The Loop

Ian Poulter overrated? 'Were he to have played with his trap shut' he'd be among most admired players

May 11, 2015

Stories of interest you might have missed…

Did Ian Poulter deserve to come out on top in a poll on overrated players? Kevin Garside of the Independent says no. "I would contend that were he to have played golf with his trap shut, he would be among the most admired figures in the game," Garside writes. "His Ryder Cup performances alone mark him out as a golfer of some pedigree; 12 wins on the European Tour is not too shabby either."

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"Qinglin Chen took nine Advanced Placement courses at Lowell High School in San Francisco and stuffed her free time with tutoring and volunteer hours at a soup kitchen. But it was a heavy load of a different kind that ultimately won the 17-year-old a full scholarship to Northwestern University: a 30-pound golf bag." Melissa Korn in the Wall Street Journal profiles the Western Golf Association's Evans Scholars Foundation.


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Pete Brown, the first African-American golfer to win a PGA Tour event and a former Augusta National caddie, died recently, and was saluted by an old golf friend, Jim Dent. "At Augusta Municipal Golf Course on Wednesday, Dent headed up a group of seven golfers memorializing Brown with a 21-ball salute at the practice range," Chris Gay writes in the Augusta Chronicle.


*** Maverick McNealy of Stanford was an unlikely candidate to ascend to the No. 1 player in men's college golf, John Paul Newport writes in the Wall Street Journal: "McNealy's path to the top is unusual…not least of which is his thin junior golf résumé. He played hockey and soccer as well as golf in his senior year at the academically rigorous Harker School in San Jose, Calif. He never played a golf tournament outside northern California until the U.S. Junior Amateur in the summer before his senior year, and so was largely unknown to college recruiters." There's also this: he grew up in a wealthy family; his father Scott was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.