Tee

Some days, Michael Phelps clearly wouldn't mind if he could swap the rest of his competitive swimming career and replace it with an amateur golfing career. Instead of rising at dawn to swim thousands of laps until his muscles burned in preparation for the London Olympics in 2012, he could spent his afternoons virtually anonymous, crushing mammoth drives, dropping long putts and joking with friends. But disappearing from the spotlight and living a life of leisure, Phelps knows, would make it harder to accomplish some of the goals he vowed to achieve when his Olympic career was taking off: raise the profile of swimming, help more people learn how to swim and raise money through his foundation to help kids lead healthier lives.

Joe Eades' mornings always begin in total darkness. The sunrise is still hours away when he arrives at Forest Park Golf Course, the city still fast asleep. It's his favorite time of day, when the grass is still dripping with dew and there is a serenity to all the silence. Out of bed no later than 3:30 a.m., he is wide awake when he pulls into the course parking lot, ready to get to work. The course, which has been around since 1934, is already talking to him in a language that takes years to learn.

It has been a rough August on golf's rules and procedures front. For the third time this month, a harsh penalty has come down for a fairly innocuous mistake. Jim Furyk was booted from this week's opening FedEx Cup playoff event after missing Wednesday's pro-am tee time. A low cell phone battery caused the device's alarm to malfunction. "I'm beside myself," Furyk told a PGA Tour liaison, "but I have a way of climbing into stupid situations. " He's not alone. The dust hasn't completely settled from Dustin Johnson's two-stroke penalty at the PGA Championship for grounding his club in a bunker at No. 18, and Juli Inkster was disqualified from last week's LPGA stop for keeping loose mid-round by swinging a club with a weighted donut attached.

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — They call the stretch of holes from Nos. 8 through 10 at Pebble Beach the Cliffs of Doom. Golfers call it names not nearly that nice. Take Dr. Gil Morgan. He led the 1992 U.S. Open at Pebble by seven shots on Saturday and had reached an Open-record 12 under par through seven holes. He was hitting everything perfectly. Life was good. The Cliffs beckoned, and Morgan smiled. Then he went double bogey, bogey, double bogey, disintegrated to 4 under by the end of his round and shot 81 on Sunday.

A Frederick County golf club is donating funds to the annual Yeardley Love Women's Lacrosse Scholarship Fund. The Musket Ridge Golf Club, at 3555 Brethren Church Road in Myersville, is donating 100 percent of green fees from its 1 p.m. tee times in June, which start at $75, according to a new release. In the event more than one group wants the 1 p.m. tee time Musket Ridge will accept bids to raise more money, the release said. The scholarship was set up in memory of Love who was murdered in May. Her former boyfriend and former UVA men's lacrosse player George Huguely was charged in her death.

A day after walking off the field in the middle of pitching to a batter, Koji Uehara said his strained left hamstring is still sore and will keep him from pitching for several days. He expects to play catch Saturday, but said he hasn't been cleared to run. "We haven't talked about that yet," Uehara said through interpreter Jiwon Bang. "Probably not within a couple days." Uehara suffered a similar injury last May and was sidelined nearly three weeks. He said he wasn't sure when he'd pitch again, but doesn't want to attempt it until the discomfort subsides.

The 73-year-old in the baseball-style cap could not look happier. It's 10:30 on a January morning, the winds are less than gale force, the sun is peeking through some clouds, and as he bends over on the first tee at Eisenhower Golf Course in Crownsville, Bruno Heidik doesn't even need the little hammer he used last week to bash his golf tee into the frozen ground. The tee "slides in nicely today," says Heidik before addressing the ball, taking a long backswing and belting an impressive drive down the middle of the fairway.

It began as a "cool idea" three years ago in the backyard of a friend's house in tiny Shelby, Ohio, after Devin Barclay found in a closet an old football that needed to be pumped up. The Annapolis native, now 26, who played soccer at McDonogh before moving on to Major League Soccer in 2001, had never kicked a football before that night. On New Year's Day, he will be kicking for Ohio State before 90,000-plus fans in Pasadena, Calif., and millions watching on television, as the Buckeyes take on Oregon in the 96th Rose Bowl.

A city homicide detective investigating the shooting of Joseph Woah-Tee, a native of Liberia and a leader in the Pen Lucy community who intended to run for president of his homeland in 2011, is reaching out to the public in hopes that someone will provide information that will lead to the man's killers. No arrests have been made despite flooding the Pen Lucy neighborhood with an artist's rendering of two suspects in Woah-Tee's death May 31, Detective Arthur Brummer said. Brummer said Woah-Tee, 60, was shot about 3:40 a.m. as he stood behind the counter at Gaimei Nangbn Multi-Purpose Neighborhood Center in the 4300 block of York Road, a center he founded in 1990 that offered GED classes to those seeking to improve their lives.