By DONALD F. BROWN /PRESIDENT, TIME CANADA

admit it: I love golf. As you can see from the photo accompanying this letter to you, my form on the links (the picture was taken at Toronto's Glen Abbey golf club) is not quite as impressive as that of, say, Tiger Woods, but the enthusiasm, I hope, shows through. It is an enthusiasm shared by an extraordinary number of Canadians over the age of 12--nearly 4.8 million, according to the Royal Canadian Golf Association--and by an extraordinary number of TIME Canada readers--roughly 500,000, or 25% of our estimated readership.

It's precisely because of that enthusiasm that we've decided to offer all our readers a bonus for the next 11 weeks during the (alas, all too brief) golfing season. Starting with the issue in your hands, we'll be publishing as many as six pages a week of news and features on the sport, produced by the people who know the game best, the editors at our sister publication SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. The SI pages, known as Golf Plus, will also appear in demographically selected copies of that magazine in the U.S., where they will be specifically targeted at readers with a known preference for the game.

The subjects will range across, well, almost everything, from this week's musing over the future of the Master's tournament to profiles of interesting pros. In general, the emphasis will most likely be on the human element of the game. Both SI and TIME think the best way to tell a story is through people. That's been a founding principle of our journalism since the days of Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, and we hope to remain true to it.

Why golf? Well, because it's spring. More seriously, because it's a sport that so many of our readers, both male and female, participate in rather than just enjoy as fans, and that they take part in throughout their lives. And also because of the sheer diversity of the canvas that the sport of golf offers to SI's editors and writers, as we hope this week's offerings demonstrate.

We want to know what you think about this experiment. In order to assist you in responding, we've included a brief, postage-paid questionnaire with these pages. We appreciate the time you take in filling it out. We hope it's not time taken away from your favorite golf course. Who knows? Maybe I'll see you there.