Scorecard

Tiger's TV Tricks
Ham with a Sand Wedge

Four takes in eight minutes. That's all Tiger Woods needed to make the 30-second Nike commercial in which he bounces a ball on the face of his sand wedge 49 times (above), then flips the ball up and fungoes it nearly 200 yards. "I can assure you there was no trick photography, no special effects," says Nike marketing director Chris Zimmerman.

Zimmerman says Woods's bouncing-ball trick, which debuted during Game 1 of the NBA Finals and aired during Tiger's near miss at the U.S. Open last weekend, has spurred more talk than any other Nike golf commercial. Yet it happened by accident. When Chuck McBride and Hal Curtis of the Portland-based advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy came to Orange County National Golf Center in Orlando last month, they brought scripts for five ads touting Nike's golf apparel and equipment Only one was to feature Woods, and it didn't include the bouncing ball. But between takes the ad guys saw Woods doing wedge tricks.

"We needed him to keep it going for 30 seconds, but each time he got to 20, Tiger dropped the ball," Zimmerman says. "He finally got it on the fourth try, then flipped the ball up and just hit the hell out of it."

NASCAR
Pocono's the Pits

For starters, you can't get there. The Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa., site of last week's Pocono 500, is 25 miles from Wilkes-Barre and a long race-day crawl even from Tannersville, which is basically an excuse for an outlet mall. Crowds of around 100,000 reach the track on roads barely wide enough to fit a yellow stripe down the middle, and they're funneled into the infield through a two-lane tunnel where traffic moves about as fast as Jeff Burton's car did after it crashed on Sunday. Not even Bobby Labonte, who won Sunday's four-hour dentathon, has much good to say about the place. "Bobby said it was his favorite track," said Labonte's crew chief, Jimmy Makar. "He was being facetious."

Pocono has been the butt of jokes for years. Aside from its decrepit garage, which was razed and rebuilt for $7 million last winter, there is the racecourse itself. It's a triangle—"an oval designed by committee," as one race regular puts it. The front stretch leads to Turn 1's 14-degree bank, which isn't much for cars moving at almost 200 mph. (Banking at Talladega, for instance, gets up to 33 degrees.) Next comes the eight-degree-banked tunnel turn, one of the toughest in the sport, and then it's on to Turn 3 with its six degrees of bank. It all makes for the flattest, funkiest, most treacherous venue on the otherwise streamlined Winston Cup circuit.

There's talk that Donald Trump and NASCAR president Bill France's International Speedway Corporation will steal Pocono's thunder with a new track closer to New York City, or that some other big wheel will buy Pocono from Joe Mattioli, the retired dentist who owns it. But the 74-year-old Mattioli plans to buck the Winston Cup trend and keep his property out of corporate hands. "I have no intention of selling," he said on Sunday morning, sitting under a POCONO sign near his track's new garage. "If they came down the walkway here with a wheelbarrow and $1 billion, it wouldn't matter. I don't need money."

On Sunday, Labonte took the checkered flag six car lengths ahead of Jeff Gordon, who has finished second three weeks in a row. Labonte wasn't griping after earning $151,110, but he did notice something very Pocono about the new garage. Unlike similar structures at other tracks, it has no garage doors.

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