Caroline Wozniacki and Rory McIlroy sitting in a tree

... K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Well, technically it wasn't in a tree, it on a tennis court in front of the Yale football team and thousands of fans who watched Wozniacki advance to the finals of the New Haven Open. That doesn't rhyme as well though.

Golf's reigning U.S. Open champion gave his new girlfriend a kiss on Friday night that must have had some good luck; the 21-year-old Dane went out the next day and won her first tournament since she and the Nothern Irish star began dating after Wimbledon.

That is the happiest I've ever seen a group of guys over a kiss involving other people. I've looked at wedding photos where the groomsmen have less of a smile than the Yale football players have plastered on their faces in this shot.

A lot of couples have to deal with differences in religion or race or finances or education or upbringing. I worry about the day when Caroline and Rory have their first adidas/Nike argument. Rory doesn't have a deal with the Oregon athletic giant yet though I'd imagine the site of him wearing a swoosh on that Yale jersey has some hearts in Beaverton aflutter.

The freefall continues: Tiger Woods drops out of the world top 20

We all knew this day was coming, we just didn't think it was coming so soon. Tiger Woods has dropped out of the world top 20, a moment which we've all anticipated in the last few months, but one which retains major historical significance.

You know the story. Woods hasn't been close to a world-beating golfer since his scandal broke in November 2009. This season, he's played exactly nine holes of competitive golf since Augusta, an ill-fated excursion to The Players Championship in May. And now, he's only ranked No. 21 in the world.

Indeed, perhaps the only surprise surrounding Woods' place in the rankings was the fact that he remained in the top 10 for so long. But the Official World Golf Rankings tally scores based on a rolling two-year average, and since Woods had a successful 2009 -- before Thanksgiving, at least -- he was cruising on past successes.

Which is why he'll be hitting terminal velocity in the rankings before long. We're coming up on the two-year anniversary of a remarkable run in which he posted two wins and a second-place finish in three straight tournaments -- the Buick Classic, the Bridgestone and the PGA Championship -- and once those no longer count in his favor, he'll have only the September 2009 BMW Championship and the November 2009 Australian Masters counting in his favor.

The top of the rankings remain familiar: Luke Donald, Lee Westwood, Martin Kaymer, Rory McIlroy and Steve Stricker. Phil Mickelson comes in at No. 6, and British Open winner Darren Clarke is No. 31. (Auburn also received votes, which seems a little strange.)

We don't need any more reminders of how far Woods has fallen. And although winning will solve many of his on-course ills, those days seem further away than ever before.

One major doesn’t make Rory Mcllroy a Tiger Woods

BETHESDA, Md. – By the time dusk settled over Congressional Country Club on Sunday evening it was clear that golf had found its challenge to Tiger Woods, even if it comes in the form of a man barely 22 years old with freckles on his face and the bushy hair of a teenager. For all the imposters and has-beens and never-really-coulds who were supposed to break the iron rule of the game’s most dominant player over the last 14 years, who would have imagined Rory McIlory?

Stalking the greens he fades into the scenery, a kid making a joke of grown men, he hardly seems tall enough to crush the drives he hits so precisely. And yet with one brilliant week here on the very course that hosts Tiger’s tournament, he leaped into that hazy ether owned only by Woods. McIlroy might only have won three professional tournaments in his brief career, but his 16-under par total in this U.S. Open was one of the most dominating performances in a major ever, obliterating Tiger’s previous Open record of 12 under set at the 2000 Open at Pebble Beach.

So here is the new face golf was desperate to find, the one whose life changed forever this weekend, the one that will now be pictured as the favorite at the next several major tournaments regardless of whether Woods returns from his injuries.

But Rory McIlroy is not Tiger Woods. He does not strut through golf tournaments with an icy indifference, breaking opponents just by the act of not even looking their way. He isn’t the kind to brush past a group of fans without at least a nod or the tiniest of waves.

On Saturday, after McIlroy nearly made the outcome of this tournament moot by shooting a 68, he walked into the clubhouse, spotted a small boy standing in the hallway and tossed him his glove. The boy beamed. The boy’s mother clapped. And Rory replied with a slight smile as he walked toward the locker room.

It’s the kind of thing Tiger would have never done lest he seem compassionate. Yet it is the frigid distance that helped Tiger win 14 major titles and become the most-feared man on the tour. He crushed his adversaries before he ever played them.

McIlroy is not a golf robot. Even as he scorched his way through Congressional doubts lingered about his will. He could have been the true challenge to Tiger two months ago in the green forest of Augusta, but his last-day lead at the Masters imploded somewhere off the side of the 10th fairway cementing a label as yet another talented young player too fragile to survive the pressure of a major tournament.

Most observers believe that Rory McIlroy will win many majors and eventually be ranked as the top player in the game.
(AP)

You do not go from being the player who blew the Masters and squandered a first-day lead at last summer’s British Open to being the most intimidating presence on the tour in a matter of weeks. You are not yet the game’s best player if thousands are lining the ropes on Sunday, craning their necks half expecting you to crumble.

Just Saturday evening Lee Westwood, who shares a business manager with McIlroy, wondered aloud if McIlory would hold what was then an eight-stroke lead. “You don’t know how he’s going to deal with the big lead,” Westwood said. “He had a big lead in a major and didn’t deal with it well before. There’s pressure on him with regards to that. We’ll see.”

Nobody said “we’ll see” when Tiger led by eight strokes on the next to last day of a major.

Maybe someday McIlroy gets a Tiger-like desire. Maybe winning this tournament and all the fame that comes with it will harden him, wiping the youthful smirk that dances on his lips and steeling him against the world the way Woods always did. Perhaps, as everyone seems to predict, he will win lots and lots of majors and approach the 14 major titles won by Tiger. But it’s hard to believe a kid who talks freely about his failings and admits that the thing he needed to add most to his game was arrogance could be Tiger.

Instead he will likely become something else, something more loveable: a really good player who knows how to treat people well, who will smile and sign autographs and play the game with joy and not as if he was on a corporate mission.

Sunday he took the victor’s walk down the 18th fairway, basking in the roar that reverberated through the trees, over the pond and against the giant clubhouse standing regal atop a hill. There are few strolls like this in sports and everybody expects there will be many more. But still it lay in contrast to the previous evening, when he leaned over to knock his final putt into the hole and from far across the water there came a voice piercing the silence.

“Just like the Masters!”

Nobody would have dared scream such a thing at Woods in the same situation.

Which is why Rory McIlroy is a really, really good golfer.

But he is not Tiger Woods. At least not yet.

Elin: I Have Been Through Hell Ever Since The Crash Issue

WINDERMERE, Florida (AP)—Tiger Woods’ ex-wife Elin Nordegren said she has “been through hell” since her husband’s infidelity surfaced but she never hit him, according to an interview released Wednesday.

Nordegren told People magazine she and Woods tried for months to reconcile the relationship. In the end, a marriage “without trust and love” wasn’t good for anyone, she said.

In November outside their Florida home, Woods drove his SUV over a fire hydrant and into a tree, setting off shocking revelations that sports’ biggest star had been cheating on his wife through multiple affairs. The couple officially divorced Monday.

Nordegren told People that she never hit Woods on the night of the car crash.

“There was never any violence inside or outside our home,” she said. “The speculation that I would have used a golf club to hit him is just truly ridiculous.”

Nordegren said Woods left the house that night and when he didn’t return after a while, she got worried and went to look for him. She said that’s when she found him in the car.

“I did everything I could to get him out of the locked car,” she said. “To think anything else is absolutely wrong.”

The magazine said the interview was conducted over four visits lasting a total of 19 hours at the rented Windermere, Florida, home where she now lives with their two children.

“I’ve been through hell,” the Swedish-born Nordegren said. “It’s hard to think you have this life, and then all of a sudden—was it a lie? You’re struggling because it wasn’t real. But I survived. It was hard, but it didn’t kill me.”

In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show on Wednesday morning, People magazine reporter Sandra Sobieraj Westfall said Nordegren and her team approached the publication.

Westfall said Nordegren wanted people to know three things: she’s not violent and never hit Woods; she had no idea this was going on; and it was a real marriage for her.

Nordegren and Woods were married Oct. 5, 2004, in Barbados and have a 3-year-old daughter, Sam, and an 18-month-old son, Charlie.

In the interview, Nordegren would not disclose the amount of the divorce settlement but did say “money can’t buy happiness or put my family back together.”

“I’m so embarrassed that I never suspected—not a one. For the past 3 1/2 years, when all this was going on, I was home a lot more with pregnancies, then the children and my school.”

Woods, who was playing a pro-am round at The Barclays in Paramus, New Jersey, early Wednesday, hasn’t commented on the couple’s divorce.

Shortly before 8 a.m., when the People magazine story broke, his agent, Mark Steinberg, stepped outside the ropes of the first fairway and was on the phone for the next 10 minutes, as was Woods’ spokesman, Glenn Greenspan.

Nordegren said she would eventually forgive Woods, but that she is still working on it.

“Forgiveness takes time,” she said. “It is the last step of the grieving process.”

Meantime, Nordegren said she is excited to start the next chapter of her life and intends to stay in the United States with her children.

She also said she has “not watched one minute of golf.”

Online:

People: http://www.people.com/people/