Morning Miscellany

It's a lethargic morning in Park City, as I acclimate to the altitude and slowly get my act together to hit the mountain.  I have a couple of longer pieces in conceptual development and there's not much actual golf news, so a few bones is all I can offer.  Not even enough to justify the F&J brand, so keep your expectations appropriately low.

• The new SI/Golf+ Digital Mag is out, and while I've not had the chance to leaf through it, I did watch this Alan Shipnuck video tour of Pebble.  Alan knows his stuff, but the curious thing is that the first point he makes is that each nine starts with gentle inland holes then the routing heads to the sea.  Huh?  That's true of the front nine, though the early holes could as well be characterized as nondescript.  But the tenth is the last of the iconic stretch of ocean-front hole, the routing then heads straight inland until the 17th.  In any event, it's worth a gander and there's a bonus Kate Upton reference for Maggot.

• Gary Van Sickle has a feature at golf.com delightfully called Van Cynical's Mailbag that is typically worth a read, as he's delightfully cynical.  An example:

Sickle, Did Bubba blame the read on his caddie again?! --Jon Hardy via Twitter

Not necessarily. He was merely expressing his surprise at the break. You know how Tour pros love to act out over a miss to prove it’s not their fault. It was the damn gravity again. That bitch.

That's a hardy perennial  in my line of work, comedy gold as they say.  Miss a five-footer, look quizzically at your looper, tamp down a spike mark, rinse and repeat.  The putt was a horrible shove lacking any commitment, and didn't even threaten the cup, admittedly a shame since he had made some great strokes down the stretch, particularly on No. 17.

• Shackelford posts a longish piece on the Enhansed Doral, which he undersells be titling it a Kneejerk Reaction.   Well worth a read for his thoughts on Hanse's changes, but this is his close:

Overall, the most stunning thing about Trump Doral? No gold crests! The Donald took the Sheikdom accoutrements down many notches, which only adds to the sophisticated and revitalized Blue Monster.

 OK, glad to hear about the absence of gold crests, though there was this modest detail:

• One last item from the Shack, who links to this item from an unusual source, The Property Observer.  The nut graphs:

Golfer Adam Scott has listed his A$7 million Mediterranean-style villa on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi.

And to drum up interest he is offering to play a round of 18 holes with whoever  buys the Saadiyat Beach property.

The piece reports that Scott bought the property for about the same price, but has never lived in it.  Think these guys rake in some bucks?