Catch Basin's trophy room is getting crowded, but we can always stack the plaques.

* Our man also took two first places for Sports Illustrated stories: “The Trials of Jobe” (Competition Writing) and “Get Real, USGA” (Opinion Writing).

Asked for a transcript of his acceptance speeches, Van Sickle writes, “You don’t get to talk, but there were glorious cupcakes, imprinted with the ING logo in the frosting. Best cupcakes ever.”

I’ll try to get Gary to sit down next week for an extended interview (not a contract renegotiation). In the meantime, stay glued to this prize-winning site for continuing coverage of the Farmers Insurance Open.

Knowing so little about Bae, I sent an emergency e-mail to the Top 50’s Director of Japanese Course-Rating and Chief Asian Correspondent, Duke “No Relation to Ryo” Ishikawa.

Duke immediately shot back a splendid e-mail informing me that Bae is the Korean who won last year’s Japan Open and topped the money list on the Japanese PGA Tour. “The same story was written in the year 2010,” Duke added, “but the player was different.

“For Koreans,” Duke explained, “the Japanese tour is just a bus stop on the way to Broadway or Hollywood. You get off the bus with 14 clubs in Tokyo. Then you beat all the Japanese and make enough money to buy a bus ticket to the next stop, which is the world’s strongest and richest tour.

Let’s continue in the popular Q&A format that relieves me of the responsibility of crafting sentences:

JG: Why are Korean golfers so successful in Japan?

Duke: One reason is our weak fields. The Japan tour doesn’t have good-enough players. That’s why many of our old-timers still have playing privileges on the regular tour. Massy Kuramoto and Kiyoshi Murota (who finished second last year at the U.S. Senior PGA Championship) will be 57 this year, but Murota still plays 16 regular tour events and Kuramoto plays 12. Isao Aoki, the first Japanese player to win on the PGA Tour, will be 70 this summer, but he played six tournaments in 2011.

JG: Senior events?

Duke: No, regular JPGA events. We ought to call it the “Old Timers Tour.” Aoki is older than my old friend Hale Irwin; he’s the same age as Tom Weiskopf. Murota and Kuramoto, they’re the same age as the Shark and two years older than Sir Faldo.

JG: Sir Faldo is here at Torrey Pines.

Duke: Playing the tournament?

JG: No, cracking wise for CBS.

Duke: That’s O.K., he’s old.

JG: Any other reasons why Korean golfers go to Japan?

Duke: The bigger reason is we have too easy courses almost every single week. Many of the courses were designed by a Japanese architect whose results have never been good. He gets the re-design job for many Japan Open courses — not because he’s good, but because he’s a director of the Japanese Golf Association. It’s all under the table, the negotiations are on the dark side. But that’s why many foreign golfers agree with the Australian, Paul Sheehan, who complains that the Japan Open plays similar courses every year.

JG: I know that golf is popular in Japan, but is it treated as a serious sport?

Duke: No, and that is the third reason. When you play at a Japanese private club, one female caddie still carries four bags the whole 18 holes.

JG: You don’t mean “carry,” do you? They’ve got those motorized trollies that rattle along over buried tracks.

Duke: Yes, but one female caddie for four players. Then we have to stop for lunch after nine holes.  You eat steak and drink a big glass of beer, like you’re at Octoberfest in Munich. It takes nearly an hour. How can you keep your concentration for the afternoon round?

JG: Do you have to have a caddie?

Duke: I carry a PING Mantis bag myself, because it saves time and I make better scores. But most courses still charge me the normal caddie fee. I tell them that in England even Winston Churchill and Lloyd George carried their own bags, but Japanese never understand. The courses provide caddies to all golfers because they believe that’s the best treatment.

JG: You sound pretty glum. Do you think the Japanese tour will bounce back in the years ahead?

Duke: I don’t know. Ryo Ishikawa is still twenty, but we see so many younger and better players like Tom Lewis, Patrick Cantley, Bud Cauley, Harris English, that whole bunch. It’s because many old courses here don’t like to open their doors to local kids. Plus there are no municipal-type courses in Japan. I’m very pessimistic about the future of golf in Japan.

Duke concluded by writing, “Anyway, I really want to see the Korean, Bae, win at Torrey Pines this week. Because he is our recent champion.”

Post Script: Duke might get his wish. The second round of the Farmers ended with Sang-Moon Bae in a third-place tie with Martin Flores, two strokes behind the leader, Kyle Stanley. Asked about his chances of winning, Bae said, “Well, first time on the PGA Tour this year, and there are many good players. I will try to be aggressive tomorrow and Sunday.”

* I’ve got my golf-writer hat on, as you can see. This is classic first-round reportage — i.e., obsessive attention paid to a star golfer who has blown himself out of the tournament before the dew is off the grass.

Good form in Wednesday presser didn't help Mickelson in the first round of the Farmers Insurance Open. (John Garrity)

Mickelson’s close call in 2011 was memorable for the way he played the 72nd hole. Needing eagle to force a playoff, Phil sent caddie Bones Mackay up to the green to pull the flag before he hit his wedge from 72 yards. The grandstand spectators and the television audience ate it up, but there were skeptics — Philistines, if you will — who rolled their eyes. “He’s good,” they muttered, “but he’s not that good.”**

** I haven’t lost my touch with that old golf-writer standby, the totally-made-up quote. I can get away with it because it’s transparently bogus. Phil’s “skeptics” obviously didn’t mutter those seven words in unison, unless they were seated together in a greenside skybox, chanting under the direction of a skeptics-conductor — which you rarely see.

Or is he? Asked at his Wednesday press conference*** if he had really thought he might hole that wedge shot, Mickelson replied that, yeah, he did, because he practices a lot. “I practice flying my wedges to a specific yardage three days a week,” Lefty said. I hit over 1,500 golf balls and try to fly it within a yard or hit a target, and, for the most part, I’m able to fly it within a yard 90 percent of the time.****

*** This is one of the perks of golf writing. You can draft off another reporter’s good questions, and you don’t even have to credit that reporter. Sweet!

****Another golf-writer blessing. I can meet my assigned word count by simply quoting golfers and their caddies, throwing in an occasional “he said” or “he recalled” to prove that I’m “writing.” I don’t even have to attend the press conference; transcripts are provided in the press room and on line. I just have to make sure that the transcript is accurate.†

† I once puzzled over a transcript of my own interview with baseball great George Brett, which said that he “planned to rent a Vada house.” Turned out he was planning to “renovate” a house.

“So the fact that it landed close to the hole,” Mickelson continued “– it was supposed to. I mean, I work at that. That’s what I practice.

Elaborating, Mickelson said,****** “About a dozen times a year, I hit the pin with a wedge, and I end up getter a worse result because of it. [Dave} Pelz wants me to have the pin removed on every wedge shot.” Mickelson said he doesn’t do that******* “because it just looks bad. But the fact is that I hit the pin a dozen times a year, and probably eleven out of those twelve, the ball ends up in a worse spot because of it.”

******My three words, entirely.

******* I paraphrased here. Mickelson actually said, “which I won’t do because it just looks bad.”

“So two things,” Mickelson said. “I wanted to give it [the wedge shot] two chances to get in — one, trying to fly it in, and two, trying to back it up into the hole. And it came close.” He shrugged.******** “It didn’t go in, so what does it matter? But it came close.”

******** In golf writing, a shrug doesn’t necessarily mean shoulders. We count lifted eyebrows, a dismissive wave — even a backward-twitch of the ears.

So that’s my Mickelson report from Torrey Pines. If time and inclination permit, I’ll run over to the locker room to see if he has anything to say about today’s awful round. Or maybe I won’t. He might bite my head off!

Gotta go now. I smell burgers.

*Having just re-read A Christmas Carol, I rejected Mackinsay’s advice and gave every employee a Christmas goose and a copy of my latest book, Tour Tempo 2: The Short Game & Beyond, available as an e-book on all iPads, Kindles and Nooks.

Top 50 courses like Cape Breton Island's Highland Links (above) could suffer if consultant's advice is followed. (John Garrity)

Mackinsay’s second recommendation called for a de-emphasis of golf course reviews (“because they’re closing more courses than they’re building”) offset by a boost in tour coverage (“because pro golfers get a lot more air time than golf architects do”). This advice made more sense, but I pointed out that qualified golf writers, such as I used to be, are paid immensely more than the quasi-galley slaves who work in my basement computer room.

Mackinsay’s rejoinder: “You only paid for two recommendations. A third will cost you forty thousand.”

So now that Mackinsay is out of the picture, I’m wrestling with a decision: Should I spend more time at pro tournaments, trying to extract something quotable from sweaty guys who spend most of their days in the hot sun? Or should I spend most of my time in the hot sun, playing the world’s greatest golf courses on behalf of my readers?

To help with that decision, I’ve put on my old reporter’s hat — the fedora with the press pass sticking out of the band — and planted my laptop on a black-fabric-draped table in the media center at the Farmers Insurance Open. I’m working for my old employer, Sports Illustrated, but I’m also here for you, my Top 50 readers. If something pops into my head that I am not contractually or ethically obligated to share with SI, I promise to share it with you.

Fortunately, nothing like that has yet popped into my head. And since it’s been a long day, I think I’ll pack up and drive over to the Del Mar Driving Range for a sunset bucket of balls.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but Phil Mickelson praised a couple of courses at his post-pro-am presser. “My favorite golf course out here is probably Hilton Head,” he said, referring to Pete Dye’s 51st-ranked Harbour Town Golf Links. “And I don’t even play there any more because it’s the week after the Masters.” Reminded that the U.S. Amateur was returning to 52nd-ranked Cherry Hills Country Club in Denver, Col., site of his 1990 Amateur triumph, Lefty said, “I loved that golf course. I thought it was spectacular. There is so much history there, from Palmer driving the green on 1, to Hogan backing up his wedge on 17 … you can’t help but feel it.”

Until prodded, Mickelson modestly left out his own contribution to Cherry Hills lore: his jaw-dropping concession of a 30-foot par putt on the first hole of his second-round match with perennial New Jersey amateur champ Jeff Thomas. “I’ll never forget the look that he gave me,” Mickelson recalled with a smile. “I ended up making a three- or four-foot birdie putt to win the hole.”

Those of us who were there remember that Mickelson minimized the length of his birdie try after the match, saying, “I wasn’t going to try to lag a two-footer. I thought it was a gimme.”

My contemporaneous account of Mickelson’s memorable week at Cherry Hills is in the SI Vault. Check it out.

John Daly: Did he wear out his welcome in 2011? (John Garrity)

John Daly received seven exemptions last year but complained when he was turned down for spots at the Bob Hope Classic and Waste Management Phoenix Open. It’ll be interesting to see how many free spots he gets in 2012 — in other words, has he finally worn out his welcome? He had a televised meltdown at a tournament in Austria, then withdrew from the Australian Open after hitting seven shots into a lake on the 11^th hole and running out of golf balls. (Daly was seven over par before the disaster.) Many observers thought Daly’s conduct was not only unprofessional but premeditated because he was angry after drawing a two-shot penalty for playing the wrong ball — a range ball — from a fairway bunker on the 10th hole. Australian golf officials were upset enough to rescind Daly’s invitation for the subsequent Australian PGA Championship. (Daly has a long history of withdrawing from tournaments before, during and after rounds.) Last year, Daly received exemptions from the Farmer’s Insurance Classic, Mayakoba Classic, Transitions Championship, Zurich Classic, Colonial Invitational, Travelers Championship and Canadian Open. Though he hasn’t been exempt for years, Daly has not attempted to regain his card by going back to Q-school.

Bud Cauley gave up his final year of eligibility at the University of Alabama to turn pro and apparently knew he was ready. Cauley parlayed four exemptions into a PGA Tour card. He’s exactly the kind of player sponsor’s exemption should go to — promising young talent that needs a chance. Cauley received an exemption from the Viking Classic in July, where he finished fourth. He was in contention at the Frys.com Classic, where he placed fifth and won $340,000.  Those top-10 finishes got him into tour events the following weeks. He was able to bypass Q-school by having more winnings on the non-members’ money list than the player who finished 125^th on the official money list. Cauley won $735,150 in eight starts.

Sam Saunders proved for a second straight year that it’s good to have a famous relative. He’s the grandson of Arnold Palmer and was able land his maximum of seven exemptions for a second straight year since dropping out of Clemson University. Saunders also scored some Nationwide Tour exemptions. Saunders finished 15^th at Pebble Beach, where his grandfather is a part-owner, and 30^th at Bay Hill, the tournament his grandfather hosts. Kevin Tway, son of former PGA champion Bob, scored four exemptions and missed four cuts.

Patrick Cantlay came off a remarkable freshman season at UCLA and enjoyed an even better summer. He was low amateur at the U.S. Open and runner-up at the U.S. Amateur. His stellar play prompted four sponsor’s exemptions, and Cantlay made the cut each time, finishing ninth at the Canadian Open. Had he been a pro, he would’ve won more than $380,000 in his PGA Tour appearances, but Cantlay went back to UCLA to be a sophomore.

Scott Stallings, a former star at Tennessee Tech, got into the Transitions Championship because his friend and mentor, Kenny Perry, helped him get an exemption. (Perry has an endorsement deal with Transitions, the eye care company.) Stallings contended for the title, finished third and used that good finish as a springboard to get in more tournaments during the summer. He won at Greenbrier and is fully exempt.

Gary Woodland won that Transitions Championship. Like Stallings, he was a Q-school grad the previous year, but he finished third in Phoenix after Waste Management offered him an exemption. Woodland won more than $3.4 million last year, finished top 20 on the money list and paired with Matt Kuchar to win the World Cup.

Brendan Steele was another young player who needed exemptions early in the year to get into tournaments. He got passes for Riviera and Bay Hill, then won the Valero Texas Open in May.

Rory McIlroy, who won the U.S. Open in June, ironically needed an exemption to defend his title at the Wells Fargo Championship because he decided to drop his PGA Tour membership at the end of 2010.

Cantlay, by the way, had the best record of making cuts among players who got exemptions, going 4 for 4. Scott Piercy and Lee Westwood (not a PGA Tour member), were 3 for 3.

Thanks, Gary. Your next assignment is to rank the tournament courses you mentioned, three of which are already in the Top 50, in your order of preference.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but the above-mentioned Bud Cauley got lots of air time while shooting a first-round 66 in the Sony Open at Honolulu’s 184th-ranked Waialae Country Club. “I did a lot of things right,” Cauley told the AP. “I did a lot of things I was doing last summer.” [Assignment for the weekend: Watch Jennifer Love Hewitt in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”]

That would be sponsor’s exemptions. Each event gets a handful of exemptions — a free invite into the tournament — to do with as tournament officials please. Non-tour members can accept up to seven free passes in a season, but for tour members there is no limit. And there is no watchdog.  In this oh-so-political game, it’s often not what you’ve done, but who you know.

Gary Van Sickle, Top 50's chief course rater, at Coyote Springs Golf Club in Mesquite, Nev. (John Garrity)

Van Sickle, who is no relation to the Gary Van Sickle who presides over the California Tree Fruit Growers Association, goes on to analyze the past year’s sponsor’s exemptions:

In 2011, 270 playing spots were awarded via sponsor’s exemptions in 31 tournaments. That’s an average of nearly nine spots per tournament — a pretty big number considering how tough it is to win a card through Q-school or the Nationwide Tour. Of those 270 free passes, recipients made the cut (and a check) 109 time. That’s 42 percent, not bad. Fourteen SE’s finished among the top ten (that’s five percent), and the best finish by a player competing on an exemption was third place. In all, 26 SE’s (9.6 percent) finished among the top 20.

“Another overlooked route to the tour,” Van Sickle continues, “is the Monday qualifier, a one-day, 18-hole event in which a field of players competes for three or four available spots.”

Not every tournament has Monday qualifying, and in 2011 the successful Monday qualifiers didn’t fare very well. Only 20 of 91 Monday qualifiers made cuts (22 percent). John Merrick, who was ninth at the Travelers Championship, earned the only top-ten finish by a Monday qualifier. Merrick, Lee Janzen and Michael Letzig were the only players to be successful twice in Monday qualifying this year.

Who is the king of sponsor’s exemptions?

“In 2011,” Van Sickle reports, “it was Joe Ogilvie.”

While Ogilvie, Scott McCarron and Brad Faxon each received 11 sponsor’s exemptions, Ogilvie was the only one to cash in on his opportunities. The 2007 U.S. Bank/Milwaukee champion made six cuts in 11 events, and his third-place finish at the Byron Nelson Championship, worth $377,000, was the biggest payday scored by any player receiving an exemption. Ogilvie won $541,650 in six events, and that, combined with 13 other appearances, enabled Ogilvie to finish 116^th on the money list and regain exempt status.

Faxon called in a career’s worth of favors for his 11 spots as he waited to turn 50 in late summer and start competing on the Champions Tour. Faxon missed 11 cuts in 11 tries, but the work apparently paid off. He won a senior event late in the year.

McCarron made six cuts, like Ogilvie, but had only one finish better than 38^th, a tie for sixth at the McGladrey Classic that earned him $125,200, more than one-fourth of his winnings for the year. McCarron finished 145^th on the money list and is only conditionally exempt for 2012.

“I’ve worked up a report on other notable sponsor’s exemptions,”Van Sickle concludes, “like John Daly, Gary Woodland and — would you believe it? — Rory McIlroy. I’ll file them as soon as I complete my rating of the Jack Nicklaus layout at Coyote Springs Golf Club in Mesquite, Nev. Until then, Happy New Year!”

 Sponsor’s Exemptions, 2011

(Cuts made in parentheses)

11 Brad Faxon (0)

11 Scott McCarron (6)

11 Joe Ogilvie (6)

7 John Daly (3)

7 Rod Pampling (4)

7 Sam Saunders (2)

5 Will MacKenzie (1)

4 Notah Begay (1)

4 Patrick Cantlay (4)

4 Bud Cauley (3)

4 Erik Compton (3)

4 Morgan Hoffman (2)

4 Kevin Tway (0)

4 Charles Warren (1)

3 Billy Andrade (0)

3 Jay Williamson (1)

3 Joseph Bramlett (0)

3 Todd Hamilton (1)

3 Lee Janzen (2)

3 Colt Knost (1)

3 Scott Piercy (3)

3 Brett Quigley (1)

3 Jeff Quinney (2)

3 Lee Westwood (3)

3 Brett Wetterich (1)

Money Won by Players Playing on Exemptions

$541,650 Joe Ogilvie

$500,804 Bud Cauley

$374,000 Scott Stallings

$369,153 Rod Pampling

$359,112 Adam Hadwin

$251,600 John Cook

$222,650 Gary Woodland

$205,704 Lee Westwood

$204,354 Scott McCarron

$177,375 Shigeki Maruyama

$164,286 John Daly

$155,440 Brett Wetterich

$135,525 Sam Saunders

$112,840 Ben Curtis

$  88,000 Peter Hanson

$  82,650 Justin Hicks (Honda)

$  69,031 Morgan Hoffman

$  67,786 Josh Teater

$  61,590 Scott Piercy

$  55,481 Martin Kaymer

Money Won by Monday Qualifiers

$190,925 John Merrick

$  54,987 Frank Lickliter

$  51,837 Erik Compton

$  42,000 Mathias Gronberg

$  29,000 Michael Letzig

$  17,356 Josh Broadaway

$  16,336 Robert Gamez

$  16,087 Erick Justesen

$  14,430 Andre Stolz

$  13,542 Troy Kelly

The 15th hole at 51st-ranked Falcon Ridge Golf Club, Mesquite, Nev. (John Garrity)

*Honks are 63-character messages from Honker Ltd., a Twitter rival in which Mr. Garrity has invested much of his fortune. If you would like to learn more about Honker, feel free to enter your social security and credit card numbers in the comment box.

We’re not sure what Mr. Garrity has in mind for 2012, but we know he’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year and remind you of the recent publication of Tour Tempo 2: The Short Game and Beyond by John Novosel and John Garrity, now available in iPad, Kindle and Nook editions.

On behalf of the Top 50 staff, I thank you for your past support and hope you’ll continue to count on the Top 50 for all your course-rating needs.

Sincerely,

M. G. Snead, Operations Director

A score of 78 may not sound impressive, but par was about 80 on a day that reminded neighbors in nearby Valley Forge of the winter of 1777-78, which sent the handicaps of General Washington and his 12,000-man Continental Army soaring. Finishing a stroke behind Van Sickle were Mike Donald, remembered for his 19-hole playoff loss to Hale Irwin in the 1990 U.S. Open, and 15-year PGA Tour veteran Bill Britton.

Van Sickle, upon presentation of the Shivas Trophy by tournament chairman Michael Bamberger, said, “You’ll have to ship it to me. There’s no way I can take this on my flight back to Pittsburgh.”

Also in the field were Sirius Satellite Radio host Peter Kessler, R.E.M. bass player and songwriter Mike Mills, and Top 50 founder and chief executive John Garrity, all of whom finished in the top 18.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but Alister MacKenzie’s Royal Melbourne composite course was in the Top 50 for an uninterrupted span of 252 months before dropping off the list this past July. Asked why the famous sandbelt course had been demoted, Van Sickle said, “No, really, I have to catch that plane.”

John Novosel Jr. explained Tour Tempo to a Golf Channel crew at the TPC of San Antonio. (John Garrity)

Fear not, Worried Reader. I just spent a working weekend in the Atlantic time zone, checking up on our two Canadian courses (24th-ranked Cabot Links and No. 31 Highlands Links) and I’m already packing for a trip to Oregon’s Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, where I’ll tee it up and trade rants with Tom Doak, designer of Pacific Dunes, No. 26. And just to forestall confusion, the Top 50 is not “a golf course blog.” It is the golf course blog.

However, like the late Steve Jobs, I take pride in revolutionizing whole industries. To that end, I co-authored the best-selling golf instructional, Tour Tempo: Golf’s Last Secret Finally Revealed, now in its 11th printing by Doubleday. And now John Novosel and I are out with an e-book sequel, Tour Tempo 2: The Short Game & Beyond, available on the Amazon Kindle* and Apple iBooks** platforms.

*Tour Tempo 2 debuted at No. 1 on Amazon’s golf books list. No surprise, that, since the original Tour Tempo was Amazon’s best-selling sports book of 2004, beating out Leigh Montville’s compelling Ted Williams biography.

**The Apple edition [which also debuted at No. 1 among golf books in the iTunes Store] is “enhanced” with color photography, instructional video clips and the  Tour Tempo short-game training tones. Buyers of the Kindle version can acquire these TT2 extras via a free download from the Web.

Naturally, promoting the new book has kept me from blogging as often as I’d like. But that hasn’t kept our highly-paid Top 50 evaluators from their appointed rounds. Within the past hour, for example, the A.W. Tillinghast-designed Wissahickon course at the Philadelphia Cricket Club jumped from No. 62 to No. 53 upon news of a breakthrough in the European sovereign-debt crisis. At the same time, a perennial Top-50 favorite, Colonial Country Club of Fort Worth, Texas, plummeted from No. 24 to No. 238.*

*Colonial’s fall, a by-product of program trading, was interrupted by a computerized “circuit breaker.” Our IT staff is looking into it.

TT2 is $9.99 on the iPad and Kindle reader.

How good is Tour Tempo 2?  Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Bamberger, co-author of the best-selling golf novel, The Swinger, rates it ahead of the collected output of every last golf guru of the past half-century. “Since Eisenhower took to the links,” Bamberger writes in his latest blurb, “there have been two important golf instruction books: Five Fundamentals, by Ben Hogan and Herbert Warren Wind, and Tour Tempo, with John Novosel playing the Hogan role and John Garrity as Herb. TT2 is clearer yet. It’s like a wonder drug.”

Coming from Bamberger, a master of understatement, this is high praise. But let’s talk value. For a mere $9.99, you get the aforementioned color photography, the short-game tones, and the instruction videos. And if you order in the next hour, you’ll receive at no extra cost a bonus chapter, “The Force,” from an upcoming e-book by long-drive specialist John Novosel, Jr. Act this very instant and we’ll throw in “The Force” video clip, which will take strokes off your game faster than you can say “Popeil’s Pocket Fisherman!”

As for Worried Reader … stop moping and play some golf before winter sets in. I recommend any of the courses on the adjacent list.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but Rory McIlroy leads after one round of the Shanghai Masters, which is being played on the Lake Malaren Masters course, a Jack Nicklaus design. Robert Allenby, meanwhile, is the first-round leader at the Asia Pacific Classic, held at The Mines Resort & Golf Club in Selangor Malaysia, a Robert Trent Jones Jr. track. Both courses are “Unrated” pending a review of the Colonial situation.

Carneivores share recipes in the Eddie Hackett Lounge. (John Garrity)

And now a once-respected Texas journalist has turned to the dark side, wielding recipes in a sad effort to dislodge Askernish Old from the top spot. His name is Bruce Selcraig*, and his byline appears in all the top magazines. But he moonlights as a golf-course critic. If you’ve got a coastal property bigger than a fairground with dunes on it, Bruce has probably photographed it. If it isn’t fenced, he’s probably played it.

*Full disclosure: He’s a friend.

Anyway, Bruce is an admirer of the Carne Golf Links of Belmullet, Ireland. (As  are we. Carne has held the number-two spot since the Top 50’s inception.) He plays there so often that he’s on a first-name basis with the clubhouse and greenkeeping staff and with many members of the Belmullet Golf Club. It is Bruce’s practice, after a round at Carne, to send us an unsolicited report on the course’s myriad charms, leaning heavily on exclamation points and adjectives such as “dazzling,” “tear-inducing,” and “unparalleled.”

On Tuesday, however, he sent this: “I got rained and winded out of Carne this time, but had a hot chowder with Eamon [Mangan]. I have written him just now, but do you happen to know the recipe or main ingredient of [Carne’s] chowder, which I like far more than the milky white stuff at many courses.” Stymied by his syntax, he added: “???”

Recognizing this as a variant of the “milkshake ploy” — as in, “Castle Pines is the best course west of the Mississippi because of their amazing milkshakes” — I wrote Bruce back, explaining that my usual lunch at Carne was the tasty vegetable soup and brown bread.

He exploded. “You have NOT had the chowder? You elongated girly man from dubious BBQ territory!” Still working the food theme, Bruce provided a link to his freshly-written PostGame blog about the 8th-ranked European Club  in County Wicklow, which led off with the news flash that he had liked the salmon-and-prawn salad at Jack White’s Lounge & Restaurant.

Today, he raised the ante, writing, “This just in from Eamon … good luck,” followed by a document titled Blacksod Bay Seafood Chowder Recipe. The recipe began, “Make fish stock from shellfish shells & white fish bones, e.g. monkfish, cod, etc. Don’t use oily fish. Sweat off 1 diced onion, one head celery, 3 leeks chopped, 2 diced carrots …. And that’s as much as I’ll share, because the recipe was signed by Carne’s head chef (and 2005 Irish Chef of the Year) John Conmy, and I’d rather not have to defend a recipe-infringement suit.

Selcraig knows that. He sent the recipe because he thinks it will tip the clubhouse-food metric in Carne’s favor and put the Mayo links ahead of Scotland’s Askernish. To which I publicly say: “No way.” The Top 50 algorithm treats unsolicited course evaluations as corrupted data —at least until the best minds at Cal Sci figure out how to digitize monkfish-bone scores.

So Carne, even if it rules the chowder rankings, is still the runner-up among courses.

As for that BBQ crack, Bruce knows that Kansas City holds six of the top ten spots in the latest World Barbecue Ranking, while Texas’ top joint limps in at No. 14. And that’s a fact.

CordeValle: Wining, yes. Whining, no. (John Garrity)

Top 50 on TV: They’ve had record crowds this week at the Frys.com Open, thanks to the Top 50. The host venue, the CordeValle Resort Golf Club, debuted at No. 50 in June of 2010, and has since soared to the 49th spot. Lured by our reports of oak-studded foothills, sprawling vineyards and soaring sycamores, Tiger Woods made a rare fall appearance. Was he impressed? Can’t say, but he decided to stay for the weekend.