Mark Kreidler
In so many words.

So here’s what you need to know about Brendan Jones: He’s from Australia, he’s 33 years old, he carries 200 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame like most normal humans, and — I like this part best — he’ll be fine.  He won’t get sucked into and blown out of the Tiger Woods Vortex.  He’s an actual guy living a pretty great golf life.  Actually, he’s probably closer to the attainable dream for most people than Woods could ever be.

The fact that you’ve never heard of him?  Just another detail.

Jones is the guy who drew the short straw and had to face Woods in the Accenture Match Play Championship near Tucson on Wednesday.  Because Tiger has spent several months healing up and learning the names of his children, his re-emergence on the golf scene has had the attendant publicity of a coronation, or (to select a more contemporary example) a presidential inauguration.  If your industry was so utterly dependent upon a single recognizable figure, you’d probably react the same way.

And sure, sure, Tiger, Tiger – but what about the other guy?

Well, the other guy’s fine.  Not only that, he’ll happily accept the also-ran label placed upon him for being paired with Woods, collect his $40,000-plus check for showing up, and mosey on back overseas, where he will continue making scads of money playing a game for a living.  Not a real problem, no, in Brendan Jones’ golf life right now.

Jones is an eight-time winner on the Japan Golf Tour, with lifetime earnings there north of $5 million (U.S. currency).  He did time on the Nationwide Tour, winning nearly $300,000 in 2004, and in the only year he gave significant attention to the PGA Tour, 2005, he made the cut in half the tournaments he entered, and won $498,817.

(By the way: This is the part about pro golf that sometimes makes it so inscrutable.  Even in a sport in which the players rise and fall according to weekly performance, it is possible to record a 50 percent failure rate and still pocket half a million bucks.  Not sure my 50 percent failure rate will accrue quite the same total out here in the world beyond.)

If you’re keeping score, Jones is ranked 64th in the world among professional golfers.  In other words, he isn’t threatening to become Tiger Woods anytime soon.  But when Jones joked on Tuesday that he might ask Woods to spot him a couple of holes per nine, he laughed right along with everybody else.

You know why?  Because 64th in the world of pro golf is a fairly lovely place to be.  And long after Woods’ fanatics have forgotten his name, Brendan Jones will be merrily playing 18 holes somewhere very green and nicely tended, and getting paid a small fortune to do it.  Tell me the part again about the tough luck for Jones.

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They keep forgetting the nuclear option in the Manny Ramirez story, one reason why it’s hard to take seriously any of this “Camp is open. Where’s Manny?” nonsense pouring out of Arizona right now.  Both the Dodgers and the Giants — along with the Yankees, Cubs and anyone else who might at some point look better with Manny in their lineup — need to take two steps back and consider the whole.

Here’s the whole: Ramirez doesn’t have to sign with anybody.

Yet.

Ramirez has more money than the S&P 500, he’s routinely in baseball shape (or Manny shape), and he’s sitting on a $25 million, one-year offer from the Dodgers.  While designated henchman Scott Boras continues to tell the L.A. front office to pound sand, Ramirez has the luxury of knowing that, if worse comes to worst, he can always hit baseballs this season for twenty-five million dollars.  Look, Ma, no crisis.

But if Boras is serious about securing a multi-year megadeal and doesn’t see it, there’s always the wait-and-see angle.  Manny can sign with any team he chooses, and right now the number of teams pursuing him doesn’t exactly set up as a market frenzy.  But what happens when the season begins — or, say, in June or July, when a team suddenly sits up on its hind two legs and realizes that it is one Man-Ram away from real contention?

Roger Clemens may be (depending upon your perspective) a turncoat, a market strangler and a luridly two-faced peer, but the man never misunderstood his value.  Clemens turned the idea of mid-season negotiations into an art form, and he often wound up with exactly what he wanted.  Don’t think Scott Boras hasn’t considered the same option for Ramirez; not only does it re-cast Manny as the subject of a potential in-season bidding war, but riding to someone’s rescue in late summer gives him another chance to raise his value for next year’s market, when the multi-year contract flow may be less restricted.

It’s interesting about Ramirez: For all the talk of his contemptible quitting on the Red Sox in order to force a trade, he is routinely lauded by fellow players as a great teammate, great clubhouse presence, and honest difference-maker.  And if he indeed winds up sitting out a couple of months while a few teams begin to grow October thoughts, you’re going to hear that talk more and more.  That’s future dollars at work.  It could happen.

* Not sure the Dodgers are a juggernaut in the NL West even with Ramirez.  Really, who’s in uniform over there?  Russell Martin is now being told he’s a team leader, in the wake of the departures of veterans like Jeff Kent, Derek Lowe and Nomar Garciaparra (I’m leaving odd-duck Brad Penny out of this).  James Loney?  Matt Kemp?  It’s a good young nucleus, but hardly the stuff that awes opponents.  The West is anyone’s to take, as usual.  (San Diego, you’re excused from the table.)

* The Giants continue to follow L.A.’s lead on the Ramirez front, and that’s just the way it is.  Everyone seems to have assumed that not until Boras and the Dodgers either come to terms or walk away will anything else happen.  But Ramirez in the Giants’ lineup achieves roughly the same effect as it would for the Dodgers: It makes them interesting, maybe even compelling.  And in S.F.’s case, the pitching staff might be able to take it from there…

* Right: They identified Alex Rodriguez’s cousin, who is not — repeat, not — the culprit in the A-Rod case.  Did Yuri Sucart do the injecting of the PEDs into Rodriguez?  Yes.  And that makes him nothing more than a common mule, which lines up with every other known description of Sucart as a guy who’d do basically whatever A-Rod needs done, including (but not limited to) making appointments, cleaning up after large-group restaurant gatherings, and, evidently, needle and bottle work.  Sucart was a glorified gopher and an A-Rod loyalist, someone the player could trust with the darker secrets of his career.  It could have been any other “cousin.”  He’s not news.  Keep the focus where it belongs: on the guy with the home-run totals and the mammoth contract, achieved at least in part by performance enhancers.  Three months from now, only the New York tabs will remember Yuri Sucart’s name.

* Brad Miller broke down in tears while discussing his tenure in Sacramento, a place rightfully described as one of the best landings for players in the NBA.  But let’s not get overly sentimental here: Miller was part of steadily inferior Kings teams over his five-plus seasons, his deft passing touch never quite offset his lack of big-man rebounding presence, and he was admittedly thrilled to be dealt Wednesday to a potential playoff team in Chicago, close to his Indiana roots.  Time to go, and best of luck.

* More interesting, as the Kings continue to dump salary and obtain expiring contracts (see today’s trade with Minny for Rashard McCants and Calvin Booth), was the waiving of third-year guard Quincy Douby after the Miller trade.  Douby wasn’t a lottery pick at No. 19 overall in 2006, but he nevertheless represents a fairly unusual swing and miss in the draft by Kings GM Geoff Petrie.  Credit the Kings with recognizing the bust and cutting Douby loose, but that’s a costly pick to punt for a team severely limited in its ability to use the trade and free-agent route to any competitive end.

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Alex Rodriguez isn’t having a career, he’s living a stage act — but that’s not news, is it?  The words “prima donna” have been attached to A-Rod for years in precisely the way they’re commonly attached to a high-maintenance Hollywood star or (insert just about any name here) pop singer, and his performance before the media in Florida only buttressed that notion about him.  Media-coached yet still terribly uncomfortable trying to find his own voice in a public setting, he’s a piece of work, pure and simple.

But A-Rod is also a flat liar, and that’s where this story gets interesting — and just a tad more serious.  Rodriguez lied about his past drug use; he lied about places and timetables and substances; he obfuscated details when it suited him.  The best seasons of his career were walking lies, which throws fair doubt on anything he might say today that he claims as the truth.

The difference between A-Rod and Barry Bonds?  Let’s face it: It’s mostly federal jurisdiction.

And what you’re about to see is how little Major League Baseball wants of any of this fight.  This is an instructive thing; it helps to explain the era we’re in as fans and consumers.  MLB, the entity, cannot run away quickly enough or far enough from the A-Rod case.  The owners, as a governing body, want this thing done and buried.

So they will evince no interest in the details of Rodriguez’s story.  They will not question that an unnamed “cousin,” not a clubhouse supplier, was A-Rod’s connection.  They will seek no interviews that might contradict — or even shadow — Rodriguez’s assertion that he abruptly went squeaky clean after orchestrating his own trade from the Rangers to the Yankees (you know how that Texas pressure can get to you, as opposed to, say, the Bronx).

Instead, MLB wants us all to move on – and while we’re at it, can we get off Bud Selig’s back?  The commissioner made it known this week that he doesn’t want to get stuck with the Steroid Era tag because, hey, he did everything he could, and baseball has made strides on the drug-testing front that no one thought possible.

Nice try: Baseball finally was forced into a testing program under threat of Congressional intervention, and even then Selig and the owners were routinely pummeled into submission on the fine details by the players union.  Meanwhile, A-Rod was getting shot up by his “cousin” and letting the world promote him as the clean alternative to Barry Bonds.  Quite a show, quite a show.

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There are other, perfectly viable non-hoops reasons why the Sacramento Kings would agree to take Sam Cassell off the Celtics’ hands — cash money, friendly ownership logrolling, all that rot.  But if Cassell is even a little bit serious about continuing to play, then the Kings ought to be a whole lot serious about getting him in uniform.

Beno Udrih, this is your future calling…

Sure, Cassell didn’t log a minute for the Celts this season.  It couldn’t matter less.  Put him in a Sacramento uniform and let Udrih see what an experienced floor leader looks like.

Say what you want about Udrih, one of the leading underperformers on a grandly underperforming team, but there’s no reason to assume the man is finished at age 26.  Still, he’s a wildly unreliable product, inconsistent in the extreme.  The revolving door of Kings coaches hasn’t helped, but I also have the nagging feeling that he hung around Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili for three years without learning a thing about leadership.

Enter Cassell: old (age 39), cranky, trash-talky and just utterly experienced.  The Kings would represent Cassell’s ninth NBA team, and quite possibly the end of the road.  (The Celts are likely dumping Cassell to free up a roster spot for Stephon Marbury, which is proof positive that not everybody in Boston is thinking with his head.  Marbury?  You can’t be serious.  You won’t get out of the Eastern Conference alive with that bad juju on the roster.)

But Cassell may still want to show he’s got something.  Maybe he has enough in the tank to direct the Sacramento offense for a few games here down the desultory stretch.  At his poorest, he’s no worse than what the Kings are throwing out there right now.  And with Udrih sucking wind every second game or so, can it really hurt?

There are no options too far out to consider on a dead-last team.  Maybe a little dose of Sam Cassell at the point could revitalize a Kings roster that looks, for all the world, as if the off-season began last weekend rather than the All-Star break.  Put a uniform on that man and get him on the practice floor.  Absolutely nothing to lose.

* Good to know the South Carolina cops have more important things to do than spend bonus time testing Michael Phelps‘ frat-party bong for traces of Beijing pool water.  But let’s also acknowledge the obvious, which is that the police were in a classically ludicrous no-win position.  Chase after Phelps on this tiny pot charge and they look petty and punitive; do nothing in the face of worldwide publicity and they look toothless and star-struck.  As it was, the sheriff’s office played it about right: spent some man-hours looking into things, announced, “Nope! Just not a lot here!,” and moved on.

* Great line, by the way, from Sheriff Leon Lott in the Phelps case, noting that it isn’t against the law to be photographed holding a bong: “They’re sold in stores.  We’re kind of sending a double message.  You can buy rolling papers at any convenience store in the world, but we’re telling kids not to smoke dope.”  Hence the confusion, sure.

* Second great line, from my friend who was a multiple NCAA All-American in the pool: “Michael Phelps smoked pot?  Duh.  He’s a swimmer.”

* Why Alex Rodriguez won’t get the break he’s looking for, Volume XXIX: Even before he takes the stage at Yankees camp today to address the media, the word is out that A-Rod has surrounded himself with a phalanx of smooth operators, spin controllers, media “crisis managers,” and the attorney who once represented Sammy Sosa before Congress, when Sosa abruptly realized he no longer could speak English.  Geez, kid, stand up and say you’re sorry, then get your pinstripes on and field some ground balls.  Instead, A-Rod is opting for the Hollywood response; you half expect him to turn up on “Inside Edition” with the exclusive.  It’s almost as if people are deliberately giving him the worst advice possible.  Shameful.

* The Oakland A’s season in your proverbial nutshell: Eric Chavez at third, Bobby Crosby at short.  Either man goes down, and the pitcher’s best friend on the left side of the infield goes with it.  Oakland reportedly is still considering free agent Orlando Cabrera for the SS position, with the oft-injured Crosby coming off a loudly sub-par season at the plate.  But get Crosby and Chavez back in sync for even a good stretch of games at a time, and that entire lineup can look better in a hurry.  The next month in Phoenix will be telling.

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Monday had barely begun when the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am was called for the year — at 54 holes – because of unrelenting rain and wind.  Sounds about right.  The old Crosby usually wins, in the end.

Oh, sure, Tiger Woods has tamed the place from time to time — under later-season conditions, he absolutely trashed the field at the U.S. Open in 2000, winning by 15 strokes — and, even in February, an absence of stormy afternoons can produce some lovely golf.  But in general, this place completely belies its public profile as a big, happy get-together where Bill Murray usually does something funny.

Northern California in February, for a pleasant little round of golf?  Forget it.  It’s windy and rainy and unpredictable in the extreme, and it’s a wonder every time they get all 72 holes in.  Quite remarkably, they usually do — but not this time.  When Dustin Johnson rolled in a 7-footer for birdie at Poppy Hills on Saturday, he won the tournament.  He just didn’t know it yet.

You’ll hear the usual pouting today about Pebble and its lousy meteorology, and the same few hardy fools will bray about changing the dates for the Clambake.  Not a chance.  The Crosby goes right here, in this crappy weather, with conditions that can change by the minute, and may the best man win.  Golf was never by definition a game of unchallenged comfort — ask the Brits, or the Scots — and any tournament that makes the golfers visibly uncomfortable is OK by me.  Let it roll.

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A quick Sunday spin.

The things you aren’t hearing about Bud Selig right now, you’ll hear again in due time — and he deserves that much.  Selig loves the game of baseball, loves the league.  He certainly never set out to denigrate the sport.  Perhaps down the road he’ll be remembered for his enthusiasm and earnestness in difficult times.

In the here and now, though, no such luck.  It’s a disaster on stilts.  The Selig Era of commissionership has become one loud grinding of gears, with the black smoke and the oil on the roadway — the whole awful mess.  And this one has the look and smell of permanence.

Selig’s issue is that he can’t take anything back.  He, and by extension Major League Baseball, stood by and watched an obviously dirty Barry Bonds take down the all-time home run record, and even the nobleman from whom Bonds took it, Hank Aaron, says you can’t un-ring that bell.

“Barry has the record,” Aaron said, “and I don’t think anybody can change that.”

Pathetic — but utterly true.  Selig, played like a puppet by the franchise owners, made no move on Bonds when it might have mattered; instead, he waited in silent hope that a federal indictment of Bonds might somehow take the burden off the commissioner’s shoulders.

Now Selig is making noises about separating off the recorded achievements of this ‘roid-raged time in the sport.  It can’t be done, no how, no way.  There’s just no mechanism for delineating the cheaters from the clean producers, and there never was such.  There is no way-back machine.  We know — or we think we know — about Bonds and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro and Roger Clemens and others, and that may color how any of us perceives their accomplishments.  But baseball, as a corporate and public entity, has no such latitude.  It can’t invalidate Bonds’ record any more than it can rewrite a box score from the drug years of the 1970s, when Dock Ellis famously pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD.

So, Bud, you’re stuck with it now.  As an industry, your league made hundreds of millions of dollars (and built at least one new ballpark, the one in San Francisco) by turning a blind eye, a deaf ear and a mute throat to the insiders’ suggestions of widespread steroid and HgH use over the past 15 years.  Baseball needed “saving” after the World Series cancellation of 1994 — a black mark on the game that, let’s be clear, also goes on your permanent record, Mr. Commish — and you let the Incredible Hulks do that for you.  They did the heavy lifting.  Wear it, without the bleating and the whining.

* Not to be forgotten in the drug debacles of this time in baseball: the union’s constant interference in, and unwillingness to get behind, a real testing program that had both teeth and punitive/deterrent measures.  Retired union icon Marvin Miller, a man rightfully credited with building baseball’s player association into the most formidable in sports, was quoted last week as saying that no testing should’ve ever been allowed because of the invasions of privacy and civil rights.  Laudable, but hopelessly out of touch.  Here’s the problem: Sports leagues thrive almost entirely on the perception that they’re being run on the up and up.  Even the gamblers want to know that the players aren’t cheating.  Otherwise, you’re the WCW, a great piece of entertainment with no enduring value.  Anyone who loves baseball would hope for a finer legacy.

* You’ve got to feel for Aaron, who certainly knows in his heart that Bonds didn’t take down his home run record cleanly.  There’s almost nothing he can say for public consumption that is going to change anything — and Aaron, above anyone else, knows that the number is the Number.  However it happened, Bonds’ 762 is in the books.  Even if Selig capitulated to MLB’s need to pretend nothing happened, the whole world knows how many homers Bonds hit.  Like it or not, it’s over.  And when Alex Rodriguez passes Bonds with his steroid-aided total, it’ll be twice over.  Guess Hank Aaron will just have to settle for his reputation as the best clean home-run hitter in history.

* It’s an afterthought on the weekend of the NBA All-Star Game, Lance Armstrong’s return to cycling and the old Crosby at Pebble Beach, but: Michelle Wie, right back in the game.  If not for a double-bogey at the 11th at Turtle Bay on Hawaii that opened the door for Angela Stanford, Wie very possibly wins her first official start on the LPGA.  As it is, she finishes second, collects a nice check, and serves notice to the women on the tour that she’ll be a force.  Because she’s so constantly in the media whirlpool, Wie is often thought of as much older than she actually is.  Don’t be fooled: She’s only 19 years old, with (it says here) the best of her golfing career ahead of her.  Keep watching.

* NBA commissioner David Stern says the league is in “a golden age of basketball,” but, look, there are no levels — none — on which an epic economic collapse is a good thing for Stern and his owners.  That goes double for the situation in Sacramento, where Stern has tied a bit of his reputation to the effort to build a new arena and keep the Kings in a growing market targeted by Forbes as one of the top “Next Sports Cities” in the nation.  With the Maloofs growing understandably edgy and local attendance shockingly terrible, Stern and his minions have to ride herd on the project to keep any momentum at all.  It’s the worst time imaginable to go looking for corporate money or taxpayer funds.

* Personally?  Absolutely no interest in hearing any details of how anyone, anywhere, stuck a needle into Barry Bonds’ over-plumped butt.  I understand the legal implications of such testimony in Bonds’ federal perjury case, but it’s just common sense that you’ve got a better chance of a productive day without that visual.  Thanks for the offer, though.

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…is to find better friends, starting now.  You’ve got plenty of time.  Three months ought to do it.

USA Swimming, in keeping with the theory that it isn’t actually great business to chase off the most popular swimmer in modern history, tagged Michael Phelps on Thursday with double-secret probation: a three-month suspension that manages to avoid any significant competition and leaves the path abundantly clear for the inevitable “Phelps The Redeemed” storyline at this summer’s national and world championships.

Phelps also lost Kellogg as a sponsor, which will come as a blow to anyone who hasn’t already seen his image on a million trillion cereal boxes.  By now you figure Frosted Flakes has moved on to the next great American hero, Greg Anderson.

But the real lesson for Phelps, besides the part about not bonging his way through his 24th year on the planet, is actually deeper than it might appear: He’s got to figure out who his friends really are, and that’s no mean feat at a time when friends invent themselves on the spot in order to bask in the reflected glow of his superstardom.

You don’t have to feel pity for Phelps, who’s still on track to earn upward of $100 million over the course of his endorsement lifetime.  He remains what he always was: young, insanely talented, with the work ethic of a throroughbred, pure gold — in the water.  On dry land, not so much.

This does not constitute breaking news.  But Phelps has to be close to the point of realizing that, for as long as he remains in the public eye, he’s a download away from social, economic and familial disaster.  They come out of the woodwork at times like these, and they’re all looking to get paid.  Phelps has to craft his short list of the real friends in his universe — and, for now, he has to stick to the list.

The Friday roll:

* You have to love Lane Kiffin, clearly drunk on the job.  Drunk from power?  Drunk from attention?  I couldn’t say.  But when Kiffin called out Florida’s Urban Meyer as a cheater — a notion that Kiffin and Tennessee almost immediately had to recant — he reaffirmed his status as a pure wild card in the dominion of coaching.  And, in that, he’s just about perfect for the SEC: Steve Spurrier, Houston Nutt, Nick Saban, Bobby Petrino, on and on.  This may or may not be the most talented roster of coaches in the history of the conference, but it sure stacks up as the most screw-loosed bunch ever mis-assembled.  Party on.

* Not sure what the Giants can actually afford to offer on the Manny Ramirez front (two years and $50 million, perhaps?), but ESPN’s Peter Gammons made an excellent case the other day that, with Ramirez aboard, San Francisco might actually jump to the front of the class in the tepid NL West.  Gammons still has a foundational belief in a rotation that includes Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and (heaven help him) Barry Zito, and he likes the Giants’ lineup once you stick Ramirez in the middle of it.  Gammons almost had me believing, although it’s still clear that the Dodgers have the first, best shot at getting a deal done.

* The Sacramento Kings affirm their essential King-ness tonight, as they retire to the rafters the jersey of a player who never wanted to join them in the first place, made repeated and overt noises about blowing out of town at the first opportunity, and never won them a ring.  No question here about Chris Webber’s positive effect on the franchise — in troika with Vlade Divac and Jason Williams, Webber was part of the group that absolutely remade the Kings as a totally compelling product — but the jersey retirement is a well intended step too far, just as it was for Mitch Richmond, a great player from the mediocre past.  I’d love to see that jersey retirement saved for the ultimate (and yet to be known) player who really does take the franchise all the way through.  And for what it’s worth, Rick Adelman’s name ought to go up to the ceiling along with anyone who played during his tenure as coach, or else why bother with the exercise?

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