Two groups after Jack Nicklaus instructed Phil Mickelson and Woody Austin to concede Vijay Singh's four-foot putt on the 18th hole Thursday at the Presidents Cup, Ernie Els faced a four-footer for par that would have earned the International squad another half-point. Els was paired with Angel Cabrera against David Toms and Jim Furyk.

As Steve Elling describes at CBSSPorts.com, Mickelson, standing directly beside Nicklaus on the apron of the 18th green, grabbed the U.S. captain by the shoulder and said, "Don't you dare give them that putt."

Damon Green, Zach Johnson's caddie, was stationed directly behind Nicklaus and said to Mickelson, "Don't worry, I've got a hold of his shirt back here."

It was all meant in jest. When Els badly missed the par-saver and blew the ball four feet past the other side of the hole, the Americans conceded the bogey and Toms tapped in from 40 inches for a bogey and a 1-up win.

The early atmosphere at the Presidents Cup on Thursday, before the U.S. swamped the leader boards in red, was reminiscent of the partisan cheering of a Ryder Cup. On the third hole, after Phil Mickelson hit a putt, someone in the gallery yelled out, "Miss it!"

Jim (Bones) Mackay walked over to the side of the green, flagstick in hand, and said, "Who's the good sportsman over here?"

It made it all the more fitting when Jack Nicklaus instructed Mickelson to concede Vijay Singh's putt on the 18th for the only International success of the day.

--Jim Moriarty

MONTREAL--It takes thick skin to be a member of Jack Nicklaus' Presidents Cup team. In a meeting with his squad last month at the Deutsche Bank Championship, the Golden Bear was going around the tables, greeting everyone with niceties until he got to Charles Howell III, who has tailed off after a hot West Coast that included a playoff win over Phil Mickelson at the Nissan Open.

According to Howell, who was sitting at a table with Zach Johnson, David Toms and Hunter Mahan, the dialogue from Nicklaus went like this:

"Zach, great job on winning the Masters green jacket, that's fantastic, that's awesome."

"David, another solid season, you are another steady, steady player."

"Hunter, you've really come along here lately. This is fantastic, young guy."

"Charles . . . you need a lesson."

Howell, who knows Nicklaus through not only the Presidents Cup but also a sponsorship deal with UBS, was quick enough on his feet to say, "My pro-am time is 7 a.m. tomorrow," but Nicklaus never showed up to give that lesson.

The Bear did, however, give Howell the featured pairing in today's Foursomes competition at Royal Montreal. Nicklaus broke up his Tiger Woods-Jim Furyk team that was so strong in 2005 at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club, pairing Howell with Woods (they won two alternate-shot matches at Fancourt in 2003) and Furyk with Toms.

"I think that Tiger would like to play with Furyk," Nicklaus said during his Wednesday news conference to announce the pairings. "I think [Tiger] would like to play with two or three other guys also. I think that Tiger and Charles played well in South Africa. I think Charles has been in a bit of a bump since then, bumpy road and he needs some help from somebody, and I think Tiger is the guy to give it to him. After that, my guess is it will be switched off, but I want to get Charles off to a good start if possible."

Woods and Howell will take on K.J. Choi and Nick O'Hern, but the match I'm most interested in watching is the second one out this afternoon: Mike Weir and Vijay Singh vs. Mickelson and Woody Austin. Singh handed Weir his most painful loss at the 2004 Canadian Open, and this is Austin's first international team competition. International captain Gary Player put Weir and Singh together to get the partisan crowd into it, but Austin has the potential to stir up Mickelson, who requested Woody as a replacement for the fiery partner he had in '05, Chris DiMarco.

And if you haven't logged on to weather.com to check the playing conditions, it's raining and 55 degrees this morning in Montreal, so expect a wet one when you turn on the TV at 1 p.m. for TNT's coverage.

--Tim Rosaforte

Golf's leading organizations announced today that an anti-doping policy will go into effect in 2008, but as far as we can tell there are still a lot of details that need to be worked out.

Today we're learning about the list of proposed banned substances, which goes far beyond steroids.

The second phase of the process, which will be completed later this year, will include the development of specific policies, testing protocols and penalties.

The proposed list of banned substances includes:
Anabolic Agents
Hormones and Related Substances
Agents with Anti-Estrogenic Activity
Diuretics and Other Masking Agents
Stimulants
Narcotics
Cannabinoids
Beta Blockers
Enhancement of Oxygen Transfer
Chemical and Physical Manipulation

Substances that may be prohibited at the option of individual golf organizations:
Glucocorticosteroids
Beta-2-Agonists

Shocking news: Gouge is overly agitated and in a lather again. Bomb attempts to restore order, but Gouge is clearly in a Howard Beale-Network state. This time he attempts to suggest that the USGA's rule on moment of inertia might end up being surreptitiously violated in the same way the spring-like effect rule was violated earlier this year. The only thing worse is Hugh Laurie not getting the trophy at the Emmy Awards on Sunday night. Check out the outrage at Bomb & Gouge.

Michelle Wie played her first round of golf as a college student Monday morning, completing nine holes at Stanford University Golf Course. She was accompanied by her parents, B.J. and Bo, who drove the cart while she walked.

Freshmen are scheduled to check in Tuesday, with classes starting next week. Wie, who turns 18 on Oct. 11, is undecided on a major.

While Wie and all freshmen are required to live in a dormitory their first year on campus, it is unclear how much time she will spend there. Her parents have rented a house locally.

It is also uncertain how much interaction Wie will have with the Stanford men's and women's golf teams. Technically, she is a professional golfer and not a student-athlete, but she will be allowed to use the course and practice facilities.

Wie is 53rd in the current Rolex Women’s World Rankings.

--Mark Soltau

There's nothing worse than bad greens, but like PGA Tour tournament director Mark Russell said last week, trying to grow bent-grass greens in the South is like trying to grow palm trees in Northern Canada. Russell wasn't passing the blame: This is one of the reasons why Augusta National closes down for most of the summer and why the greens at East Lake were never an issue until this year, when the Tour Championship was moved from leaf-turning chill of late October-early November to one of the hottest and driest late summers on record for Atlanta.

Whether it was Mother Nature or the affects of Global Warming, it was an embarrassment for a man who is not used to being embarrassed -- not with his type of track record for a community and golf course renovator. But just to make sure the affects of a heat wave would not happen again, course owner Tom Cousins has plans to change East Lake's greens to one of the new strands of hybrid Bermuda, either the most-established Champion or the new-age Mini Verde that was used in renovating the TPC-Sawgrass.

It won't be a knee-jerk decision, but one that is researched by director of golf Rick Burton and course superintendent Ralph Kepple and implemented in May 2008. With the course closed for the summer, East Lake should play hard and fast like this year's Players Championship by the time we reach next September.

"We met with the tour, and we could either go with a no-till method, where we go in and aerify and put springs down on top of the soil, or we could go the other way and two 2-4 inches off and add a new greens mix," Burton said Thursday. "There are pros and cons to both." East Lake's chipping green was done with the no-till technique in Mini Verdi and did fine, coming back quicker than the more radical stripping.

So back to Russell's point, why bent grass at East Lake? Well, because when the course went through its reconstruction 12 years ago, Crenshaw Bentgrass was just coming out and was considered to be better than the Bermuda being produced at the time. Plus, with Bentgrass, the course didn't have to go through overseeding in the early fall or close down in April-May to get the overseeding out.

"We had the worst heat we've ever had in August, 10 straight 100-degree days, plus drought," Burton said. "The ground temperature never got below 70 and the roots got so short, the grass just died. Even if we had the tournament in the old days the weather would have stressed the greens. We just would have had more recovery time by the first week in November."

--Tim Rosaforte

One of the game's greats died this summer at 80 without many headlines, but if you were part of professional golf in the late 1970s through the 1990s it was hard to not know John Montgomery Sr. (right, with Jack Nicklaus), or call him anything  but "Senior." He was to tournament operations what his best friend, Jack Nicklaus, was to winning majors and so it made sense that they went arm-in-arm, or needle-for-needle, for over three decades.

There was a ceremony to honor Montgomery last Friday at the TPC-Sawgrass clubhouse in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. Nicklaus spoke. So did PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem, who credited Montgomery's company, Executive Sports, with helping to grow the game. "A writer once said that there are three types of golf tournaments," Finchem said. "Tournaments that aren't run by Montgomery. Tournaments that are run by Montgomery. And tournaments that want to be run by Montgomery."

They held the memorial in the Jacksonville area because it was John's adopted hometown and because his impact was felt at the home of tournament golf in the years before the PGA Tour started running golf tournaments themselves. John goes back to the old Jacksonville Open, the forerunner of The Players, but he was also instrumental in the development of the Memorial Tournament as the most well-run event on tour. Someday, they should find a place for Montgomery in the World Golf Hall of Fame under the distinguished service category.

Driving to the service, Jackie Nicklaus, the eldest son of the Golden Bear's five children, made the observation that Senior always reminded him of John Wayne. When Montgomery's widow, Nancy, was told that, she grinned. John Wayne was always one of Senior's heroes, to tell you what kind of man Senior was.

I met John back in the late '70s covering the events at Inverrary and Doral, and along with Larry Dorman (then the golf writer at the Miami Herald), Senior used to tease us about our hair and our beards and our shorts--or something we wrote, especially if it put us in the Golden Bear's doghouse. John was an old-school guy who played football at Duke and worked his way up through the ranks of the FBI and Southern Bell before turning to golf. We'd imitate him and his North Florida accent, just to shut him down, or maybe do our Nicklaus imitations in front of him. He'd go off chuckling, threatening to tell Jack.

As I said, Senior loved to needle. Some of his greatest pranks occurred at Nicklaus' expense, usually around Jan. 21, Jack's birthday. Jack lives in Lost Tree Village, a gated community in North Palm Beach, Fla., but every year Senior would work his way through the guard gate transporting various forms of gag gifts. One year it was a donkey, which he tied to the mirror of Jack's Lincoln Continental. Another year he arrived by boat, spread chicken feed all over Jack's backyard and unloosed dozens of chickens. There was the monkey that did a strip tease and the five-ton pile of manure with the pin flag that said, "Happy Birthday" on top.

But if Montgomery was famous for anything, it was helping to write a page in golf history-—and perhaps motivate Nicklaus to his greatest triumph.

It was Montgomery who took a particular Atlanta Constitution article written by Tom McCollister previewing the 1986 Masters and taped it to the refrigerator at the home Jack rented in Augusta and shared with Montgomery. In the article, McCollister wrote that Nicklaus had no chance of winning, that he was done, finished, washed up. Later that week, Nicklaus won his sixth green jacket. As Nicklaus said concluding the service, John's probably still laughing about that one. It was part of the legacy he left behind.

-—Tim Rosaforte

ATLANTA--Golf's Big Two, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, spent some time with the media Wednesday, and both expressed opinions about whether they view the FedEx Cup playoffs as a success. Read the transcripts of today's interviews at the Tour Championship.

The best moment might've been when Tiger was asked if $10 million still gets his attention. . . . Woods nodded his head, slowly.

Later, Tiger confirmed on his website that he will not be playing in the PGA Grand Slam of Golf in Bermuda next month. Instead, Jim Furyk will join Masters champion Zach Johnson, U.S. Open champion Angel Cabrera and British Open champ Padraig Harrington in the Oct. 15-17 event at the Mid Ocean Club.

--Mark Soltau

ATLANTA--It was a pleasantly low-key day at East Lake. Because practice rounds were limited due to the distressed greens, player and fan attendance was down, giving the old Bobby Jones stomping grounds and its attendant Tudor architecture the serenity of a grand urban park on a Sunday morning.

Amid the quietude, a modest ceremony in which Hal Sutton was awarded the 2007 Payne Stewart Award began on the first tee. But everything changed once the 49-year-old Sutton stepped to the podium and opened his soul.

Sutton began by saying that because lockers on the PGA Tour are assigned according to the alphabet, he and Stewart had adjacent lockers at nearly every tournament they played in for almost two decades. When Sutton related that one of the things he learned about Stewart was "how much he cared about Tracy and his children," his deep voice broke.

Recovering, he said, "I'm sorry. It's hard. I've been away from competitive golf for three years . . . you kind of get lost."

Sutton then went on a torrent of reflection that showed--through charitable efforts including the establishment of a children's hospital in his hometown of Shreveport, LA, as well as teaming with fellow Louisianans Kelly Gibson and David Toms to raise more than $2 million in aid to Hurricane Katrina victims--how much he'd found.

"I finally learned how to get my self-esteem out of something other than just golf," he said. "Something more important than chasing my own dreams."

He looked behind him to the East Lake practice tee and remembered how in 2000 he had found a swing key that helped him produce the best ball-striking in his life in winning the Tour Championship. "But I was working on the balance in my swing, instead of the balance in my life," said Sutton, who won 14 times on the PGA Tour and captained the 2005 U.S. Ryder Cup team. "When I was competing, I don't know if I ever had balance in my life. I think I would have been a better player and certainly happier if I had. That's why I tell young players. Don't be so self-serving. Think about others."

After concluding his remarks, Sutton hugged Tracy Stewart for a long time and acknowledged warm applause. Before leaving, he stopped to converse with a few members of the media.

"I left golf on my terms at exactly the right time," said Sutton, who doesn't have definite  plans to play the Champions Tour. "I didn't leave bitter. I left looking for something else. I've already been paid by the game. It's time for me to pay back. Now I wonder if my contribution will be to talk about what I've learned and pass it on."

--Jaime Diaz