Managers left holding baby

It is, to say the least, infuriating when real life encroaches upon the territory otherwise known as the Golf Masters. For the past week a sizeable percentage of our managers have been pacing up and down their living room floors, cigars at the ready, eyes fixed on the golf pages of Ceefax, but right up until the transfer deadline Lee and Laurae Westwood (and those managers) were still waiting for the birth of their first child.

So, Lee withdrew from this week's tournament. That would be bad enough in regular Golf Masters' weeks, but, as you know, this is no regular Golf Masters' week. This is US Masters week, the first opportunity of the season for you to win double the usual paltry amount your team collects.

At registration time 1,089 of you chose Westwood as your £5 million big gun, resisting the attractions of Woods, Els, Montgomerie and co. But all this baby talk got 187 of you down and you abandoned ship. The remaining 902? Like us you pictured the scene: Baby Westwood arrives in time for Daddy Westwood to catch that flight to America; Daddy Westwood wins US Masters and names his son/daughter `Green Jacket Westwood' after an eagle on the final hole sees him pip Tiger Woods to victory.

Now? Like all 902 of you Westwood will be watching the 2001 US Masters on telly. "All being well, though, I'll be back in Augusta next year - with my family," he cheerily vowed. A vow that was of huge comfort to those 902 managers, in no sense at all.

With a bit of good fortune another member of those 902 line-ups will make up for the disappointment and win you a few bob over the weekend - see right for the full list of Golf Masters' players who made it in to the Augusta field.

Week five proved less than lucrative for most of our teams with 2,139 scoring nothing and 3,057 picking up just £500. In all only 8,935 line-ups hit five figures in combined earnings, a sad statistic not helped by the fact that the BellSouth Classic was our sole tournament (because the Open de Argentina was added too late to the `European' schedule to be included in our list of tournaments for the year).

Not that Dun Laoghaire resident and Limerick native Kevin Barry is complaining - his `Price' line-up did very nicely, thank you very much, in Georgia, earning him £285,500 and a fourball in Powerscourt, Co Wicklow to boot. Kevin was one of 1,281 to profit from Scott McCarron's first PGA Tour win since 1997 and also had in his line-up ALL three players who tied for third - Chris Smith, Dennis Paulson and Phil Mickelson. J L Lewis chipped in with another £500 to win Kevin the second fourball of his Golf Masters' managerial career.

Hearty congratulations, too, to our biggest riser of the week - John Kinsella of Rathmines, Dublin who leapt a mightily impressive 13,146 places to 579th thanks purely to Mickelson and Paulson's efforts. `Kinsella's Hackers' are now on a roll and if their three representatives in the Masters' field - Mickelson, Paulson and Darren Clarke - can hack their way to filling the top three places in Augusta they'll win their team £500,000. In which case we'll award John a polo shirt and a copy of that self-help book: How To Live With Vertigo.