Well, this is why they play 72 holes.

For three days of the Travelers Championship, Justin Rose scorched the field and made the USGA look like total fools for keeping him out of the U.S. Open (he made his charge up the World Golf Rankings too late to qualify). On Sunday, though, the USGA secretly swapped Rose’s putter for a tree branch topped by a cupcake. (Possibly not true.) How else to explain his total meltdown, in which he held a three-shot lead going in but shot a 75 to put himself completely out of contention and fall all the way to a tie for ninth?

"It’s hard to play golf when you feel like you’re going to miss every putt from two feet," Rose said afterward, a quote that should send shivers down the spine of every golf fan. Driving mistakes can be corrected, power off the tee can be increased, short-game squiggles can be undone with practice. But when the yips start creeping in on the putting green? When the little monster perched on your shoulder starts yanking gimme putts left and right? That, my friend, is where your troubles begin.

Rose has one of the brightest futures on Tour. Hopefully he can put this one out of sight and forget about it until next year’s Travelers. Shakespeare has a line about roses by any other name smelling as sweet, but right about now, Outkast’s NSFW-language take on the smell of roses is far more appropriate.

Clip-n-save this post for future reference, as this is the kind of story we could be referring to for a long time to come: Jamie Lovemark has won his first tournament as a professional.

Lovemark, one of the wave of superior young golfers far closer to diapers than the Champions Tour, won the Nationwide Tour’s Mexico Open Bicentenary on Sunday in a playoff, and he did it in dramatic fashion: eagling the first playoff hole at the El Bosque Country Club to knock off B.J. Staten. 

The 2007 NCAA champion, Lovemark is best known in professional circles for making a playoff in just his fourth tournament as a pro, the Frys.com Open last October. In that tournament, Lovemark and another well-known and talented young fella, Rickie Fowler, lost out to Troy Matteson on the second playoff hole. 

Winning the tournament is nice, but the real benefit of the victory is that it puts Lovemark in prime position to snag a 2011 PGA Tour card. With his $108,000 check from this tournament, he’s now in second place on the Nationwide money list behind Chris Kirk. The top 25 earn cards for the Tour next year. Lovemark’s winnings now sit at $247,351 for the year. (For reference, last year’s No. 25, Fran Quinn, earned $191,467 through October 2009 to get his card.)

Congrats to Lovemark on the win. With any luck, he won’t have many more on the Nationwide Tour.

Disclaimer: This post isn’t so much golf-related as it is Tiger-related. If you are sick of the Tiger rumor posts, skip over this one, as golf posts are a-comin’. If you are interested in what is going on in Tiger’s personal life, read on. 

For the first time in months, Tiger Woods and wife-for-the-moment Elin Nordegren were photographed at the same place, a party for 3-year-old Sam’s birthday party.

Tiger hosted the party, and according to The Sun, arrived at the party with his manager and, umm, another lady. While the details are very, very sketchy on who exactly the lady was (could have been a sitter, a personal assistant, a friend or any number of other workers that I’m sure Tiger pays), the report did say someone close to Elin said she was "understandably angry," even though it didn’t say why.

While some people have ripped Tiger for missing Sam’s birthday, people need to understand that he did this because it was U.S. Open week, and golf is still his job. While it is easy to cast stones at Tiger when it comes to family right now, any number of people reading this article have missed family events because of work, and Tiger playing in one of the four biggest tournaments of the year is a very understandable reason to be absent.

With the party over, Tiger will again return to golf, at the AT&T National, an event he won in 2009. Reports and rumors continue to swirl about Tiger and Elin’s marriage, so his personal life still seems to be in shambles, but his golf game has improved. Tiger finished tied for fourth at the U.S. Open a week ago, his second fourth-place finish in a major championship this season.  

Poor Ai Miyazato. Her standing atop the LPGA’s Rolex Rankings lasted exactly seven days before she was bounced by Cristie Kerr. (Lorena Ochoa’s reign, by contrast, was 1,158 days.)

Now, the Rolex Rankings don’t have a tremendous swath of history behind them — they only date to 2006 — but Kerr is the first American to hit No. 1. Previously, that spot was held by Annika Sorenstam, Ochoa, Jiyai Shin and Miyazato.

OK, so here’s the question. Does it matter that Kerr, an American, is now No. 1 in the LPGA? More to the point, is this the only way that Americans are going to get into the LPGA, if there’s an American atop the rankings?

Sad to say, I think that’s indeed the case, at least to some extent. There’s a bias that veers on thinly disguised racism against the Asian contingent of golfers so dominant in the LPGA, and their dominance is often held up as the reason why Americans haven’t embraced the sport in greater numbers. Like it or not, most Americans would find it a lot easier to connect with the sport if there was an American woman atop the standings. Michelle Wie is often held up as the gold standard here, but if a human fireball like Christina Kim found her way to No. 1, we’d be looking at a sport with serious crossover appeal.

So can Kerr help that crossover? Perhaps. She’s had personality conflicts in the past with fellow LPGA members. She’s worked hard to connect more with the media in recent years than in the early part of her career, when she was perceived as cocky bordering on arrogant. Still, she’s got a fine opportunity now to wipe away any past issues and start fresh.

We’ve wondered whether it would take an American at the top of the heap to get the USA to key into the LPGA. We’re about to find out.    

For a long time, Bubba Watson was squarely in the "more famous for being famous" category among golfers. A popular Twitterer — say howdy to him on his @bubbawatson account, and he’s likely to say hi back — he’s also a noted video-making goofball. But now, he’s a PGA Tour winner, and we can move him off that "never won on tour" square and right onto the "never won a major" category. (Don’t sweat it, Bubba, that square’s a lot more prestigious than the first one.)

Anyway, with Bubba all over the news, it’s high time we take a look back at a couple of his greatest video hits, with the fond hope that there’s more to come. First, Bubba goes trick-shooting in Scottsdale: 

More follows.

Watson also stalked Ellen DeGeneres, filming the following video which, if something happens to Ellen anytime soon, will surely be entered into evidence: 

Oh, and if that’s not enough, Bubba recently played in a pro-am tourney with our very own Shane Bacon. (Language NSFW, but with good reason.) Yep, totaled together these disparate elements make it definitive: Bubba Watson is our new favorite PGA Tour golfer, by a long shot.