Kilted New Year's Resolution

I hope everyone in TGS and elsewhere in golf had a wonderful holiday. Mine was very low-key, but I went out of my way to re-charge my batteries both physically and mentally, and I'm ready and looking forward to a great 2010. I'm not typically one for making New Year's Resolutions, and the ones I make I normally don't keep, but for 2K10 I'm going to not only make one but make it public as well: I will write about golf consistently. I thoroughly enjoyed blogging about golf last year, and I appreciate everybody's feedback, but it was very much a roller-coaster year as far as the frequency of my postings. Some months I had as many as 15, but other months I had less than a handful.It's obviously easy to write about golf in April and June and July, when majors are on everybody's mind, but if I am to be able to look myself in the proverbial mirror I need to be able to find ideas and stories week in and week out. I need to do this regardless of whether a tournament presents a neatly packaged fairy-tale finish, or whether it's a bit of a dud. Anyone could have waxed poetically if Tom Watson would have won The Open last year. It's a lot more challenging to cover Dustin Johnson winning at Pebble in a rain-shortened tournament. Even though I'm still doing this as a hobby, I guess it's called being a Professional. To make it a craft. To be a reporter rather than a supporter. I caught a lot of the end of the year review pieces on TV and in writing, and it really bothered me how consistently broadcasters and journalists alike complained and whined about the major winners in 2009. This includes writers I have a lot of respect for. You should never lose track of the fan inside, but I feel like they were not being fans of a particular golfer, they were fans of the easy story. Kenny Perry winning his first Major. Lefty coming back from his layoff and winning the US Open. Tiger, well, any time. If you're a reporter it's your duty and job to report on what happened, not complain about what didn't happen. If you're a writer, you should be able and willing to write well about any conclusion and to extract a spirited piece even if the dominoes don't necessarily fall the way you would expect. At the core of it all, it's about the game of golf, and the game is greater than anyone in it. It always was, and it always will be. It's about putting the ball in the hole 72 times in four days. The game was greater than Bobby and Ben and Jack and Arnie, and it's greater than Tiger and Phil today.