John Holmes's blog

The European Tour’s powerful Tournament Committee meets Tuesday evening at the HSBC Abu Dhabi Golf Championship, and could select the 2014 European Ryder Cup captain at that get-together. With that possibility looming, the world of European golf was overflowing with Ryder Cup chatter.

It’s not clear how much input that Rory McIlroy has, but he capped off the weekend by voicing his opinion in favor of Paul McGinley.

So what did you do on Sunday? 2011 U.S. Amateur champion Kelly Kraft stacked this tower of golf balls.

Seems pretty cool to me, but someone wasn’t too impressed.

After Kraft tweeted out the photo of his dimpled skyscraper, he got a reply from Kevin Tway, the son of former PGA Champion Bob Tway and quite a golfer in his own right.

"u must be real bored haha," tweeted Tway.

"No big deal," responded Kraft, who clearly doesn't know a big deal when he sees one.

The temperature is dropping like a rock across much of the country this weekend, so I thought it was the perfect time to tell you about a new golf course being built on the north coast of Iceland.

Ben Hogan famously said that the secret to golf "is in the dirt." If any golfer can figure out whether or not that's actually true, it's Louis Oosthuizen.

Why, you ask? Well, the affable South African won himself an excavator on Friday at the Volvo Golf Champions.

A total of 15 players knocked drives over 400 yards last week at the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, which is about the norm these days on the mountainside layout at Kapalua – especially with last week's big winds whipping. But it was a drive halfway around the globe on Thursday that had the golf world talking.

The signings have been coming fast and furious since the calendar flipped to 2013, and Callaway has made the latest splash.

Late Wednesday night, Callaway announced the signing of Ryo Ishikawa. The 21-year-old sensation remains overwhelmingly popular in his native Japan and across Asia, and is a fast-rising star in the United States, where he will play a full PGA Tour schedule this year.

We've all been talking about the proposed ban on anchoring putting strokes for the last couple of months, but one man is doing something about it.

It's no surprise that our man is wily veteran and inveterate hard worker Vijay Singh. As our friend Alex Miceli of the Golf Channel notes, Singh has been spending hours on the putting green out at Waialae Country Club in advance of the Sony Open.

The 2013 season will be a huge one in golf, says Dan Talintyre, a featured columnist over at Bleacher Report. In fact, he says, 2013 is shaping up to be even greater than 2012, which of course, was bookended by Bubba Watson's amazing victory at the Masters and that record-setting European comeback at the Ryder Cup.

Why is he so enthusiastic about the year that's just begun? Well, he tells all in his column on the most exciting storylines of 2013.

If you really want to know what's going on in the car business, you can ask the carmakers – or you can get a broader perspective by asking companies that supply them with parts and pieces.  The same goes in golf.

The Jumeirah Group isn't renewing its five-year sponsorship with top-ranked Rory McIlroy, the luxury hotel chain has announced, which seemingly paves the way for the world's top-ranked golfer to finalize his much-rumored endorsement deal with Nike Golf.