Some thoughts on The Players Championship:

I agree with Tiger. The 17th hole is gimmicky. Maybe too gimmicky. Fifty balls in the water on Thursday alone. The clincher was poor Sean O’Hair landing his ball in the middle of the island green and having it hop over the green and into the water, leading to a quadruple-bogey 7 and drowning his chances to win. At 147 yards or so, a 9-iron for most of the Tour pros, this whole should be difficult, but not that difficult. If you land your ball on the putting surface, toward the middle of the putting surface, it should not go into the waterl. That’s too gimmicky.

Enough already with the Phil Mickelson-Butch Harmon story. Mickelson switched swing coaches for a reason, no doubt. But he won plenty, and three majors, without Harmon. He didn’t simply win the Players because of Butch. He might have won it with Rick Smith. We should all wait for the long-term results of the Phil-Butch marriage before we draw any definitive conclusions.

And enough ALREADY!!!!!! with the Phil-Tiger showdown talk. Because by this evening everybody was already yakking about what a great duel it’s going to be at Oakmont and the U.S. Open next month. Chances are, again, that won’t happen in any given major. It will be one or the other or neither in the hunt on Sunday.

Phil was still the exciting magician on his way to this win. I didn’t catch nearly enough of The Players, but I did see when he knocked that shot out of a waste bunker and through an opening in the trees about the size of a tea bag, and onto the green, then telling his caddie Bones that he didn’t want to tell him how small the opening actually was. But if Phil catches a branch there, maybe he doesn’t win anything, maybe we don’t hear about Butch Harmon and the Winged Foot hangover and the Oakmont showdown with Tiger.

Rory Sabbatini has done a lot of things to irritate me, among many others, but his latest “I want Tiger” stuff is pure idiocy. First of all, Sabbatini’s not good enough to be talking like that. Second, why do you want to rile up Tiger? I loved Tiger’s comeback to Sabbatini’s statement that he likes the “new Tiger” because, in his opinion, the new Tiger is beatable. To which Tiger noted that the new Tiger had won nine of his previous 12 tournaments, including three this year, which Woods gleefully added, is as many as Sabbatini has won in his career. Good comeback, TW.