The Loop
Missing Links: A 'healthy' Tiger says 'it's fun to be able to play with my kids again'
Stories of interest you might have missed…
"I'm mostly excited about being healthy again," Tiger Woods writes on his website in this look at the year past and the year ahead. "I've struggled for the past year-and-half with my back, and it showed in my results…Now that it feels healthy, strong and stable, it's fun to be able to play with my kids again, to play soccer and run around with them, shoot hoops … things that I used to do and took for granted. For anybody who has ever had a bad back with nerve damage, it's downright debilitating. To not feel that is finally just incredible relief."
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Former PGA of America president Ted Bishop, who was unceremoniously removed from office for what he wrote about Ian Poulter in defense of Nick Faldo, demonstrates a warmer side in this story posted on his blog about Jimmy Walker's caddie Andy Sanders, once an aspiring tour player himself. "Then one day Sanders woke up and experienced a blind spot in his right eye…Sanders would soon discover that he had Multiple Sclerosis. He tried to fight through the condition and keep on playing. He was receiving muscle injections every other week and eventually he contracted vertigo which was the worst thing that could happen to a golfer."
"The idea that the PGA Tour calendar is too full depends on how you look at the calendar. In this new world of the wraparound season, it seems as though golf never ends…But is that much different from 10 years ago?" Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press writes in this lead item to a notes column.
This doesn't bode well for the future of golf in China. "After the 1949 revolution, Mao had all the courses dug up and forbade government officials from playing—a ban never officially lifted… [U]nlicensed courses started popping up as golf's popularity took off among the middle classes. That led to a 2004 blanket ban on construction of new courses to preserve arable land. Ironically, most of China's golf courses have been built since then. But under [President] Xi (Jinping), the country is starting to take the rules seriously." Andrew Browne has the story in the Wall Street Journal.