• “Get the smelling salts, because in all likelihood, Thomas will be paired with the captain for Thursday’s opening four-ball session at Royal Melbourne Golf Club.”

• “Few players have grown closer to Woods than Thomas, 26, who is one of several PGA Tour players, including Tiger, who now call Jupiter, Fla., home. It was Thomas and Rickie Fowler, the latter whom Woods selected to fill in for the injured Brooks Koepka, who often reached out to Woods to play and practice with them as he slowly began his comeback”

Full piece.

• “In Ryan Herrington’s Golf World look at where loosened and reimagined amateur status rules may go, he notes this late in the piece….Where USGA officials see the most opportunity for potential changes to the amateur rules to have a meaningful impact is if restrictions on accepting money for expenses were to go away. Particularly in the case for junior golfers whose families don’t necessarily have the financial resources to compete beyond a very local basis.”

• Shackelford again…”While I have little doubt there are cases where this will be true and might do wonders for de-emphasizing privileged upbringings, I would hope some in the sport might question the need to corporatize our youth at increasingly younger ages”

Full piece.

• “Phillips in New York held the auction Tuesday as part of its “Game Changers.” Also up for auction was a Rolex GMT-Master reference 1675, which Phillips says belonged to Marlon Brando and was worn by the actor while filming “Apocalypse Now.”

• “Bidding on Nicklaus’ watch, lot 18, began at $500,000. Experts on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” had speculated the watch could eclipse the record of $17.8 million that Paul Newman’s Rolex sold for in 2018. Despite the stature of the watch in golf’s history, the final bid didn’t come close to the record.”

Full piece.

• A taste…”What the journalist wanted to know was whether Reed expected specific backlash to his specific act in the Bahamas. He answered as if he was being asked a generic question about fan reaction to an opposing team, which is either missing the point or willfully evasive. There’s safety in numbers, and Reed was quick to turn the singular personal into the plural general.”

• “It’s also, as these things go, a fairly intelligent tactic if your goal is to quash a story by starving it of oxygen. In fact, most of Reed’s press conference was a tour de force of media management by way of blandness, because no matter what he was asked over the roughly 20 minutes he stood before the gaggle of press, he responded with something broad, and something true, but something ambiguous nonetheless. If journalists were expecting an illustrative quote from Reed’s presser, they came away disappointed.”

• “Says Ogilvy: “The importance of your tee shot is not about being able to get it as close as you can to the green… it is important to get yourself in a position to find the right place on the green with your next shot.”

• “You can’t outmuscle Royal Melbourne. Distance is valuable in some spots but sometimes it’s a 4-iron off the tee and sometimes it is a driver. Power is usually always an advantage but it is a balanced advantage here.

• “You need to work out where to be by theoretically playing the hole backwards. Sometimes the rough on the correct side of the hole is better than the fairway on the wrong side of the hole. You have to find that position from the tee and that can be tough as it is very wide and the best position isn’t always obvious.”

See the full piece for the other 6 secrets.

• “The prestigious golf tournament returned to Northern Ireland for the first time in 68 years – having been staged at the north coast club back in 1951.”

• “Commissioned by Sheffield Hallam University’s Sport Industry Research Centre, the report’s figures relate to the week of the tournament in July this year.”

• “More than 237,000 fans attended over the four days of competition which was a record number for the Championship outside of St Andrew’s in Scotland, with 57.6% of spectators from outside Northern Ireland.”

Full piece.

• “Spicer isn’t hiding those headcovers from you or me or some headcover burglar. She’s guarding against total catastrophe. If anything tragic happened to her nearby warehouse – which holds more than 10,000 headcovers and their decades-old designs – she would always have those six tigers in their own little cage. Consider them headcover insurance, because Spicer just never knows when Tiger Woods’ mother, Tida, will come calling again for a replacement.”

• “Spicer, 56, is the always-smiling CEO of Daphne’s Headcovers, and through luck, persistence and a commitment to her customers (see above), she has provided the 15-time major winner with his world famous tiger headcover for 24 years. When Tida Woods phones, all other calls get dropped. It’s the most important business Spicer has.”

• “I remember three dates,” she says with a chuckle. “The birthdays of my two children and the date that Tiger first won the Masters. That’s pretty much it.”

Full piece.