Tiger Woods

Woods loses his bully Teddy Greenstein Chicago Tribune Lucky guy, that Steve Williams. Now that he no longer has to carry Tiger Woods' bag, we can find out if he's actually a decent guy. For the last 12 years, he played the role of PGA Tour goon. He put a photographer's camera in a pond at the 2002 Skins Game and snatched a camera from a fan at the 2004 U.S. Open. That fan turned out to be an off-duty policeman. But that's what Woods needed.

Dynasties eventually crumble. The Romans left some spectacular ruins, but ruins nonetheless. Ottomans are relegated to the furniture gallery. The Mings, the Greeks, the Mayans … the Celtics, the Yankees, the Fighting Irish. The framework crumbles. Key personnel depart. Success gets taken for granted. It happens in history, it happens in business, it happens in sports. It even happens to Tiger Woods. With the departure of caddie Steve Williams, another piece fell off the infrastructure that helped build a dynasty unseen in golf.

The Greenbrier Classic What : This PGA tour event is part of the FedExCup series. The golf tournament will take place on the Old White Course at The Greenbrier, a historic resort. Tour golfers expected to participate include defending champion Stuart Appleby, John Daly, Sergio Garcia, Justin Leonard and Phil Mickelson. (As of last week, Tiger Woods was not on the list.) The event also includes the Greenbrier Classic Concert series, featuring performances by The Black Eyed Peas, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, Luke Bryan and Miranda Lambert at the West Virginia Fairgrounds.

It's still Tiger and Phil Bill Dwyre Los Angeles Times The best golfer in the world is at home in Florida with ice packs on his bad knee. Battling for 1-A are Phil Mickelson, Rory McIlroy, Luke Donald, Lee Westwood and Steve Stricker. We eliminate McIlroy because he is just a kid and showed that when he whined after the British Open about not liking to play in bad weather. It's not Donald because he can't hit enough big boomers. We eliminate Westwood because he always seems to eliminate himself.

140th British Open When, where: Thursday-Sunday, Royal St. George's Golf Club, Sandwich, England. Course facts: 7,211 yards, par 70. The Open's first venue outside Scotland has hosted the championship 13 times. Format: 72 holes, stroke play. Field cut after 36 holes to top 70 and ties. Four-hole playoff, if necessary, immediately after final round. Field: 156 players (149 pros, 5 amateurs). Openings remain for the highest top-five finisher not yet qualified at both the John Deere Classic and Scottish Open.

If he had the chance at a mulligan, Tiger Woods wouldn't have teed it up at The Players Championship. Maybe then his balky left knee would have allowed him to take his usual place at the U.S. Open. And certainly he wouldn't be wavering — again — about the next major that looms over whatever he is able to accomplish these next two weeks. "It was a borderline call," Woods told reporters at the AT&T National, where he's a bystander this week instead of a competitor. "I made the call on that and played and wasn't quite 100 percent.

He's winner off course Teddy Greenstein Chicago Tribune Rory McIlroy aspires to be more than Tiger Woods, and here's hoping he gets there. As a golfer, he's just as talented. "Such a fluid motion," Luke Donald marveled. Not that that means he'll get to 14 major victories. It has taken Phil Mickelson 20 years to win four. Ernie Els has three. And there are a mess of talented players (Davis Love III and Tom Weiskopf come to mind) who have only one. Where McIlroy already has Tiger crushed is off the course.

Sometimes, covering the news depresses me. I imagine what it would be like to write fiction instead, like this much better version of how Weinergate should have unfolded: In the news vacuum of the Memorial Day weekend, Congressman Anthony Weiner accidentally sends a very special self-portrait to all his Twitter followers, instead of just one of them. He removes it quickly, but not so quickly that a conservative blogger, who apparently never takes a holiday from his big-game hunting of liberals, grabs it. Called to explain what's aptly known as a TwitPic, Weiner doesn't lie outrageously or claim he was punked.

In the Tiger Woods era, it was hard to find a better Father's Day storyline for the network announcers to ply than that of the young superstar and his dad. Woods' father, Earl, put a golf club in his son's hands when the child was only months old, and the one-time Green Beret remained Tiger's foremost mentor until his death in 2006. The relationship and storyline were so deeply ingrained in the popular imagination that in 2010, Nike used the voice of Earl Woods in an ad asking Tiger whether he had "learned anything" — presumably from his off-course personal troubles.

BETHESDA, Md. — The U.S. Open long has billed itself as the most democratic among golf's major championships. The big names get reserved spots, sure — though they share the practice range with up-and-comers, amateurs, club pros and maybe a hotshot teen. More than half the field, in fact, remains allocated to qualifiers. Egalitarianism rules, limited only by one's ability to survive 36-hole qualifying. It remains a noble approach, even if the bluebloods typically assert their superiority once the opening round commences.