Consider Michelle Wie. Now 20-years-old, the phenom from Hawaii burst onto the professional golf scene in the period between 2003-2005. By her sixteenth birthday, she had already played an event on the men's PGA Tour twice. She then turned pro, signed with Nike, and promptly almost won a women's professional...

The 2009 pro golf season (mercifully) officially ended this past weekend, with the Tour Championship in Georgia. On the course where Bobby Jones learned to play golf, East Lake, Tiger Woods won the controversial FedEx Cup, and Phil Mickelson won the tournament. Tiger took home $10 million and salvaged a...

No one tuning in to the U.S. Open men's and women's semifinals and finals this weekend is going to want to hear this, but I have bad news: the vaunted American "tennis boom" of the 1970s and '80s was a fluke. We were supposed to see tennis broken out of...

Andy Roddick will win the 2009 Wimbledon final 7-6 6-7 7-6 6-7 9-7, defeating Roger Federer in his bid to reclaim his All England Club crown and surpass Pete Sampras' record of 14 Grand Slam titles. You heard it here first!

Actually, my predicted score line is the only...

There's some debate on this, but many, many fans, journalist, and writers agree that John McPhee's 1969 book, Levels of the Game, is the greatest sports book ever written. Using an extremely intimate and carefully paced narrative style, McPhee recounts a deceptively important tennis match: a semifinal at the...

The U.S. Open is back at the Bethpage Black course on Long Island for the second time. It last hosted the tournament in 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11. Tiger Woods won (naturally), re-christening the U.S. Open the "people's championship" because it had been staged not on a country club...

When I wrote about the Kentucky Derby earlier this month, I wasn't sure horse racing could get any weirder. And then it got weirder. Here's what happened.

Mine That Bird, a 50-1 longshot, won the Derby. Now obviously, if there's to be a 2009 Triple Crown winner, Mine That...

I'm serious. There's probably no more analyzed, scrutinized, and deconstructed action in all sport. Michael Jordan's jump shop? Obscure. Michael Phelps' butterfly? Unknown. Roger Federer's forehand? Unexplored. In fact, I'd suggest that Tiger Woods' golf swing in the most assiduously pondered movement a human being has ever made. There are...

The 135th running of the Kentucky Derby takes place today, which mean that for more than a century Americans have been annually treated to one of the most bizarre and deranged sporting events ever devised. The Derby is a full-on freak show, encased in a bubble of ersatz southern elegance....

Have you been watching The Golf Channel's wonderful series "The Haney Project: Charles Barkley"? If you haven't, you should be. It's great stuff.

A little background. Hank Haney is Tiger Woods' coach and a highly regarded guru of the golf swing. (To get technical, he's a strong advocate of...

Tiger Woods is a smart guy. He's the only professional golfer I've ever heard effortlessly deploy the word "caveat." But he's now thrown his weight behind a fairly stupid idea: golf as an Olympic sport.

According to USA Today, Woods is "supporting the International Golf Federation's (IGF) bid to be...

After a crazy, dazzling, wildly unpredictable 2009 Masters, we could all be forgiven for wanting a little breather before the next major championship in golf, the U.S Open in June.

Not gonna happen!

It's game on now, and the next biggie is the Players Championship, recently rechristened, annoyingly, just...

The automobile business has never been in worse shape. Two of Detroit's Big Three, Chrysler and General Motors, have been bailed out by the taxpayers and are on the verge of bankruptcy. Even it doesn't come to that, both carmakers, along with Ford, are all facing declining market share, anemic...

Man, what a rich, full, and yeasty Masters 2009 delivered! One feels bad for Kenny Perry, who had it won--and the record for oldest Masters winner ever locked up at age 48--but who after a brilliant shot on the 16th hole finished bogey-bogey to drop into a tie with Chad...

He's not completely out of it! Tiger Woods--and Phil Mickelson, the closest thing he has to a rival--will both begin their final rounds at the Masters seven shots behind surprise leaders Kenny Perry and Argentina's Angel Cabrera. Perry, at 48, is chasing his own bit of Masters history: if he...

When Tiger Woods was making his way up the amateur ranks back in the early 1990s, you heard about him constantly. You also heard about the great players, the Palmers and Nicklauses, who were at least aware of his prodigious talent.

Now that Tiger is the top guy, you...

With the first two rounds of the Masters golf tournament finished, the weekend sets up for fans to enjoy Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and a host of other players both familiar and unfamiliar shooting it out for the coveted green jacket. The sentimental stories involving aging past champions have been...

This week, golf fans worldwide will herald the official arrival of spring as the Masters gets underway in Augusta, GA. Assuming favorable weather, the white sand bunkers and the menacing water hazards will shimmer in the April sun. The fairways will be improbably green. The famous azaleas will bloom pink.

I freely admit that I'm obsessed with India's Tata Motors and in particular with their ultra-low-cost Nano "People's Car," which was slated to go on sale in the subcontinent earlier this year, but has run into some controversies and delays. Still, that hasn't stopped the company from thinking...

The green blogosphere is understandably reeling from the recently announced finding that our levels of global atmospheric CO2 are locked in for the next Millennium. From this point on, we can't reverse the damage -- we can only try to not make it worse. Obviously, we're aren't going to...