John Daly runs out of balls during tournament, walks off course after Tin Cup-esque hole

The casual golf fan absolutely loves watching John Daly when he's in the tournament field. Want to know why? It's because he's the everyman golf pro; sure, he's going to have his moments of sheer brilliance, but sooner or later you know he's going to do something that will make you say "Hey, I could do that."

Well, friends, Daly had another one of those moments on Thursday at the Australian Open. Playing in the event on a sponsor's exemption, he had the opportunity to pocket a nice check at a world-class tournament in Oz.

But in typical Daly fashion, he found a way to ruin the tournament's generosity in spectacular fashion. After knocking his ball into a bunker on the 10th hole, Daly inadvertently hit the wrong ball out of the sand -- hard as it is to believe, the ball he hit was actually one from the range -- to take a 1-stroke penalty. That's where things went horribly wrong.

Frustrated with the penalty on the 10th, Daly came unglued after hitting his first ball into the water on the par-5 10th hole. After taking a drop, Daly then hit six more balls into the water. For a brief moment, it seemed like golf fans were watching a real-life "Tin Cup" moment.

The only problem was that unlike Kevin Costner's character, Daly didn't hit his seventh, and final, ball on the green. It found the water, leaving Daly without a ball. He immediately shook the hands of playing partners Hunter Mahan and Craig Parry and stormed off the course.

"[W]hen u run out of balls u run out of balls. yes, I shook my player's partners hands & signed my card w/rules official," Daly tweeted on his Twitter account.

Things got even worse when Daly's girlfriend, Anna Cladakis, took a swipe at a television camera, leading the Golf Channel announcers to lament the entire situation, as a camera followed Daly off the course.

Of course, tournament officials were extremely unhappy with Daly's antics. Trevor Herden, the tournament director for the Australian Open, told reporters at the tournament that Daly wouldn't be coming back to Australia anytime soon.

"I would say this would be the last time we see John Daly," he said.

Taking things to an even lower low, Brian Thorburn, CEO of PGA of Australia, made it clear that Daly shouldn't even bother hanging around to play the Australian PGA Championship, on a special invitation, in two weeks.

"The PGA does not need this kind of behavior tarnishing the achievement of other players and the reputation of our tournaments. John is not welcome in Coolum," Thorburn said in a statement.

If Daly hadn't burned all of his bridges yet, he certainly burned every one of them in Australia. There used to be a time when Daly was one of the marquee names in the game, but in recent years, he's turned into nothing more than a sideshow that people come to mock.

This was another incident that made you realize he's no longer good enough to contend on a weekly basis. If anything, he's just wasting a spot in the field. Running out of golf balls in a professional tournament should tell everything you need to know about the state of Daly's game. He's turned into a complete joke

Fred Couples Grants Tiger Woods Asylum????

 Corey Pavin, wherever you are, accept this belated olive branch.
Like many, I spent the latter half of 2010 having a field day with your captaincy of the U.S. Ryder Cup team, belittling the sieves that passed as team raingear in Wales, poking fun at your colorless quotes, making cracks about your height, questioning whether your wife was actually running the show.
There's only one thing left to say after the developments of the past few hours: Bring back captain Corey, because the guy steering the Presidents Cup team is steering the team headed toward the Great Barrier Reef.
U.S. captain Fred Couples, in a remarkable admission, said Thursday night in Seattle that he has already told Tiger Woods that he's assured one of the two captain's picks, even though Woods' season has been punctuated by missteps, missed cuts and missed fairways.
Couples is having none of it. Or all of it, whichever way you hook or slice it.
"In my opinion, when you’re the best player in the world for 12 straight years and you’re not on a team, there’s something wrong," Couples said.
That's the crux of the critical blowback here. Woods was indeed the best player on the planet for 12 years. Problem is, we're in Year 14 now.
“I don’t know how you can criticize someone for choosing Tiger Woods," Couples said. "If he goes there and doesn’t play well, I would be shocked."
Hopefully, Couples doesn’t scare easily, or he could be in for some fainting spells when the matches begin in Australia, based on the way Woods has played in 2011. Perhaps Couples missed the parts at the PGA Championship where Woods missed the cut, hit balls in 22 bunkers, and hit a 20-foot putt so fat, it came up six feet short of the hole.
Woods hasn’t won in 23 months in the States and others have blown past him so fast, he has plummeted from second to 36th in the world, a spiral that will continue because he is ineligible to play for four weeks and his last PGA Tour win is about to fall off his two-year ranking period.
Couples sounds about as stable as Captain Queeg, rolling around two ball bearings in his hand and trying to figure out who swiped the strawberry ice cream.
This call is wrong for so many reasons, it's nothing short of astounding. Let's list a few.
At No. 11 in points is Jim Furyk, who has had a forgettable season on the whole. But Furyk is the reigning PGA Tour Player of the Year, a guy who won the FedEx Cup last year after finishing with three wins. Furyk, unlike Woods, has shown far more recent signs of life, including T9 last week.
Keegan Bradley not only isn’t on the team, he's 18th in points despite two victories in his rookie season. Phil Mickelson noted this week that Bradley is the perceived front-runner for tour player of the year, opined that Bradley ought to be the first player named as a captain's pick. Oops. Mickelson and Bradley are represented by the same management firm, so there's a bias here, but Mickelson's got a point. No other American won a major this year. Woods hasn’t won a major since mid-2008.
Even though Bradley, now No. 18 in points, was unable to amass a single Presidents Cup point last year, he is 10 spots ahead of Woods in the standings. Woods is 28th and sandwiched between immortals Kevin Na and D.A. Points.
Couples, a guy who will never be confused for Vijay Singh for his work ethic, is taking the easy way out. The captain's picks are not set to be finalized for four more weeks, until after the Tour Championship in Atlanta. What, he didn’t want to face questions for a month about his two at-large options?
Even for those who believe Woods deserves a pick, there is absolutely no defensible reason to announce the selection a month early. Too many other players who play well over the next month could get left at the curb as they angle for the last remaining spot.
The doltish Couples move certainly underscores the fact that the Presidents Cup is an exhibition, and not held in nearly the same esteem as the Transatlantic swordfight called the Ryder Cup. Making the pick now makes the PrezCup, a thinly veiled Ryder knockoff, look even more farcical.
Think the PGA Tour, which invented and runs the Presidents Cup, wasn't giggling in the hallways when their savant captain tabbed Tiger on Thursday? Moments after Couples told reporters in Seattle that Woods was already a lock, the tour sent out Couples' comments in a blast email, cementing the deal and trumpeting to all the world that Tiger was on the team.
Twelve years ago, after watching a couple of balls take cruel bounces at the 1999 U.S. Open, David Duval stoically answered a question about the caprices that had just cost him the title. "There is no such thing as 'deserves,'" he said. Well, looks like he was wrong. In a game known as the ultimate meritocracy, Woods was grandfathered in based on his resume from two years ago. If he handed any employer a resume with a gap that large in is performance history, the boss would say, "so, what's the deal with the last two years?"
If Woods wanted to earn a spot on the team the right way, he should have played last week in Greensboro, his last chance to qualify for the FedEx Cup playoffs, which began this week at The Barclays. He was outside the top 125 positions required to make the FedEx series, tied in with rookie Will McGirt, who not only played well enough at Greensboro to get in the series, he was an overnight co-leader at The Barclays on Thursday night. Woods didn’t play. He said he had family commitments. Then he participated in a corporate PR stunt for EA Sports last Tuesday, sending a nice message of indifference while others were trying to grind their way into the FedEx picture.
Couples is so out of touch with affairs on the tour, he was unaware that Woods had not qualified to play in the FedEx series, and told him he wants him to add another tournament before heading to Australia to play in the Aussie Open (where he will receive an appearance fee) and Presidents Cup. Couples didn’t even wait to see whether Woods followed through and signed up for a Fall Series event before picking him. The Australian Open is Nov. 10-13 outside Sydney and the cup matches follow the next week.
Couples' assistant captain is Jay Haas, whose son Bill is 10th in Presidents Cup points at the moment. Guess who gets bumped if anybody makes the slightest move over the next four weeks and displaces him from the automatic-pick perch in the top 10? Right. Haas would then need to be picked to make the team. Awkward.
Plenty have compared Couples' decision to pick the skidding Woods as comparable to International team captain Greg Norman's decision to tab Adam Scott two years ago. Scott was in a months-long slump, and Norman figured being on the team might give the young Aussie a lift. What people forget is that Scott finished 1-4, however.
Picking Woods is akin to juggling dynamite. Couples, especially has ensured that a decent faction of Americans will be pulling against the U.S. team.
Nice call, captain America.

Tiger Woods not really winning a lot of friends over in the media

Tiger Woods and the media have never really mixed, ever since that infamous 1997 Esquire magazine interview that showed Woods actually being himself, but it seems of late the relationship has grown even colder.

On Wednesday at Atlanta Athletic Club, Tiger took to the podium in his usual pre-major press conference, but didn't exactly divulge a lot of information, pushing away any question concerning the recent comments by Steve Williams.

Woods said he was, "not going to speculate on Stevie," and, "Those are obviously his feelings and his emotions and his decision to say what he wants to say," and even said he was "surprised" by what Williams said following the win on Sunday by Adam Scott.

This all comes on the heels of a story that the AP's Doug Ferguson published on Tuesday from last week, that had Tiger walk off from a Thursday press conference, muttering, "That's why you guys listen and I play," after someone asked if winning was still his number one priority at Firestone after a three-month layoff from golf.

It isn't new information that the media and Tiger aren't exactly exchanging Christmas cards, but it seems lately that Tiger has gotten even colder to the media, brushing off any question that isn't about the golf course or his goals, and looking irritated and downright bored through most of it.

My biggest problem with the way Tiger handles the media is that he is smart enough to realize that these people have a job, and Woods is Patient X to anyone with a golf windbreaker or handicap card that gets paid to print about this sport. While I can understand not wanting to answer certain questions about his past caddie/player relationship, it seems giving most of the questions the proper respect isn't hard and should be something he understands.

And as for the comments from the Bridgestone? This is something we battle with all the time between athletes and journalists. Writers and broadcasters have no idea what it must be like to stand on the free-throw line or over a 7-iron on the 18th hole, and that's true, most of us don't. But we do understand the game, and the players, and the situation, and most of the people sitting in that press conference room have covered as many golf tournaments as Tiger has played. While "the moment" might fly over our heads, the situation sure doesn't. Most have seen it all, and have tried to relay that action onto paper so that the person at home can see it and relive it. That's the job, and trust me, they all wish they could hit a 3-wood like any pro in the game. Some people run, other people write about it. That's just the nature of the business.

Bethesda: The proof of Rory McIlroy's remarkable resiliency was the silver trophy at his side and the pages of a record book that he changed during four mind-boggling days at the US Open.

For his father, it was a phone call right after a most crushing collapse at Augusta National two months ago.

Poised to fulfill his potential and become the youngest Masters champion since Tiger Woods, McIlroy shot 80 in a final round that was painful to watch. Gerry McIlroy, who worked three jobs so his son could pursue his passion, was home in Northern Ireland when the phone rang some 20 minutes after it was over.

"I said, Rory, are you OK, son?' Because you always fear for your kids," the father said on Sunday. "And he says, 'Dad, um, I have no problem with it at all. I hit a few bad shots. And if you play golf, then you'll understand that.'"

The father had his country's flag draped over a green shirt during a momentous celebration at Congressional on Sunday.

McIlroy, the 22-year-old who can make golf look easy even in the toughest of circumstances, buried that Masters memory the way he buried his competition in a breathtaking performance filled with the promise of more majors to come.

"I felt like I got over the Masters pretty quickly. I kept telling you guys that, and I don't know if you believed me or not. But here you go," McIlroy said, gesturing to the shiny prize on the table. "Nice to prove some people wrong."

Four days of flawless golf finally ended when McIlroy polished off a 2-under 69 to shatter U.S. Open records that simply defy logic at the major known as the toughest test in golf.

The combined scores of the last 10 U.S. Open champions were 14-under par.

McIlroy was 16 under.

He finished eight shots ahead of Jason Day, whose score of 8-under 276 would have been enough to win 26 of the last 30 U.S. Opens.

"It's just phenomenal golf," Day said. "He lapped the field, and for such a young age, how mature he is. Golf right now is in a really, really good spot where Rory McIlroy is right now."

McIlroy nearly holed an impossible putt from the front of the 18th green to within a foot, and it was then he finally saw his father. He smiled and shook a clenched fist, and after tapping in for par, walked off the green and into his arms.

"Happy Father's Day," McIlroy told him.

It was the second straight U.S. Open title for the tiny country of Northern Ireland, and defending champion Graeme McDowell walked back across the bridge to the 18th green to embrace the new winner.

"You're a legend," McDowell told him.

Not many would dispute that now, not after a week like this.

Golf had been looking for a star ever since Woods' personal life and formidable game spiraled out of control 18 months ago. This was supposed to be the "U.S. Wide Open" because parity had taken over.

McIlroy, who goes to No. 4 in the world, now stands above everyone going into the final two majors of the year.

"Nothing this kid does ever surprises me," McDowell said. "He's the best player I've ever seen. I didn't have a chance to play with Tiger when he was in his real pomp, and this guy is the best I've ever seen. Simple as that. He's great for golf. He's a breath of fresh air for the game, and perhaps we're ready for golf's next superstar.

"And maybe," he said, "Rory is it."

This was more than just one major. It was the way McIlroy decimated the field with a golf swing so pure that he made had only four holes worse than par all week.

McIlroy finished at 268 to break the U.S. Open record by four shots. That record 12-under par by Woods at Pebble Beach? McIlroy matched it in the second round and kept right on rolling.

"I couldn't ask for much more, and I'm just so happy to be holding this trophy," McIlroy said. "I know how good Tiger was in 2000 to win by 15 in Pebble. I was trying to go out there and emulate him in some way. I played great for four days, and I couldn't be happier."

He even tried to be like Woods in the final round, showing no mercy on those chasing him.

McIlroy opened with an 8-foot birdie and never let anyone get closer to him the rest of the day. Even when he made his first bogey of the final round at No. 12 that trimmed his lead back to eight shots with six holes to play, he wasn't happy. Woods kept his focus at Pebble Beach by trying not to drop a single shot. That's what the kid was trying to do.

"I was trying to go out and trying to make no mistakes, and really not give anyone a chance to catch me," McIlroy said.

When he arrived for his press conference, he took a picture of the silver U.S. Open trophy on the table and posted it on Twitter with two references that said it all: Winning. Bounceback.

"Going back to Augusta this year, I felt like that was a great opportunity to get my first major. It didn't quite work out," McIlroy said. "But to come back straightaway at the U.S. Open and win, that is nice. You can always call yourself a major champion, and hopefully after this, I can call myself a multiple major champion."

Since the Masters began in 1934, McIlroy is the second youngest major champion next to Woods.

Day, a 23-year-old from Australia, closed with a 68 and was runner-up for the second straight major. Unlike the Masters, however, Day didn't have a chance. No one did this week.

McIlroy opened with a three-shot lead, stretched it to six shots after 36 holes and eight shots going into the final round. No one got any closer over the final 18 holes.

Tributes poured in throughout the steamy afternoon outside the nation's capital — first from the players he beat, then from Jack Nicklaus and ultimately from Woods.

"What a performance from start to finish," Woods said in a statement. "Enjoy the win. Well done."

Nicklaus invited McIlroy to lunch last year in Florida and talked to him about how to close out tournaments. He apparently wasn't listening when he took a four-shot lead into the final round of the Masters, only to implode on the back nine and shoot 80.

"I didn't think it was going to happen again, and it hasn't," Nicklaus said by telephone to NBC Sports. "I think this kid's going to have a great career. I don't think there's any question about it. He's got all the components. He's got a lot of people rooting for him. He's a nice kid. He's got a pleasant personality.

"He's humble when he needs to be humble, and he's confident when he needs to be confident."

Just think: If he had avoided the collapse at Augusta National, he could be headed to Royal St. George's for the British Open with the first two legs of the Grand Slam.

Among the records he set in a U.S. Open unlike any other:

— The 72-hole record at 268.

— The 54-hole record at 199.

— The 36-hole record at 131.

— Most under par at any point at 17 under.

— Quickest to reach double digits under par — 26 holes when he got to 10 under in the second round.

McIlroy also tied Woods' record for a six-shot lead at the halfway point, and he joined Lee Janzen in 1993 and Lee Trevino in 1968 as the only players to post all four rounds in the 60s.

Some of that had to do with Congressional, which was softened by rain and cloud cover. The USGA did nothing to try to protect par, moving tees forward to tempt players to take on some risk. The result was a whopping 32 rounds under par on Sunday. The previous record of 18 final rounds under par was at Baltusrol in 1993.

But there is no denying that one guy played far better than anyone else — eight shots better. McIlroy became the first player since Woods in 2002 at Bethpage Black to go wire-to-wire in the U.S. Open without ties, and his best might still be ahead of him.

"I think he's still growing, and it's just scary to think about it," said Y.E. Yang, who played in the final group the last two days.

Amid the celebration of McIlroy came growing concern about the state of American golf. For the first time since the Masters began in 1934, Americans have gone five majors without winning. They were on the verge of being shut out of the top three for the fourth time in the last five majors until Yang made bogey on the last hole for a 71.

That put the South Korean into a tie for third with PGA Tour rookie Kevin Chappell (66), Robert Garrigus (70) and Lee Westwood (70).

"It says, I think, that the Americans struggle a little bit," PGA champion Martin Kaymer said. "Since Tiger has been on a — how you do say? — little down, nothing has really happened. We've just become so much stronger."

The game also is getting much younger.

McIlroy became the fourth straight player in his 20s to win a major, the longest such streak since 1897.

The drama Sunday was not who would win, but by how many.

There was simply no catching McIlroy, not when he was staked to an eight-shot lead while playing flawless golf, not on a soft course that allowed him to hit wedge into six greens on the front nine.

With chants of "Let's go, Ror-eee" coming from the massive gallery, and teenagers climbing pine trees to see golf's bright new star, McIlroy came out firing with a wedge that settled 8 feet from the pin for an opening birdie.

Twice when he faced putts from across the green, he holed 7-footers for par. He stretched his lead to 10 shots, and when he made the turn, his tee shot on the par-3 10th rolled down the slope and stopped inches away from an ace.

The way his week had been going, it was shocking not to see it fall.