We noted the other day that immediately after he fired Warren Spector, James Cayne shot a golf personal best, probably because stripping someone of his livelihood is a good way to tighten your wrist cock and improve the explosion through your hips. (I shot a 30 after firing Bressler). Today DealBook compares Bear Stearns’s closing stock price between June 14 and August 9 and Big Jim’s golf score. A 35 percent correlation between BSC’s price and Cayne’s score reveals that when Bear is down—which is most of the time—Cayne's game is down, too, by which we mean up, because that’s how golf is tallied, and if you don’t know that, you shouldn’t be reading this site.

Now, by personal best, we mean 88, which is not good at all, unless it’s amateur hour. The Bear Stearns press office, staffed—out of necessity—by con artists, came up with an excuse that would no doubt please shareholders worried that he was spending too much time away from the office: “[Mr. Cayne] regularly plans an evening round after work on Thursdays and again on Fridays,” and the reluctant CEO: “Why, you think he should spend more time on the green?”

The Bear Stearns Golf Index [DealBook]