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Missing Links: 'Lee Westwood rubs salt in Tom Watson's wounds'

November 17, 2014

Stories of interest you might have missed…

The U.S. Ryder Cup fallout apparently isn't going to pass easily, as this headline in the Independent suggests:" Lee Westwood rubs salt in Tom Watson's wounds." Last week, Westwood weighed in on the Americans' most recent failure. "Captains don't really have a massive influence on winning a Ryder Cup but they can certainly have a massive influence on losing it and getting stuff wrong," he said in this story by Paul Mahoney of the Independent. "There didn't look to be that much harmony with the US team room...It's a massive pat on the back for the Europeans that the Americans need a task force to pull all their ideas together."

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Lee Westwood and Jamie Donaldson (Getty Images photo)

"Nearly every professional athlete has a manager. But Gary Player, the legendary South African golfer, has a somewhat unique situation: his longtime manager, and the executive in charge of his business ventures, is his son, Marc," writes Daniel Roberts in this story in Fortune.


San Diego or Phoenix? It's no contest weather-wise, so Geoff Ogilvy and family opted for the former, possibly to the detriment of his golf game. "All the good golfing habits he developed in the desert disappeared in his new surrounds, and so did the good results," Russell Gould of Australia's Herald-Sun writes. So Ogilvy elected to return to the Phoenix area. "From a golf perspective, Arizona made more sense," he said.


Luke Donald was once No. 1 in the World Ranking and was a fixture on the European Ryder Cup team. Now he's ranked 39th and was bypassed by Euro Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley. "I've been banging my head against a wall for the last few months," he said in this story by Reuters' Tony Jimenez. "It's tough when you know you are a capable player and it's not quite happening for you. This game will get to you sometimes but I'm quietly confident with the work I've been doing with my coach and it's starting to pay off."


The future of the PGA Tour's Humana Challenge beyond 2015 is uncertain, given Humana's decision to bow out as title sponsor, but the tournament is in a healthier position than it was before Humana came on board, according to this story by Larry Bohannan in the Desert Sun. "[T]he tournament was unsponsored from 2009 through 2011, and by the end of that stretch the tournament's very existence was seriously in question," Bohannan writes. "But everyone, the [Desert Classic Charities] officials, folks at the PGA Tour, heck, even people from Humana agree that the tournament is in better shape now than it was in 2009."