We were looking up the results of the Byron Nelson Championship on the sportsline.com website earlier in the week and noted a little feature on their leaderboard where you can "highlight your players", putting their names in to three different colour-coded categories - "Favourite", "Preferred" and - are you ready for this? - "Despised".
We wondered if this feature had been added for the benefit of Golf Masters' managers, but while we've come upon several over the years who've been frustrated and infuriated by the form of their players, we've yet to meet one who confessed to despising their under-achieving recruits. "Despised", then, was, we felt, a touch extreme.
Even Peter Dwyer, we're sure, couldn't despise Michael McGeady, Peter Senior, Arjun Atwal, Craig Perks, David Duval, Brad Kennedy and Andrew Coltart even if he tried, despite their combined earnings to date, after four weeks, leaving the Dublin manager as the worst performing in the entire competition.
In fairness to Peter's team they doubled their money last weekend, Perks' €500 for missing the cut at the Byron Nelson and Coltart's €1,500 for his share of 54th at the Spanish Open bringing the team's grand total, after a month of Golf Masters' action, to €4,000, over €8,000 short of our second least effective line-up. But, if you look at it another way, Peter's team is actually the most successful in the competition because it's living down to all its manager's expectations. Its name? "Try For Last Place".
Congratulations, then, to Peter, and congratulations too to Patrick Kavanagh of Moyglass, Co Galway, the highlight of his Golf Masters' week Charl Schwartzel's second European Tour success at the Spanish Open in Madrid. The course, incidentally, was built on a landfill site, and not, alas, stony grey soil, robbing us of all kinds of poetic possibilities.
Patrick, who is well versed in Golf Masters' matters having finished just outside the overall top 20 last year, had, nonetheless, put in "seven years of slogging" in his quest to win a weekly prize. "I used to worry about it," he said, "but I decided not to this year."
That relaxed approach paid off, so much so Patrick, a member of Curra West Golf Club in Co Galway, is now bound for Druid's Glen.
Patrick's COAM 12 held off the challenge of Alan Grehan's Jet Star Seven, with all six of the players he had in action contributing handsomely to the team total. Simon Dyson tied for fourth in Spain, Nick Dougherty and Stephen Gallacher took a share of eighth, with Peter Lawrie and Robert-Jan Derksen bringing in another €53,500 combined from the same tournament.
Our top three on the overall leaderboard remain unchanged, Eamon Murray €70,000-odd away from the €1 million mark in earnings, our biggest movers of the week Michael Keegan's Token Paddies and John Canning's Bandits, both teams in the top 10 having been outside the top 40 a week ago.
Twenty-eight of the world's top 30, including Tiger Woods, are due in action at the Wachovia Championship this week, while the European tournament in our schedule is the Italian Open in Milan. With transfer activity in mind, remember the next three weeks all feature bonus tournaments, where you can win one and half times the regular prize money (The Players Championship, the Irish Open and the BMW PGA Championship).
