Rubenstein on CanOpen date; Daly's debut; Giving Tiger away

• There's a funny story in a San Diego paper about a man who won the right to play with Tiger Woods in the pro-am for the Buick Invitational. The man determined it would be better if he gave the opportunity to his son Jeff. Interestingly, Jeff is struggling with his game at the moment and has that fear of killing a spectator that pops into the head of anyone who has played in a PGA Tour pro-am. He made this remark about playing with Tiger:

  "My brother Brad is going to have to get out there and get the gallery ready," said Jeff, a sales executive for a payroll services firm. "They're going to need hard hats and safety goggles."

• John Daly's "Daly Planet" (not the most original name, but I guess it works) debuts on the Golf Channel. Maybe once they get their 15 years of PGA Tour events, the station's programming won't be filled with infomercials and questionable reality shows. Anyway, this one has some promise, acccording to Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle and the show picks up with Daly coming to Niagara Falls to try and hit a ball across the gorge as a stunt for Thundering Waters, the course in the area which uses his name for marketing. Daly's comments sound like the show might be worth watching (and God knows the GC will surely show it over and over and over):

  At 8:31 a.m. Daly says, "Time for that first cold one, isn't it?" Two hours earlier he said to a friend, "Thank God we're not drinking beer this early, they'd think we were alcoholics or something."

  

• The Globe's Lorne Rubenstein writes that the new date for the Canadian Open, which will now follow the British Open, "is likely to be more damaging than helpful." Rubenstein paints the RCGA, the organization that runs the CanOpen, as a toothless tiger, unable to even manage the event's date. "The worst part of what transpired is that the RCGA had no say in the dates," Rubenstein writes. And is it just me, or does Stephen D Ross, the organization's executive director, appear to get zinged by Rubenstein in this remark: "Ross's voice during last week's announcement did betray embarrassment, which was appropriate. Humiliation would have even been more appropriate. The RCGA and the Canadian Open, which started in 1904, deserve better." The entire story can be found here.