Hannigan and Hootie

Frank's love for the man, which started when he went down to Augusta to file this April 2000 feature, has clearly got him still swooning enough that he writes this column blasting the golf media's coverage of the redesign.

Johnson is a victim of the USGA which failed utterly in its mission to control distance. Since 1995 the distance on the Tour has increased around 10%. Johnson, with his latest changes, has upped the yardage of the course by 10%. It's not clear to me what he was supposed to do: just leave it alone so that Augusta would have become a sort of toy, a museum piece?

Frank, he could have added length without adding the rough and trees and chintzy bunker lips and oh, did I mention the trees?

And he could have left some of the old tees behind so that they would have playing options that keep the players off-kilter, something Bobby Jones loved.