Two tours, two wins for Villegas
Golf Betting Lines
03/08/2010 - (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Before Camilo Villegas arrived at the first tee Sunday, he called his mother in Colombia. "Tell the little bro congratulations and keep it up," he told her.
More than 1,500 miles away, Manuel Villegas was signing his scorecard at the Nationwide Tour's Bogota Open, a final-round 67 that earned him a tie for 15th place and a $9,900 check.
Hours later, Camilo Villegas holed a 19-foot putt on the last hole to win the PGA Tour's Honda Classic by five shots. His third PGA Tour victory netted him more than $1 million.
Believe it or not, there's some question as to which finish was more valuable.
As the elder Villegas was running away from the field at PGA National -- leaving Anthony Kim, Justin Rose, Vijay Singh and Paul Casey in his dust -- his native Colombia was hosting the first-ever PGA Tour-sanctioned event in South America.
Camilo Villegas played a big part in the landmark tournament. He flew to Bogota on Monday, taught in the junior clinic, played the pro-am, went to the dinner and the player party.
Then he hopped on a plane and returned to his new home -- he lives 15 minutes from PGA National -- to play in the Honda Classic.
In one whirlwind week, Villegas shined a spotlight on a part of the globe that has largely been neglected by the major U.S. golf tours, to their detriment. As the tours have expanded to locations in Asia, Australia and elsewhere, they have largely ignored Latin America, even as those countries continue to produce top-flight talent.
The cold shoulder couldn't have lasted much longer. Not while South America is six years from hosting the first Olympic golf tournament in more than 100 years.
"I believe it can be a huge step for Latin American and South American golf," Camilo Villegas said of the Bogota event. "I think the Nationwide should keep exploring other countries down there. I've had a chance to play throughout all of South America, and it's a beautiful place, full of great people, great golf courses, and the game keeps growing.
"I mean, we keep trying to do our best to represent this game and make it grow down there...and we all should keep doing the same things."
Villegas, 28, noted after his win that many Colombians would be watching the Nationwide event closely (48-year-old Steve Pate won in a playoff). But he also knew they would be following him.
He just hoped that the newspapers in his home country would split the page in half: equal space for him and the Nationwide event. Of course, that was unlikely.
The country's oldest paper ran a large picture of Villegas on the front page with the headline "Que buena onda" -- which, as far as I can tell, is akin to "That's awesome."
"Having the Nationwide event there was huge for my country," Camilo Villegas said. "I'm sure all of those guys are going to come back to the states with a totally different perception of my country. That's what I've been telling a lot of people. I mean, you've got to go there. You've got to visit. You've got to experience it. You've got to just see reality."
For a long time a lot was made of Villegas' potential to be a transformative young player. He could bash the ball. He also had a delicate touch. He worked hard and had the biceps of an Olympic swimmer. He had the Spider-Man crouch he used to read greens, a photogenic move that shutterbugs scrambled to capture.
But for two-and-a-half seasons on the PGA Tour, and one on the Nationwide Tour, there was something Villegas hadn't done: win a tournament. That all changed when he won back-to-back events during the FedEx Cup playoffs in 2008, against two stacked fields.
A year before that, in a column on Sept. 9, 2007, I wrote that the media should "refrain from lauding Camilo Villegas until the young Colombian star does something laudable."
We are certainly past that point now.
Amherst, MA (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - The University of Massachusetts is in the market for a new women's basketball coach after the school decided not to retain Marnie Dacko for next season. Dacko's contract is set to expire April 10.
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FOOTBALL TRASH TALK
NFL Football Trash TalkTrash talk has a place in every competitive endeavor (except baseball; those stirrup-wearers are too busy chewing on their sunflower seeds and their supplements to worry about what their opponents are doing).
Fantasy sports is no exception. Any intelligent discussion of the subject would probably start with a thesis statement or a definition of terms. Thankfully, this wont be an intelligent discussion.
Let me just say that I am happy to take a place in this space alongside my talented colleagues, even our commissioner. (You should see how she bleats like a demented paper boy about league fees on our fantasy site).
Trash talking, I would argue, is primarily about amusing your friends, their sheeplike demeanors and sloping foreheads notwithstanding. The best place I have found for football trash talking is at www.SportsAlarm.com.
Beyond the entertainment factor, though, I would recognize that the sophomoric ritual has one advantage, when properly applied. It magnifies your fantasy triumphs and mitigates your fantasy failures by transforming the eventual point total into an afterthought. Winning makes it seem like your opponent really is a truss-owning, lapel-pin-wearing nitwit. And in defeat, trash talk can be the air bag to break the fall from your hyperbolic heights. The plug-necked yahoos on your team, you can say, will be sacking groceries by the end of the season.
The best trash talk, in my view, is layered and nuanced. And it doesnt focus only on your opponents team. It picks apart your opponent. The idea is to create a shock-and-awe-scale blizzard of nonsense, and the goal is to make your opponent drop his hands from his keyboard in exasperation.
What team does your opponent root for? Accuse a Giants fan of having a Joe Namath pillowcase. Wheres your opponent from? Give a look of concern no matter his reply, then say, I'll try to type slower for you next time. Is your opponent into politics? Label everyone a tax-and-spend corporate shill.
Cap all that with a liberal application of irrelevance. For instance, dont just conclude by saying your opponent is a twerp who drafts like my grandmother. Say that your opponent is a sweater-wearing, eyebrow-plucking twerp who drafts his team about as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor gave acceptance speeches at the Oscars. By the time your foe makes sense of that, his starting running back will have had puppies.
But what about you? Hmm? Recall a memorable slam? Have a tried-and-true technique? Know someone who seems impervious to insult? Take a moment and tells us about it. Put together some (fit-for-publication) thoughts. You wont be too busy returning phone messages from your friends, Im sure, to reply.
In addition to the trash talking, the Sports Alarm has a huge gallery of high resolution pictures of beautiful women and models in bikinis. The most popular models are: Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Underwood, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Paris Hilton.