Off the tee: Main men in the mainland

While the professionals compete at Clearwater in Christchurch this weekend, New Zealand's top amateurs will be in Invercargill for the South Island championship.

Defending champion is Wellingtonian Brad Iles, who also won the North Island title last year.

His closest challenger last year at Waitikiri in Christchurch was young Aucklander Travis O'Connell from The Grange Club. Another Auckland teenager, Kevin Chun from Titirangi, is the in-form man this year after winning the Tasmanian championship last weekend.

The South Island championship over 72 holes will be contested at the Southland Golf Club. The following weekend many of the same players will be at the Invercargill Golf Club in the SBS Invitational for provincial teams.

Iles and Waikato player Mathew Holten will miss the SBS event as they will be in Australia for the Riversdale Cup in Victoria, a 72-hole event in which Iles finished second last year.

In April the pair head to Europe for the Bonallack Trophy event in Rome, where they will be part of the eight-man Asia-Pacific team, which includes outstanding Australians Nick Flanagan and James Nitties.

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Big John Daly's popular United States PGA Tour win this month rekindles memories of his booming drives and hyper-extended backswing. But the victory owed most to his magical short game, exemplified by the sure touch of his long bunker shot, which clinched the winning birdie in the playoff.

He also worked wonders with his putter. For the first two rounds he had an average of 1.462 putts on greens he reached in regulation, the best average in the field.

In those 36 holes he had 21 one-putts, sank five of the seven putts he had in the 10-15ft range and also holed a 20-footer.

He shot a seven-under-par 64 in the second round despite finding the fairway only 57 per cent of the time with his drives. The putter made the round - he had 13 one-putt greens.

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The Ladies Professional Golfing Association, the controlling body of the women's professional game in the United States, is increasingly image conscious.

But it is far from a feminist stronghold as some of its critics (mostly male) would insist.

Still it comes as something of a surprise to find that the LPGA was the principal sponsor of a Dodge car in the Daytona 500, one of the iconic events for the far-from-feminist Good Ol' Boys of Nascar.

Not only was LPGA writ large on Larry Foyt's car, but there were life-size images of two of the tour's more comely golfers, Laura Diaz and Cristie Kerr, on the bonnet!

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The 60th anniversary of the historic D-Day Landings will be commemorated by the European Seniors Tour when the Open de France Seniors is played at Omaha Beach Golf Club, close to the scene of the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944.

The Seniors Tour marked the 50th anniversary of Operation Overlord, when the Allied Forces invaded German-occupied France, by staging the D-Day Seniors Open at Omaha Beach in 1994.

The title that year went to England's Brian Waites, who won by six shots from Spain's Antonio Garrido with a 10-under-par total of 206.

A decade later, the Seniors Tour returns from May 7-9 to honour one of the most momentous occasions in history with the Open de France Seniors, the first event on mainland Europe of the 2004 schedule.