Lee--

And so, just like that, America has a new hero. Bob May for President! May's the slightly chubby, 5-foot-7 golfer who yesterday dueled Tiger Woods all the way down the back nine in the PGA Championship, coming up a stroke short but winning his way into the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. Actually, that may be overstating things a bit, considering that the New York Times had a photo only of Tiger on the front page, saving the article for the sports page, and considering that most people don't watch golf at all.

But there was something cool about May's performance yesterday. He was the first person really to challenge Tiger in a major all year long. In both the U.S. Open and the British Open, Tiger's playing partners on the fourth day plainly cracked and let him cruise to victory. But May stayed blissfully within himself and, had it not been for a missed short putt on the 15th hole, might have become as unlikely a PGA champion as we've seen in a long while. Then there's the undeniable fact that Bob May looks like what a golfer's supposed to look like. He's got a paunch, he's got jowls, he's losing his hair, he's short. He doesn't look as if, like Woods or David Duval, he spends lots of time on the track or in the weight room. I swear to God I thought he was in his early 40s, before Jim Nantz or someone said he was 31. And yet he struck the ball fantastically well. There was actually this weirdly moving tape CBS showed of May arriving at the country club yesterday morning, pulling his Ford Contour or some such nondescript rental car up to the curb, getting out, unloading his clubs by himself, and then checking his pockets to make sure he had his keys before walking inside. Of course, he won $540,000 yesterday, so his Ford Contour days are probably gone forever.

The flip side of all this is that Tiger was absolutely stunning down the stretch. The one criticism that's been made of him is that his nerves haven't really been tested by a serious challenger, and while I don't think Bob May and Tiger will become the Nicklaus and Palmer of our day--though it'd be cool if they did--certainly yesterday Tiger gleamed only the brighter for the pressure. You and I have talked a lot about the problem of talking about "heart" when it comes to athletes, but Tiger's ability to focus, at least, seems unparalleled.

The other really interesting thing about the PGA--and I promise this will be the last mention of golf--were the TV ads. In the first place, the same ads kept being repeated over and over again, which may be straight out of Marketing 101 but seems to me like a guaranteed way of getting people to switch the channel and to hate your product. I mean, I love that old Monster.com ad--which they reran yesterday--with the little kids saying things like "I want to claw my way up to middle management" and "I want to do the same work for less money." But by the ninth time I saw it--in the space of an hour or so--I no longer loved it. And it's much worse with ads that are bad the first time you see them.

Still, the mix of ads was interesting: Monster.com (for middle managers worried about their future), golf equipment (of course), Oldsmobile, and Viagra. So many Viagra ads. But these commercials were actually bizarrely sweet (as opposed to the Bob Dole ads, which were sweetly bizarre). There was one featuring all these couples, with the men talking about how their inability to perform had hurt their relationships, but that now things were great, and another with a guy racing home early to clean the house and make a candlelit dinner for his wife. What was also cool about these ads is how sexy the older women in them were. It's a familiar cliché that Hollywood has no place for older women to be sexy (though Rene Russo and Michelle Pfeiffer have turned that cliché on its head recently). But Pfizer, at least, does. Which is a good thing.

One other TV note: This article in the Times on Court TV's new series "Confessions," which is going to feature the unedited confessions of dismemberers, serial killers, and jaywalkers ("the Nobody Beats the Wiz store was in the middle of the block, so I just sprinted across the street"), has one fantastic line, after a quote from some pundit saying the network must be "desperate" to run this kind of show. "But while Court TV programmers do not dispute that they want high ratings for the program, they took issue with the word 'desperate.' "

Best,
Jim