They took their swings

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo and singer Justin Timberlake didn't come close to qualifying for this week's US Open, but they proved to be decent players, breaking 100 last Friday on the tough Torrey Pines South Course. The pair joined "Today" host Matt Lauer in trying to disprove Tiger Woods's theory that a 10-handicapper couldn't break 100 on a US Open course. Romo, who boasts a 2.2 handicap, was the low man in the group, with a 13-over 84. Timberlake (6.0 handicap), suffering from allergies, finished second, at 27-over 98. Lauer (6.2) carded a 100 on the par-71 course, while contest winner John Atkinson (8.1) had a 114.

Jack Black's Po the panda got the best of Adam Sandler's Zo the hairdresser at the box office. The cartoon comedy "Kung Fu Panda" pulled in $60 million over the weekend to debut as the No. 1 movie, while Sandler's salon romp "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" opened in second place with $40 million, according to studio estimates yesterday. Overall, it was a big weekend for Hollywood. The top 12 films took in $172.4 million, up 32 percent from the same weekend last year when "Ocean's Thirteen" led with a $36.1 million opening. "Panda" and "Zohan" bumped off the previous weekend's leader, the chick flick "Sex and the City," which slipped to fourth place with $21.3 million. That was a steep 63 percent decline from its $56.8 million debut, but with a total of $99.3 million, "Sex and the City" was just shy of $100 million hit status after only 10 days. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was No. 3 with $22.8 million, raising its three-week domestic total to $253 million.

The New York City Opera has commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on "Brokeback Mountain," the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx that was the basis for a 2005 movie that won three Academy Awards. The opera is scheduled to premiere in spring 2013. It'll be City Opera's second Wuorinen premiere, following "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," which was based on a Salman Rushdie novel and opened in October 2004. "Ever since encountering Annie Proulx's extraordinary story I have wanted to make an opera on it, and it gives me great joy that Gerard Mortier and New York City Opera have given me the opportunity to do so," Wuorinen said in a statement. "Brokeback Mountain" is a cowboy romance about two ranch-hand buddies who start a homosexual affair when they meet on the fictional mountain in 1963.

Patrick Swayze's going back to work. The actor, who says he's been responding well to treatment for pancreatic cancer, is set to star in the A&E drama "The Beast" alongside Aussie actor and former "Tarzan" star Travis Fimmel. "I have searched for quite a long time to find a character that is this multilayered, unpredictable, and downright entertaining, as well as a project this current and cutting edged," Swayze, 55, said in a statement. In the series, the actor stars as a veteran FBI agent who is assigned to teach his rookie partner (Fimmel) his eccentric undercover crime-solving methods while secretly being investigated by an Internal Affairs team. Swayze is currently undergoing care at Stanford University Medical Center and will continue his course of treatment during filming. The original pilot for the A&E series was shot last December, just three months before the actor revealed his cancer diagnosis.

"The actors were wonderful. And I didn't care about the sets or anything like that or the cheesy spaceship." - Actor William Shatner, talking about the original "Star Trek" series