Missing Links: Navy SEAL who shot Bin Laden found golf 'more stressful than combat'

Stories of interest you might have missed…

"The future of golf is handicapped," the headline to this story by Harrison Jacobs of the Economist says. The handicaps are familiar: It takes too long and it's too hard. As for the latter, "Robert O'Neill, the Navy Seal who shot Osama bin Laden, was urged by his psychologist to take up golf, but found it more stressful than combat,'" Jacobs writes.

(Getty Images)

There are many reasons to like Charley Hull, the budding 18-year-old star from England, but the best reason? Her personality. She would like a boyfriend, for instance, "[b]ut I'm really fussy with guys," she said in this profile by Sue Mott in the Independent. "I don't like those maintained pretty-type boys. I like somebody who can stand up for himself. An outdoors type, not a poncey pretty boy."

John Huggan of the Scotsman presents his annual Huggy awards, always an amusing read. For instance, his Huggy for "daftest rule" has nothing to do with golf rules. It's this: "No one is allowed to take food/water from the [Augusta National] media centre, lest the sun fall from the sky presumably." He cites the example of a BBC producer who purchased sandwiches that he took into the media center, but then was not allowed to take them out of the media center. "Welcome to Augusta National everyone," Huggan writes.

"My slump had gone on for so long it had got to the stage where I couldn't keep doing it. My results were terrible, I was playing with people on the Challenge Tour who didn't know I was quite good once who were thinking: He's rubbish'. It had become embarrassing." Oliver Wilson then beat the best player in the world, Rory McIlroy, to win the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at St. Andrews in October. Now, "instead of contemplating another profession, he can pore over the European Tour schedule and pick the glamour places to play," Derek Lawrenson of the Daily Mail writes in this look back at one of the more improbable victories in golf.

Follow @JohnStrege