1. “Woods began his second round chipping in for birdie from just off the 2nd green but followed with a bogey on the par-4 3rd. He breezed through the next nine holes in two under, with birdies at the 5th and the 8th holes. Four groups ahead, Scotsman Colin Montgomerie birdied the 15th hole, grabbing the outright lead at six under, but he gave back the shot with a bogey on the par-3 16th. Three holes behind Monty, the 1997 Masters reached its second inflection point.
David Feherty: Every player can find another 10 or 15 yards if they hit it hard. Tiger could find another 50. It was like watching a creature from another planet.
Peter Kostis: He looped a driver over the corner and hit just 8-iron in to 13.
From 170 yards, Woods knocked his approach 20 feet past the pin, then rolled in the putt for eagle. He was alone in first. Stankowski, meanwhile, bogeyed four of the first 11 holes, including three straight starting at the 4th. Huston, his playing partner, was hanging on, at one over for the day and four under for the tournament when he reached the 12th tee.
Paul Stankowski: It was my fourth year on Tour, and this was the first time I was in the lead group at a major. It was a little unnerving. Neither John nor I performed very well.
Feherty: Normally when you get in front, players slow down. You can’t be as aggressive because you could make a big mistake, especially at Augusta National. That inward half, where you hit one bad shot. You can run yourself up a number.
Stankowski: John laid the sod over a few shots as he was chipping over Rae’s Creek. He just kept chunking them into the water. It’s like a car wreck; you don’t want to look at it, but you can’t stop.”
Sean Zak’s oral history of Tiger Woods’s historic 1997 performance at the US Masters for golf.com is well worth your time.
2. “Manchester City have just been fined £35,000 for failing to ensure testers knew the whereabouts of their players on three occasions. The fine was limited not necessarily because the FA did not care, but because current guidelines suggest a fine of around £25,000. Reportedly the FA knows that it is a tiny sum, and the punishment guidelines need updating. Even if the FA does now care, the small sum suggests a few things.
“One, it suggests that the FA remains thoroughly incompetent when it comes to organising the game. It repeatedly fails at all levels of the game, such as appointing Sam Allardyce and then being surprised when he was busted for looking dodgy. It fails to provide training for youngsters at a level commensurate with the wealth in the game. And here it fails to set an example of the importance of playing drug-free. At one point in the future, the FA will stop chasing its tail and reacting to self-created disasters, but one expects that to be the distant, not the near future.”
In an article for Yahoo Sports UK, Alex Netherton asks whether doping is football’s biggest secret.
3. “Rivera concedes that a rough element came with the team upon the Raiders’ return to Oakland. ‘Shit, if we lose, man, stuff is going down — you could feel that in the air the first few years,’ he says. ‘Then it turned into a positive, passionate, ferocious fan base, which was what we were about from the beginning.’ (In 2011, the Black Hole hired a PR man, hoping to shift attention toward the group’s charitable works, since community service is a core tenet of the Black Hole.)
“Of course, none of that matters anymore — not the dummy, the chicken bones, nor the community efforts. Because when the Raiders suit up in 2018 (or thereabouts), it will be in front of a group of fans whose idea of charity amounts to sitting down at the penny slots, and the only Black Hole to speak of will be the $750 million stadium bill that lands at the feet of Nevada taxpayers like so many high-arcing beer bottles after a last-minute defeat, with a heavy dunt dunt dunt!”
The hostile ‘Black Hole’ of which Oakland Raiders fans are so proud has quite a fearsome reputation but with a move to Las Vegas now agreed, that is all going to change, writes Rafi Kohan for The Ringer.
4. “It is hard to know where to start but the fact that Brian Kilcline has a nine-metre-long metal dragon in his house feels like as good a place as any. ‘We call it Ouroboros – the name of the dragon that eats its own tail,’ explains Lynn, Kilcline’s wife, smiling as she looks up towards the ceiling. ‘The main lights for here are stored in Ouroboros’s body.’
“Elsewhere there is an elaborate candelabra with a giant spider, a crossbow on the stair wall, gothic doorways throughout and a couple of huge green legs dangling down from the loft conversion. ‘That’s Finn MacCool from the Giant’s Causeway, he’s bigger than me,’ Kilcline says. ‘There’s a mermaid up there as well. She’s lying on AstroTurf, to give the impression of a garden. Lynn made them both, using push fit piping for the skeleton. We had to drive them back from our home in Portugal, so we sat them in the back – you can imagine what that was like at passport control in Spain.’”
Stuart James’s excellent interview with eccentric former Coventry City centre-half Brian Kilcline for the Guardian drags you in from the outset, and doesn’t let you go thereafter.
5. “Those in the know will vouch, though, that if Heffo had a consigliere, it was Whelan, who shortly after helping Heffernan and Dublin win the 1963 All-Ireland as a player, uprooted his family to pursue his PE and coaching studies and then discreetly help design much of the training programme that would revolutionise football in the 1970s.
“Decades later, he’d be the right-hand-man to another head of the St Vincent’s and Dublin family, Pat Gilroy. Even since he departed upon the county’s 2011 All Ireland breakthrough, he’s remained the coach’s coach, in more ways than one.”
Mickey Whelan has been the godfather of Gaelic football coaching in the capital for years, as Kieran Shannon of the Irish Examiner explains.
6. ”From the magazine side, Golf World, which began publishing in 1947, published its last print issue in July 2014. It has since existed as an online platform, recently debuting as a standalone vertical on GolfDigest.com. Sports Illustrated, which used to publish regular ‘Golf Plus’ sections in its magazine, also has scaled back its coverage.
“The media shifts have produced a rise of the game being covered more by online outlets. Several are considered respected mainstream sites such as this site, ESPN.com, GolfChannel.com, Global Golf Post, Golf.com and a markedly beefed up PGATour.com. Several others, though, are blogs with contributors who don’t staff tournaments and are accused of controversial posts aimed at getting page views. That dynamic, coupled with the volatility of social media, has several of today’s players weary of dealing with the media.”
Golf coverage is mostly online these days, and this led Golf Digest writer Ed Sherman to ask ‘Where have all the golf writers gone?’
7. “On March 29, 1987 — 30 years ago now, as hard as that is to believe — at 4 p.m. local time, the first ringside bell was rung at the colossal Pontiac Silverdome. Thousands of Metro Detroiters, mostly pre-teen boys, many of whom had been begging their parents for tickets since Christmas or before, and millions more watching around the world via closed-circuit locales or on this new thing called pay-per-view, were about to witness the greatest extravaganza the ‘sport’ had ever seen, and one that, even to this day, stands the test of time.
“Hulk Hogan, the fresh, oiled, tanned and bandana-wearing face of wrestling, and Andre the Giant, the old guard, faced each other in the main event with the world heavyweight championship belt at stake. Ricky ‘The Dragon’ Steamboat and ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage stole the show in an undercard bout for the Intercontinental title. Celebrities Alice Cooper, Aretha Franklin, Mary Hart and Bob Uecker were there, in on the act. And a sellout crowd — whether it was 93,173, as the then-World Wrestling Federation announced, via “Mean” Gene Okerlund’s unmistakable voice, mid-show, or the tempered and more-realistic figure of 78,000 — soaked it all in, every grunt, every clothesline, every oversized head to the turnbuckle and every folding chair to the skull.”
The Detroit News this week did an oral history of its own, taking a look back at Wrestlemania III — the day wrestling went mainstream and Hulkamania exploded.
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