Newsday (N.Y.): Golfers expecting rough time of it at British Open

By Art Spander
Special to Newsday

LYTHAM ST. ANNES, England -- It is a course of too many bunkers and too little room. Royal Lytham & St. Annes is squeezed between railroad tracks and brick Victorian homes, where Bobby Jones got a title, Tiger Woods got confidence and David Duval's fling with greatness reached its apogee.

Read the full story here.

Copyright © 2012 Newsday. All rights reserved.

RealClearSports: Tiger and the Course of History

By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

LYTHAM ST. ANNES, England - It is a place of history, not beauty, a links course next to Victorian homes instead of the coastline. Blackpool, Britain's idea of Coney Island, is up the road, and the Beatles' home, Liverpool, is some 30 miles to the south, another reminder of the area's proletarian setting.

Royal Lytham & St. Annes, where the 141st British Open starts Thursday, isn't much for aesthetics. The elegance comes from the test it provides and from the players in 10 previous Opens, Bobby Jones to David Duval, who conquered her.

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© RealClearSports 2012

PGA.com: Americans play crucial role in Open's success

By Art Spander
Special to PGA.com

LYTHAM ST. ANNES, England – In a land of royalty, we begin with The King. Not of the nation but of the country of golf, Arnold Palmer. He believed in the Open Championship, in what could be described as a sporting manifest destiny, of Americans crossing not mountains but the sea, to accept a challenge and win a championship.

Since 1922, when Walter Hagen, also given a title that would fit in Britain, “Sir Haig," there have been 89 Opens and 40 native-born American winners. That includes the last two at this year's venue, Royal Lytham & St. Annes on the Lancashire Coast -- Tom Lehman in 1996 and David Duval in 2001.

Read the full story here.

© 2012 PGA.com, the PGA of America and Turner Sports Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

RealClearSports: Deng Tries to Sell Hoops to Skeptical Brits

By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

LONDON – He plays the wrong game, the one, which has made him rich and famous across the ocean but is barely recognized in his home country.

“The British Olympic Giant,’’ was the title of a piece in the Sunday magazine of the Times of London. Giant in terms of height, because as everyone familiar with the NBA knows Luol Deng is 6-foot-9.

Read the full story here.

© RealClearSports 2012

RealClearSports: There's Crying in Tennis, Rain in London

By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

LONDON – The tears apparently have dried, but unfortunately the streets haven’t. The Sunday Times had a front-page story on something other than the overdone hopes of Andy Murray, and it was about the weather for the upcoming Olympics.

In a word, like England’s results in soccer, grim.

Read the full story here.

© RealClearSports 2012