As further proof that Yani Tseng is the planet's most underrated athlete, today's lead column topic will be on a 26-year-old Tennessee Tech product named Scott Stallings.

Yes. That Scott Stallings.

I know, I know. Tseng made history, winning her fifth major championship at age 22 at the Women's British Open at Carnoustie, and she's the best in the world. I addressed her criminal lack of fame in a column when she won her last major a scant five weeks ago.

And still, she is overshadowed again, this time by two names – one anonymous, one world-famous.

Stallings, of course, is the little-known player. He was fun to watch on Sunday at the PGA Tour stop at The Greenbrier Classic in West Virginia, bombing it an average 325 yards off the tee. The new champion gave a good reaction when making birdie on the playoff hole, tossing his putter to the ground and thrusting his arms aloft in disbelief. The kid is a fresh face. He even said he attended a Black Eyed Peas concert Friday night and a Keith

Think of all the things that have happened between Oct. 9, 2005, and July 24, 2011.

The iPhone was invented. The Oval Office changed hands from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Even Tiger Woods has lived about 43 lifetimes in that time span. Between those dates, he won four majors, urged Jaimee Grubbs to change her outgoing voice mail and fell from No. 1 in the world to his current rank of No. 21.

What also occurred during that time span was the golf career of John Daly, continuing, unnoticed, spinning wheels in a ditch.

In that nearly six-year span, Daly did the following:

• Lost his exempt status on the PGA Tour.

• Lost swing coach Butch Harmon, who said the most important thing in Daly's life was not golf but getting drunk.

• Was picked up by the cops when drunk outside a Hooters restaurant in North Carolina.

• Got suspended by the PGA Tour for six months.

• Had lap-band surgery and lost 40 pounds.

• Started an endorsement career with Loudmouth Golf, wearing outrageous plaids and

Sometimes in golf writing, we try too hard to draw neat lines and boundaries and discern storylines, trends and questions: Like, what’s up with American golf? Who is the next Tiger? Is golf suffering from too many first-time winners?

And then along comes a story like Darren Clarke.

Along comes a 42-year-old with a famous name in golf, but with no major wins. Along comes a player we all remember from the early 2000s, but a player who hasn’t finished top-10 in a major since 2001. Along comes a guy who professes his love of drink and people, of good cheer and perspective – but a guy who was believed to be fading from the golfing landscape, despite a European Tour win in May, his first in three years, his world ranking a lowly 111th.

Along comes a Guinness-bellied gent who is gregarious, who smiles and laughs, but someone who has been dealt a devastating blow in life, losing his wife, Heather, in 2006. She was the mother of his two sons, dead of breast cancer at age 39.

Along comes Darren

The same way Al Capone controlled Chicago, the same way Suge Knight controlled hip-hop – that's the way Steve Stricker controls the John Deere Classic.

Don't even think about stopping Stricker in Moline, Ill. The Midwestern boy may talk like Beaver Cleaver, but he'll carve your heart out and have it with bacon for breakfast. The Cheesehead Assassin fears no man at the John Deere, and if that means burying your golf soul in the dirt underneath the rusted-out tractors in the faraway field where nobody finds it for decades, well, so be it.

For Stricker, three consecutive wins at the John Deere is one thing. Becoming only the ninth player since World War II to win the same event thrice consecutively is another. The "Stricker Swagger" gains steam when you learn he's the only player to have multiple wins in each of the last three seasons on the PGA Tour.

That he did it with a birdie-birdie close to clip promising young rookie Kyle Stanley by one shot shows the 44-year-old has a finishing

On the weekend Nick Watney – talented but essentially bland – rolled to his second big win of the year, and on the weekend Rickie Fowler wound up looking silly dressed in orange while disappointing on Sunday yet again, and on a weekend where Bubba Watson had to apologize to the continent of Europe via Twitter, I found myself missing the hell out of Tiger Woods.

See, I just finished an advance copy of the novel "The Swinger," co-written by Sports Illustrated golf aces Michael Bamberger and Alan Shipnuck. Bamberger and Shipnuck did what excellent writers do – they wrote a book that had to be written, taking the mind-blowing events of Tiger's downfall and putting them into the fictional form of multiracial golf superstar Tree Tremont, a sex-addicted international icon whose world comes tumbling down when his perfect home life is blown up, one sordid revelation at a time.

I won't reveal too much about the entertaining book that essentially details Tiger's tumble, except to say it's a

The good news for Yani Tseng is: She's awesome. She hits her golf ball long and true; she hits her irons crisply and with authority; she putts well and plays the game with the demeanor and attitude of a winner. She's a record-setter, a barrier-smasher and a major champion four times over after a McIlroy-ian 10-stroke romp over the field at the LPGA Championship in Rochester. She smiles and waves, does interviews gracefully and has the golf world at her feet.

The bad news for Yani Tseng is: Nobody knows who she is.

I find this disconcerting.

Granted, my survey-taking skills are unscientific, not to mention that the LPGA Tour falls just short of the NFL in TV ratings, so that may affect the results. But I asked four sports-fan friends of mine – some of whom work in the media industry professionally – what they thought of Yani Tseng's historic win. After all, Tseng just became the youngest ever to win four majors, man or woman, and each one responded:

"Huh?"

There were the obligatory

We need some mood music. Somebody cue Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be An American" and play it at a super-slow, morbid pace.

Or we could go New Orleans-style. The Crescent City does funerals well. Somebody get those umbrellas and Dixieland jazz bands and start the march. Put the casket at the back of the march. Paint on its side: "AMERICAN GOLF, 1913-2011. REST IN PEACE."

Rory McIlroy is the record-setting U.S. Open champion after barnstorming Congressional Country Club. McIlroy is from Northern Ireland. Dating to last year's U.S. Open at Pebble, that marks five consecutive major winners who have no idea what the words "gallantly streaming" mean.

Northern Ireland's Graeme McDowell, South Africa's Louis Oosthuizen, Germany's Martin Kaymer, South Africa's Charl Schwartzel and now McIlroy are your last five champions – the first time in the modern era of major championships, since the Masters was born in 1934, the Americans have gone 0-5 in any stretch.

I don't want to say the American slump

No better way to prepare us for this week’s U.S. Open golf championship than for Harrison Frazar to bag his first win in 355 tries, at the tender age of 39. After all, in a golf year with no direction or sense – Who wants to be No. 1? Who the heck are these guys winning on the PGA Tour? Who guessed Tiger Woods would be this absent and ineffective? President Obama is playing a round with Speaker of the House John Boehner? Will there be blood? – we might as well welcome another unlikely story to the front burner.

Make no mistake, Frazar’s story is a great one. He penned a first-person column in Sports Illustrated in March, an open-book read into the life of a pro golfer: how much he missed his family, how much his body ached, how much he wanted to win but never could, how much he questioned his mental state in a game that he alternately loved but could not tame. Frazar essentially said in the piece, "All I want is one win, for my kids, for my wife, for my coach, for my friends, and I