British Open: Nice result. Good for the kid from Ohio. I wouldn't try to handicap this kind of event, since golf really is, at the upper echelon, an any-given-day game. (How to explain Tiger? The great ones appear occasionally in any sport. In golf, how many have there been? Jones, Nicklaus, Tiger. Surprising, when you think about it, that it's been a generation or more since there was a "man to beat" -- and it was Nicklaus.) I'm sure Flyer admired the "biscuit brown" links, and I'm sure it was a challenging course, but Royal St. George's looked awful on TV. I guess I have to respect the fact that they didn't force a greening for the cameras. That's the British way, I suppose: No use pretending that golf on the coast of England isn't like this.

I was glad to see a nod to my boy, Ian Fleming, during the telecast. Fleming was a St. George's homeboy. If you think golf is boring to watch, let alone read about, check out the first half of Fleming's Goldfinger, in which Fleming spends several chapters detailing a high-stakes match between Bond and Goldfinger. (Fleming set the match at the fictitious "Royal St. Mark's" course, in Kent, but he decribes the holes so well that nobody ever had any question what club he was really talking about.) His ability to make golf writing thrilling is one of the reasons why Kingsley Amis admired Fleming. Hell, in Moonraker, Fleming is able to make a rubber of Bridge exciting. Anyway, enough of this.

Okay, one more thing: A nice bonus to Goldfinger is the introduction to the archaic language of golf clubs. You'll learn about spoons, brassies, mashies, niblicks, and other odd-named implements. Impress your friends on the course by threatening to whip out your mashie!