Real Crane in business at Torrey Pines as Tiger talk episode fades

SAN DIEGO -- Ben Crane is so level-headed and low key, his standing pulse rate is about two heart ticks above flat-lining and one above comatose.

He is not an excitable boy.

"I'm trying not to be surprised by anything," the 33-year-old said Thursday, "and trying to stay in the moment."

Given the way he handled a five-alarm fire in mid-December, the fact that Crane was able to max out a 7-under 65 in the first round of the Farmers Insurance Open should hardly have been a surprise.

Crane, playing the North Course about as well as the absent world No. 1 might have if he were here, hit 17 of 18 greens and cruised within a stroke of the first-round lead. With the greater golf industry mourning missing Tiger Woods, who traditionally made Torrey his season starting point and has seven professional wins at this site, Crane did a capable imitation.

Fair enough.

Somebody did a pretty fair job of pretending to be Crane a few weeks back.

Crane represents Exhibit A among the cautionary lessons that, hopefully, were learned during the evolving media circus that still encircles Woods today. That is, when gossip and celeb sites are using un-bylined stories and paying sources for information, the veracity of those stories can surely be hit and miss.

With Crane, it was an outright whiff.

On Dec. 10, the celebrity magazine Life & Style posted a story in which Crane torched Woods for being a fraud and hypocrite. The attributed passage was: ""This is no surprise to anyone who knows Tiger. He's a phony and a fake and he can't retain that squeaky-clean endorsement deal any longer."

Thus began the PR scramble.

Ben Crane hits 17 of 18 greens for a 7-under 65 in the first round at Torrey Pines. (Getty Images)

Crane, at home in Texas, got a frantic phone call from his manager, Tommy Limbaugh. Newspapers, networks and other outlets, caught up in the Woods frenzy and perhaps using material that might not have been considered for publication in the past, ran with the story. The magazine's editor claimed a freelance writer had gathered the quote from Crane at the PGA Tour Qualifying School Finals, staged in West Palm Beach, Fla., a week earlier.

"It was obviously a huge surprise when Tommy called and said, there's a quote, and I said, 'That's funny, I haven't given an interview in five weeks,' " Crane said.

The online report was erroneous in so many regards, it's amazing Crane didn't have an aneurism. His unflappability, if there's such a term, was pushed to the red line.

Crane wasn't at Q-school, because he was already fully exempt for 2010 after finishing a comfortable 51st on the 2009 money list. He wasn't within a thousand miles of Florida, period. Then there's the incomprehensible notion, for anybody who has ever spoken more than a sentence to Crane, that he would ever utter anything that inflammatory to begin with.

Crane, deeply religious and as respectful as anybody with a tour card, might be the last guy who would ever pop off in such a public manner, especially about an iconic figure like Woods. But once the story was loosed in cyberspace, it was hard to erase.

"Once something is out there, how do you pull it back when it's wrong?" Limbaugh told CBSSports.com at the time. "When the bloggers get hold of it, how do you fix it?"

Limbaugh contacted several national outlets and implored them to help clean up the misunderstanding. Apparently, the magazine writer spoke with somebody at Q-school who claimed to be Crane, and the writer didn't know the difference.

"It was just kind of a bummer that someone would lie and make it up," Crane said.

Crane said he learned a few lessons in spin control. Usually, though, this type of crisis management comes when a guy has done something wrong. Crane was home playing with his kids.

"What I didn't realize about the situation was just because I didn't say it doesn't mean that I don't need to try to put out the fire and let people know," he said.

Crane, a quiet sort with two PGA Tour victories to his credit, had to take the offensive.

"We all tried to call all the sources that we knew and say, look, I didn't say it," he said.

Crane even asked a tour official to send word to Woods that he had been painted with a false brush. It probably speaks to Crane's unruffled character that he didn't get too upset over the affair, when most people might have gone ballistic.

That's probably a trait that will hold him in good stead if he remains among the leaders this week at a tournament site dominated by the absentee in question.

"I can understand if I said it, it might be frustrating or hurtful or whatever that now all of a sudden it's all over the national news," he said. "I didn't say it. My friends knew I didn't say it, and people that know me know I really don't run my mouth on things