As Winds Bury Woods, Vuvuzela Fever Returns

Filed under: Golf, British OpenST. ANDREWS, Scotland -- My great concern this weekend, beyond a possible Lochness Monster sighting in the North Sea, is that a new swarm of vuvuzelas will descend upon the Old Course. Seems a heretofore invisible South African named Louis Oosthuizen -- nickname: Shrek -- leads a wind-gutted, largely unwatchable British Open for no other reason than he played his round Friday morning in reasonable conditions. When the gusts turned farcically ferocious in the afternoon and delayed play 65 minutes, guess who was gutted by the swirling meteorological madness and blustery, 40 mile-per-hour breezes?

Tiger Woods, the human storm himself, who fell eight shots out of the lead, will not win his 15th major championship and is leaving us to wonder if he'll ever win again.

"I'm not exactly where I want to be," Woods said. "I'm not at 12-under par."

The other victim was Rory McIlroy, the mop-haired, 21-year-old phenom who tied a majors record with a sterling first-round 63, only to blow up with six bogeys, a double bogey and a ghastly 80 that buried his chances.

The hope was that the two would duel for a championship Sunday afternoon, the troubled megastar and his potential heir. Instead, both are gone with the wind. If not for 50-year-old Mark Calcavecchia, who has followed the recent path of Tom Watson and Greg Norman as an old-timer who reclaimed his game at the British, Oosthuizen might already have clinched his first major title. Can't you hear those obnoxious World Cup horns buzzing? I can handle the five girls from Nevada Bob's who don't wear much but do paint tiger stripes on their faces and shriek when they see Woods, an attention-grabbing scheme for a European online golf store. I can handle the daily sartorial truck spill that is John Daly, this time giving us pink paisley pants, some sort of neon shirt and a green cap -- with the pants matched Friday by his high-energy, grinning girlfriend as he climbed to a 76. But who thought the World Cup host nation would invade golf's sacred birthplace, in the name of Oosthuizen, and interrupt the chilled silence with a vuvuzela invasion?Mick Fanning Surfer Garrett Reynolds BMX