ESPN Golf

I usually save the Item That May Interest Only Me for later in the column, but the fact that the Houston Open has had more homes (11) than Elizabeth Taylor has had husbands (8) seemed more relevant up top. So after nearly a dozen different venues in 58 tournaments, the music stops (for now, anyway) at the new Rees Jones-David Toms Tournament Course at Redstone, which is across the street from the Peter Jacobsen-Jim Hardy layout at the same complex, the tournament's home the last three years.

Without going into too much detail, I'll sum up the new course by deferring to architecture whiz and colleague Ron Whitten, who said of it after a recent visit, "Basically, I was playing a kinder, gentler, Rees Jones version of Pete Dye's TPC at Sawgrass, without all the spectator mounds."

I'm sure more than one player in this week's field hopes it's a lot kinder and gentler given the way Sawgrass played last month.

Things are finally clicking for Aaron Baddeley. The young Aussie says he finally feels comfortable with his swing changes after picking up his first career win in Hilton Head last week. It was just another example of how good Australia, a nation of only 20 million people (by comparison, New York City has 8 million people), is as a sporting nation, as Baddeley put it. This tiny nation has now produced four winners and three runners-up so far this year.

Can there be anyone hotter on the planet who isn't actually hot than Vijay Singh? The last time Singh, who has seven top-10s in nine tournaments this year, went this deep into a season without a win was 1998. His first victory that year didn't come until the PGA Championship at Sahalee. At one point during the second round of this year's Masters, Singh was seven under par. If he'd played even par the rest of the way, that would have been good enough to force a playoff with Phil Mickelson. That's easier said than done at a place like Augusta National, but the point is, if it's not one thing with Singh, it appears to be another. He was as comfortable as he'd been all year with his putter going into The Masters, then saw his iron game self-destruct mid-tournament. Maybe returning to Houston, where he has won three of the last four years, will help. But with the way Singh is playing right now, it's anybody's guess.

This is irrelevant to this week's tournament, but according to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Tiger Woods was telling friends he won more than $500,000 playing blackjack on a recent visit to Sin City (or I guess in this case, it would be Cha-Ching City). That's about $200,000 more than he won at this year's Masters, where he finished third.

It's too tempting to pick Singh, so I'm going with another hard-luck guy this season in Greg Owen. He lips out putts like he actually means to do it, but the rest of his game is incredibly underrated. Owen is a tremendous ball-striker and a great scrambler, and he finished T-4 at Houston last year.

Brian Wacker is an assistant editor for GolfDigest.com.