You know, nothing says "golf" quite like old rich white dudes. In golf, as in business, we can look to them to uphold our highest ideals and treat the game with respect … well, sort of:

All right, your verdict on FedEx’s "Golfing School of Business" — funny? Trying too hard? Singularly appropriate for these ethically vacuous times? Have your say.

Sun Young Yoo won the Sybase Classic over the weekend, a landmark achievement for her — it was her first win on the LPGA Tour, and she had to knock off Jiyai Shin and Angela Stanford on Sunday to do it.

Great story, right? But buried in the PGA Tour’s report was this little tidbit:

Yoo also became the LPGA Tour’s eighth straight foreign winner and 25th in the last 26 events. Michelle Wie — in the Lorena Ochoa Invitational in November — is the lone U.S. champion since [Cristie] Kerr won the Michelob Ultra Open a little over a year ago.

That’s the kind of stat that represents a huge opportunity for the LPGA yet is highly troubling. Opportunity, of course, because every foreign-born winner helps spread the game’s reach a little farther. But highly troubling because, for at least a certain segment of the population, every foreign-born winner erodes a little of the domestic fan base. 

Of course, Yoo’s reticence and all-but-unknown status are, in and of themselves, the basis for some potential problems. Over at Wei Under Par, Stephanie Wei filed interesting reports throughout the Sybase, and noted that Asian golfers, including Yoo, have significant work to do to improve their public standing and public perception.

What to do? Well, what can you do? Handicap foreign players? Give American players a two-stroke head start? There’s not much that can realistically be done; the Americans simply need to pick up the pace. But it’s yet another example of the balancing-on-razor-wire act that the LPGA continues to endure.

Ernie Els helped participate in and design a huge reworking of the West Course at the Wentworth Club in Surrey near London. This past weekend, the course hosted the BMW Championships. And it wasn’t quite the lovefest that Els may have anticipated.

Both golf pros and commentators have pretty much destroyed the course, in particular its new 18th hole, pictured above and at right. The Telegraph dubbed it a "nasty piece of Americana," a Florida-style water hole imported to Merrie Olde England. (Visor tip: Geoff Shackelford.) Says the Telegraph’s Mark Reason:

The result is something that looks flash, but is a golfing nonsense. A
perfectly good par five has been turned into a bash, a lay-up and a pitch
across water. It might as well be a par three. They spent half a million
quid on an aquatic folly -– there goes the winner, not waving, but drowning.

Delicious! Love that chipper English prose, expertly weaving literary references and devastatingly droll bon mots! Still, looking at the 18th, it’s tough to disagree with Reason. Throwing a creek right there in front of the green plays right into that island-green mentality of TPC Sawgrass — very cool to look at, but not necessarily the best test of golf acumen. 

Els, meanwhile, didn’t take kindly to having his baby mocked. "There is going to be criticism with any new design, but I really wasn’t
expecting the backlash I got," he said. "I don’t think anybody deserved it. If they
had criticisms they could’ve handled it differently. That’s the sad
part of the week -– a lot of the guys I’ve known for a long time came
out and basically put the knife in. I don’t really appreciate that."

Can’t blame the guy for being prickly. On the other hand, there’s nobody more snide, whiny and gripey about the most nitpicky of matters than golf pros, and the old-line golf media isn’t far behind. These guys whine about everything.

So you go, Ernie. Do whatever you like with your course. And if the pros and the media don’t like it, give ‘em a free ice cream cone and a couple games of Skee-Ball at the game hut behind the 18th green.

The longest major streak on the PGA Tour is in serious jeopardy.

Vijay Singh came into last weekend’s HP Byron Nelson Championship ranked 51 on the Official World Golf Rankings. But lacking any other form of exemption, Singh needed to get into the top 50 in order to get a free pass into the U.S. Open next month at Pebble Beach.

Singh shot a 73 and a 75 and missed the cut. That, friends, won’t get it done. Singh now sits at No. 59, and he’ll need to make it through a 36-hole sectional qualifier to get to Pebble Beach without a ticket. (For comparison’s sake, Jason Day, the weekend’s winner, jumped from No. 140 to No. 79. He’ll still need to qualify, though.)

Singh has played in every major since the 1994 U.S. Open, a streak that now stands at 63. So why hasn’t this become a bigger story? This is a Hall of Fame golfer who’s quite possibly staring at the beginning of the end of his career. So where’s the attention, the encouragement, the go-get-’em Vijays? 

I have a theory. I think Singh falls into that Eddie Murray/Jim Rice category of athlete, undeniably talented but such a jerk so many times that people have given up rooting for him. He plays the game looking like he’s on his way to a six-hour timeshare presentation. No, golfers don’t need to be gladhanding their way up the fairway, but Singh is so condescending and dismissive of fans that he makes Tiger Woods look as jolly as old St. Nick.  

Look, if Singh wants to play the game looking like he wished the fairways were empty and someone just left his check in his luxury car at the end of the tournament, fine. But the crickets accompanying his current struggles are the logical outgrowth of that. 

It is a golf tournament named after a legend, and one of the best parts of the Texas swing on the PGA Tour. As guys were fighting to take home the title of Byron Nelson champion, a couple of young guys stole the show. Read on to find out who won and lost this weekend. 

Rips

Jason Day: He’s only 22, but Day has won a lot on a lot of different continents, and Sunday marked his first trophy as a PGA Tour member. In 2007 Day claimed a Nationwide Event title, and absolutely bullied the amateur ranks in both Australia and New Zealand. His Sunday 72 was good enough for a two shot victory.

Brian Gay: After a great run through 2008 and ’09 where Gay claimed three PGA Tour wins, his 2010 wasn’t going to plan. That all stopped when he blitzed Four Seasons for a Sunday 63 to jump 36 spots and tie for second place.

Arjun Atwal: The 37-year-old Indian golfer is currently bouncing around the PGA and Nationwide Tours, but a top-10 this week sure helps his cause and will look nice when it shows up in the bank account. Atwal has now made three straight cuts on the PGA Tour this season.

Jordan Spieth: A lot of times we see teenagers have success on the LPGA Tour, but hardly ever do we see these kids make waves on the PGA Tour. That changed this weekend, when Spieth strung together rounds of 68-69-67 to put himself in, gulp, contention for the title. His Sunday 73 showed that nerves even creep up in recently DMV’d gentlemen, but it was an impressive week all around for Spieth. 

Shanks

Vijay Singh: Another missed cut for Vijay means in nearly three months, the former world number one has made just a single check, and that was in an event he withdrew from. At this point, it seems Singh is counting down the days until he is 50 and can beat up on the old guys.

Ricky Barnes: Barnes was having a splendid 2010 up until the Players Championship, making all but one of his cuts and finishing in the top-10 three times, including the Masters. The Byron was his second missed cut, however, and he can probably blame that on a putter that needed 31 putts on both Thursday and Friday.

Kenny Perry: He has struggled most of the season with his golf game, but it looked like this was going to be the week he’d change all that. Bogeys on his first two holes on Sunday, and three of the first five, gave him no shot at posting a low number to catch Day, and a 73 was what he finished with.

The entire golfing world — well, the part that’s not Tiger-only — spent much of the weekend focused on Jordan Spieth, the 16-year-old high school junior who made the cut at the HP Byron Nelson Classic. Spieth wasn’t really a threat on Sunday — he missed 11 of 14 fairways en route to a 72 and a tie for 16th — but that’s not really the point. His success, as well as that of 22-year-old tourney winner Jason Day, are a sharp reminder that if you want to be a big winner on the PGA Tour, you’d better start very, very early.

The only player to win a PGA Tour event prior to turning 20 was Johnny McDermott. Don’t remember him? No surprise; he won the U.S. Open in 1911. Gene Sarazen, Chick Evans and Francis Ouimet all won in the early part of their 20th year, Sarazen twice. 

But those guys are long, long gone. How about players since 1970? The youngest player to win a tournament since then was age 20 years, six months, and he took the 1991 Northern Telecom Open. His name? Phil Mickelson. Right after him comes a sprightly lad by the name of Tiger Woods, who won twice within two weeks in 1996 at age 20 years, 9 months.

The rest of the players since 1970 who won at age 21 or below are almost all world-beating familiar names: Seve Ballesteros, Scott Verplank, Sergio Garcia, Ben Crenshaw and Robert Gamez. (I said almost.) Some interesting notes: Woods won six times before turning 21, Garcia three times. 

So here’s the lesson: if you want to be a golf immortal, give yourself a head start on the field and win before you’re able to drink. And if you’re already past that point, well … there’s always your kids.

Okay, so it wasn’t the most star-studded field in history at the HP Byron Nelson Championship. So? So let’s dance with the best shotmakers of the weekend, and draw some inspiration from them as we go …

First off, there’s eventual champion Jason Day, righting a day that was about to go scarily wrong with a birdie at the par-4 12th:

More below.

Jordan Speith, the 16-year-old phenom who made the cut, had a precious lil’ 37-foot birdie on Saturday, inspiring a thousand "next phenom" stories:

Rory Sabbatini saw that 37-footer and raised 1, draining a 38-footer on the 18th on Saturday to cap what was otherwise a disappointing day. Hopefully his wife helped him get through it okay:

And finally, Steve Elkington turned in this fine eagle from the bunker on the 7th. Best part? His "did it go in?" reaction.

Congrats to Day and all the players this weekend. Here’s hoping you had a few halfway decent shots of your own along the way.