The team from Isleworth (including Tiger Woods) is on the Lake Nona premises for their annual inter-club competition known as the Tavistock Cup.

Josh Robbin of the Orlando Sentinel will be live-blogging it, for those who are interested. The Golf Channel will begin live coverage at 11 a.m. (EDT) today and noon tomorrow.

-- John Strege

The question was ubiquitous (see here and here, among countless other places) in the wake of Phil Mickelson's miserable start to the year: What's wrong with Phil?

There was this headline, too: "Has Phil lost it?"

The answers are and always were: Nothing and no.

Shouldn't we have learned this by now? He runs spectacularly hot and cold and always has, which makes him, next to Tiger Woods, the most interesting player in golf.

-- John Strege

Sally Jenkins' column in the Washington Post on Monday makes the case that as interesting as Woods' career has been to this point, it has also been fairly predictable, at least as far golf prognostication goes. Jenkins argues that from here on out his career holds more intrigue than it ever has.

Woods' genius includes both his ability to figure out a way to win, as he demonstrated in the U.S. Open last year, and the fact that nothing other than winning matters in his orbit. Golf World's Ron Sirak said on ESPN recently that Woods' reaction to holing the putt at the last hole to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational a year ago was that of a man who had never won a tournament before.

Complacency is not a part of Woods' DNA. Jenkins is correct. The rest of his career promises more of the same, but how he pulls it off with a reconstructed knee, a wife and two young kids, and great, young talent ready to challenge him make the years going forward more intriguing than the years behind him.

-- John Strege

It won't get much attention played opposite the WGC-CA Championship, but Michael Bradley's victory in the Puerto Rico Open surely qualifies as remarkable.

It was Bradley's first start of 2009. The number of PGA Tour starts he's had in the previous four years collectively add to one full season, 32. Yet he outplayed 21-year-old Jason Day on Sunday and emerged victorious with a birdie at 18.

-- John Strege

My colleague and friend John Huggan has an interesting column in Scotland on Sunday, headlined "Bunkered by US Greed," in which he makes the compelling argument (after lamenting U.S. whining about lack of American representation in WGC events) that had European golfers had better access to the three major championships played in the U.S., they'd have a better record.

"Where America's 'pretty goods' were allowed annual entry into at least three of the game's four most important championships, the same was far from true for their counterparts in Europe," Huggan writes. "Take the quartet of Sam Torrance, Ken Brown, Howard Clark and Mark James, by any measure players who would have, had they been born American, routinely teed up in the Masters, US Open and US PGA.

"They did not, of course. And again, the numbers are startling and disgraceful. Between them, Torrance, Brown, James and Clark amassed 26 Ryder Cup appearances, yet they could manage only six more starts in the three US majors. More to the point, at a time when the likes of Jeff Sluman, Bob Tway and Larry Mize - to name but three - popped up to win Grand Slam titles, clearly superior foreign talents were struggling to gain even occasional entry to those same events."

All of this is true. But who knows whether that second tier or Europeans -- those a rung beneath Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer and Jose Maria Olazabal -- might have won a major given greater access? What we do know is that in more recent times, when access has not been a issue, Europeans other than Padraig Harrington have not distinguished themselves in major championships. For instance, Sergio Garcia has played in every major championship since the U.S. Open in 1999 and has yet to win. Colin Montgomerie, meanwhile, has never won in a tournament in the U.S., much less a major.

Then there's this: Harrington was the first European to win the PGA Championship since Tommy Armour in 1930. And this: No European has won the U.S. Open since Tony Jacklin did so in 1970. And this: Olazabal was the last European to win the Masters, in 1999. And this: Between 1993 and 2006, Paul Lawrie was the only European to win the British Open.

None of which matters, of course, since Rory McIlroy seems to possess the ability to single-handedly exact European revenge for past slights.

HUGGAN RESPONDS: "My pal Strege speaks the truth of course; we'll never really know how Europe's 'biggish-four' of the 1980s and 90s would have fared with a more concerted run in the game's very biggest events. But, given that majors have always been occasionally won by less likely players, I still think that a reasonable case can be made that at least one, maybe two, of 'my' guys would have done so. Certainly, all four were surely more talented than the likes of Sluman, Tway, Mize and Andy North.

"As for Montgomerie, the picture is, as usual, more complicated. To an extent, the Scot only has himself to blame for a CV that does not include either a PGA Tour win or a major championship title. While he has not always enjoyed the best of fortune over the closing holes of Grand Slam events, he has temperamentally contributed to his own downfall more than once. He was, for example, clearly the best player at Congressional in 1997 when Ernie Els won the US Open, but a long way from the calmest.

"Certainly, the Scot could and should have gone full-time to America. But for reasons that, one suspects, had much to do with appearance money, he never did so. Had he moved to the US at his peak, it says here he would not only have won multiple tournaments he would have, pre-Tiger, topped the money list, such was the grinding consistency of his best play. Sadly, history will not accord him the place he should have earned had he chased majors rather than cash.

"And then there is the current generation of leading Europeans, those blessed with automatic entry into every big event, major or not. Their collective lack of success is, I feel, down to two factors. Firstly, there is Tiger Woods. Lots of players - not only Europeans - are walking around with one or two less major titles thanks to the almost all-powerful world number one.

"Secondly, the notion that they, as a group, have been more than a little overrated has some merit. All I know is, I’d still take Brown, Clark, Torrance and James over the likes of Rose, Poulter, Casey and Donald."

-- John Strege

From Robert D. Grober, a physics professor at Yale:

"It is shown that the putting stroke of world class golfers can be described as the motion of a pendulum driven at twice its natural resonance frequency. This model minimizes error in the speed of the putter head due to random errors in the magnitude of the applied forces, providing rational for why great players have developed this particular putting stroke."

Well said. We think.

Here's a more detailed story on his study, in Technology Review.

-- John Strege

Tiger Woods has been witness to a parade of would-be challengers, none of whom actually challenged, and none of whom he endorsed as an heir to his throne. Until now. He was asked when Rory McIlroy, 19, could one day be ranked No. 1 in the world.

"There's no doubt," he said after third-round play at the WGC-CA Championship Saturday. "There's no doubt. The guy's a talent. Hopefully while I'm not around, or while I'm around. Certainly he has the talent. We can all see it: The way he hits the golf ball, the way he putts, the way he can chip, get up-and-down. He has the composure. He has all of the components to be the best player in the world, there's no doubt.
It's just a matter of time and experience, and then basically gaining that experience in big events."

-- John Strege

It was not long ago that Jason Day of Australia was among the more heralded young players in the world, a star in training, who at 19 had become the youngest player ever to win a PGA Tour-sanctioned event (the Nationwide Tour's Legend Financial Group Classic). But he's ceded his place in golf's youth movement to Rory McIlroy, Danny Lee, Ryo Ishikawa and, at 23, the veteran of the group, Anthony Kim.

Day, however, could at least re-introduce himself to the conversation this weekend. Still only 21, Day is the co-leader of the Puerto Rico Open, and though it's the equivalent of an off-broadway event, it's still the PGA Tour, and a victory would restore the tour exemption he lost by finishing 136th on the money list in his rookie year last year.

The most noise he has created as a professional came off the course, with his bold statement regarding Tiger Woods and his intent to supplant him as the No. 1 player in the world. "I'm sure I can take him down," Day said late in 2007, a statement for which he was roundly criticized and ridiculed.

Kids say the darndest things.

-- John Strege

Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was denied membership in the St. Andrews Golf club.

Speculation as to why centers on RBS' collapse last year with Goodwin at the helm. Goodwin, the Daily Mail reports, "has been vilified for presiding over its spectacular downfall yet still accepting a £700,000-a-year pension."

Apparently, those still at the bank were gleeful over the rejection. The Daily Mail quotes one senior staff member, anonymously, as saying: "The word that Sir Fred has been blackballed by St. Andrews has gone round the bank like wildfire.There was a lot of hollow laughter at the thought of him getting a comeuppance. How he had the nerve to think that he would get a welcome in St. Andrews beggars belief. There's no sympathy for him here."

-- John Strege

An attempt by organizers of the New Zealand Open to replicate the FBR Open's party hole apparently has failed, when the most people there at one time topped out at about 250 people during the second round, some of them even asking for quiet from a bar near the designated hole, No. 15 at the Hills.

"While it would be unfair to say it's simply a reflection of the clientele at the golf tournament being held near Queenstown, it might be a bit of a stretch to get traditionally austere Kiwi golf fans to whoop and holler at chips and putts," this story in the Southland Times notes.

-- John Strege