Ever wanted a chance to try your game against Tiger Woods? Playing with the best of the best is the stuff of dreams for anyone who has ever picked up a golf club. For Jim Burke, the head coach of Harvard's men's golf team, that dream has already come true.
Burke apparently can do more on the golf course than just coach golf. The teacher proved to his young charges that he still has it by qualifying for one of the PGA Tour's premier events, the Deutsche Bank Championship in early September. The event has a winning purse set at $990,000, though Burke didn't manage to earn himself an early retirement from teaching Crimson golfers how best to get out of sand traps.
Burke, formerly a coach at MIT, jumped ship to Harvard two years ago. In July, when he found himself without any players to train or tips to give, he set out for the New England PGA Deutsche Bank Qualifier. Luckily, he didn't have to travel far — the tournament was held at the Tournament Players Club of Boston, right near Cambridge, in nearby Norton, Mass.
His excellent weekend culminated in a top-two finish that earned him a qualifying spot in the field of 156 players vying for the Deutsche Bank title.
At the Championship, Burke shot a respectable 162 over two rounds, but missed the cut.
Who ended up taking the victor's check? Some guy named Eldrick Woods — known to most as Tiger — topped the field.
Ithaca to Ottawa
People must think that Cornell preferentially admits Canadians. At least, that could be one reaction to the sudden glut of Big Red hockey players who are graduating from Ithaca and heading directly for the NHL.
Two Cornell alums, Charlie Cook and Ryan Vesce, signed one-year contracts with the Ottawa Senators. Besides Cook and Vesce, three other Big Red players have joined the ranks of NHL players in the past year.
Cook, a deadly defenseman in his time with the Big Red, was named Outstanding Player of the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference Hockey League (ECACHL) tournament in his senior year. He also earned first-team All-Ivy honors for his efforst during that campaign, during which he scored a career-high nine goals.
Vesce may have been Cook's polar opposite while the two were teammates. A diminutive five-foot, eight-inch forward, Vesce was a stellar scorer and an intimidating offensive force. He left the Big Red ranked 22nd all-time in scoring, having accumulated 128 points throughout his four years.
Considering that most Ivy Leaguers have a far better chance of becoming U.S. Senators than Ottawan ones, Vesce and Cook certainly have a reason to be proud of their accomplishments.
Best in world, not in race
Some days, you just can't win. Sam Burley, a 2003 graduate of Penn, was part of a world-record-breaking team that somehow didn't even manage to take first place in the race.
Burley ran the third leg of the United States' 4x800 relay race at the Memorial Van Damme meet in Brussels, Belgium.
The team ended up finishing with a time of seven minutes, 2.82 seconds, which shaved more than a second off the old record of 7:03.89. The nearly 25-year-old record was set in 1982 by a British team. It was also a dramatic improvement over the previous American record of 7:06.5, which was set 20 years ago.
Of course, this tremendous effort only earned them next-best honors at the meet thanks to the Kenyan squad.Apparently, the fleet-footed runners from eastern Africa decided that anything the U.S. could do, they could do better.
The Kenyan team ran a blazing 7:02.43 to set a new standard in the same race, snatching both the world record and the meet victory from the Americans.
Burley, however, can't be entirely disappointed with the results. His own split time was an outstanding 1:46.02. Clearly, the Quaker alum wanted to show his old teammates that he hadn't lost the speed that made him the 2003 NCAA champion in the 800-meter sprint. In the same year, his last at Penn, he also claimed the 1,000m title at Heptagonals.
Burley and his teammates still can claim that they rewrote the record books. Unfortunately for them, another team was making its own edit as well.
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