Reminder: Live Blog Starts At 3:30 EDT

We had a lot of fun the last two days, some come join us starting just a little before CBS comes on the air.

2010 Masters Second Round Live Chat

"The game needs sweeping change now."

Nice job by Alistair Tait to not get swept up in the excitement of the day to let the ridiculous pace of play go unnoticed. In our live chat the UK readers noted Peter Alliss' complaints about the pace, which ended up at 5 hours and 45 minutes for the Woods-Kuchar-Choi group.

These days the five-hour plus round is the norm. The way it’s going, the six-hour round will soon become commonplace.

Meanwhile the R&A and USGA sit in their ivory towers and do absolutely nothing. Exactly two years ago, at Royal Birkdale, R&A chief executive Peter Dawson said there was going to be a meeting during The Players Championship where the subject of slow play would be discussed by governing bodies and professional tours. He promised then that he wouldn’t slow play us on this one. Two years later and we’re still waiting for the powers that be to do something.

(Are you reading this Peter?)

What's interesting about round one was the role of the golf course setup. Clearly Fred Ridley and the committee wanted to get the players around in the face of a bad weather forecast. The easier hole locations and forward tee placements worked in one sense: thirty players finished under par and we saw some of the most exciting golf in years. Yet the pace of play remained awful. And as Tait notes in his piece, there's only one solution: shot clocks and penalty strokes.

Reminder: Second Round Live Chat Around 4 EDT

We had a good old time Thursday. Didn't hurt that it was maybe the best first round ever. Join us tomorrow...

"It's amazing how it -- how my dad can speak to me from different ways, even when he's long gone."**

After his Masters opening round 68, Tiger was asked by Christine Brennan about the new Nike ad featuring his father's voice.

Q. As you know in addition to this being a big day in golf for you, your Nike ad did start airing and there's been a lot of conversation on it; on such a private matter you don't want to speak about, why then would you have an ad come out?

TIGER WOODS: Well, I think it's very apropos. I think that's what my dad would say. It's amazing how it -- how my dad can speak to me from different ways, even when he's long gone. He's still helping me.

I think any son who has lost a father and who meant so much in their life, I think they would understand the spot.

According to this ABC story, it seems the audio from Earl Woods was taken from the Tiger DVD set produced by Disney a few years ago. Turns out Earl was paraphrasing a talk about Tida vs. his style, and the word "Tiger" was edited in.

The documentary then cuts to Earl Woods, then 72 and already showing the ravages of prostate cancer, talking about Kultida "Tida" Woods, his Thailand-born wife and Tiger's mother.

Earl's full quote in the film is: "Authoritarian. Yea, Tida is very authoritative. She is very definitive. 'Yes' and 'No.' I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what you're thinking was, I want to find out what your feelings are and did you learn anything?"

Earl then adds, "So, we were two different types but we co-existed pretty well."

Gene Wojciechowski had this to say about the ad:

The voiceover of his deceased father asking, "And did you learn anything?"

I can answer that.

No.

If he had, Woods would have never let Nike air the bizarre, self-important, manipulative commercial. Instead, the spot would have died a quick, appropriate death on a creative director's desktop.

Gene Yasuda sheds some light on the ad's creators and the reaction in the ad world.

And the first parodies are in on the ad. Huffington Post puts together a nice gallery of them, though the Jimmy Kimmel edition of the follow up ad featuring Tida wins the prize:

Update on 2010-04-09 06:02 by Geoff

**Two more reviews of the ad. James Corrigan in the Independent:

So what has he learnt? To listen to advisers who assure him it is all right to use the scandal to flog his sponsors' equipment? To listen to advisers who insist there's nothing at all hypocritical in complaining about the intrusion into his family's privacy and then to parody a private discussion between himself and his dead dad? To listen to advisers who say it's not remotely distasteful to base a marketing campaign on an addict's rehabilitation and in the process borrow words from a dead dad's past and put them into his lifeless mouth?

Yep, Tiger has learnt all that. Those advisers of his do know what they are doing.

John Hopkins in The Times:

The shamelessness of Woods and his principal sponsor is almost beyond parody. The unprecedented billion-dollar fortune of Woods was constructed, at least in part, upon his image as a decent man with strong family credentials, the soft-focus photoshoots with his wife, children and late father engineered to appeal to the basic values of Middle America.

Now, with that image shattered by the tawdry reality of his private life and with many of his sponsors fleeing for cover, Woods and his advisers have sought to repair his tainted image by using precisely the same pitch, this time with Woods seeking redemption via an invented dialogue with a man in his grave. You couldn’t make it up.

2010 Masters First Round Live Blog



See Jack and Arnold Tee Off

And then watch Andy North say great 450 times in one sentence, after.

One Last Prediction On How Tiger Will Play

Set for a 1:42 tee time, so I don't think it's too late to post this prediction...