After a couple of low-key weeks on the US Tour the season kicks right back into gear with what should be a cracker of an event at the Quail Hollow Championship.

Tiger Woods continues his comeback at the North Carolina track, and as a winner here in 2007 (and fourth-placed finisher last year) is the obvious first choice from the A-list.

But then there's Phil Mickelson, also in the field and also with a good record at the course after he tied for fifth in the event last season. Don't bother looking past either man.

In the B-list we're sticking with Brian Davis. He got off to a great start last

Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, is far and away the most controlled environment in golf.

The fairways are as smooth as fuzzy felt; the sand in the bunkers as powdery white as a bowl of flour; the small, invited field restricted to a handful of the best in the sport; and even the spectators are the chosen few on a long-since-closed subscription list, with the right to buy tickets a jealously-guarded privilege passed down from generation to generation.

In such a cosy environment it was almost too easy for Tiger Woods to make his comeback.

The crowd's warm reaction to golf's

Some tournament venues just seem to get lucky.

Take the Old Course at St Andrews, for example. By modern standards the course is a surreal experience, so much so that if a course architect turned in plans for the course today - shared fairways, blind approach shots, holes that criss-cross each other and a green the length of a football pitch - they would not just be fired. They'd be sectioned.

Yet the roster of recent winners at the Home of Golf reads like a who's who of modern golf: Tiger Woods, Nick Faldo, Seve Ballesteros and Jack Nicklaus all lifted the Claret Jug there.

The New Orleans

Sportsmen cheat constantly.

Footballers dive in fake agony, then rise to the ground gesturing to the referee to send their opponents off.

Rugby coaches openly instruct their players to cheat as much as possible, so much so that the arts of scrummaging and rucking have long since disintegrated into farce.

Basketball players are unrepentant about fouling opponents in order to save vital seconds at the end of close games.

And even in cricket, once renowned as the gentleman's game, batsmen regularly stand their ground when they know they are out, or claim catches that have clearly grazed the turf

The 2010 Masters was without doubt one of the great Major championships, so you can only pity organisers of the poor tournament that has the unenviable job of putting on the next event.

Luckily, the Verizon Heritage and Harbour Town in Hilton Head, South Carolina is one of the oldest, most venerable and well-respected tournaments on the American calendar.

Where the Masters rewards long drives and nerveless putting across rolling greens that run at the pace of linoleum, the Heritage is all about accuracy off the tee and wonderful iron play. It has an impressive roster of past winners, with Nick

It's now over four years since Michelle Wie turned
professional. It's probably about time that she started acting like one.

But no: the Hawaiian fell foul of the rules for the third
time in her career while in contention at a tournament. Instead of taking it on
the chin, though, she decided to have a grumble.

"It's
unfair," she whined, "but there's nothing I can do about it."

Wie was penalised for grounding her club in a hazard - you
can catch the video here of her doing so - to incur a two-shot penalty just as
she was trying to reel in eventual winner Hee Kyung-Seo. The rule is
effectively

1. Tiger is back!

Making his reappearance at The Masters was a masterstroke: not only does he have a special relationship with the place since winning his first Major there in 1997, not only is the course better suited to his game than a fish is suited to swimming, but there's the special circumstances of the crowd. The spectators - or patrons, as the club call them - are on a long-since closed subscription list of people who get tickets every year. Nobody in their right mind would dare risk losing their regular allocation by heckling the great man, making Augusta the ideal location for an

Perhaps the single greatest asset that Tiger Woods has is the ability to turn a bad day with his swing into a good day on his scorecard - and never has that been truer than during the third round of The Masters.

To put it bluntly, and despite the odd stunningly good shot, Woods played a terrible round of golf at Augusta on Saturday. He carved drives into the trees, blasted irons long and short of their targets, putted like a man with the touch of a drugged-up elephant, and chipped poorly from spots where he would normally leave the ball stone dead.

BM wasn't the only one wondering what on