Jack Nicklaus

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Jack Nicklaus, making another of his legendary final-round runs, shot a 5-under-par 67 yesterday and successfully defended his title with a one-stroke victory at The Tradition over Jim Colbert, Phil Rodgers and Jim Dent.Nicklaus, in his season debut on the Senior PGA Tour, came from five shots back to finish with an 11-under 277 and take the $120,000 top prize in the $800,000 tournament."I didn't think I could make up that much ground," Nicklaus said. "I never had done that before in 30-something years of playing golf, so why think I could do it now?"

BETHESDA -- When he won the U.S. Open at Oakmont three years ago, Ernie Els seemed put off by the stir his victory caused. Being 24, there were the inevitable comparisons to a young Jack Nicklaus. Being South African, there was heightened talk about being his country's next Gary Player."He just wanted to be the first Ernie Els," said Liezl Wehmeyer, who had been dating Els for more than a year at the time and now shares homes with him in South Africa and Florida. "He didn't like the spotlight.

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. - Tiger Woods chased history yesterday at the Pebble Beach Golf Links. He kept it in his sights throughout the first nine holes in the final round of the 100th U.S. Open. Shortly thereafter, Woods caught it, passed it and obliterated nearly every record he was pursuing. Like the rest of the field who meekly got out of his way, history proved no match for the world's greatest player. In winning his first Open title by a whopping 15 shots for the third major championship of his remarkable four-year career, Woods tore out the pages from record books, some of which had been in there for more than a century.

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- The smell was unmistakable. As Tiger Woods and Retief Goosen of South Africa stepped onto the first tee yesterday at Augusta National Golf Club for the final round of the 66th Masters, there was a hearty stench from the muddy path nearby on which most of the huge gallery was standing. They were there to witness history in the mucking. Woods had a different scent altogether, the kind that the world's best golfer has experienced many times. While sharing the lead with Goosen after three rounds, Woods and nearly everyone else here understood what was going to transpire.

The TV repairman:Season's greetings, sports fans, the start of the mini-series you've been breathlessly awaiting these many months is at hand: WTL football.WTL stands for the Waste of Time League, of course, and the first official confrontation goes tomorrow with Denver and Detroit meeting in the Hall of Fame debacle in Canton, Ohio (ABC, 12:30 p.m.).Ah, can you wait for Frank Gifford to wax, "[So-and-so] has had a good camp so far and they really like him." Tears will well in the eyes of Giff when he thinks back over the careers of inductees Earl Campbell, Bob Griese, John Hannah, Stan Jones and Tex Schramm.

LYTHAM ST. ANNES, England -- An eerie sort of golf symmetry descended on the Lancashire coast yesterday and covered the British Open. Senior golfers acted their age, obscure major pretenders drifted out to the Irish Sea and the major players positioned themselves for either a Masters reprise or a Grand Slam blowout.Tom Lehman, who held the third-round lead in the 1994 Masters, shared it in the 1995 U.S. Open and held it just a month ago in the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills, is back there again.

DIRECTOR Quentin Tarantino is no Johnny Miller, but in the DVD version of the movie Pulp Fiction, there's a scene that wasn't shown in theaters involving Uma Thurman's character that I've always felt beautifully explains the universe, and in turn, the PGA Tour. "My theory is that when it comes to important subjects, there's only two ways a person can answer," Thurman tells John Travolta. "For example, there's two kinds of people in this world, Elvis people and Beatles people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis.

AUGUSTA, Ga. -On the eve of the 2007 Masters, Zach Johnson walked off the 18th green with one prevailing thought: "I haven't got a prayer." "It was playing so hard," Johnson recalled of that practice round. "It was so cold and windy. My preparation was good, but I just didn't feel like I had an opportunity to play well because it was so long." Trevor Immelman had a similar woe-is-my-game mind-set one year ago. He entered the tournament ranked 129th and less than four months removed from surgery to remove a benign, Titleist-size lesion on his diaphragm.

When Ian Woosnam of Wales won the Masters Tournament yesterday, millions of golfers might have been asking what Turf Valley's Charley Brandt said aloud:"What's going on? The Masters used to be won by Americans like Jack Nicklaus [six times], Arnold Palmer [four times], Ben Crenshaw, Larry Mize and Tom Watson. Now all of a sudden the Brits own this tournament."True enough. Woosnam is now the fourth straight player from the British Isles to win the prestigious American event. Preceding him were Nick Faldo (1989 and '90)

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. - Leave it to Jack Nicklaus to give the crowd watching behind the 18th hole at the Pebble Beach Golf Links yesterday one last memory from more than four decades in the U.S. Open. Leave it Nicklaus to find a way to say the proper goodbye to a golf course and a tournament that defined his legendary career. It didn't matter that Nicklaus shot an 11-over-par 82, his highest score in 160 Open rounds. It only mattered that Nicklaus had one last great shot left in his 60-year-old body.