I'm told we have some torrential rains coming tomorrow, which means that the bride shall be on sump pump detail. That forecast for tomorrow made the merely heavy rain to which I awoke this morning doubly depressing and as I find myself with far too many browser windows open, how about we blast through my blogging backlog?
Buckle in as this could go long...
Kunta, One-Upped - As noted in the prior post, golf-buddy Kent did great in yesterday's qualifying, but this is of a higher order:
Case Cochran has never played in a PGA Tour event. The Dallas native and former Texas
A&M player tried to qualify for the St. Jude Classic several years ago but he didn't make it. That all ends on Thursday when Cochran will tee it up for the Byron Nelson Championship.But it wasn't as mundane as it sounds.
Cochran made it through the Monday qualifier with a walk-off hole-in-one in extra holes to take the last spot for the tournament.
This shortly after he missed a five-foot birdie putt that also would have put him in.
So he misses from 5 feet and makes from 175 yards or something...yup, that's golf. Monday qualifying might just be the toughest test in golf. Typically there's more than 100 players fighting for maybe four slots, so they fire at every pin because you'll need a 64 or 65 to qualify.
Cochran, who is the son of Champions Tour player Russ Cochran, couldn't see the pin and didn't know it went in until he got to the hole:
“I punched it under the wind and it looked like it landed in front of pin,” said Cochran, “but we couldn’t see it. There were about 15 people on the tee watching us and that’s it. On the green, there was no reaction because there was nobody there.
“As I walking up, I’m still in grind mode thinking about making a good stroke and a good putt. I walk up and there’s no ball and a ball mark five feet in front of the hole.”
Monday qualifying legend Jason Alred, who we covered back during the West Coast Swing, also qualified by sinking a 40-foot putt earlier in the playoff.
Tasteless - The title isn't quite up to the task as Will Gray tells us:
Days after a caddie died on the course at the European Tour's Madeira Islands Open, an Australian newspaper has come under fire for reportedly publishing a cartoon making light of the situation.
Several tweets circulated Wednesday in response to a cartoon run by the Herald Sun about the situation. The Melbourne-based newspaper reportedly ran the cartoon above an article questioning the tournament's decision to resume play following MacGregor's death.
So, let me see if I can wrap my brain around this... The Melbourne Herald Sun believes that the Euro Tour was insufficiently sensitive to the tragic death of a caddie during a tour event, and they make that moralistic point while simultaneously running this cartoon:
Pot, kettle.
Foam Finger At The Ready - With all the discussion of who would take over the No. 1 spot in the Official World Golf Rankings, this would seem entirely in keeping with its importance:
Scott had four mathematical chances over the last two months to replace Tiger Woods at No. 1 in the world. His best chance was to win at Bay Hill, only he couldn't hold a seven-shot lead on the weekend. His most recent opportunity was The Players Championship, where he would have needed a 68 on Sunday. He closed with a 73.
And now that he has a week off, Scott will go to No. 1.
This has happened at least four times in the past, and most disturbingly would have happened a week earlier had Scott not played at TPC. That said, it's only upsetting if one gave any credence to the algorithms utilized. When we have a true No. 1, we don't need a calculation to apprise us of it.
Rules Enforcement - As a follow-up to the Justin Rose imbroglio, Luke Kerr-Dineen has a curious post titled Here are 4 other times golf has been flexible with its normally rigid rules. This is an interesting subject that Luke's substandard post doesn't quite do justice.
First, one of Luke's examples is the LPGA allowing Lexi Thompson to join while still under the tour's minimum age requirement of 18. But surely even Luke understands that the rules governing membership on a golf tour are not, you know, the rules of golf.
The best example he cites is Arnold Palmer at the 1958 Masters, but he mangles the actual incident beyond recognition:
After hitting his tee shot over the green on Augusta's 13th hole, Palmer summoned a rules
official because he felt he was due relief for an embedded ball. The rules official declined, so Palmer played two balls; he made double bogey with his original, and par with the second ball. Later that round, rules officials gave Palmer the benefit of the doubt and granted him relief. That par helped him win his first major by one stroke.
First of all, I'm guessing that Palmer didn't actually hit his tee shot over the thirteenth green, because even the longest hitters rarely do that on Par-5's. It actually happened on the twelfth, and Luke ignores the most damning part of the story, which is that Palmer only went back to play a second ball after making double-bogey on the first. None of us can know whether the ball was truly embedded, but a rules official on the scene thought otherwise and on what basis could a committee, not having seen the ball, made a different determination? Ken Venturi went to his grave convinced that a Masters had been stolen from him and, much as we all love the King, it's hard to disagree.
Trump Does Shannon - Shackelford posts this video of the Hair to the Throne's arrival at Shannon Airport to visit newly-acquired Doonbeg:
Shack loved it for its awkwardness and Irish Golf Desk's Brian Keough points out:
Add to this scene the presence of a musical trio of crimson clad women which appeared to bemuse The Donald and it was a Shannon arrival as memorable as any US President or even the non-appearance of a drunk Boris Yelstsin
We'll get back to Boris in a sec, but Keough has further detail:It was more like the visit of a Head of State than a businessman but with Trump promising to double or even triple the reported €15m he's invested in purchasing the Co Clare resort, it would not have been unusual to see the Minister doing cartwheels at the thought of hundreds of new jobs being created.
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| Making New Friends. |
Given the environmentally sensitive nature of the site where 51 acres were out of bounds to original designer Greg Norman because of the protected status of the grey dunes and the narrow-mouth whorl snail or angustior vertigor, which inhabits them, Trump has taken a softly softly approach.
Our sources in Co Clare inform us that Hawtree has no intention of using the 51 acres of dunes. With the 51 acres deemed unsuitable, it appears that a land swap deal may be made with neighbouring landowners.
Didn't know that Donald had the softly, softly thing in his quiver. Now back to Yeltsin...Keough helpfully posts this video (which one assumes to be a recreation) of the famed Yeltsin state visit:
Drone On - Not sure if this was part of their red meat for millennials strategy, but even this ageing baby boomer enjoyed Mathew Rudy's feature in Golf Digeston the use of drones in golf. The appeal should be fairly obvious:
From a practical standpoint, drones can go where helicopters can't, both in terms of proximity
Drone hovering over a possibly recognizable golf hole. and cost. NBC used eight-rotor drones to chase skiers down the slopes at the Sochi Olympics. Movie directors use them for close-up aerial shots from positions where cranes can't reach. Developers can survey large plots of land quickly, and park rangers can broaden their anti-poaching surveillance. One company is even testing a solar-powered drone that could stay up for five years, tracking global weather patterns.
Top-of-the-line drone rigs are completely handmade and can cost upward of $30,000, but when an hour of helicopter time—not counting the camera operator or video equipment—runs more than $2,500, the cost analysis starts to make fiscal sense. "You're going to see them used more and more in search-and-rescue situations, and with fire departments—situations where you need more information from above," Short says. "Railroads and oil companies have miles of track and pipeline that need to be inspected. Things that are dirty, dangerous or boring are great uses for drones, we like to joke."
It's not dirty or damgerous, but I guess golf qualifies as boring. There's discussion of using it to take overhead shots during lessons, though one would think it easier to mount a camera over a lesson tee than to unleash the drones. But here's where it gets interesting:
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| An example of a 3D map made from drone photographs. |
Colorado-based DroneMapper builds software programs that create densely detailed 3-D aerial maps. "Let's say you have 100 images from the drone looking down onto your golf course," says Jon-Pierre Stoermer, DroneMapper's chief technical officer. "The software stitches those images together and translates them into a three-dimensional map, complete with topographical elevations. You can zoom right down and be the golfer on foot and see every leaf on the grass."
The images are hyper-realistic, from the detail in rock formations to the slight curvature of the Earth. The images culled from satellites and traditional airplanes have a resolution of about half a square meter per pixel. The images produced by DroneMapper have a resolution of six square centimeters per pixel. In Google Maps, you can see the green. With DroneMapper, you can see the white of the lining in the cup.
The page linked above also includes drone video from the range and seventh hole at Pebble Beach.
Yowzer - The new issue of SIG+D included this photo of the Punchbowl, the new Tom Doak/Jim Urbina putting green that opens later this month at Bandon Dunes:
Modeled after The Himalayas at St. Andrews, it's the size of two and a half football fields. I've previously said that hiring Doak and Urbina to create a putting green is like hiring Van Gogh to paint your bathroom. As if I needed another reason to make the trek to Oregon...
Splurgeworthy? - Also from SIG+D, is this Gary Van Sickle piece on the new Miura irons, which cost a
cool $250 each. Miura, a small Japanese company best known for its wedges, uses a meticulous hand-grinding process to manufacture what may be the most flawless forged clubs. No excerpting available, so you'll have to click through if you're interested in the subject.
No doubt they look great, and Van Cynical loved them enough to put the six and eight-iron Miura sent him in his bag, even though it meant playing a mixed set. I've never so much as touched one, but I always loved the look of these so-called K-grind wedges.
Kind of sinister looking, don't you think? Seems like a Miura demo day at Willow Ridge should be in the works.
On The Road Again - David Owen has move his blogging base of operations over to The Loop, but not to worry it's the same old David. This time he's in travelogue mode:
I don’t like to fly on the same plane with soccer teams, Cub Scout dens, Shriner lodges, or similar groups, because it’s too easy to imagine the headline the following day: “Plane Carrying All Members of Small Order of Spanish Nuns Goes Down in North Atlantic.” So I felt more than slightly anxious when, a few minutes before our scheduled departure, two dozen members of a Scottish cheerleading team, who had had to run to make their connection, boarded our plane. I learned later that the team was from the Blast Cheer & Dance Academy, in Glasgow, and that they had just won an international title of some kind at a big competition in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
But this isn't just any trip, it turns out he's on his way to famed Machrihanish, located at the far end of the Kintyre Peninsula. It's probably no more than thirty-five miles from Troon as the crow flies, but you can't get there by crow (I know, I've used that line previously). They took the new Kintyre Express boat service, economically feasible with a decent-sized group (especially if Golf Digest is helping to fund the endeavor).
Machrihanish is a famed Old Tom Morris links that until our 2009 trip was my Great White Whale. It takes two ferries plus a bunch of driving to get there from Troon, but fortunately our dear Portrush friends Lowell and Carol came along for the adventure (and Lowell did all the driving). David will give his thoughts on the links in a future post, but I'm going to shimmy way out on a limb and speculate that he'll love it. Here's a taste of what's in store for him:
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| The bride and I on the first tee, reputed to be the best opening hole in Scotland. It's not, but that's not meant to detract from the beauty of the links. |
The first hole has an unusual (for links) forced carry over the beach, but besides that it's a delightful example of a minimalist out-and-back links. The outward nine runs along the dunes, so is the more visually dramatic of the nines. But it's all good.
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| The author on one of the one-shotters, which gives a feel for the terrain. |
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| Madam mugging for the camera on the finishing hole. The white building with red roof is the inn where we stayed. |
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