Just a matter of hours after Ryo Ishikawa became the first player to shoot a 58 on any major professional golf tour, the Japanese teenager’s fellow prodigy Rory McIlroy shot a course record 62 to win his first PGA Tour title at the Quail Hollow Championship.

Cue excited conversations about how these achievements signal a changing of the guard in terms of golf’s dominating protagonists, fuelled further by Tiger Woods missed cut at Quail, only his sixth in his professional career and second in ten months.

Is such gossip justified or idle? A little bit of both, probably.

Ishikawa and McIlroy are hardly new to the golf stage and the limelight that goes with it. Read more…