The Knucklehead of the Day award

Today's winner is Associate editor of Golf World magazine, Brian Wacker. He gets the award for the following.

Tiger Woods is expected to announce at 1 p.m. Friday that he will skip next week's Nissan Open at Riviera Country Club, meaning that the next opportunity he'll have to extend his seven-tournament PGA Tour winning streak will be at the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship at The Gallery at Dive Mountain Feb. 22-25 in Tucson.

In 11 career starts at Nissan, Woods has never won, posting four top-10s, including a pair of runner-up finishes in 1998 and '99. Last year, he withdrew after the second round with flu-like symptoms.

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As for the Nissan, or any other tournament, Woods now has more off-course commitments than in previous years with the pregnancy of his wife, and a new course-design business that kept him in Dubai after finishing T-3 there last week before he flew home.

If Tiger is able to extend his streak to eight at the Match Play, he would go for No. 9 at the Honda Classic, where he is the defending champion. From there, it's off to the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, then the WGC-CA Championship, where he could tie Byron Nelson's record of 11 in a row.

And if Woods is to break Nelson’s record? That opportunity would fittingly come at Nelson's tournament itself.

I think Tiger is skipping Nissan because of his lackluster record there but that's just my opinion. In an earlier blog post, I predicted Woods streak would end at that tournament. Now if I were to predict an end to Woods streak, I'll say it will end at the Match Play event.

On a side note, this article written by Golf Digest Associate editor Brian Wacker is an excellent example of incredibly bad golf journalism. In less than 450 words, Wacker manages to make SIX mistakes. They are.

1- Tiger Woods is not the defending Champion of the Honda Classic
2- Woods isn't playing at the Honda Classic either.
3- Tiger's 9th win wouldn't be Honda but then the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill
4- Tiger's 10th win would then be at the WGC-CA Championship, where he is defending champ.
5- Then Tiger would go for #11 at the Masters, not the record breaking 12th.
6- The 12th win, the one that would break Tiger Woods record, could come at The Byron Nelson Classic, a tournament named for the record Woods would break.

Note on #6- Tiger is a past Byron Nelson Classic winner but has failed to play in the tournament in at least one year also. 2006 for example, primarily due to the death of his father. If Tiger were to skip the Nelson, his try for 12 in a row would either come at The Wachovia one week later or the week after that at The Players Championship.

Also note Golf Digest already corrected the mistakes in Wacker's column. They did that after I made my screen capture. The article now says.

If Tiger is able to extend his streak to eight at the Match Play, he would likely go for No. 9 at the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, then the WGC-CA Championship before heading to the Masters, where he could tie Byron Nelson's record of 11 in a row.

And if Woods is to break Nelson’s record? That opportunity would fittingly come at Nelson's tournament itself.

Wacker's column could have been easily checked before hand at the PGA Tour Schedule. The irony that was missed in this horribly bad example of journalism is that Tiger could break the all-time win streak record at a tournament named for and hosted by the golf legend who held the streak before Tiger. Byron Nelson whose 11 win streak has stood since 1945, died in 2006.

Just one more example of hack work done by the sports reporters covering Pro golf. Brian Wacker, an associate editor of Golf Digest Magazine, is today's Knucklehead of the Day.

Cross posted at OTB Sports and Poliblog's Deportes.
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