The big story of the weekend is Tom Watson. Sure, Stewart Cink is the British Open Champion today -- and a long-awaited and deserved Major Champion he is -- but Watson was the story all weekend long.

Sitting just off the fairway on 18 with a one-stroke lead and needing only a par to win the British Open at age 59, Watson faltered, bogeying the hole and eventually losing to Cink in a playoff.

It was heart-wrenching. It made you sick to watch. But was it the better “story?” Nick and I debate if this is the better ending to the movie Kevin Costner will undoubtedly make about the 2009 Open Championship (I hope they give Cink an evil mustache in the adaptation).

The saddest part of watching Watson miss the putt on 18 and fall apart during the playoff is that we knew -- and he knew -- this was his last chance at something like this. This isn’t a guy like Mickelson who has years left on his career. This was, presumably, Watson’s last real chance...the darkest of all horses in the Open race.

Of course, his success led many on Friday (and over the weekend) to spark the debate of whether or not golf is a sport. We discuss that discussion because, clearly, golf is a sport, and those who say otherwise are just looking for people to react to them and trying to get attention. Go walk and carry 36 on a hot summer day and tell me golf isn’t a sport. The fact is, the sport has been around for 150 years, so why do current American sportswriters get to decide if it’s a sport or not because a 59-year old man was in contention of one of the bigger tournaments? It’s ridiculous. Tell Tiger Woods’ knees that golf isn’t a sport.

And yes, for full disclosure, we feel that any sport that needs judging to determine the winner isn’t a sport. There is no denying the athleticism involved in gymnastics or diving or figure skating...we just think it’s something different. Athletic competition, surely. So we understand the irony here.

The Weekend That Was:

We talk about the US National (B) team’s visit to Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. The event was great, the crowd was into the matches (especially the thousands of Honduran fans who showed up) and the US won, which is the most important thing, we suppose.

Or was it? There were just over 31,000 fans at the match, and while the Sons of Ben and Sam’s Army did their best to make the event as raucous as possible, the half-empty stadium was rather sad to see. Granted, the crowd may have been better if casual soccer fans had heard of any of the players on the field (honestly, there were five or six starters whose names I had never read at all, let alone in conjunction with the USMNT.) But with the city getting an MLS team next season, shouldn’t more fans in Philly start paying attention to soccer? We have a great local sports city, but is Philly a great US sports city?

It also leads to the discussion about the Union’s presence in the City of Brotherly Love. Will the new MLS team get a foothold in the city and become part of the overall coverage in the papers, blogs and radio and TV? Or will the team be relegated to the Soul/Wings/Phantoms level -- do something in the playoffs and maybe we’ll talk about you?

Whether you like soccer or not, this is about civic pride. The Philadelphia Union is coming next year and it’s our responsibility to root on the local teams. Nick, who has said he’s not a soccer guy, has even agreed to come to a few matches. We discuss if the team will be successful and if it’s more an indictment on the region, not the MLS, if they aren’t.

Print’s Not Dead:

Walter Cronkite died on Friday evening...the worst time to die. Had he died earlier in the week, he’d be the lead story on every news broadcast, but now, things have happened since then, and with Cronkite being 92 and of ill-health, it was no surprise that he had passed. We hope those out there give as much attention (knowing we/they won’t) to his death as they would Michael Jackson, because Cronkite meant every bit as much to his industry as Jackson meant to his.

Cronkite deserves his day. Hopefully he gets more of the adulation a man of his stature is due.

I jokingly said to my daughter yesterday that her grandmother was reading something called a ‘newspaper’ and that it was like ‘a living dinosaur.’ Can you believe that my daughter may never read a newspaper in her adult life? I find that hard to believe. But the times are a changin’.

Completely shifting gears before we end the show, people asked us about the Erin Andrews peep hole tape. We haven’t seen it. We won’t see it. Taping someone through their door in a hotel is about the worst invasion of privacy (tantamount to hiding cameras in their home) you can do to someone. It’s criminal. It’s sick. There is no news merit to it, and we hope whoever is responsible for the video goes to jail for a long time. Before I go off on a rant, Nick brings up the logistics of it all, wondering how one can film into something you aren’t supposed to see into anyway. Frankly, I’m not sure I want to know.

Grant Wahl from Sports Illustrated on tomorrow to talk about his new book, The Beckham Experiment. Thanks for hanging with us today.