him stronger.   Rory will be back, and I am willing to bet, he will win the Masters within the next three years.

 

It was also good to see Tiger Woods hitting on all cylinders for most of the final round.  Only a couple of weeks ago, he looked totally lost.  Now, suddenly, we see glimmers of the Tiger of old.  That bodes well for the U.S. Open.

 

Charl Schwartzel has a gorgeous golf swing and, obviously, and poise under pressure.  But his name looks misspelled and before today I couldn’t pick him out in a police lineup. Personally, I was rooting for, in this order: (1) Rory McIlroy (2) Tiger (3) Adam Scott (4) Luke Donald (5) Jason Day.

 

Still, it’s hard to be disappointed when the Masters set the tone for a great season of majors.

After Tiger Woods shot 66 on Friday and moved to 7-under par and three shots off the lead in the Masters, several people have been kind enough to call or email to point out that I wrote in this space a week ago that he is lost and has "no chance" to win a fifth green jacket this week.

 

Oh, how I hope me makes me eat my words.  If golf needs anything right now, it is Tiger back on his game. Remember, I didn’t say I wasn’t rooting for him; I just said I didn’t think his game looked sharp enough to win. 

 

It is looking more and more like we will ever see him dominate the way he did at the peak of Tiger-mania.  He’s 35 and not the same player anymore, and the guys he’s competing against these days are young and fearless and crazy-long off the tee.  If fact, if the sudden rejuvenation of Tiger is a major storyline this week, so is what is increasingly looking like a changing of the guard at the top of golf.

 

How can we not be impressed by the crop of young players who are muscling their way onto the leaderboard and into the limelight?  Rory  McIlroy, Jason Day, Alvaro Quiros, Ricky Fowler, not to mention Dustin Johnson, Gary Woodland and a couple of others.  These guys are the next generation of stars.   We should not be surprised at all of young McIlroy finds the poise to hold it together and win his first major.

 

Meanwhile, Saturday’s third round is crucial for Tiger.  So far this year in the reconstruction of his game, weekends have not been overly kind to him.  At the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines, he shot 74-75 in the third and fourth rounds and fell off the leaderboard.  At the Dubai Desert Classic, he shot 72-75.  At the Arnold Palmer Invitational, he went 74-72.

 

Saturday is an even bigger test.

If you ever doubt the veracity of the PGA Tour slogan, "These guys are good," play a round of golf with a Tour player.

 

I did that last week, in the pro-am at the Champions Tour event, the Mississippi Gulf Resort Classic, at Fallen Oak.  My pro in the pro-am was Mark Wiebe, a two-time winner on the regular tour and a two-time winner on the Champions Tour.

Despite Wiebe’s career earnings of $7.5 million, it’s fair to say that most of us likely think of him as no superstar, rather as a moderately successful journeyman pro.

 

And yet, I am here to tell you that besides being a gracious and likeable guy, Mark Wiebe plays at a level well above even a hot-shot scratch player.

 

Over 18 holes at Fallen Oak – one of Tom Fazio’s better courses, by the way – Wiebe hit long, towering tee shots that almost always found the center of the fairway.  More impressive, however, were his second shots.

 

When you and I stand over a 4-iron shot in the fairway, we hope to get the ball up around the green, in up-and-down range, or on the green with a long putt, if we are lucky.

 

Wiebe, on the other hand, would stand over a 4-iron (from about 20 yards behind where I hit 4-iron) and proceed to launch a rocket that would sail higher and higher until it dropped straight down out of the sky to 10 feet from the pin, settling 5 maybe feet from the hole.

 

On par threes, with a mid- to short-iron in his hand, he was all over the hole, always giving himself a makeable birdie putt.

 

The format for the pro-am was a "shamble," meaning we four amateurs all tee shots, then we picked the best of the bunch and we all played out our own balls from there.  Wiebe played his own ball the entire round.

 

On the green, Wiebe would let all of us amateurs take our best shot at making the birdie for the team.  If none of us converted, he would attempt his own birdie putt. At least twice, we appeared to have no chance at birdie, as Wiebe faced a tricky 10- or 15-foot downhill, sidehill putt.

 

Both times, Wiebe and his caddie, Brett, read the greens with skills that elude me, factoring in speed and degree of break caused by the grain, even recalling how a similar putt from the same spot broke in last year’s tournament.

 

Both times, Wiebe sank the putt and kept our birdie run alive.

 

Did I mention Wiebe’s back was killing him?  He’s a big guy, 6-foot-3, 250 pounds with a lot of aches and pains.  On the first tee, he said he wasn’t sure he’d be able to play the entire round.  By the fourth tee, he was lying on his back, doing leg cross-over stretches.

 

After nine, when we headed to the 10^th tee, Wiebe said he needed a "little work" and headed to the fitness trailer.  A few minutes later, he showed up on the 10^th tee.

 

"I’m fine now," he said.  "They popped my back into place."

 

On the 14^th, as we all agreed that the course, the scenery, the weather, the setting sun couldn’t make for a finer place to be at the moment, Wiebe said, "Welcome to my office."  Then he smiled and drove off after his tee shot.

The more I watch Tiger Woods fumbling his way around golf courses, the more inconceivable I find it that a player of his skill, success and confidence can be so totally lost.

 

C’mon, the guy has been a natural and preordained superstar since the moment he picked up a club while he was still in diapers.  Add to that the support system that was his parents, a work ethic that is second to none, a competitive drive to match, and the result was that run of greatness that we all got used, even began to take or granted.

 

So to see him mired in such frustration and ordinariness now pretty much defies the imagination.  How can he have gotten so lost?  How can he have become so uncertain of the most natural motion he has made in his 35 years -- his golf swing?  Outwardly, he still tries to project a certain bravado, but it’s all a front.  The man must be desperate by now.

 

Friends of Tiger’s have said that his primary emotion of these past 18 months is unspeakable shame and humiliation.  That’s understandable.   Aside from Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign the presidency during the Watergate scandal, it is hard to name another public figure who has fallen so far, so fast, as Tiger.  For that matter, at least before his troubles, Nixon was already a controversial political figure.  No so for Tiger, who had enjoyed an unblemished climb to the top as the ultimate athlete, success story, role model and corporate pitchman.

 

That he hit rock bottom and lost his image and his family, was unfortunate but to be expected.  You do the crime, you do the time. 

 

But given Tiger’s incredible ability to focus on the task at hand and to overcome all odds, I must say I imagined, even hoped, he would rise up out of the ashes better than he has so far.   We all know how badly he wants to win again, to regain his old superiority, to reestablish some semblance of his old life.

 

So to see him self-destruct with a 74-75 on the weekend, as he did at the Farmers Insurance Open, or shoot 74, as he did on Saturday at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, or watch him finish bogey-double bogey on Sunday at Bay Hill...I don’t know; it just makes me sad.

 

With the Masters a week away, we are coming up on a year since Tiger’s return to competitive golf. I give him virtually not shot to win.  I expect him to make the cut, maybe attract some attention with a 69 or Friday or Saturday, then fade. I hate that I expect that. 

 

Put me in the camp that believes that if Tiger can resurrect his career, it will be the greatest story of redemption and recovery in modern sports.   I’m pulling for him.  Not because I like what he did or have any naive notions about who he is as a person.  I’m only pulling for him because how can I not?

If you haven’t played your first round of the year yet, what are you waiting for?

 

I hit my maiden tee shot at Talamore CC last Saturday, when skies were clear and the thermometer was flirting with 60.  The fairways were surprisingly full and green and the greens were slow but true, for this early in the season. Tomorrow, it’s supposed to hit 58 and I’ve got 10:20 a.m. tee time.

 

Across the region, courses are awakening from their winter slumber, sprucing up as the new season dawns.

 

"We’re off to a normal start," said Darin Bevard, senior agronomist with the U.S. Golf Association’s Mid-Atlantic office in Glen Mills.   "Most courses are getting opened, if it would stop raining on them."

 

At Whitemarsh Valley CC, superintendent Tony Gustaitis agreed.  "It’s a relatively normal spring, except for the rain last night."

 

As both Bevard and Gustaitis noted, yesterday’s day-long deluge, which ranged from 1½ to 3 inches, was a bit of a soggy setback.    Some courses, including Whitemarsh, were closed today because of the deluge.

 

"Courses only need 2-3 days to dry out," said Bevard.  "But we need some warm weather. We haven’t had any warm weather yet to speak of."

 

Some winters are harder than others on golf courses.  Gustaitis rated this winter as a 6 on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being the worst. Bevard described this winter as pretty much average.   We had snow cover for about seven weeks, from right after Christmas to late February. Snow cover is not necessarily bad; it can a protective blanket for turf grass.  The good news is, we didn’t get much in the way of damaging ice storms.

 

The most damage to courses resulted the wet, heavy snow we got back in late January or early February, said Bevard.  That caused tree damage at many courses, as did high winds that whipped the region on several occasions.

 

"Conditions are...well, this is still the first week or so of March," said Bevard.  "Most courses are okay but guys haven’t had much chance to do much grooming."

 

Conditions are not the same everywhere.  In the Poconos, there are still some courses with snow.  The Jersey Shore, on the other hand, is a week to 10 days ahead of Philadelphia, said Bevard.

 

"The Shore doesn’t get as much snow as we do, and their courses drain a little better – at least some of them do."

 

Barring any weather setbacks, Bevard predicts Spring-like conditions will arrive right on time, around April 1.

When the U.S. Golf Association named Mike Davis its new executive director on Tuesday, they not only picked a capable executive and good guy, they chose someone who was instrumental in bringing the 2013 U.S. Open to Merion GC.

 

Here’s the pertinent passage I wrote in a 2009 story for Golf World headlined "Resurrecting Merion."

 

Mike Davis, the USGA's senior director of rules and competitions, had had his eye on Merion for a while. A native of Chambersburg, Pa., Davis was a longtime fan of the course and respectful of the club's place in the game. He had also been in that original making-amends meeting at Far Hills, so he knew the effort Merion was putting forth.

In the fall of 1998, Davis, then deputy to Tom Meeks, had been invited to Merion to examine the changes, both underway and planned. And there was something else.

"I was asked by Buddy [Marucci], 'Could you come down and tell our board why we can't have another Open?' " recalls Davis. Therefore, it was not a trip Davis relished. "It is easier telling somebody their kids are ugly," he says, "than telling them their course can't hold an Open."

But a funny thing happened on that visit as Davis played a round with Marucci, Iredale and Greenwood: He became something of a believer in the possibilities for Merion. He marveled at the improvements, especially the new tees and the removal of trees that had clogged pedestrian traffic during the '81 Open.

Then, later...

As the Amateur approached, however, Davis continued to visit. It was during one of those trips, in late 2001 or early 2002, over lunch in the Merion grillroom, that Davis dropped a bombshell. He said he liked the changes so much he had broached the subject of trying to figure a way to bring the Open to Merion with his boss, USGA executive director David Fay.

"We were stunned," recalls Iredale.

Immediately, the conversation turned to the outside-the-ropes obstacles. That's when someone at the table wondered aloud about maybe using the acres and acres of wide-open space a stone's throw away—the athletic fields at nearby Haverford College. During the '81 Open, those same fields had been used for parking. Why wouldn't they work for corporate hospitality tents?

"We got up and went straight over to look at it," says Iredale. The Haverford fields were perfect, but given the scale of the modern Open, they would still need more room.

How about Merion's West Course, two minutes further up Ardmore Avenue? And what about the mansions along Golf House Road, adjacent to Merion? Could they put hospitality tents in their yards?

By the end of that day, Davis was all the more convinced Merion could pull off another U.S. Open. Not a giant Open, such as Bethpage or Pinehurst, with 45,000 spectators a day. But a smaller Open, similar to Winged Foot, with room for 20,000 or 25,000 spectators per day.

"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.