Soporific Sunday

Nobody seems to have much of anything to say on Planet Golf this morning, so what's a poor blogger without a single original  thought of his own to do?  At times like these one can only revert to the advice of the great sage Ton Lehrer, who urged us in such circumstances to, "Plagiarize...remember why the good Lord gave you eyes."

• Match-Play Humility - No one knows anything, William Goldman famously said about the movies, but he might as well have been a golf fan.  Though I will note that after starting the week in 1,680th place, I am currently in 134th place in the Golfweek bracket challenge.  Which simply means that everyone else's brackets are as red as my own.

I saw nothing of the Jason Day or Rickie Fowler wins, though I gather that Furyk gave Rickie the match on No. 18 (in a different sense than Sergio gave him the prior match).  I did see GMac's magic fail him, as it inevitably must, and saw the very end of the Els-Spieth match.  Shackelford pokes fun at himself for his Local Knowledge piece declaring Spieth a match-play wizard, only to see Jordan self-identify as a mental midget after his strangely desultory effort in the quarters.  The stream of exultant e-mails from Ulster has died down as the Portrush hometown boy heads back to Lake Nona.  

John Strege has a short item at Local Knowledge to the effec t that if Spieth ever solves his Saturday problems he'll be a force to reckon with.  That thought occurred to me as well, though he's also gone the wrong way on some Sundays.  As I've noted previously, he's done a great job of getting himself in the hunt seemingly every week, now he's got to start finishing some of these opportunities.  But if there were a futures market for golfers, his would be one pricey contract.

Reader and friend Mark Williams writes from sunny Florida to jump on the Victor Dubuisson wagon, picking him to go all the way.....at Augusta.  Now I'm not even sure he's in the field at the Masters, yet.  Obviously a win this week would take care of that little detail.

Here's the Tour's Saturday highlight package: 

I'm liking Jason Day at this point, just because...CBS can't be terribly happy, but as we've discussed extensively, this event generates it's excitement in the first few days, and the most we can hope for is good skiing on the weekend.  Well, at least that's what I hope for... your mileage may vary.

• Ladies Day -  If the LPGA holds an event in the woods, does it make any noise?  I've confessed previously to an affection for the ladies' tour, but admittedly they don't make it easy.  They actually held an event this weekend in Thailand, though you'd have to expend some effort to know that.  The event was won by Anna Nordqvist, the Swede who burst on the scene by winning the 2009 LPGA Championship and virtually nothing since.  

Nordqvist is a strabgely short hitter for such a, how shall we phrase this, big-boned girl.  But this event may be more notable for the names that came after hers on the leaderboard, which include Inbee Park, Yani Tseng and Michelle Wie.  I should admit at this juncture that if I had completed my 2014 outlook post, it would have included my sense that Inbee was headed to Yani Tseng-land.  The LPGA would be helped if those three ladies could show up on leaderboards and television a bit more often.

•  SIG+D - Seriously guys, you have to give us something better to call you.  Another middling effort this week in my humble opinion.  The cover story was by Mike Bamberger questioning whether golf has a Michael Sam, i.e., have there been gay golfers on Tour?  The answer is likely yes, but why do you think we care about enough to put it on your cover?  Having established that this is beneath me, I will admit that in the good old days there was some idle speculation amongst the boys as to who on Tour might be gay, and that Davis Love's name was thrown around as much as any.  But we wre young and had no pretensions of being serious journalists...

Even the photography failed to inspire: 

Lee Westwood seeing the lights at Riviera.

This is a great photo, but it's from last year.  And only serves to remind us of who decided to give it a miss this year.