This will be the 91st PGA Championship but only the second time at Hazeltine. The course was built by the famous Robert Trent Jones in 1962. Hazeltine will play just over 7,600 yards long for the Championship. The layout of the course has narrow fairways over rolling hills. It’s also known for having small greens and, to make matters worse, half of the holes have a water hazard of some sort.

The last time the PGA Championship was played at Hazeltine was back in 2002. That was the year, you may recall, that Rich Beem narrowly edged out Tiger Woods as the latter tried to make a late comeback with a series of birdies to close out his round. Since that event several changes have been made to the course. It is now 300 yards longer and several bunkers have been added and tee boxes have been moved.

This year’s field is packed full of golf superstars with 100 out of the 101 topped ranked players in the world planning to attend. As always, I’m pulling for Tiger because I’m a total front-runner when it comes to picking the winner. I’ve basically been a terrible prognosticator this season so take my pick with a grain of salt.

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For the third consecutive time this season, Tiger Woods has won a Tour event two weeks before the start of a Major tournament and will come in as the leading favorite to win. But, as most of you probably know, Woods came up short in both of the previous majors: letting his putting beat him at the U.S. Open and not even making the cut at the British. The PGA Championship will be Tiger’s last chance to win a Major this year so be on the lookout for him making a showing just as strong as the one he made in the final three days of the Buick Open this past week.

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This year the Open Championship is being held at Turnberry in Scotland. The event will be played on the Ailsa Course, which will be hosting the British Open for the fourth time and the first time since 1994. Turnberry also has another 18-hole course, called the Kintyre Course, that has never hosted an event as big as the Open Championship but still offers quite a challenge.

I did a little research and anyone interested in seeing the Open Championship live and in-person can still find excellent travel and accommodation deals this close to the event itself. A lot of the travel packages available include lodging and passes to the Open itself as part of one deal. This makes it easy to kill two birds with one stone and take care of everything you need for a nice golf vacation in one shot.

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The 2009 US Open has lots of interesting plot lines developing already. The surging Tiger Woods is probably everyone’s favorite to win. After his performance at the Memorial there aren’t many doubters left about whether or not Tiger has returned from his injury. The talking heads on sports television are back to picking between Tiger or the field again like they used to do when Woods was crushing the opposition week after week.

With the recent announcement of his wife’s illness, the sentimental favorite to win will be Phil Mickelson. Since it’s now heavily rumored he’ll be missing the British Open, this year’s US Open will be the end of his streak of 61 straight appearances is a major.

My personal pick to win is Tiger Woods (tough choice, I know) but I can certainly see someone on the fringe of people’s minds right now, like Sergio Garcia maybe, taking a run at things. Whomever wins I know I’ll be enjoying it on television even though I wish I was going to be there in person.

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Some very awesome prizes are up for grabs at Falcon’s Fire Golf Club, for anyone proving to be a skilled golfer and being able to ace one of their par three holes.

Proceeds from this benefit will be helping to provide many career opportunities for veterans that are making the transition out of the military, our youth that are at-risk, several individuals with disabilities, and many dislocated workers.

There have already been more than 1,000 people who have enjoyed benefiting from this outstanding program.

The Golf Classic is to be held along with Breakaway, a conference held annually for members of CompTIA. It is schedule to be held at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center, also in Orlando on August 5 through 7.

The mission of CompTIA, which was founded in 1998, is future hopes of being able to eliminate shortages in the industry of certain skills and to produce individuals that are qualified to handle entry level IT positions.

For further reading check out the Travel Guide Orlando.

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