How do you feel going into 2009?
Adam Scott
By DOUG FERGUSON
I just returned home, to Philadelphia, from a visit to my in-laws in Los Angeles and went to pick up the dog from our friends the Winders. The dog is an ancient mutt, deaf, with bad legs. My wife and I got Slippers from a pound about 17 years ago, when she was a puppy named Cathy about a week shy of extermination, and we were newlyweds without kids. We renamed her Slippers, and she’s here at my feet as I write this. A friend at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where I worked then, said it sounded like a 4-year-old had named her, but Christine and I came up with it all by ourselves.
HONOLULU (AP) — Paul Goydos once joked that he made PGA Tour history in 2007 by winning the Sony Open as the first player to beat a field that included a 5-foot boy (Tadd Fujikawa) and a 6-foot girl (Michelle Wie).
You wouldn’t expect boring old golf to give us the sloppiest, most joyous scene of the sports year, but the Ryder Cup has a way of uncorking unexpected emotion. In the giddy moments after the U.S. team had trounced the favored Europeans, the American players gathered on a balcony at the back of the clubhouse of Valhalla Golf Club, high above a sea of hoarse fans. Magnums of champagne were popped, and the victorious Yanks took turns schvitzing the crowd and each other, washing away a century of Ryder Cup frustration. (OK, it was merely the 21st century, as the U.S. hadn’t won a Cup since 1999.) In the middle of all the fun was U.S. captain Paul Azinger, who was shampooing his players’ hair with bubbly in between lusty swigs from whatever bottle he could get his hands around. All 12 of his players had contributed to the victory, but it was Azinger who had single-handedly changed the American team’s culture of losing.
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