Ranking the live leaderboards (PGA Tour wins)

It might surprise you to find out that RonMon is half-mennonite, half technologian, and half baked. We know that adds up to three halves, but the third half explains it all. The half-mennonite refers to the fact that cable television is absent in the Mon household. Local stations and public t.v. are all you’ll view if you stop by for a brew (of coffee, that is.) As such, RonMon (third person…nice touch) is left to utilize the various wifi feeds in the ‘hood to keep up with the various tours.

Each of the tours presents a live leaderboard of some form or fashion. The PGA Tour, Champions, and Nationwide tours are bundled under one website, and utilize the same functionality. This site, PGATour.com, is by yards the finest trafficker in useful information. Let’s say you’re watching the Nissan Open in February online, and want to find out how Dean Wilson is doing. If you click the “c” next to his name, you can highlight his name in one of four colors for easy access as you scroll. Click his name and you go immediately to this round’s live scorecard and brief biographical information. From today’s round, you can access a complete tournament update (all four rounds) as well as 12 event statistical categories. Back on the main page, four more buttons to the right of the player’s name (marked SC, P, S, and H) refer to scorecard, play, stats, and hole. Scorecard and stats jump you directly to previously-mentioned nuggets, while play and hole are something new. Play brings up a club-by-club rundown of the current hole, complete with shot distances and club choices. Hole brings up a 2-D map of the current hole, with six lines of information on that particular hole. The best feature of the PGATour.com functionality is that it happens either write in front of you or on a separate, linked page. No pop-ups to confuse the issue.

The remaining tour websites (European Tour, LPGA Tour, Asian Tour and Japan Tour) are light-years away from this type of information access. Truth be told, they may not care to present as much number-overkill as the PGA Tour seems to do. The Asian Tour pops open a separate mini-window with round-by-round scores on each hole. Scores are color-coded according to eagle, birdie, par, et al. The LPGA Tour pops open a separate window that crashes when used with the FireFox browser. It provides the event’s scores and a brief profile of the player. The Japan Tour has two live columns…relation to par and player name. Relation to par takes you to the entire set of event scorecards, while the players name takes you to a picture and bio, with additional links relative to perfomance on the Japan Tour (Profile, Stats, Results and Lifetime Record.) The European Tour also provides two “hot” columns. A flag in the far left column ‘flags’ the player’s line for easy viewing, while the second (the contestant’s name) takes you to the player’s scorecards, with easy-viewing color coding.

Number crunchers should head for the PGA Tour’s three different levels of competition. They’ll find much more in the way of stats than they could ever use. Each of the other tours, while not up to the same standard, certainly provide enough live online information to keep us abreast of details.