Good Thing He Didn’t Play From Back Tees

It was a round of golf Andre Tolme will never forget, one that he finished with an eagle -- but with a 506 for the hole and a 12,170 on his final scorecard.

And he still almost was par for the course.

The course: Mongolia. As in the entire country. Tolme, 35, a civil engineer from New Hampshire, divided its length into 18 holes measuring up to 196,000 yards long.

It took Tolme nine months to complete the 1,234-mile layout -- over a terrain once ruled by Genghis Kahn -- with an estimated par of 11,880.

Using only a three-iron, traveling in a Jeep with a local guide, he lost 509 golf balls and spent much of his time battling the elements -- relentless heat and strong winds -- and fending off bubonic plague-carrying marmots.

Why did Tolme do it? “Because I wanted to,” he told Associated Press.

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Trivia time: What is the U.S. men’s basketball team’s record in Olympic competition?

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Yellow fever: Denver Nugget forward Carmelo Anthony, on why he has publicly guaranteed an Olympic gold medal for the U.S. basketball team: “I guess that’s going to make the Games more fun,” he said. “Right now, teams are not scared of us no more. Why not hype the Games up? It’s the Olympics. We’re having fun, man. We’ve got to go over there and win.”

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Mr. Morose: HBO presented a feature Saturday on the history of cutmen in boxing and profiled Joe Souza, who has worked his magic in Arturo Gatti’s corner. Asked why he loves his job, Souza remarked, “I guess I have a passion for blood. My lifelong dream was to be a mortician.”

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Fast times: Two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves, asked by ESPN the Magazine what an alternate career choice might be:

“I like driving so much, I’d probably be a chauffeur. Hopefully, I would chauffeur a lot of celebrities. Meg Ryan would be nice. Maybe Britney Spears, just to spice it up a little bit. But not too spicy!”

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Cold turkey: Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News announced recently that he was boycotting ESPN, saying it “has gotten bloated and maddeningly self-absorbed.”

The network “has always had a split personality,” Kawakami wrote. “Good ESPN, with tremendous reporters, excellent game coverage and a sense of responsibility; and Bad ESPN, which believes that the only way to cut through the clutter is to SHOUT LOUDER AND LOUDER and produce dumber and dumber shows.”

“Somewhere in the past few days,” the columnist reasoned, “it dawned on me that Bad ESPN had finally gobbled up good ESPN.”

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Trivia answer: The record is 109-2, with losses to the Soviet Union in 1972 and 1988.

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And finally: Australian rugby player Brendan Cannon, in an interview this week with Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, stood by his accusation that South African enforcer Bakkies Botha last year tried to gouge his eyes out. “It literally felt like he was going to pop my eyes out,” Cannon said. “I know it happened. I’ve got the marks on my face. It looks like I’ve been scratched by a ... very large panther.”