CLINTON, SOUTH CAROLINA | It was not a matter of if, but when Musgrove Mill Golf Club would close its doors and put a lock on the gate, and to walk away would have been one of the great golf tragedies, particularly in this part of the world.

Musgrove Mill is a rare find, a near masterpiece unlike anything you’ve ever seen or experienced. It pitches and rolls, meanders, rises and falls and unlike others who claim this, it really and truly tests every part of your game and each club in your bag. You can leave the 18th green at Musgrove Mill having your hind parts severely kicked for four hours and ask the staff if there’s a time on the tee sheet for later that afternoon.

And it was about to die.

The club is owned by McConnell Golf, founded by John McConnell, who bought Raleigh Country Club – which was on the doorstep of bankruptcy – in 2003. McConnell was founder and CEO of Medic Computer, which sold in 1997 for $923 million, personally netting McConnell a reported $60 million. He then invested in and became CEO of A4 Health Systems, which was sold for $272 million in 2006, according to The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C.

McConnell now owns eight private clubs in North and South Carolina and the roster is regionally impressive. The idea was to build a portfolio of high-rent properties that were financially challenged, make them operationally lean and mean, and give a full member of one club membership rights to all eight.

And when Musgrove Mill came into McConnell’s sights in 2007, it was going to be one of the jewels in the crown. But just as the ink was drying on the contract, the economic catastrophe of 2008 hit marginally profitable private clubs especially hard and Musgrove Mill took a full blow.

At its peak, Musgrove Mill had about 320 members and did 15,000 rounds annually. Last year, the club was down to 170 members – only about half locally – and rounds were down about a third. The club lost $650,000 in 2010 and about that much in 2011. McConnell had enough and told the staff last October that the club was going to be shuttered.

He still had some hope, however, as he was prepared to spend $200,000 annually to keep the course in condition so that if the economy improved substantially, the club could reopen without having to perform drastic maintenance measures.

Musgrove Mill opened in 1988, an Arnold Palmer design that wasn’t even close to anything that Palmer had ever done. According to Golf Club Atlas, Tom Fazio did some of the routing and Ken Tomlinson – of Tidewater Golf Club near Myrtle Beach – contributed some changes. But Palmer gets the design credit.

It is easily the best thing Palmer has ever done and it’s also easily the second-most difficult course in South Carolina – the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, site of this year’s PGA Championship, coming in first in that race. Two or three of the green complexes might be slightly over the top, but it has consistently ranked among the Top 100 Modern Courses in the U.S. by Golfweek.

When McConnell announced the closure, the response was overwhelming. “It was unbelievable the number of members or people who had been members in the past who contacted us,” said head golf professional Jeff Tallman. “It wasn’t like a facility closing, it was like someone’s funeral. There’s a spirit in this place that is pretty special.”

McConnell, his staff and the club members dodged a couple of deadlines and were finally given until Dec. 31 of last year to generate a plan to save the club. After some late nights, a new membership classification was developed. The staff is marketing 100 memberships to people already belonging to a private club in the Carolinas for $1,200 a year. And it is also trying to sell 150 memberships to private club members outside the Carolinas for $600 a year.

If those memberships become fully subscribed, it will only generate $210,000 a year. The rest of the shortfall is anticipated to be made up by cart fees, guest fees and other forms of revenue. New members are asked to bring three guests per quarter. As of Feb. 1, the club had sold 73 of the new memberships.

The problem Musgrove Mill faces is similar to many private clubs across the nation. The days of the initiation fee are all but gone to all but the most exclusive clubs. Most of the mid-level clubs are practically giving away memberships just to get people in the doors to pay the monthly dues, which are the lifeblood of the private club. And many private clubs are starting to allow limited public play, simply in an effort to generate revenue.

Still, the biggest thing we sell in golf is hope, and everyone associated with Musgrove Mill has high hopes.

“Mr. McConnell is a hero down here,” Tallman said. “Those people who stuck with Musgrove Mill, they are heroes, too. They understand that we’d rather be open and people use the facility as opposed to closing the doors.”

And, at the end of the reality-stricken day, the bottom line is, unfortunately, the bottom line.

The thing is, no one likes slow play, except for that one guy who sent an e-mail and told us he is in no hurry to get home from the golf course and start in on that honey-do list his wife has waiting for him.

He needs to find the card room at the club and learn to play gin rummy for a penny a point. That will keep him occupied for a while and he won’t hold up the rest of us while we’re trying to play golf.

Besides him, everyone we heard from last week is on our side. Slow play is the scourge of our game. With the exception of the PGA Tour, which doesn’t have a pace of play problem – just ask them. Denial is a powerful force.

The real question is: What do we about it? Mike Keiser, who developed and owns the stunning courses at Bandon Dunes Resort, suggested that the PGA Tour put the slow players off last every day. That way, we’d identify them, expose them and perhaps shame them into playing faster.

It’s a great idea but impractical because if one or more of the slowpokes gets near the lead, they will have to co-mingle with the faster players on the weekend for television. Besides, there are only a handful of really fast players these days.

Vast numbers of PGA Tour players have fallen into the apathetic majority, which is to say that players who used to pick up the pace have slowed down considerably and now only keep up the tortoise-like pace. If the Tour allows you upward of five-and-a-half hours to play, you might as well take your time. There’s no valor in fighting a losing battle in this case.

Tiger Woods and Tony Romo’s foursome at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am took five hours, 38 minutes in the first round at Spyglass Hill. They can’t blame the amateurs for the funereal pace. It takes a threesome almost that long in a regular Tour event.

And the slow players don’t care if they are identified. They have no shame. Besides, if there are no consequences to pay, what’s the motivation to change your behavior?

The only way to affect the PGA Tour is to hit it smack in the pocketbook. So, I have a proposal and I need your help. What I’d like you to do is boycott PGA Tour telecasts. That’s right, don’t watch.

Tell the Tour how you feel about slow play by voting with your feet and your remote. I need you with me on this. Instead of watching the PGA Tour, go out and play nine holes. Take your child or your grandchild or both and head to the course. Golf is infinitely more fun to play than to watch. At the very least, go to the driving range and hit balls for an hour or so. If you live where winter is still a problem, find an indoor range where you can hit a bucket or two.

If you can’t go to the course, take a walk with your spouse. Get out of the house. Go to a movie. Visit a friend. Call your children or your parents. Actually talk to someone, have a conversation.

Read a book, a golf book if you insist. Anything by James Dodson, John Feinstein or Mark Frost will keep you company and hold your interest all of Sunday afternoon.

If you’re glued to the television, tune in to college basketball (but not the NBA). And don’t watch Full Metal Jousting. We have standards. Can’t do without golf? Go with the LPGA or Champions Tour. They aren’t slow. In fact, on average, the women and seniors are an hour or more faster per round than the big Tour.

For this to be effective and get the PGA Tour’s attention, we must have a groundswell. Tell five of your friends and relatives and ask them to tell five of theirs. Go on Twitter and Facebook. Spread the word to the members of your Saturday morning dogfight. Put a note on the club bulletin board.

Stand up and tell Ponte Vedra Beach that you’re mad as hell and you won’t take it anymore. Let them know that slow play on Tour begets slow play at your course. And the slower we play, the faster golf will shrink instead of grow. We need more players, especially fast ones, and nothing drives away new golfers with more certainty than the time it takes to play.

If you have other ideas to draw attention to this cause, please feel free to e-mail me at mikep@globalgolfpost.com. I’m glad to hear from all of you. Just make sure it’s practical.

In the meantime, join the cause. Let’s do something that really matters. If an issue ever needed to go viral in the golf world, it’s this. If we can stamp out slow play in our lifetime, the generations that follow will be indebted to us for as long as they play our game.

Our mission is to leave golf better than we found it. This is the way.

Unfortunately, all we are left with is to face facts. The discouraging, frustrating, fist-pounding, let’s-walk-off-the-golf-course facts. The PGA Tour is not going to do a damn thing about slow play. Not now, not ever.

And the Tour has had every opportunity to solve this problem way before it got out of control. If they truly had the willingness, Tour officials could have stopped slow play dead in its tracks years ago, and today players would practically be running around the golf course.

The bottom line is that the Tour has no appetite for affecting the outcome of a tournament by implementing one of its own rules. Because adding a shot to a player’s score is the only impediment for slow play on a professional level. Fines simply don’t work.

If you levy a $5,000 or $10,000 fine to a player who makes three or four million dollars a year, he can probably pay the fine out of his money clip and still have enough left over not to tip the locker room attendant.

No, the solution is clear and has been for years. Slow players must face the wrath of the one-shot penalty in order to change their behavior. And the Tour simply won’t drop the hammer on such a punitive, drastic move. The last player to be assessed a one-shot penalty was Dillard Pruitt and that was 20 years ago. In the sweetest of ironies, Pruitt today is a PGA Tour rules official.

The Tour simply has an alarming lack of insides and it starts and ends with Commissioner Tim Finchem. Everyone below him on the food chain, including the on-site rules officials each week, are simply doing his bidding. Finchem believes the slow play hue and cry is the figment of an over-active imagination by the golf media. It’s a sometimes effective duck-and-cover move by most CEOs in trouble – blame the media.

However, the media doesn’t put the Tour’s starting times together, and here’s what happened two weeks ago at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines. In the third round, the Tour sent the final group off at 12:45 p.m. Eastern time. The CBS television broadcast was scheduled to finish at 6:00 p.m. Eastern. That’s 5 hours, 15 minutes for a three-ball to complete 18 holes. For Sunday’s final round, the Tour sent the leaders off at 1:00 p.m. Eastern and they took 5 hours, 20 minutes to finish regulation play.

That tactic is strangely familiar, particularly to those who travel by air. The airlines build in a cushion in their departure and arrival times so that a two-hour flight in real time is 2 hours, 45 minutes on the schedule so that the airline has a better chance to record on-time arrivals.

In Saturday’s third round of the Waste Management Phoenix Open, the Tour sent the leaders off at 1:50 p.m. Eastern and it took the threesome an hour to play the first three holes, more than five hours to play the entire round.

You might ask the question, “Why should we care?” The answer is clear: Because it affects how the rest of us play the game. More and more, people watch the tour professionals and mimic their actions in their Saturday or Sunday foursome. The trickle down has become a cascade.

Slow play is an epidemic among public and club golfers and not only is it keeping new players from entering the game, but it’s driving the marginal players away. If the powers that be, which include Finchem, are at all serious about growing the game, then they need to be a little more authentic and do something about the scourge of our game.

Now, the players are starting to speak out. Luke Donald, the No. 1 player in the world, spoke out at the beginning of the year about slow play. “It’s not that hard – be ready when it’s your turn. Slow play is killing our sport,” Donald said via his Twitter account. Later, he said, “I could rant all day long, don’t think anything will ever change as the slow players don’t realize they are slow.”

Everyone on Tour knows who the worst offenders are. They include J.B. Holmes, Ben Crane, Jonathan Byrd, Hunter Mahan, Kevin Na and Trevor Immelman. And, among the newer players, Webb Simpson can easily join that group. To Crane’s credit, he knows he’s slow and he has made overtures toward doing something to speed up. So, now, he’s gone from slow to merely deliberate.

On Tour, you basically have 45 seconds to play a shot. Do you realize what can happen in 45 seconds? Tom Brady can engineer a scoring drive, the Miami Heat can score 10 points, and I can get my car from zero to 60. But for many Tour players, 45 seconds is not enough to get a club in their hands and pull the trigger.

Two of the historically worst offenders in slow play are making huge strides to solve the problem. The AJGA is implementing get-tough procedures, which include tacking on penalty strokes, and their pace of play has improved markedly. College players, who used to take six hours or more to play a tournament round, are starting to be monitored by their coaches and tournament officials to pick up the pace.

Yet, those who oversee the best players in the world won’t lift a finger to put an end to the worst thing about this game. The PGA Tour’s inert and close-mouthed state tells the rest of us that it just doesn’t care. Never has, never will.

The argument is all wrong. The anti-modernists screech at the top of their lungs that today’s golf equipment is wrecking the game, particularly at the highest level. They couldn’t be more misled.

In fact, there are some areas that today’s PGA Tour players are worse at than they were 20 years ago. We know that there are lies, perfect lies, buried lies, damned lies and statistics. We utilize the latter to throw some light onto some hitherto dark areas. We look at six statistical categories from last year, 10 years ago and 20 years ago. And we take the No. 1 player and the No. 70 player in each category (see chart). The numbers speak for themselves.

Let’s get the distance issue on the table and out of the way. Today’s drivers, with their super-engineered clubheads, along with advances in shaft technology and the distance the modern ball travels, make players longer off the tee than ever before. There’s no dispute.

Tour players have benefited from 30 extra yards off the tee on average from 20 years ago. So have the rest of us. A combination of forces produces the prodigious length. Clubheads are better and more forgiving. And golf balls – at all levels – perform like never before.

And the least talked about part of a driver – the shaft – has made more technological inroads than perhaps anything else in clubmaking. Shafts can be dialed in to get the most possible distance out of the club without having to change your swing.

Has more distance ruined the game? Hardly. PGA Tour courses are much longer than they were 10 or 20 years ago, stretching to 7,400 yards or more. At one time, a 430-yard par-4 was a manly hole. Today, on Tour, it’s 480 – or longer. The 500-yard par-4 is now a staple in the professional game. Courses with a par of 70 are becoming more popular with the PGA Tour staff, which limits the long-ballers to only two par 5s per round instead of four.

Purists claim that distance has rendered great old courses obsolete. From whom? Tour players compete on only about 40 courses a year. That leaves the rest for us to play and extra distance isn’t causing even scratch players to bring the Pine Valleys and the Merions and the Seminoles to their knees. The greats are still great.

With all this extra distance, you’d think that Tour players are hitting wedges to every hole, which would mean they are hitting a lot more greens. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The 2011 leader in greens in regulation hit on average just fewer than 13 greens per round. The 70th ranked player was just under 12 greens per round. That’s significantly worse than the stats from 2001 and 1991.

Perhaps the reason for the fall-off is that players are hitting shots to the green from the rough more often. The bombers’ logic is that a wedge from the rough is better than a 7-iron from the fairway. As a result, the top-ranked player in driving accuracy in 2011 only hit 10.5 of 14 fairways per round. The 70th-ranked player hit fewer than nine fairways per round. Once again, significantly worse than 10 and 20 years ago.

So, if today’s Tour player is missing more fairways and greens per round, then surely he chips and putts better with the modern ball. Not true, either. Last year’s leader in scrambling got the ball up and down just over 65 percent of the greens he missed. The 70th-ranked player was successful about 58 percent of the time. Worse still.

In defense of modern players, they must deal with hole locations that are tucked three paces off the edges of greens in many cases during tournament week. However, nothing is ever wrong with hitting the center of the green. From the fairway.

Putting happens to be the one area today’s Tour player is marginally better than his brethren of 10 and 20 years ago. Last year’s leader averaged 27.75 putts per round, which is about a quarter of a stroke better than 10 years ago and a little more than that 20 years ago. Still, that only amounts to about one shot better per tournament.

There are a couple of reasons for the improvement. One is agronomy. Grass strains and green surfaces are better than ever. Tour players compete on almost perfect greens nearly every week. It’s markedly easier to hole putts when the greens are pristine. And Tour players have access to the latest in technology to analyze their putting strokes and thereby get a perfect fit for a putter.

All of which adds up to scoring, which is statistically about even with 2001 and 1991. The 2001 leader in scoring averaged 68.86 strokes per round, .05 worse than 2001 and about three-fourths of a stroke better than 1991.

Hitting the ball farther never made anyone better. And straighter isn’t necessarily the answer, either. You still have to somehow get the ball in the hole. Joe Durant led the PGA Tour in 2011 in driving accuracy and was third in greens in regulation. Yet, he finished 160th on the money list.

Even for the best ball-strikers in the world, it’s still a hard game.

Who in his right mind would turn down a ticket to paradise, how is it that Tiger is skipping Torrey Pines and what in the name of Frank Chirkinian is Nick Faldo doing sharing a television booth with Johnny Miller?

If the golf world looks upside down, well, folks, welcome to the game’s new day. Wasn’t it just a day-and-a-half ago that Luke Donald was cashing big paychecks, we had four first-time major champions and Woods was winning again, sort of?

As we begin the year of our Finchem, 2012, we find that the first event of the PGA Tour season, the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, is also the one in the most trouble. Only 28 of 2011’s Tour winners signed up for a trip to Maui and only 27 actually started in Friday’s first round.

It’s no secret that the Tour’s biggest names – Donald, Phil Mickelson and Adam Scott among them – don’t like to start their new seasons this close to the end of the old year. And the Hyundai was never expected to attract major winners Rory McIlroy, Charl Schwartzel and Darren Clarke. Dustin Johnson might have been there except for a little knee surgery.

Perhaps the players don’t like the Plantation Course at the Kapalua resort. Let’s face it, Kapalua is not a great track. It has 75-yard wide fairways, huge, undulating grainy greens and you have to shoot about a million under to have a sniff at winning.

Maybe, if the truth were known, Kapalua is just too dangerous for the Tour pros. Last year, while snorkeling, Geoff Ogilvy cut his finger on a coral reef badly enough that he needed double rows of stitches and had to pull out. This year, the 28th player in the field – Lucas Glover – injured a ligament in his right knee while paddle boarding and couldn’t make the tee on Friday.

Only two players in the world’s top 10 – Steve Stricker and Webb Simpson – were in the field and looking at the quality of the entrants at the Hyundai, you can no longer snicker at Woods winning the 18-man Chevron World Challenge. It can be argued with assurance that Woods’ tournament had the stronger field.

Speaking of Tiger, can he really need the money that badly that he would jilt the Farmers Insurance Classic at Torrey Pines for a fat appearance check in Abu Dhabi? He practically has the deed to the property at Torrey, winning there seven times as a pro, including the 2008 U.S. Open, where he did so on one leg. If Woods wanted to post a W on the board early, wouldn’t it make sense to get the confidence meter on high at a place he’s the most comfortable?

But that’s not the only burning question as we ring in the new year. Here are a few more to consider:

What kind of year will Woods have? Listening to the pundits as January dawned, the touts were giving Tiger three or four victories in 2012, including possibly The Masters. As we summon the specter of Lee Corso, not so fast, my friend. While winning at the Chevron was a big deal, it won’t validate itself until Woods wins in a field of at least 144, where 50 guys have a chance to win instead of five or six. Which is why skipping Torrey Pines leaves itching heads.

Will Donald validate his world ranking? Winning a major championship seems to be the only way for that to happen for the world No. 1. He’s not long enough to manhandle Augusta National and the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island is too big a ballpark for Donald at the PGA Championship. Royal Lytham & St. Annes is a crapshoot at the Open Championship. So, it looks like the U.S. Open at the Olympic Club could be his best bet. It’s not overly long and his short game seems tailor made for Olympic’s small greens. Otherwise, Donald has a chance to devolve into his generation’s Colin Montgomerie.

How brightly will McIlroy’s star shine? While McIlroy is the most physically talented player in the game, it’s what’s goes on between his ears that will determine if he is truly a great player or just another one-off. He ditched his longtime manager, waffled about playing the PGA Tour, whined about conditions at the Open Championship and flitted around the world with his celebrity girlfriend, who apparently channels Yoko Ono when it comes to giving advice to her beau. Someone needs to remind McIlroy that he’s a professional golfer and that’s how he became the next big thing.

Who is the next breakout player? For a while, we thought it would be Dustin Johnson, a physical specimen who can drive the ball miles and turn the most difficult course into a par-68 or better. But he has had three very real chances to win majors thus far and spit the bit each time. Which is why the world No. 10 – Simpson – is the one American poised on the precipice of stardom. This could be a major year for Simpson.

Oh, yes, the Ryder Cup is in September at Medinah Country Club. The greatest event in golf is enough by itself to make this way more than a Happy New Year.

Who in his right mind would turn down a ticket to paradise? And how is it that Tiger is skipping Torrey Pines? And what in the name of Frank Chirkinian is Nick Faldo doing sharing a television booth with Johnny Miller?
If the golf world looks upside down, well, folks, welcome to the game’s new day. Wasn’t it just a day-and-a-half ago that Luke Donald was cashing big paychecks, we had four first-time major champions and Woods was winning again, sort of?

As we begin the year of our Finchem, 2012, we find that the first event of the PGA Tour season, the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, is also the one in the most trouble. Only 28 of 2011’s Tour winners signed up for a trip to Maui and only 27 actually started in Friday’s first round.

It’s no secret that the Tour’s biggest names – Donald, Phil Mickelson and Adam Scott among them – don’t like to start their new seasons this close to the end of the old year. And the Hyundai was never expected to attract major winners Rory McIlroy, Charl Schwartzel and Darren Clarke. Dustin Johnson might have been there except for a little knee surgery.
Perhaps the players don’t like the Plantation Course at the Kapalua resort. Let’s face it,

Kapalua is not a great track. It has 75-yard wide fairways, huge, undulating grainy greens and you have to shoot about a million under to have a sniff at winning.
Maybe, if the truth were known,

Kapalua is just too dangerous for the Tour pros. Last year, while snorkeling, Geoff Ogilvy cut his finger on a coral reef badly enough that he needed double rows of stitches and had to pull out. This year, the 28th player in the field – Lucas Glover – injured a ligament in his right knee while paddle boarding and couldn’t make the tee on Friday.

Only two players in the world’s top 10 – Steve Stricker and Webb Simpson – were in the field, and looking at the quality of the entrants at the Hyundai, you can no longer snicker at Woods winning the 18-man Chevron World Challenge. It can be argued with assurance that Woods’ tournament had the stronger field.

Speaking of Tiger, can he really need the money that badly that he would jilt the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines for a fat appearance check in Abu Dhabi? He practically has the deed to the property at Torrey, winning there seven times as a pro, including the 2008 U.S. Open, where he did so on one leg. If Woods wanted to post a W on the board early, wouldn’t it make sense to get the confidence meter on high at a place he’s the most comfortable?

But that’s not the only burning question as we ring in the new year. Here are a few more to consider:
What kind of year will Woods have?

Listening to the pundits as January dawned, the touts were giving Tiger three or four victories in 2012, including possibly The Masters. As we summon the specter of Lee Corso, not so fast, my friend. While winning at the Chevron was a big deal, it won’t validate itself until Woods wins in a field of at least 144, where 50 guys have a chance to win instead of five or six. Which is why skipping Torrey Pines leaves itching heads.

Will Donald validate his world ranking? Winning a major championship seems to be the only way for that to happen for the world No. 1. He’s not long enough to manhandle Augusta National and the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island is too big a ballpark for Donald at the PGA Championship. Royal Lytham & St. Annes is a crapshoot at the Open Championship. So, it looks like the U.S. Open at the Olympic Club could be his best bet. It’s not overly long and his short game seems tailor made for Olympic’s small greens. Otherwise, Donald has a chance to devolve into his generation’s Colin Montgomerie.

How brightly will McIlroy’s star shine? While McIlroy is the most physically talented player in the game, it’s what’s goes on between his ears that will determine if he is truly a great player or just another one-off. He ditched his longtime manager, waffled about playing the PGA Tour, whined about conditions at the Open Championship and flitted around the world with his celebrity girlfriend, who apparently channels Yoko Ono when it comes to giving advice to her beau. Someone needs to remind McIlroy that he’s a professional golfer and that’s how he became the next big thing.

Who is the next breakout player? For a while, we thought it would be Dustin Johnson, a physical specimen who can drive the ball miles and turn the most difficult course into a par-68 or better. But he has had three very real chances to win majors thus far and spit the bit each time. Which is why the world No. 10 – Simpson – is the one American poised on the precipice of stardom. This could be a major year for Simpson.
Oh, yes, the Ryder Cup is in September at Medinah Country Club. The greatest event in golf is enough by itself to make this way more than a Happy New Year.

The thing about Heather Deranek is not that she’s a woman. Or that she’s an attorney. Or that she has boundless energy. Or even that she has enthusiasm that’s downright contagious.

The thing about Deranek is that she’s all those things. Breaking into professional golf as a player agent – and competing in her rookie year – she’s going to need everything that makes her stand out to survive the shark tank into which she has plunged headfirst. Plus, a great deal of good luck couldn’t hurt one bit.

But you’re not telling her anything she doesn’t already know. And that makes her resolve even more steely.

“There’s nothing I love more than to prove people wrong,” says Deranek. “And being able to be successful when people think it couldn’t be done. I’ve had people say to me, ‘Oh, you’re really cute. You should be in sales but you shouldn’t be an agent.’

“I’ve had people tell me that I wouldn’t be successful if I didn’t work for a big agency first. It just makes me want to work that much harder. The more people tell me that I can’t, the more I want to prove that I can.”

And therein lies a big part of the mission statement of Hi-Def Rep, Deranek’s newborn agency, based in Seattle, about a half hour from where she grew up. Her road to the golf business has been circuitous. But in her mind, she kept her cart on the path that led from where she was to where she wanted to be.

A graduate of the University of Washington with a degree in communications, she is also a graduate of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. “Doing your homework on the beach is not a bad way to go,” she says.

In 2010, there were two professional golf events in the Seattle area – the U.S. Senior Open and the Boeing Classic, both on the Champions Tour. Through a friend, she was introduced to Phil Stambaugh, a media official on the Champions Tour. She told Stambaugh at the Senior Open that she wanted to learn everything there was to know about his job.

The two connected two weeks later and Deranek started her journey, getting her post-graduate education about how the media center works at a professional event. For the next few weeks, she flew on her own dime on the weekends, volunteering in each media center and becoming immersed in the background of golf.

Now that she knew more about how the media works, she set out to find out how players are represented.

“I started on a fact-finding mission and I met with a number of agents, all the way from the guys at IMG down to the guys who were one-man shops, and I just picked their brains,” Deranek said. “What did they like about the job, what they didn’t like, what was their background.

“When it comes to agents in golf, I found out there weren’t very many lawyers. What would it take for me to get a job here? I didn’t really find an agency I loved. So I decided that if I couldn’t find an agency who did it the way I wanted, I’d just do it on my own.”

And Hi-Def Rep was born. Deranek started her agency with a couple of aspiring golfers and a cyclist from the Northwest. But they weren’t going to make much money, which meant that Deranek wasn’t going to make much money. So, she set out on the road to make her case.

“I started going to Nationwide Tour events to see who was available. I’m not in the business of poaching guys who had agents. So I had a list of guys who didn’t have agents. Once you get to the point where people see you on Tour and know you by name, you know you’ve made an impact. The only way I was going to do that was to be out there. I wasn’t going to accomplish much sitting on my couch.”

A friend of a friend got her in touch with Gary Christian, who, at age 39, will be a rookie on the PGA Tour next year by virtue of finishing in the top 25 on the Nationwide Tour in 2011, and before long, a deal was struck.

“It’s a tough business for her to break into,” said Christian, an Englishman who lives in Alabama. “But she’s not high-pressure and she came across as extremely intelligent and keen to go the extra mile.”

Cleveland Golf was not willing to extend Christian a deal for 2012, even though he had been using the company’s equipment for several years. But Deranek negotiated a contract for Christian with Adams Golf, done in an environment where club and ball deals are shrinking, especially for players without a big name.

One of Deranek’s clients is Tommy Bahama and she brokered a deal for Ken Duke to wear the company’s clothing and logo while he won the Nationwide Tour Championship. It’s not huge, but it’s a place to start.

“Gary likes to say that we both have a little underdog in us,” Deranek says.

And, who doesn’t love an underdog?

The thing about Heather Deranek is not that she’s a woman. Or that she’s an attorney. Or that she has boundless energy. Or even that she has enthusiasm that’s downright contagious.

The thing about Deranek is that she’s all those things. Breaking into professional golf as a player agent – and competing in her rookie year – she’s going to need everything that makes her stand out to survive the shark tank into which she has plunged headfirst. Plus, a great deal of good luck couldn’t hurt one bit.

But you’re not telling her anything she doesn’t already know. And that makes her resolve even more steely.

“There’s nothing I love more than to prove people wrong,” says Deranek. “And being able to be successful when people think it couldn’t be done. I’ve had people say to me, ‘Oh, you’re really cute. You should be in sales but you shouldn’t be an agent.’

“I’ve had people tell me that I wouldn’t be successful if I didn’t work for a big agency first. It just makes me want to work that much harder. The more people tell me that I can’t, the more I want to prove that I can.”

And therein lies a big part of the mission statement of Hi-Def Rep, Deranek’s newborn agency, based in Seattle, about a half hour from where she grew up. Her road to the golf business has been circuitous. But in her mind, she kept her cart on the path that led from where she was to where she wanted to be.

A graduate of the University of Washington with a degree in communications, she is also a graduate of the Thomas
Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. “Doing your homework on the beach is not a bad way to go,” she says.

In 2010, there were two professional golf events in the Seattle area – the U.S. Senior Open and the Boeing Classic, both on the Champions Tour. Through a friend, she was introduced to Phil Stambaugh, a media official on the Champions Tour. She told Stambaugh at the Senior Open that she wanted to learn everything there was to know about his job.

The two connected two weeks later and Deranek started her journey, getting her post-graduate education about how the media center works at a professional event. For the next few weeks, she flew on her own dime on the weekends, volunteering in each media center and becoming immersed in the background of golf.

Now that she knew more about how the media works, she set out to find out how players are represented.

“I started on a fact-finding mission and I met with a number of agents, all the way from the guys at IMG down to the guys who were one-man shops, and I just picked their brains,” Deranek said. “What did they like about the job, what they didn’t like, what was their background.

“When it comes to agents in golf, I found out there weren’t very many lawyers. What would it take for me to get a job here? I didn’t really find an agency I loved. So I decided that if I couldn’t find an agency that did it the way I wanted, I’d just do it on my own.”

And Hi-Def Rep was born. Deranek started her agency with a couple of aspiring golfers and a cyclist from the Northwest. But they weren’t going to make much money, which meant that Deranek wasn’t going to make much money. So, she set out on the road to make her case.

“I started going to Nationwide Tour events to see who was available. I’m not in the business of poaching guys who had agents. So I had a list of guys who didn’t have agents. Once you get to the point where people see you on Tour and know you by name, you know you’ve made an impact. The only way I was going to do that was to be out there. I wasn’t going to accomplish much sitting on my couch.”

A friend of a friend got her in touch with Gary Christian, who, at age 39, will be a rookie on the PGA Tour next year by virtue of finishing in the top 25 on the Nationwide Tour in 2011, and before long, a deal was struck.

“It’s a tough business for her to break into,” said Christian, an Englishman who lives in Alabama. “But she’s not high-pressure and she came across as extremely intelligent and keen to go the extra mile.”

Cleveland Golf was not willing to extend Christian a deal for 2012, even though he had been using the company’s equipment for several years. But Deranek negotiated a contract for Christian with Adams Golf, done in an environment where club and ball deals are shrinking, especially for players without a big name.

One of Deranek’s clients is Tommy Bahama and she brokered a deal for Ken Duke to wear the company’s clothing and logo while he won the Nationwide Tour Championship. It’s not huge, but it’s a place to start.

“Gary likes to say that we both have a little underdog in us,” Deranek says.

And, who doesn’t love an underdog?

No matter how many ugly demons dance in his head, no matter how much you really want this to be the last time he does something this egregious and offensive, there comes a time for John Daly to accept responsibility for his behavior – and to pay some consequences.

Daly, golf’s wickedly troubled stepchild, pumped seven balls in the water at the 11th hole in the first round of the Emirates Australian Open. He called it a tournament and packed it in, claiming he had been cleaned out of ammo. He was out of balls, all right, in more ways than one.

Until now, time has been Daly’s friend, giving him more chances than anyone deserved to finally set right his unbalanced world and become an adult. All those opportunities failed miserably. After walking off the course – for the second time in six weeks – an entire continent has kicked Daly out for good. And the five other continents that play professional golf need to pay attention.

For the past four years, Daly has been scratching out a living in golf, depending on sponsor’s exemptions because he hasn’t played well enough to earn his playing privileges on any tour through his own merit. Tournament officials have refused to stand up and do the right thing and lock Daly out of their events. Some of them still believe he moves the needle and brings fans through the gates.

That might have been true in years past, but the time is long past due for Daly’s career to be over. He’s 45, non-competitive and too damn unpredictable. He’s a ticking bomb and you never know when he’s going to blow.

The tired old rationale was that the common man identifies with Daly and his struggles. That’s not true anymore, either. The few stragglers who are still in Daly’s camp do so because he makes everybody else look good by comparison. In the past couple of years, he draws more pity than praise.

In Australia, he hit a wrong ball in a bunker at the seventh hole, took a two-shot penalty and slap-shotted it around the green, winding up with a triple-bogey seven. Four holes later, he tried to go for the green in two and drowned it seven times. He would have been hitting his 16th shot, had he chosen to continue.

He walked in with his young son and girlfriend in tow on international television. His girlfriend, Anna Cladakis, slapped at a photographer. What will his son, John Patrick, remember from his trip to Australia?

Maybe Daly had a flashback, coming up a couple of letters short and thought he was in Austria again. Six weeks ago at the Austrian GolfOpen, he was chopping it around in the second round and had a run-in with a European Tour rules official over a disputed drop from a television tower. He pitched a wedge into the lake, stormed in without finishing and dumped his fans and tournament officials in the process.

“It’s very disappointing for the tournament … that he has treated the championship this way,” Trevor Herden, Golf Australia’s director of tournaments, said Thursday. “It is a bit of a habit.”

Herden said later, “We’ve seen the last of John Daly in Australia.”

He had been invited to play in the Australian PGA next week, but in light of current events, that invitation has been rescinded. Daly was kicked out of that event before it even started.

“The PGA does not need this kind of behavior tarnishing the achievements of other players and the reputation of our tournaments,” said Australian PGA chief executive Brian Thorburn. “John is not welcome at Coolum.”

He shouldn’t be welcome on the PGA Tour, either, and hopefully, tournament directors are taking notice. Until now, they have been among Daly’s biggest enablers. And there’s more than one reason to refuse Daly a sponsor’s exemption. His behavior is certainly cause enough. But the other is his performance, or lack of it.

This year, he has played in 18 PGA Tour events, making the cut only six times. In Europe, he played in eight events, making four cuts and withdrawing twice. He called it quits in the middle of the second round of the BMW PGA Championship. In 2010, he made 14 of 20 cuts on the PGA Tour but withdrew three times and made only $158,000. From 2006-09, he withdrew 14 times on the PGA Tour.

The bottom line is that not only can’t he comport himself like a professional, he simply can’t play anymore. No one could imagine what Daly would do if it weren’t for golf. However, it’s high time he find out.

His legacy will not be that of a two-time major champion with as much raw talent as anyone who has ever played the game. Instead, he will be remembered as golf’s most prolific give-up artist.

He has used every excuse imaginable and we keep on buying it, making us just as culpable. He keeps on asking for yet another chance. Beginning immediately, the answer should be, “No.”

Because no matter how much he needs golf, the other way around is simply no longer true.

No matter how many ugly demons dance in his head, no matter how much you really want this to be the last time he does something this egregious and offensive, there comes a time for John Daly to accept responsibility for his behavior – and to pay some consequences.

Daly, golf’s wickedly troubled stepchild, pumped seven balls in the water at the 11th hole in the first round of the Emirates Australian Open. He called it a tournament and packed it in, claiming he had been cleaned out of ammo. He was out of balls, all right, in more ways than one.

Until now, time has been Daly’s friend, giving him more chances than anyone deserved to finally set right his unbalanced world and become an adult. All those opportunities failed miserably. After walking off the course – for the second time in six weeks – an entire continent has kicked Daly out for good. And the five other continents that play professional golf need to pay attention.

For the past four years, Daly has been scratching out a living in golf, depending on sponsor’s exemptions because he hasn’t played well enough to earn his playing privileges on any tour through his own merit. Tournament officials have refused to stand up and do the right thing and lock Daly out of their events. Some of them still believe he moves the needle and brings fans through the gates.

That might have been true in years past, but the time is long past due for Daly’s career to be over. He’s 45, non-competitive and too damn unpredictable. He’s a ticking bomb and you never know when he’s going to blow.

The tired old rationale was that the common man identifies with Daly and his struggles. That’s not true anymore, either. The few stragglers still in Daly’s camp do so because he makes everybody else look good by comparison. In the past couple of years, he draws more pity than praise.

In Australia, he hit a wrong ball in a bunker at the seventh hole, took a two-shot penalty and slap-shotted it around the green, winding up with a triple-bogey seven. Four holes later, he tried to go for the green in two and drowned it seven times. He would have been hitting his 16th shot, had he chosen to continue.

He walked in with his young son and girlfriend in tow on international TV. His girlfriend, Anna Cladakis, swiped at a photographer. What will his son, John Patrick, remember from his trip to Australia?

Maybe Daly had a flashback, coming up a couple of letters short and thought he was in Austria again. Six weeks ago at the Austrian GolfOpen, he was chopping it around in the second round and had a run-in with a European Tour rules official over a disputed drop from a television tower. He pitched a wedge into the lake, stormed in without finishing and dumped his fans and tournament officials in the process.

“It’s very disappointing for the tournament … that he has treated the championship this way,” Trevor Herden, Golf Australia’s director of tournaments, said Thursday. “It is a bit of a habit.”

Herden said later, “We’ve seen the last of John Daly in Australia.”

He had been invited to play in the Australian PGA next week, but in light of current events, that invitation has been rescinded. Daly was kicked out of that event before it even started.

“The PGA does not need this kind of behavior tarnishing the achievements of other players and the reputation of our tournaments,” said Australian PGA chief executive Brian Thorburn. “John is not welcome at Coolum.”

He shouldn’t be welcome on the PGA Tour, either, and hopefully, tournament directors are taking notice. Until now, they have been among Daly’s biggest enablers. And there’s more than one reason to refuse Daly a sponsor’s exemption. His behavior is certainly cause enough. But the other is his performance, or lack of it.

This year, he has played in 18 PGA Tour events, making the cut only six times. In Europe, he played in eight events, making four cuts and withdrawing twice. He called it quits in the middle of the second round of the BMW PGA Championship. In 2010, he made 14 of 20 cuts on the PGA Tour but withdrew three times and made only $158,000. From 2006-09, he withdrew 14 times on the PGA Tour.

The bottom line is that not only can’t he comport himself like a professional, he simply can’t play anymore. No one could imagine what Daly would do if it weren’t for golf. However, it’s high time he find out.

His legacy will not be that of a two-time major champion with as much raw talent as anyone who has ever played the game. Instead, he will be remembered as golf’s most prolific give-up artist.

He has used every excuse imaginable and we keep on buying it, making us just as culpable. He keeps on asking for yet another chance. Beginning immediately, the answer should be, “No.”

Because no matter how much he needs golf, the other way around is simply no longer true.