Watching Golf and Tennis

In the past two days we got to attend the Barclay's PGA Golf event in Paramus and the US Open Tennis competition in Flushing.

Both are remarkable spectator sport events. We were struck by what seemed to be a light spectator turnout at the golf match, and what appeared to be a heavy attendance at the tennis matches.

The energy at both venues was electrifying - sports at its finest and the business of sports entertainment and marketing at its most professional.

In case you are wondering, Maria Sharapova is not Jewish. Shahar Peer of Israel (16th seed) is Jewish, and she won her match today.

Times' Stanley Fish: Plagiarism and the Rules of Golf

We like Stanley Fish because of his sometimes strange analogies. In his current Times column, Fish compares the rules governing plagiarism with the rules governing golf. We do get it, we like it and we think it makes some sense. The problem is that most people who don't play golf won't understand what he is talking about and his analogy won't advance insights into the violation that we call "plagiarism" and the actionable tort that we call "copyright violation."

Fish proclaims what we already know by looking around at what goes on in the world, "Plagiarism is not a big moral deal." Let's see what Fish says about golf and plagiarism:

Golf’s rules have been called arcane and it is not unusual to see play stopped while a P.G.A. official arrives with rule book in hand and pronounces in the manner of an I.R.S. official. Both fans and players are aware of how peculiar and “in-house” the rules are; knowledge of them is what links the members of a small community, and those outside the community (most people in the world) can be excused if they just don’t see what the fuss is about.

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no.

We need to add a bit of Talmudic insight to what Fish says. In golf, if you violate the rules, there are penalties. A stroke or two can be added to your score for each violation. You can be disqualified from a competition or thrown off the tour if you commit a serious enough breach.

Let's say for a minute that we like to think of golf as a sort-of religion. And guess what? Golfers we play with do not observe the rules according to ultra-Orthodox standards. They know you can't take a do-over shot by the rule book. But many of us take "mulligans" usually setting our own accepted standards and trying to stick to them. One mulligan on the front nine and one on the back nine. And who has not joked about using their foot-wedge to advance the ball out of the rough?

Fish might have tried a religion analogy to explain what governs academic life. Originality is kosher and plagiarism is treif. Some folks who say they are religious, surreptitiously eat treif. Some golfers move the ball to improve their lies and save some strokes when they are out of the sight of their playing partners. Some scholars take shortcuts to enhance their reputations, put their name on the work of others to increase their output and pump up their CVs.

But at the end of the day plagiarism is not truly comparable to cheating at golf or to eating a cheeseburger. Unless you are playing for money, golf is a gentleman's (and gentlewoman's) game where you keep your own score, a competition where you are not taking the property of others if you enhance your own performance with a pencil on the scorecard. Do that and you are a cheater in the sport, a moral deal only if sportsmanship matters to you and your friends.

Religion in America is a personal calling. Unless you bring the ham into your house and desecrate your cookware, when you eat a pork sausage, you satisfy your appetite but take nothing of value from the pockets of your friends. You are a sinner within that system, and it is a moral deal on your Rosh Hashanah scorecard.

And then we come to scholarship which is both a calling and a competition. Cheaters violate their own standards and the standards of others. That's a moral deal on both levels. And of course there is that money that the plagiarizing cheater puts in his pocket, earned out of the intellectual property of others. "Not a big moral deal," insists Fish.

Fish says, "Plagiarism is breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe." But Stanley. It is obviously a theft of property and that is in the Ten Commandments. So maybe you mean to say that it is a big moral deal in every traditional religious sense. But you just don't care a lot about those old rules.

We like Fish most because he does not take himself seriously. At the conclusion of his column he does a truly talmudic about-face and decides the rule of law, the halakhah, for the case in which another professor lifted his work, "They took something from me without asking and without acknowledgment, and they profited — if only in the currency of academic reputation — from work that I had done and signed. That’s the bottom line and no fancy philosophical argument can erase it."

WSJ: Pray for Cool - the Heat is Wrecking the Golf Courses

The heat has been oppressive and the golf courses are suffering according to the WSJ, "The Ugly Summer of 2010: Brutal heat has greenkeepers fighting to save their courses from ruin." The article reports:

The sustained record-breaking heat across much of the U.S. this summer, combined with high humidity and occasional heavy rain, is killing the greens on many golf courses. A handful of high-profile courses have already had to close, and if the heat continues, others are likely to follow. Golfers themselves deserve part of the blame for insisting that putting surfaces be mown short and fast even in weather conditions in which such practices are almost certain to ruin them....more...

That back 9 was brutal...

Safe for Tiger Woods - No Women Members at the Masters' Augusta National Golf Club

The most famous US golf tournament, and it is held at Augusta National, a club that does not allow women to join as members.

We call it a Tiger Woods safety zone.

Ian O'Connor in the Bergen Record:

...No, sameness isn't always a virtue at Augusta. Nobody here stands accused of being an overly progressive thinker, and the guardians of this all-male sanctuary won't make this tournament everything it can be until its membership goes coed.

Billy Payne, chairman, is moving toward that inevitable day when a woman is invited to join. He's taking baby steps in Hootie Johnson's wake, hoping to avoid embarrassing his Jurassic-minded predecessor any more than he has to...

[Annual repost updated for Tiger!]

Is Tiger Woods Jewish?

Yes, Tiger Woods is a Jew by avatar. The Buddhist golfer has served as the avatar of former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who is a Jew.

Film director James Cameron apologized on all the major networks on Friday for enabling the world's most awful politician Eliot Spitzer to enter the body of the world's greatest golfer and avatar Tiger Woods each night for the last several years.

Cameron said, "Tiger has nothing to apologize for. All the trouble Woods got into is my fault for allowing Spitzer to inhabit Woods' body."

Cameron enabled this to occur because for several years he has been shooting his next film, "Governor Golfer's Avatar Journey on the Titanic."

Happy Purim.

Times: Better Roads and Golf Course Boost Prices of Houses in Caesarea

Our local Jewish newspaper has an upbeat feature on rising house prices in Israel, even in these difficult times:

...Over the past five years, housing prices in Caesarea, a privately owned village about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Tel Aviv, have risen 30 to 50 percent, said Chana Kristal, owner of Chana Kristal Real Estate Caesarea. The growth was spurred in part by Israel’s improved infrastructure; better roads and railroads have allowed for easier commutes from Caesarea to Tel Aviv, said Yaron Netiv, sales manager of the Caesarea Development Corporation, which manages this 6,000-resident community. Also, in May, Caesarea’s golf course reopened after being redesigned by the golf course designer Pete Dye...more...

Rabbi Ariel on davening with women: "Men are not able to concentrate..." and the same applies to golfing

I knew that eventually the real reason would come out for the construction of the mechitzah in Orthodox synagogues and for the prohibition of women in leading prayers.

A Ramat Gan rabbi has cleared it all up for us. It's to compensate for a problem that Orthodox men have, "Men are not able to concentrate..."

Ramat Gan chief rabbi slams 'radical feminist' egalitarian minyanim
Matthew Wagner , THE JERUSALEM POST Feb. 19, 2008

Ramat Gan Chief Rabbi Ya'acov Ariel said Tuesday that it is prohibited according to Jewish law to take part in an "egalitarian" or "partnership" minyan that permits women to read from the Torah or lead the congregation in prayer.

Ariel was reacting to the publication of The Guide for the Halachic Minyan by Michal and Elitzur Bar-Asher. The guide is a compilation of halachic sources on how to integrate women into prayer while at the same time purportedly adhering to all Orthodox strictures.

This is not the first time Ariel has proscribed attending partnership or egalitarian minyanim. Last summer, in a series of articles, Ariel publicized his opinion, specifically mentioning the Shira Hadasha minyan in Jerusalem, one of several "halachic egalitarian" minyanim in Israel. "These minyanim are the product of radical feminist agendas," said Ariel. "And they are a departure from normative Judaism."

Jewish law prohibits giving women the opportunity to read publicly from the Torah out of respect for the community [kvod hatzibur]. Ariel interprets kvod hatzibur to mean "distraction," including sexual distraction.

"Men who come to the synagogue to pray do not want to be distracted by the prominent appearance of women," said Ariel. "I do not necessarily mean only sexual distraction, although that is a real possibility since too many women dress provocatively these days.

"Rather I mean that women attract a lot of attention from men, both intentionally and unintentionally, on many different levels. And this hurts the quality of the prayers because men are not able to concentrate as well..."

And the Times today reports that a similar concentration problem apparently extends to men golfers in Massachusetts (not necessarily Orthodox Jewish men).

Barred From Men’s-Only Event, Woman Sues Public Golf Club

By MARCIA CHAMBERS

Elaine Joyce, a champion amateur golfer, and her father were not allowed to play in a tournament at the Dennis Pines course because the tournament was not open to women....more....

It's clear then that men are not able to concentrate when a woman is around. //repost from 2/19/08//

WSJ: Venezuela's Chávez Wants to Ban Golf and God

Some would object that it is sacrilegious to invoke golf sarcastically and mock its serene meditative inner bliss in the hope of making some cheap op-ed political points for the capitalists over and against the striving of the socialist leader Chávez of Venezuela.

But that is not the tack we take in replying to Daniel Friedman's WSJ essay, "Chávez Takes a Swing at Golf. A 'bourgeois' sport? Or a forced march spoiled?"

The tone of the WSJ opinion aside, Chávez surely makes a valid point about golf, both within his own classical socialist worldview and yes, even in the capitalist context of social constructions.

When we traveled to China and Japan in 1991, knowing that the actual opportunities to play golf would be chancy, we took with us an adjustable golf club - an iron that allowed us to tilt the clubface to the angle of a one iron through pitching wedge (pictured). We surprisingly located, and were able to play at, a nice executive course outside of Beijing. Our decadent capitalist round went rather well with that clever club. Bravo to capitalist ingenuity.

In the Keiretsu-ridden society of Japan, they laughed at us when we told them we wanted to play golf -- the next day! The competition for tee times is so intense there that without interlocking connections, a plain person needs at least 30 days notice to get a round on the board. So we ended up hitting a bucket of balls at the Kyoto driving range adjacent to our hotel. And in the spirit of capitalism, we sold the adjustable club to grateful Japanese golfer for more than we had paid for it in Edina Minnesota.

Really. Do we want to use his golf ban as an argument with which to club Chávez? He does have a valid point. Although golf is a real sport, the way it is allocated to the populace in America surely makes it a blatant divider of people along the lines of social classes.

For a stark instance, consider that the exclusive members-only capitalist Augusta National golf course still does not allow women, just recently opened to a black member and certainly is not known for welcoming Jews over its dark history. And if you are poor, you might aspire to be a caddy there.

Chávez does have a powerful justification for picking golf as a symbolic target in his war on capitalist decadence.

So our point is that it's not effective for the opinion writer in the WSJ to invoke the hackneyed and half-serious alleged divine and mystical characteristics of the game of golf in order to denigrate the fully-justified critique of an often oppressive streak in world culture.

In the context of his argument, here is part of what the writer says.

...Players surrounded by the natural beauty the Lord created are reminded of the limits of man's ability to conquer it. Consider the elusive hole-in-one, the wind that ruins the otherwise near-perfect swing and the bunkers that upset a quick recovery.

"The Calvinists' ideal testing ground" is how the late British-American journalist Alistair Cooke once described it. "The bunkers, the scrubby gorse, the heather and broom, the hillocks and innumerable undulations of the land itself, were all seen not as nuisances but as natural obstacles, as reminders to all original sinners that in competition with the Almighty, they surely would not overcome."

In that sense, golf threatens to undermine a dictator's personality cult by reminding people of the true ultimate power. That's not the kind of message el presidente would probably like Venezuelans to hear—even if he once described Jesus as the world's first socialist...more...

More Golf, Less Blog

Play golf while the sun shines.

Holy Sex Books!

What we need now is books about money, not sex. Our financial crisis is killing us as people and murdering our institutions.

Poorly timed as usual, religious publishers are busy ejaculating sex books of every stripe and denomination. Some of us suspect that the spate of these books is an act of desperation, to rescue the publishers and authors from financial crisis. Better they should write about money.

Let's just be clear about our assessment of this burst of sacred self-help sex manuals. When we want to learn how to play better golf, we buy a book by a golf pro, not a rabbi. To learn about any sport or other important activity we'd suggest one turn to professionals with actual credentials.

Here's the link to the review from PW ("In Religion Publishing, Sex Is Hot") and the list of what it covers:

• Dr. Les Parrott's Crazy Good Sex: Putting to Bed the Myths Men Have About Sex (Zondervan, May).
• Dr. Kevin Leman, Turn Up the Heat: A Couple's Guide to Sexual Intimacy (Revell, Mar.)
• Intended for Pleasure (Revell, 1997) by Ed and Gay Wheat
• Kiss Me Like You Mean It: Solomon's Crazy in Love How-To Manual by Dr. David Clarke (Revell, May)
• No More Headaches: Enjoying Sex and Intimacy in Marriage (Focus on the Family/Tyndale, Aug.) by Dr. Julianna Slattery.
• The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (NYU Press, June), an anthology edited by Danya Ruttenberg
• Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible (NYU Press, Sept.) edited by Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser and David Shneer
• Dale S. Kuehne's Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationship Beyond an Age of Individualism (Baker Academic, July)
• Dennis P. Hollinger's The Meaning of Sex: Christian Ethics and the Moral Life (Baker Academic, June)
• The Kosher Sutra by Shmuley Boteach
• Rabbi Shefa Gold's In the Fever of Love: An Illumination of the Song of Songs

Obituary: John Updike, Great Writer (not Jewish)

No, John Updike was not a Jew. Many of this great writer's characters, friends and detractors, were Jews.

Mark Feeney wrote a wonderful obituary for Updike in the Boston Globe. Here are a few excerpts from that Feeney essay:

Updike on America:

...beneath the comfortableness of the affluent, suburban settings Mr. Updike most often wrote about, and the glittering surface of his prose, were profound and piercing concerns. One was an ongoing examination of his native land. “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” he wrote in the 1980 story collection, “Problems.”

Updike on Sex:

Another concern (unto obsession) was sex. Mr. Updike told Time in a 1968 cover story that when his wife read his then-scandalous novel “Couples” (1968) “she felt that she was being smothered in pubic hair.” Adultery looms as large in Mr. Updike’s fiction as paranoia does in Thomas Pynchon’s or hunting and fishing in Ernest Hemingway’s. “Sex is like money,” he once wrote; “only too much is enough.”

Updike on theology:

Mr. Updike focused on the spiritual no less than the carnal. "I wouldn't want to pose as a religious thinker," he said in a 1990 Globe interview. "I'm more or less a shady type improvising his way from book to book and trying to get up in the morning without a toothache.”

He was being unusually modest. Religion figures throughout Mr. Updike’s writing (fiction as well as essays). References abound to such religious philosophers as Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth. The protagonists of his novels “A Month of Sundays” (1975), “Roger’s Version” (1986), and “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984) are, respectively, a minister, a religious historian, and the Devil (memorably played in the movie adaptation by Jack Nicholson).

Updike's own religion:

Raised a Lutheran, Mr. Updike became a Congregationalist after moving to Massachusetts and later an Episcopalian. “The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion,” Mr. Updike said in that Time 1968 interview.

Updike's Jews:

Henry Bech, the hero of “Bech: A Book” (1970), “Bech Is Back” (1982), and “Bech at Bay” (1998), is a much-lionized (and vaguely ridiculous) Jewish-American writer. As an undergraduate, Mr. Updike had been president of Harvard’s student humor magazine, the Lampoon. The Bech books are the most potent reminder of how playful and witty Mr. Updike could be when he so chose.

Bech was Mr. Updike’s riposte to those who consigned him to the tony blandness of WASP suburbia, the successor to John O’Hara and John Cheever in The New Yorker’s fiction pages. “A strangely irrelevant writer,” the critic Leslie Fiedler called Mr. Updike; “all windup and no delivery,” another prominent Jewish critic, Norman Podhoretz, wrote of Mr. Updike’s stories.

Updike on golf:

... his favorite sport ... (“Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child,” Mr. Updike once wrote. “Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”)

Read Feeney's entire essay at the Globe...

Bergen Record: Claims of AntiSemitism at Teaneck's Golf Course

Anti-Semitism got him fired, ex-Bergen worker says
BY OSHRAT CARMIEL, STAFF WRITER

A former Bergen County parks employee who was fired in 2006 has sued the county, claiming that he repeatedly was subjected to anti-Semitic remarks on the job.

In the lawsuit, now in federal court, Jack Lovett, 76, a former ranger at the county’s Overpeck Golf Course in Teaneck, says that parks officials ignored his complaints that colleagues were referring to him as “Jack the Jew,” praising Adolf Hitler and making derisive comments about his religious affiliation.

“Nothing was ever done for him,” said Jamison Mark, Lovett’s attorney. “He was just left to hang out there.”

Brian Hague, a county spokesman, said Wednesday, the county would not comment on pending litigation.

When county officials fired Lovett from his job two years ago, they accused him of illegally selling golf equipment from his car and his locker at the golf course, according to his suit and his attorney.

But the accusation, according to Lovett’s suit, was just another part of the harassment.

“When they fired him, they found a ton of stuff in his locker,” Mark said.

There was nothing improper about why it was there, Mark added.

“A lot of the people would come by and give him golf balls and golf equipment, and he would take it and donate it to charitable organizations,” Mark said.

It was not the first accusation Lovett endured in the workplace, according to the suit. Another colleague accused Lovett of taking money to allow players to begin their rounds on the back nine holes of the course, it claims. An investigation did not substantiate that claim, according to court records filed by the county and Lovett.

Lovett, of Fort Lee, was a seasonal employee for the county, starting in 1998. He worked only during the months that the golf course was open. In 2005, his last full year of employment he made $5,136, according to county payroll records.

He worked as both a golf starter and a golf ranger, responsible for supervising golfers’ start times and roaming the course to ensure that games moved along, his attorney said.

According to the suit, the harassment began in 2000 by another golf ranger, who made derogatory references to Lovett, all prefaced by the word “Jew.” He also suggested to Lovett that “Jews should move out of the way,” the lawsuit says.

After he complained about the harassment, officials changed Lovett’s shift so that he would not have to work alongside the person who allegedly made those comments. But the harassment continued, according to the suit, when the golf course manager — Lovett’s supervisor — publicly praise Hitler in front of Lovett and another employee.

“That was witnessed by someone,” Mark said.

Lovett’s civil rights suit, seeks his job back in addition to damages, his attorney said.

NBC Sports: Apology for Saying Rocco Looks Like the Guy Who Cleans Tigers Swimming Pool

I heard the crack and wondered what in the world was this announcer thinking? Imagine if the remark were the other way around - Tiger looks like the guy who cleans Rocco's swimming pool - Miller would be gone from broadcasting in a millisecond.

And why did it take a week for the story to break and the apology to come out?

I for one am happy to have a vacation from Tiger. Sorry of course for his injury. But his mechanical dominance of the sport both amazed and disconcerted me.

Miller apologizes for comments on Mediate
NBC Sports commentator says description had nothing to do with ethnicity

NEW YORK - NBC Sports golf analyst Johnny Miller apologized for his description of U.S. Open runner-up Rocco Mediate, saying the comments had "absolutely nothing to do with his ethnicity.''

Mediate, a 45-year-old Pennsylvanian of Italian heritage, held a one-stroke lead over Tiger Woods during the fourth round Sunday. Miller said Mediate "looks like the guy who cleans Tiger's swimming pool.'' He also said, "Guys with the name 'Rocco' don't get on the trophy, do they?''

"I apologize to anyone who was offended by my remarks,'' Miller said in a statement Friday through NBC. "My intention was to convey my affection and admiration for Rocco's everyman qualities and had absolutely nothing to do with his ethnicity. I chose my words poorly and in the future will be more careful.''

Woods beat Mediate in a playoff that lasted 19 holes for his third U.S. Open title.

Times: How to Get to Nirvana? Go to Your Brain and Turn Right

More reductionism (we like it don't get us wrong) from the Times.

A Superhighway to Bliss
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.

But she did it by having a stroke.

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.

After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

While her spirit soared, her body struggled to live. She had a clot the size of a golf ball in her head, and without the use of her left hemisphere she lost basic analytical functions like her ability to speak, to understand numbers or letters, and even, at first, to recognize her mother. A friend took her to the hospital. Surgery and eight years of recovery followed.

Her desire to teach others about nirvana, Dr. Taylor said, strongly motivated her to squeeze her spirit back into her body and to get well....

Tiger Woods: We will let you know when the lynching scandal is over

The Washington Post reports that Tiger says the lynching scandal is over. Tiger cannot be serious. This was not a remark by some woman made to Tiger at a cocktail party. This was a "witticism" uttered on national TV.

In the wake of this scandal, Golfweek has had to fire an editor for running a noose on its cover.

The issue is between the broadcaster, the media and the viewing public. Accordingly, we will let you know when the matter is closed, Mr. Woods. But not yet sir, not yet.

Woods: 'Lynch' Issue Over

Tiger Woods says Golf Channel anchor Kelly Tilghman meant no harm when she used the term "lynch" during television commentary about him, and he regards the issue closed as he returns to work this week.

"It was unfortunate," Woods said yesterday in his first public comments since Tilghman was suspended for two weeks. "Kelly and I did speak. There was no ill intent. She regrets saying it. In my eyes, it's all said and done."

The world's No. 1 player will make his 2008 debut at the Buick Invitational in La Jolla, Calif., which starts Thursday.

Golf Channel: Lynch Tiger Woods

Here I agree with Al Sharpton (hard to believe). What Kelly Tilghman said was the equivalent of joking about a great Jewish golfer that the only way to beat him would be to stuff him in a gas chamber.

She should be fired.

Golf Channel anchor suspended for 'lynch' Tiger Woods comment
By DOUG FERGUSON, Associated Press
HONOLULU - Golf Channel suspended anchor Kelly Tilghman for two weeks on Wednesday for saying last week that young players who wanted to challenge Tiger Woods should "lynch him in a back alley."

Tilghman was laughing during the exchange Friday with analyst Nick Faldo at the Mercedes-Benz Championship, and Woods' agent at IMG said he didn't think there was any ill intent.

But the comments became prevalent on news shows Wednesday, and the Rev. Al Sharpton joined the fray by demanding she be fired immediately. Golf Channel didn't know who would replace Tilghman in the booth this week at the Sony Open or next week at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic.

"There is simply no place on our network for offensive language like this," Golf Channel said in a statement.

Tilghman became golf's first female anchor last year when the PGA Tour signed a 15-year deal in which Golf Channel broadcasts the first three events of the year, weekday coverage of all tour events, and full coverage of the Fall Series and opposite-field events.

The suspension ends in time for the Buick Invitational on Jan. 24, when Woods will make his 2008 debut.

Faldo and Tilghman were discussing young players who could challenge the world's No. 1 player toward the end of Friday's broadcast at Kapalua when Faldo suggested that "to take Tiger on, maybe they should just gang up for a while."

"Lynch him in a back alley," Tilghman replied.

"While we believe that Kelly's choice of words was inadvertent and that she did not intend them in an offensive manner, the words were hurtful and grossly inappropriate," Golf Channel said in its statement. "Consequently, we have decided to suspend Kelly for two weeks, effective immediately."

Woods and Tilghman have known each other 12 years. She was picked to host a club demonstration with Woods in south Florida when he talked about new products from Nike Golf.

Tilghman was helped when Mark Steinberg, Woods' agent at IMG, said it was a non-issue and considered the matter "case closed."

"Tiger and Kelly are friends, and Tiger has a great deal of respect for Kelly," Steinberg said Tuesday night in a statement released by Golf Channel. "Regardless of the choice of words used, we know unequivocally that there was no ill-intent in her comments."

Tilghman had said in a previous statement she apologized directly to Woods, and the immediate support from Woods' camp was critical.

After Woods won the 1997 Masters at age 21 to become its youngest champion, Fuzzy Zoeller referred to him as "that little boy," and suggested that Woods not serve fried chicken or collard greens, "or whatever the hell they serve," at the Champions Dinner.

Woods, who had a different management team in his first full season, did not respond for three days to Zoeller's apology, and it took Zoeller years to recover from the fallout.

Tilghman's comment made the rounds Wednesday on TV shows such as CNN's Headline News, and it was prominently discussed on blogs and message boards on the Internet. It also was a topic on the practice range at the Sony Open.

"I'm sure Kelly wishes she never said that," Jim Furyk said. "I haven't spoken with Tiger, but I've been told that they've had their talk and they've discussed it. Anything I say is kind of just like pouring salt in the wound at this point. Obviously, she would love to not have said that and for it not to be news. I'm glad that her and Tiger spoke."

Fred Funk only heard about the comment Wednesday morning.

"There was no ill intent at all," he said. "I think it was just a slip, and they said that Tiger has already forgiven her. I think when you're in the TV tower for that many hours, you're going to wish you didn't say some things probably, and that was one thing that slipped out. I think you've got to give them a little grace.

"Her integrity, how Kelly is respected out here, is pretty good. I think Tiger really likes Kelly, so that helped squash it. Because Tiger could have run off with that if he took it the wrong way. But he didn't, so that was good."

Before her suspension was announced, Sharpton spoke earlier on CNN's "Prime News" and continued to push for her firing, saying he wanted to meet with Golf Channel because the comments were "an insult to all blacks."

"Lynching is not murder in general, it's not assault in general," Sharpton said. "It's a specific racial term that this women should be held accountable for. What she said is racist. Whether she's a racist ... is immaterial. She's a broadcaster. The channel has to be accountable to the public."