Despite our shortcomings on the green, my father and I managed to approach each round of golf with a sense of carefree optimism. The five hours of topped irons, shanked woods and sand showers between the first swing and the defeated trudge to the parking lot brought us back to earth.

Sometimes, rounds went uncompleted. One three-wood is responsible for the shortest stay Dad and I — or perhaps anyone — ever had at a golf course. On the very first hole Dad unloaded a whistling duck hook that, after a detour or six, nestled itself in the only empty bottle slot on a nearby soda machine. Amid laughter from amused onlookers, Dad said to me, “I left the car running,” and started off toward the parking lot. I knew what that meant — follow him now or walk home.

Then there’s the nine-iron Dad used to rewrite some inviolable laws of physics. He tried to hit a flop lob onto the green, but instead, without benefit of ricochet, deflection, collision or headwind, he managed to send the ball 25 feet behind him. Dad had not kicked it. He did not throw it. He did not catch the ball on his backswing. Dad merely swung the club, the club hit the ball, and the ball went backward. Mass, force, energy, square root of the speed of light — none of Einstein’s Principles stood a chance against my father with a golf club in his hand.

I had my share of inglorious moments, too, after I took over the clubs. Once my fourth attempt to escape the beach resulted in a clean pickup of the ball. It rose like a ballistic missile high over the green and across not one but two adjacent fairways.

Another round I teed my ball up on 18, just a double bogey away from breaking 90 for the first time. The hole was a long par four. I swung mightily and, to the shock of everyone present, put it on the green in one bounce! The wrong green, as it turned out — the one I’d just played, located a mere 100 feet away.

The shared agony of our rounds together was not without its moments of joy. Sometimes we’d just laugh at our mutual ineptness. Occasionally fate, luck or a well-parked Buick led to a brilliant and unexpected result. We drank in the good fortune and cheered each other on.

But the best times were just when Dad and I were walking down a fairway, the weather perfect, the conditions ideal, the green relatively empty. I’d look over and see my father, a half-smile on his face. He’d catch my glance, turn toward me and say, “Son, not a bad way to spend an afternoon.” 

The tour’s code of conduct states that when a player becomes a member, he “voluntarily submits himself to standards of behavior and ethical conduct beyond those required of ordinary golfers and members of the public.”

Woods began the final day one shot off the lead but never recovered after making two bogeys in his first three holes.

The 14-time major winner finished tied for 20th place at 4-under 284. Woods has gone 17 tournaments without a win for the first time since turning professional in 1996.

Television cameras spotted Woods spitting in an earlier round in the Dubai tournament.

Ewen Murray, a commentator for Britain’s Sky Sports, said on air after seeing Woods spit on the second tee during the second round that it was “one of the ugliest things you will ever see on a golf course.”

On Sunday, after Woods spit on the 12th green, Murray said on air that “somebody now has to come behind him and maybe putt over his spit. It does not get much lower than that.”

A year has passed since the infamous crash that started it all, and Woods appears ready to re-enter the marketing game. A survey within the last month to test Woods’ appeal produced “very powerful, positive, positive results,” his longtime agent, Mark Steinberg, said, adding that he’s already engaged in “several constructive conversations.”

“We are a society of second chances. That’s been proven over the years,” Steinberg said. “He’s not going to be in any deal until he looks the company in the eye and has a serious conversation with them. ‘How are you going to live your life? We want to be part of the redemption, rehabilitation. Are you serious about that?’ And he knows that. He’s comfortable with it. And he’s going to do that.”

He has already started.

Woods is tweeting and was a guest last week on ESPN Radio’s “Mike & Mike in the Morning” Show. In an op-ed column for Newsweek magazine, his tone was humble and hopeful.

“A smart decision by Tiger and his team to be proactive and get ahead of the one-year story,” said David Schwab, a vice president at Octagon specializing in celebrity strategy for brands. “Now those stories will talk about his latest words, goals and plans.”

Before the crash, Woods was the standard by which all other megawatt pro stars were measured. He exuded class, excellence and determination. Most importantly he was a winner. Corporations around the world were eager to align themselves with him, even if their business had nothing to do with golf. He was, Forbes estimated last year, the first $1 billion athlete.

TV ratings rose when he played, and soared when he was in contention on Sunday. He was a staple of TV and print ads. He was Nike Golf, a walking, talking embodiment of the brand. Even when he did ads for other companies, the Swoosh or TW logo was often present.

“Tiger has done a great job breaking the rules of marketing,” said Dean DeBiase, an expert in advertising and brand strategy who is featured in the new book “Nike.”

After the crash, though, sponsors found themselves being pulled down by the weight of the scandal. Accenture, for example, was the inadvertent butt of jokes, its ad taglines fodder for late-night comics and tabloid websites.

Two weeks after the crash, Accenture dumped Woods.

“Although Tiger had been an effective symbol of Accenture’s high-performance business strategy, our research and analysis concluded that the news surrounding his personal issues last year compromised his ability to help us deliver our key messages to the marketplace,” the global consulting firm said in a statement when asked to evaluate its decision almost a year later.

AT&T Inc., whose logo was on Woods’ bag, and Gatorade, which had created a Tiger Woods-brand drink, soon followed. Gillette and Tag Heuer de-emphasized him in their marketing.

According to Kantar Media, Woods appeared in about $700,000 worth of advertising through the first nine months of this year, all for EA Sports and Nike. In the same period a year ago, Woods appeared in $70 million worth of advertising on behalf of his sponsors.

“I knew there was going to be fallout. I’m not sure I looked at a list and went down every company. But I can’t say I was terribly surprised, except by maybe one.” Steinberg said.

Woods went more than four months between TV commercials before showing up in the black-and-white Nike ad featuring the voice of his late father, Earl, who says, “Tiger … I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?”

The ad may have only added to his woes, however, with many questioning its tastefulness. Nike later said the audio was from a 2004 documentary in which the elder Woods was comparing his parenting style with that of his wife.

“When a company takes on a sponsorship, they take on this person like you’re friending someone on Facebook,” said Laura Ries, president of Ries & Ries, an Atlanta-based marketing/consulting firm. “Who your friends are says a lot about you, and corporate sponsors really take that to heart.”

Companies like Nike and EA Sports, whose ties to Woods were based on sport, not overall image, remained loyal, and those relationships provide a blueprint for future deals.

“Nike’s brand equity is not really about sports or athletic performance … but about the emotion of sports,” said DeBiase, now chairman of Reboot Partners, a growth advisory consulting firm. “They sell what drives people to watch or participate — the fact that sports is the ultimate drama in which no one, not even the participants, knows the outcome.

“They are not standing by him as much as standing by his reality, delivering the drama that makes sports so compelling.”

Woods still fascinates people.

Aside from a few snide comments, he’s been greeted by supportive fans since he returned at the Masters in April. Based on the size of their galleries, only Phil Mickelson can rival Woods’ star power. After Woods’ posted his first Tweet on Nov. 17 — “What’s up everyone. Finally decided to try out twitter!” — he added more than 40,000 new followers in three hours.

“I think I like this twitter thing,” Woods said in his second tweet. “You guys are awesome. Thanks for all the love.”

Overnight ratings for the final round of the U.S. Open, with Woods, Mickelson and Ernie Els in contention, were way up, 35 percent over 2009, when only the third round was completed at Bethpage Black on Sunday because of rain. Even the notoriously tough British press took it easy on him at the British Open and Ryder Cup.

Potential sponsors have taken note.

Though Steinberg did not give specifics, he said he is talking with an Asian company based outside of China about an endorsement deal. He also said Woods will have a new logo on his bag “at some point next year”; the Tiger Woods Foundation logo was on his bag at the HSBC Champions and Australian Masters.

“I feel pretty positive that we’ll start to slowly build back his partnership base,” Steinberg said.

Aside from repairing his image, Woods has another project — fixing his game.

He failed to win a single tournament for the first time in 15 seasons as a pro, and only once this year did he go into the weekend within three shots of the lead. He has gone 10 majors without a victory, matching the longest drought of his career.

Worse, he hasn’t seemed to be in control of his golf. Divorce proceedings loomed over Woods for most of the summer — it was finalized Aug. 23 — distracting his thoughts and disrupting his normal practice routine. After dumping swing coach Hank Haney in May, Woods began working with Sean Foley at the PGA Championship.

“We never underestimate his abilities as a competitor,” Nike said in a statement.

But he needs to start winning, Ries said.

Now.

“We will quickly forget this time if he comes back,” she said. “But the more time we see him downtrodden on the course, losing, the more trouble it is.”

Corporations and consumers alike want to be associated with winners. It’s why athletes make such attractive marketing partners.

But Woods has something equally powerful working in his favor right now, Ries said.

“We love stories of redemption. We want that happy ending,” she said. “That’s what Tiger has going for him, because we are rooting for him now.”

——

AP Golf Writer Doug Ferguson contributed to this report.

California Watch has found that of the 10 out-of-state companies contributing to the “Yes on 23″ campaign since mid-May, nine attended and contributed to Valero’s 2009 charity annual golf tournament in San Antonio, Texas.

Valero would not release the 2010 roster to California Watch. However, since Valero began hosting the event in 2003, most of the same sponsors have returned every year, said Bill Day, Valero’s spokesman.

OK, let’s concede that Day has a point when he notes that it shouldn’t be all that big a surprise that a bunch of energy companies would all be concerned about Californian laws that threaten to cut into their profits by forcing them to clean up their petrochemical polluting act. But it’s still kind of funny. According to Rust, this year’s tournament “ran from May 10 through May 16. Contributions from out-of-state companies started coming in on May 14.” These guys were practically writing checks while walking down the fairway!

The good news, for Californians who want to keep the state’s tremendous clean energy investment boom rolling along, is that lately, the No on Prop 23 campaign has been raising ridiculously more cash than the Yes on 23 folks.

Todd Woody reports:

As it turns out, the No on 23 campaign is outspending the Texans. Big time. Case in point: Over the past few days, the No forces have collected $5 million from venture capitalists, New York financiers, renewable energy companies, and other deep-pocketed backers, according to California Secretary of State records.

The Yes campaign, meanwhile, has received only a single $10,000 donation over the past week, from a Houston company that provides services to the oil and petrochemical industries. The last big contribution to the Yes coffers was a $100,000 donation made on Sept. 13.

(I can only assume that No on 23 strategy sessions were conducted while playing Ultimate Frisbee and grinding up hills on grueling century rides.)

An illuminating illustration of the geographical distribution of Prop 23 campaign finance contributions can be found here.

For starters, their open is not a genteel croquet match. In good years, with an angry ocean beside them, players limp off 18 like Vikings returning from the hunt.

I love to hear the flagpoles at the open clanging in the gales. We have some stout wind here in Texas, but we don’t have to anchor our children for fear they’ll be sucked into the North Sea.

How does any mortal golfer even sniff par in such brutality? I always marvel that Scots like Paul Lawrie, who won the Carnoustie debacle in 1999 after playing a lifetime in wind that would frighten Chicago, don’t come to our girly-man country clubs in America and shoot 59s with their eyes closed. It might have something to do with our upholstered putting surfaces, but it could also be our sodden skies.

Unless you have experienced Scotland’s radiant high latitudes — St. Andrews sits about even with Goose Bay, Newfoundland — it’s difficult to appreciate the vibrant quality of sunlight and air at such monumental links as Cruden Bay, North Berwick and Machrihanish.

I’ve seen hardened pro photographers all but weep like Sean Connery when describing how their work leaps from the lens over there. I have sat on the stone steps of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club for hours at a time, mesmerized simply watching the sky above the first and 18th holes at St. Andrews go from Cancún blue to seething mountains of coal, then back again. Scotland’s summers are grand theater. (We’ll not discuss the rain just now.)

Its luminous storybook towns seem backlit by Hollywood. Rows of red and green pubs — now finally smoke-free — stand in the pristine morning light like new boxes of Crayolas. Freckled kids with names like Tavish and Tyra seem to glow on the way to school. It’s enchanting and half-spooky to those of us trapped in dingy urban air most of the year. When the sun shines in Scotland, it’s like the whole country is in high-definition.

The British Open is often played in a true golf village, a wee dip in the road like Gullane (population 3,700, next to Muirfield) that might vanish were it not for eons-old dunesland between the ocean and the farms that some genius architect like James Braid or George Lowe Jr. turned into a golf sanctuary. I’ve been to high school basketball games that had more people than some of these legendary golf company towns.

On one of my first journeys to Scotland, I teed off at Gullane’s revered championship course, known to locals simply as No. 1, and to my dumbfounded glee, a young mother, well within her rights, crossed directly in front of the tee box down a communal path with her baby stroller.

“Splendid day for the golf,” she chirped to our enchanted group of Yanks.

We waved and smiled as if we were at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, giggling at the thought of the SWAT-team response such a trespass would have caused at a private American golf cathedral. Such scenes are commonplace throughout Scotland and Ireland. Many of the world’s consensus top 10 links courses are not only open to the general public, unlike our Oakmonts and Seminoles, but their trails and dunes are also shared with joggers, surfers and mums on a stroll. That helps to remind us golfers that, technically, we don’t yet own all of nature.

Over there golf is more deeply woven into the local culture. You see happy mall-deprived teenagers walking to the courses with golf bags over their shoulders. In Ballybunion, Ireland, I once stood in a grocery check-out line and listened to two middle-aged women fervently discuss their golf grips. (Cue the ad team from Viagra.) Despite the efforts of clueless barons like Donald Trump, who is intent on Americanizing Scottish golf and importing his valet-parking culture, golf remains for most Scots an unpretentious game that knows its place.

The tournament itself is, of course, brilliant — from the singsong introductions by the beloved starter, Ivor Robson, to its fabulous rota of links courses and the eternal quirkiness of evil burns and pot bunkers, to the glorious charges and inevitable flameouts of nondescript golfers like Van de Velde, who come within steel millimeters of touching golf immortality … then disappear.

I care little about which major has the most worthy champions or finest fields. That’s not why I wake with the roosters to watch the British Open. Actually, I think I might love this major the most because it seems that overlooked golfers who rarely play on a world stage somehow find their inner giant here and flirt with greatness.

That’s good for golf, and the wise Scots would have it no other way.

Bruce Selcraig, descended from Scots, is a former writer with Sports Illustrated and lives in Austin, Texas.