In the continuation of his insight to life as a GOLF Channel broadcaster in Hawaii, Grant Boone relays how he is responsible for Dottie Pepper's new career, Hawaii's best masseusse, and why he is more like Albert Brooks than Tom Cruise.

By Grant Boone, Special to PGA.com

First off, before we resume the riveting recap of my grueling week slaving over a hot microphone at the LPGA Fields Open in Hawaii, GMT sends out its congrats to Mark Wilson, who -- with his playoff victory Monday morning at the Honda Classic -- not only moves up to seventh on the money list but also becomes the second-most popular sports-related "Wilson," right behind Tom Hanks' volleyball in the Oscar-nominated film "Cast Away."

Condolences are in order for the Honda Classic's three playoff castaways: Camilo Villegas (pronounced "villegas"), Jose Coceres (pronounced "ho-ZAY"), and Boo Weekley (pronounced with a heavy drawl). (Confession: until I met him at Q-School in 2001, I thought Boo Weekley was the title of a Halloween newsletter.)

In crunching the numbers from Mark Wilson's maiden Tour title, I may well have unwittingly discovered a matrix of disturbingly interconnected events of what my buddy Seidman would call ergolonomic proportions. ("Ergolonomic" is not really a word, at least in English, but it's so stinkin' polysyllabic and Seidman says it with such conviction that most people just nod and think, "This is a man to be reckoned with." Actually, he is -- but not for his vocabulary.)

Follow along at your own risk.

1. In "Cast Away," Hanks' character, Chuck Noland, is an executive with? FedEx.
2. Seven years later, the PGA Tour creates a season-long points race, culminating in a playoff at the Tour Championship. The sponsor? You guessed it, FedEx.
3. Mark Wilson shares a name with the aforementioned "Cast Away" volleyball, which most agree was robbed as Best Supporting Actor at the 2001 Oscars.
4. The winner of the Best Supporting Actor in '01? Benecio del Toro, whose name in English means "international delivery company of the volleyball." (More reputable Spanish-English lexica suggest "toro" means "bull," which probably best describes my first translation.)
5. With his victory Monday morning, where does Wilson stand in the FedEx Cup points race? Right again, seventh.
6. When you multiply 7 by the number of playoff holes it took for Wilson to win, 3, you get 21. Add 2 for the number of kidneys Wilson has, and you come up with The Number 23, which, as Jim Carrey's latest movie of the same name has proven, everything in life eventually adds up to ... though sometimes it takes Stephen Hawking and the occasional quantum physics application or two to get there.
7. How old I was when I owned my first Honda? (Trembling?) 23.

Consider the evidence. Coincidence? Obviously. Ironic? Barely. Interesting? Not even remotely. Conspiracy? Only if:

a) you're a long-time listener/first-time caller to the Art Bell show; or

b) you're Ann Coulter, whose sophomoric sortie aimed at John Edwards over the weekend -- was reprehensible even by her standards and will hopefully remove her once and for all from the mainstream of public discourse, allowing opposing candidates and parties to return to their merely despicable antics. (A close second in shamelessness went to Edwards' website for encouraging supporters to raise $100,000 in "Coulter Cash" to -- and I quote -- "keep this campaign charging ahead and fight back against the politics of bigotry." Sorry, John. In a GMT exclusive, I'm outing you: as a phony fundraiser. I've spent enough time in development -- which itself is a euphemistic term for "asking people for their money" -- to recognize that smell. The Edwards team could've responded with something genuine, such as, "Folks, this was nothing more than a radical Right Winger with a broad vocabulary" -- (also acceptable would've been, "Folks, this was nothing more than a broad with a radical Right Wing vocabulary") -- "trying to get a little face time on the Sunday shows and sell a few books. The reality is, I do need your financial support to become the next President. But please don't give because I was the butt of a bad joke or because you don't like Ann Coulter. Give because you believe in me." Instead, the Edwards website concocted "Coulter Cash" in hopes of preying upon the choler -- a foundational fundraising tenet: people give emotionally, not rationally -- of those who are either pro-Edwards, Ann-ti Coulter, or both. This is why almost everyone I know hates politics.

Lest Coulter write a scathing tome about this column -- "Golfless" -- let's get back to the game.

All great tales of Hawaii are told in multiple parts, as evidenced by the classic "Brady Bunch" three-episode extravaganza in which Bobby finds the tabu in a cave and immediately puts his entire family in mortal danger. Now that's comedy!

Meanwhile, we left off the recap of my week anchoring Golf Channel's coverage of the Fields Open in Hawaii as morning was breaking on day one of the tournament and our first broadcast.

Thursday, February 22
(all times are local)
4:55 a.m. -- Up early again. Still haven't adjusted to the time zone. I head down to the lobby of the Ihilani Resort for coffee. I bump into Australian Wendy Doolan, a three-time LPGA winner who a year ago at this time was cracking two of her ribs during a workout. This week would go better for Doolan. She instead cracked the top 10 with all three rounds under par. Plus the free coffee.

8:30 a.m. -- Breakfast with Dottie Pepper. We go through the buffet and over that day's upcoming show, as well as catch up on the events of each other's lives. (Note: The food was delicious, if not a bit pricy. The good news is that you can get a second mortgage on your home while you eat, thus creating the necessary cash flow to go ahead and pick up the check.)

I like to tell people I'm responsible for Pepper's burgeoning career in golf media, which includes not only her work with Golf Channel but with NBC and Sports Illustrated, too. Mind you, it's patently false, but I still like to say it. As her playing career was winding down, I snagged Pepper and had her join me in the booth at the Evian Masters one year. It was obvious from the first words out of her mouth that her immediate future after competitive golf would be spent calling golf on TV. She has everything you want in a booth analyst, including:

1) The ability to tell what's going on in a golf tournament and then articulate it to an audience which only knows and loves the game from outside the ropes.

2) The ability to pull off No. 1 with copious credibility. Pepper won 17 times on Tour, including two majors, played in the first six Solheim Cups, won a Player of the Year Award and a Vare Trophy. And in 1992, Pepper finally rid herself of the "Best Player Who's Never Won A Tournament With Dan Forsman" tag by taking home the JCPenney mixed team event.

3) The willingness to say something she knows might not be received well in the locker room but that she thinks needs to be said. More on that later.

The point is, we had breakfast.

1:15 p.m. -- Rehearsal. Fifteen minutes before air, we do a quick run through the opening of the show, having already discussed where we're going at the production meeting 45 minutes before. It's my first Golf Channel event in 18 months. I'm getting the shpilkis. Talk amongst yourselves. (Quick aside: my spell-check software didn't recognize "shpilkis," which tells me it didn't waste hours of its misguided youth watching Saturday Night Live and the subsequent reruns. As alternatives, spell-check offered me "spikes," "splices," "shrikes," and "syphilis." I experienced many things in Hawaii, but I can assure you, shrikes were not among them. Moving on.)

1:30 p.m. -- You are looking live at a sold-out Ko Olina Golf Club in Kapolei, Hawaii! We're on the air. The lights go on and right on cue, I begin sweating profusely. Realizing we're not broadcasting in HDTV until Phoenix in a couple of weeks, I hold perfectly still as I listen to Dottie answer a question. I feel like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible as he and that single drop of perspiration dangle dangerously over the floor at CIA Headquarters but probably look more like Albert Brooks as the heavy-sweating anchorman in "Broadcast News."

3:05 p.m. -- Heads up. Dottie's mid-show snack squirts out the wrong end of the wrapper and all over her shirt. This helps explain why she so doggedly held on to the controversial dry cleaning clause during contract negotiations.

3:20 p.m. -- Ten minutes left in the show. A nice, tidy broadcast goes nuts. Cristie Kerr's ball at the par-3 12th is teetering on a slope in the green, and she's having trouble replacing it in front of her coin. Like someone in a movie theater yelling at the woman who doesn't see the monster creeping up behind her, I suggest Kerr not sole her club, lest she make it move. Sure enough, she addresses it, puts the putter behind the ball, pulls it away, and it begins rolling down the slope. Instead of replacing the ball to its original position and taking a one-stroke penalty, Kerr plays it from where it came to rest. She two-putts for what she thinks is par. We begin debating the rules and ramifications of what Kerr's just done, all while producer Beth Hutter is trying to figure out how in the world we can squeeze a complicated issue into the remaining few moments of air.

3:30 p.m. -- We're done. To quote Ron Burgundy: "Nice work, everyone. Sharp broadcast. Really good. Everyone on the floor as well. Really a lot of hustle. I liked it."

5:15ish p.m. -- Behind closed doors, Kerr confers with LPGA rules officials in the Golf Channel compound to review the incident at the 12th. Official Doug Brecht determines Kerr caused the ball to move, which when combined with playing it from the wrong spot, results in a two-stroke penalty. Kerr disagrees with the ruling.

5:20 p.m. -- I go for a quick workout wearing what will forever be known as my jiggle shirt. It's one of those tight-fitting stretchy things my wife bought me a few weeks ago that reveals way more about my torso than anyone ever wanted to know. The paparazzi (read: Dottie) caught me at the pool in the midst of demonstrating the Whitney Houston weight loss plan, which involves hiking up one's shorts and "Waiting to Exhale." See here. This photograph, while personally humiliating, does once and for all confirm the widely-held notion that my Golf Channel colleague, Kay Cockerill, does indeed have all five toes on her left foot.

6:00 p.m. -- Deeply wounded from having my jiggliness caught on camera, I drown my sorrows in a deep-tissue massage. If you ever go to Oahu, stay at the Ihilani and get a massage. And make sure you ask for Linda. It could possibly change your life.

9:14 p.m. -- I'm losing an epic battle with my eyelids to remain awake. I'm glad to get the first day under my belt, which was easier because I'd hiked my belt as high as I had it in the picture.

Wednesday, March 7
I'm pushing 1,900 words and haven't made it past the first day on the air. You know what this means. I'll have to conclude this trilogy in next week's GMT. Listen, if three parts was good enough for the Bradys, it's good enough for me.

(Yes, I've already counted. When you take the six Brady kids plus guest star Don Ho, multiply by the number of Hawaii episodes, and add Mr. and Mrs. Brady...)

Grant Boone is a husband, father, golf broadcaster, and sports journalist based in Abilene, Texas. His column appears on PGA.com each Wednesday and every day during major championships and other big events. He can be contacted at pgagrant@hotmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed here do not reflect those of PGA.com or The PGA of America.