Bubba Watson began to play golf gain

He hasn’t forgotten how to play. He hasn’t been gone from the game that long, though it sure seems that way.

The reminder of how long Watson has stayed away from golf came on the practice range Tuesday at Muirfield Village. With the U.S. Open only two weeks away, players were still congratulating him on winning the last major two months ago.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising Titleist 712 AP1 Irons that Watson replied to a fan on Twitter on Friday during The Players Championship that he’s “not missing golf at all.”

He and his wife, Angie, adopted a baby boy just two weeks before he became a Masters champion. The adoption process is still not finished, though a few months doesn’t seem like much considering they began thinking about adoption four years ago. Watson is selling two houses and trying to find a home in Orlando, Fla. (The baby was born in Florida.)

The Memorial boasts a strong field, as usual, with defending champion Steve Stricker, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Rory McIlroy and Hunter Mahan leading the list of top players. Dustin Johnson returns from a back injury, his first tournament since Doral the second week of March.

It has been just more than seven weeks since Watson hit that wild hook with a wedge out of the Georgia pines and onto the 10th green to win the Masters in a playoff. He became an overnight sensation Titleist 712 AP2 Irons in a green jacket, and then he virtually disappeared from the golf scene. He has played only one tournament since, in New Orleans, and only because he was the defending champion.

And if that’s not enough, he has organized “Bubba Bash” on Tuesday night with some 10 Christian bands to raise money for a hospital in Kenya. Typical of a guy named Bubba, he has arranged for Waffle House to provide the backstage meals.

Winning majors can be a life-changing experience for everyone except those who seem to win them all the time. Few, however, had this many life-changing moments away from golf as Watson in such a short time.

Watson adds another layer of discount golf clubs intrigue, mainly because he is a major champion who has accumulated more rust than riches in the last two months.

“A lot of stuff going on in our life,” Watson said. “A lot of positive things, nothing bad. But it’s just different changes.”

“You can turn your phone off or lock down yourself at Isleworth and nobody can get to you, and just spend time with the family, play golf when I want to,” Watson said. “It’s been a good thing. It’s been relaxing, rewarding. It’s been fun.”

Rory McIlroy believes he will be the best player in the world

“I think maybe after Congressional last year, I started thinking of myself as definitely one of the elite players,” McIlroy said.

“I ran 36 holes every day. My mum and dad left me at the first tee at 8 a.m. and I didn’t see them until 6 p.m. It was great.”

“You have to believe that you’re the best Titleist 910 D2 Driver and I certainly do believe that. And it’s just a matter of going out there and showing everyone what I believe.”

From the European Masters last September through to his most recent win, at the Honda Classic at the start of March which lifted him to No. 1, McIlroy chalked up two victories, eight top-five finishes and an 11th place. His missed cut at The Players Championship two weeks ago was the first time he failed to make the weekend in 23 tournaments.

Since then he has topped the rankings, overtaken Luke Donald and Lee Westwood, and the 23-year-old Northern Irishman believes there is no reason he can’t stay there.

This week’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth will be McIlroy’s first appearance at a European event in seven months, since the Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland last October.

His comments contrasted sharply to those of Donald, when asked if he was the best player in the world. Unlike McIlroy, Donald took the diplomatic route.

“That’s the thing that I’m trying to learn how to do, because I’ve proved in the past that when I’m on my game, I’m pretty hard to beat.”

“I don’t really think in terms of that. I think my focus is to try and always continue to improve and be a better golfer,” Donald said.

Now based in the United States, he has limited his trips back over the Atlantic but always relishes a return to the home of European Mizuno MP-69 Irons, which he visited regularly as a kid when the World Match Play Championship was hosted at Wentworth.

“I think you have to believe that you’re better than anyone else,” he said. “On my day, I believe I can beat anyone in the world — it’s just finding that capability of when you’re not playing the best, to still come out on top.

Donald described McIlroy as “the most naturally gifted player there is.”

What McIlroy has done since his record-breaking exploits at Congressional is plant some consistency into his game, putting himself on a par with Donald in that regard.

“He just has that look about him — free-flowing, hits the ball far, just seems really effortless,” the Englishman said. “I feel, personally, if I don’t work discount golf clubs hard and grind it out, I’m not going to be that successful. It’s just not that easy for me.”

“This is a golf course I love, a golf course I came to every year since I was 10 years old,” McIlroy recalled.

McIlroy plays alongside Ernie Els and Martin Laird for his first two rounds at an event where he has only one top-10 finish in four starts.

Na even blamed himself for the rude and coarse conduct

Na even blamed himself for the rude and coarse conduct that enveloped him as he, uncharacteristically, hurried around TPC Sawgrass amid an understandable meltdown that was truly painful to watch.

No argument here, but Na deserved credit for spilling his guts to reporters about the ghastly impact his swing changes were having on his game and pace of play. He probably should have expected a modicum of heckling from a few jerks outside the ropes. But what he could not have foreseen, and most definitely did not deserve, were the boos and taunts he received from a group of thugs whom officials should have ejected for interfering with play.

''It is what it is,” the 54-hole leader told reporters after fading to a T7 finish -- five strokes off the pace TaylorMade RocketBallZ Driver of winner and playing partner Matt Kuchar. 
“I do need to work on what I need to -- I do need to work on my pre-shot routine. I do need to play faster.”

“You know, when I'm over the ball, it would be nice if it was quiet. But just guys, you can hear them talking, like ‘pull the trigger, pull the trigger, hit it,’ which makes me back off even more. So that part was a bit tough,” he said. “I was getting ready to get over the ball and you can just hear them saying, ‘hit it,’ and I just got over the ball. And I backed off and they're booing me. I said, ‘look, guys I backed off because of you guys.’ It's not like I backed off because I couldn't pull the trigger.”

“I’m going to try to take out the whole waggle, no waggle,” he said. “But it's going to take time, practice and tournaments, and I'm going to try to take out the whole waggle. Honestly, it's going to be a battle.”

You have to be completely heartless not to feel for this guy, and we sincerely hope he conquers his demons and gets whatever help he needs (a session or two with Yani Tseng's Vision54 gurus couldn’t hurt) to be able to step up and smack the ball without all of his TaylorMade RocketBallZ fairway wood nervous tics.

But the reprehensible way so-called “fans” treated the struggling one-time tour winner during The Players Championship finale on Sunday was far more outrageous and deserving of censure than a guy turtling his way around a golf course. While some observers believe Tiger Woods and his tour brethren should just get used to cameras clicking on their back swings and other ambient noise (like the jeers and raspberries emanating from the bleacher creatures on the 16th hole at the Phoenix Open; hey, at least that’s non-partisan heckling), even they would likely view Sunday’s demonstration of ill will more suited for a hated football rival than a competitor in a golf match.

With all that (plus the requisite “na na na na, goodbye” chanting) going on, Na did his best to speed things along, for Kuchar’s sake.

“I know the whole world is watching. I'm trying to play as fast as I could,” he said. “I was 40 yards ahead of Matt discount golf clubs basically trying to sprint out to my ball so I can get to extra time.”

Still, Na declined to call them out for their boorish behavior, choosing instead to shoulder the responsibility for the out-of-bounds reactions to what LPGA Tour star Christina Kim would undoubtedly term his “slower than evolution” crawl around the links. Indeed, Na’s harshest words were a plea for civility.

Na ended the week with a pledge to continue refining his tortuous ritual, but could not promise an instant cure.

Great fun from Championship

Fowler wore a black leather outfit set off by a Native American choker. Mahan, dressed as an urban hunter, was in animal-print tights and sported two different styles of fur jacket, one long and with sleeves, the other a short vest. For part of the video, he went shirtless, as did Watson, who was clad in denim overalls. Crane donned a red polyurethane way-above-the-knee surfer suit, pink socks and white-toe sneakers.

“It’s more kind of showing I’m not too worried about what other people think,” Fowler said Tuesday. He was talking about his facial hair but he could have been speaking about his colorful attire or his participation in the video. “It’s just me being me and whether that can be a lesson to some kids, just not trying to fit in, just be themselves.”

Your father’s favorite golfers, these guys clearly are not. Gone are the days where the pros dressed in solid Mizuno MP-59 Irons colors, spoke in shades of vanilla and showed the emotional range of a Botox-addicted actor. The PGA Tour season is only in its fifth month, but a Player of the Year already can be crowned: the nonconformist.

In talking about the robust state of the PGA Tour, people point to the obvious: the burgeoning rivalry between Fowler and McIlroy; the game of hot potato between McIlroy and Luke Donald for the No. 1 ranking; the return to the winning circle of Woods at the Arnold Palmer Invitational; and the major breakthrough of Watson, a modern-day Paul Bunyan.

“It’s taken on a whole life of its own, and it’s been super fun,” Crane said, adding, “I think for a while there was a statement that, well, these guys should be working on their golf game and they’re like out there having fun, like that can’t be productive — like go spend some time working on your golf game. And now everyone is playing pretty well, so I think they can, if we don’t play as well going forward, they can always say, ‘Well, maybe you need to go back to having more fun.’ They’re always going to say something like that. I think it helps us to not take ourselves quite so seriously.”

Last summer, Fowler and Mahan joined with Bubba Watson and Ben Crane to form golf’s version of All-4-One, a boy band, the Golf Boys. It has produced one big hit, “Oh Oh Oh,” a song that puts Titleist 910 D3 Driver them firmly in the genre of R&B — Rap and Burlesque. The video, shot at the Vaquero Club in suburban Dallas, has drawn over 4.7 million views on YouTube and is a virtual two-minute hallelujah to the glory of the PGA Tour’s dawning era.

More powerful than any of Watson’s 350-yard drives is the message being driven home by a leading cast of characters working without a script. The Golf Boys are in the vanguard of a free-to-be-me movement that is turning the tour into a mobile Improv, where the joke is on anybody who feels the need to conform.

Is it a coincidence that three of the Golf Boys have been among the tour’s 19 winners this year? Mahan doesn’t believe so. “The more you’re yourself, the less insecurities you’re going to discount golf clubs have on the golf course about performing in front of people,” Mahan said Wednesday after playing the front nine of the T.P.C. Sawgrass.

Watson won the Masters without the benefit of a swing coach but with ample help from an imagination that knows no out of bounds. Fowler secured his first tour win at the Wells Fargo Championship in a playoff that included his fellow 23-year-old, Rory McIlroy, while dressed from hat to toe in orange and sporting a starter mustache. Mahan, 29, the only two-time winner in 2012, has preyed on his peers.

The video was the brainchild of Crane, the only player in the band without a victory this year. One of his sponsors, Farmers Insurance, is donating $1,000 for every 100,000 views, with the proceeds supporting charitable initiatives near and dear to Farmers and to Crane.

Webb Simpson shared the lead at Quail Hollow

By then, Simpson got used to playing with Tiger Woods and all the commotion that comes with the galleries following. It was only the second time Simpson played with Woods.

Not so much for four of the top-10 players in the world — 2010 Wells Fargo champion Rory McIlroy (70) and the trio of Lee Westwood, Phil Mickelson and 2007 champ Tiger Woods, all who finished at 71. Mickelson, McIlroy and Woods are playing for the first time since the Masters. Woods made bogey on the first hole and struggled with his short game on the front nine before shooting 2-under 34 on the back.

The course could hardly have played easier. With a heat wave rolling through the Queen City this week — it topped out at 93 in the first round, and the forecast calls for two more days of the same — the course needed to be watered at night in fear of baking out. With the Mizuno Mp-63 irons softened course, and little wind to speak of, players faced few obstacles en route to busting par.

"It's great to play with him," said Simpson, who won twice last year and finished second on the money list but is looking for his first victory this year. "It's fun to play with him. There's just a lot going on. But the more times I play with him, it will probably get easier."

"It was kind of a whirlwind on the front," said Simpson, who lives one mile from the Quail Hollow Club and finished TaylorMade RocketBallZ fairway wood with six birdies and an eagle to more than offset a lone bogey. "It calmed down a bit on the back."

Among others having field days were Cink and Moore, who both finished with three birdies to cap off their rounds. Rickie Fowler, putting cross-handed these days, joined five others at 66. In all, 38 players broke 70, 79 players broke par and another 15 players matched par.

"This by no means is an easy golf course or a course you're going to see 20 under win on. But it was out there today."

"It just wasn't too windy," Moore said. "It was windy enough, and you had to play for it most of the round. But it wasn't a significant wind, you know, enough to make the ball be doing crazy things discount golf clubs or curving too much. Without the wind, it just made the course score-able.

"I did play good on the back," Woods said. "I gave up too many shots on the front nine, though. I didn't get up-and-down a couple times and made a couple bad shots on the wrong side of the hole. I didn't take care of the par-5s. I had an easy up-and-in at 8, which I messed up there. I short-sided myself on 10, and three or four shots and I'm right there. I've got to obviously not make those little mistakes like that (Friday). I'm not out of it."