They say that baseball is chess at 90 miles per hour.

   Golf has some of the strategy and intelligence of baseball, but none of the athleticism, and the result is that it generates few genuinely memorable or exciting moments. I included Tiger Woods masterpiece at the 2000 U.S. Open as one of my favorite games (Greatest Games #19) and Ben Hogan's 1950 triumph as one of my favorite moments (Greatest Moments #14), and could have easily included Woods' 1997 Masters as well, but most of the moments below reflect generic victories over adversity and improbability that could have come from any sport.

   This is not to disparage the game of golf, but simply to point out that the plodding nature of the game is not conducive to this kind of endeavor.

   Imagine that you went to a Super Bowl as a fan and happened to find seats on the 50-yard line.  Imagine that the starting quarterback of your favorite team got injured, and that somehow the team's coach asked you to be the starting quarterback.  Now imagine that you threw for 300 yards, tossed 4 TD passes and won the game in overtime.

   Something like this happened to Francis Ouimet in 1913.  He was a geeky kid, a 20-year-old who worked in a sporting goods store in Brookline, Massachusetts.  He lived about the length of a tee shot from the 17th green of the Country Club, where the 1913 U.S. Open was held, and he knew that course cold because been caddying there since he was 11 years old and he had spent hours there hunting balls and sneaking shots.

   Ouimet was also the state amateur champion, so he was offered a last-minute spot in the Open to round out a foursome as a publicity stunt. Ouimet was reluctant to ask his boss at the sporting goods store for time off, but he figured that he would just need a day - just long enough to play two rounds, miss the cut, and shake hands with the great golfers of the day like Bill Vardon and Ted Ray.

   He shanked his first tee shot, which went about 40 yards, and was 4 over par at the end of two holes.  But then something magical happened - he started playing golf as if he owned the place.  By the end of Thursday's 36 holes, he had scrambled back to within four shots of the lead.  He made up the four shots in Friday's morning round, and was tied for the lead as the final round began.

   With locals turning out in droves, Ouimet started slowly - he shot a 43 for the front nine.  But he came back on the back nine, finishing two under and tying for the lead with Vardon and Ray.  The decisive moment came on 17 - his very own 17, just a crushed 2-wood from his backyard - when he fired a 20-foot, nasty, downhill snaking putt into the hole for a birdie.

   He came back for the playoff against Vardon and Ray on Saturday.  The first five holes looked a little shaky, and he cold-fanned his approach to the green on 5 so badly it ended up out of bounds.  But he settled down again, and stiffed his next approach to within three feet of the hole, setting up the most wonderful bogey in golf history.  After that, he was bulletproof - he came back to tie the score on the next hole, opened up a one-shot lead on 10, made it a two-shot lead on 12, and then sealed it - guess where? - on 17 with a 15-foot birdie putt.

     He always did love that green. 

   It is the crowning achievement of Jack Nicklaus' illustrious career: the 1986 Masters at Augusta. The final round 65 is his most memorable round of golf, and the eagle putt on 15 and birdie putt on 17 are the two most memorable strokes of his career.

   He qualified for the U.S. Open at 17, and at the tender age off 22, he slew Arnold Palmer in front of the partisan gallery ("Miss it, Jack!") at the U.S. Open playoff in 1962. From that tournament until 1979 - a string of 71 majors - the Golden Bear finished in the top 10 in 61 of them, and was in the top five in 51.

   Besides Palmer himself and perhaps Ben Hogan, the only other golfer who might have been as great was Bobby Jones, who dominated the 1920s, won the Grand Slam in 1930, and - seeing no more world titles to conquer - hung up his cleats at the age of 28. Nicklaus dominated the 1960s and 1970s, and kept winning majors until 1986.

   When he made his glorious final run, shooting a 30 on the back 9 at Augusta in 1986, he came from off the leader board to win his sixth Masters.

   The First Gentleman of Golf electrified the crowds one last time. At the age of 46, he was left for dead as a contender in the majors; he started that day 6 strokes back. But his final 10-hole stretch went: birdie, birdie, birdie, bogie, birdie, par, eagle, birdie, birdie, par, giving him a 65 on the day. On the back 9, he passed Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman, Tom Watson and Bernhard Langer, gaining the decisive one-stroke margin of victory on 17.

   In her last tournament as an amateur, Babe Didrikson won for the 17th time in 18 events as she played brilliantly in the Broadmoor Women's Invitational Golf final in Colorado Springs.

   Babe Didrikson began as a muscular phenom who mastered numerous sports and ended as a brilliant golfer.  When Babe was voted the Greatest Female Athlete of the first half of the 20th century, she received 319 first-place votes and 34 for second of the 361 cast in the AP poll.  She also was voted the greatest woman track-and-field athlete. 

   The gregarious tomboy burned with a competitive fire worthy of Ty Cobb; her life was athletics, and she was accomplished in just about every sport - basketball, track, golf, baseball, tennis, swimming, diving, boxing, volleyball, handball, bowling, billiards, skating and cycling.  When asked if there was anything she didn't play, she said, "Yeah, dolls."

   As an amateur golfer, Babe won an amazing 13 consecutive tournaments during 1946.  The next year, she was the first American to win the British Amateur.  Among her 55 tournament victories were three U.S. Women's Opens.  With Zaharias, Patty Berg and Fred Corcoran, she founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association in 1949.

   This was her greatest performance as an amateur - she simply overmatched her opponents in one of the most dominating performances of all time.  Combining powerful drives and precision putting, she routed Dot Kielty in the 36-hole match. She won the final four holes with a par and three birdies, including a 15-foot putt on No. 10 to end it.  She was eight-under par at 108 for 28 holes when the match concluded.

   Babe went five up in the morning round, including making a 40-foot putt for an eagle.  She won 13 of the 28 holes, with Kielty winning just 4.  The other 11 holes were halved.

   At the awards presentation, Babe repeats to her rival her simple formula for success: "All you have to do, Dottie, is hitch up your girdle and swing."

   The 21-year-old Tiger Woods captured the country's attention in 1997, when he became the youngest ever to win the green jacket, but he had long been a golfing phenom.  At age 3, he had shot nine holes in 48 strokes.  From 1994 to 1996, he won the U.S. Amateur three years running - the first player ever to do that.  After turning professional at the age of 20, Woods won two PGA tournaments and kicked off the 1997 tour with a bang, beating veteran Tom Lehman in a playoff at the Mercedes Championship.  Then he won the Asian Honda Classic by ten strokes.

   But it was the 1997 Masters that made him a household name.  The exclusive course in Augusta, Georgia, hadn't integrated it's membership until the early 1990s, and that added a compelling spin to Woods' performance there: he shot a 30 on the back nine of round one, and posted an incredible 66-66-65 in the first three rounds.  That left him with a massive lead going into the final round.  As he reached the 18th hole, he needed to make par to beat the four-round Masters record of 271, which was held by tour legends Jack Nicklaus and Ray Floyd.

   His tee shot went left, but he recovered on the second shot and was on the green.  His first putt put him within four feet of the hole, and as his final putt dropped the gallery erupted.  Not only was he the youngest winner with a record score, but he beat the second-place finisher (Tom Kite) by 12 strokes, the biggest margin in majors play in 125 years.