Thursday Threads

Got a few items to throw at my vast audience before what promises to be a beautiful weekend in the New York area.  Care to join me for the tour?

The Prime of Mark Broadie - Golf Magazine has done a very smart thing, grabbing Mark Broadie for a

monthly column in each issue.  Broadie you'll recall is the Columbia University professor whose been driving the statistical revolution in golf, originator of the Strokes Gained putting metric.  His first column appeared in the June issue and dealt with driving statistics, explaining why Bubba typically leads in Strokes Gained Driving.  His contribution to the July issue, which just hit my mailbox and is thus far unread, is a statistical analysis of Jordan Spieth's game.  

A great move on the part of Golf Magazine, which seems so much more on point than Golf Digest's targeting millennials with articles about pimping out golf carts or smoking a doobie on the course.

Kate Upton, Unplugged and Unhinged - Maggot will be depressed for weeks, but Kate Upton has

created quite the kerfuffle in the golf world with a tweet about the misogynist policies of the Los Angeles Country Club, specifically for not allowing women to play before noon.  

There was only one teensy little issue with the tweet, and that would be its, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, truthiness.  As in not true.

From Golf Channel:

Let's start with the bad: Kate, you've been misinformed. But the good news: women can play there anytime of day. 

LACC General Manager Kirk Reese told GolfChannel.com that "(Women not being allowed to play before noon) is absolutely not true," and the club "has had female members since 1898."

There were women in 1898?  Who knew?

For anyone interested, Shackelford has a summary of who ran with the story, who corrected it and who ignored it entirely (which about now seems a viable strategy).

 The Long Wait is Over - For those whose sleep has been impaired by the escalating tension, your long

nightmare is over.  Captains have been named for the 2015 Presidents Cup to be held in South Korea...may I have the envelope please.  They are, drum roll please, Jay Haas and Nick Price.  But wait, there's more...

Per the unbylined PGATour.com announcement:

Immediately upon being unveiled as The Presidents Cup 2015 captains, Price and Haas each named one of their captain’s assistants.

Price invited South Korea’s K.J. Choi to join his team’s leadership, and, in a nod to the significance of The Presidents Cup being played in Asia for the first time, Choi was given an elevated title of Vice-Captain.

Haas essentially “traded places” with World Golf Hall of Famer Fred Couples, asking his good friend and three-time U.S. Team Captain to assist him in 2015. Choi attended Wednesday's announcement; Couples was scheduled to attend but withdrew from the Big Cedar Lodge Legends of Golf due to a back injury.

Or, as Shack put it, Freddie is in charge of talking Tiger and Phil into making the trip.

I actually enjoy the Presidents Cup, and not just because the Americans win.  It proves the appeal of the team match play format, even when divorced from the blood feud drama of the Ryder Cup.  But it is one nice group of lads from Orlando playing another nice group from Orlando, so the venue seems besdies the point.

Pinehurst Preamble - Per Luke Kerr-Dineen, Rory takes a shot at recreating the Payne Stewart "moment" and kind of makes  hash of it:

Umm Rory, this is how you do it:

The winning team at the National Country Club Championship, October 2014.

We might not know who the richest player in the Pinehurst field is, but the richest caddy is easy to identify.  John Strege fills us in:

The wealthiest man inside the ropes at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst next week won’t be Phil

Scott McNealy

Mickelson or any of golf’s other multimillionaires. It’ll be a billionaire. And a caddie, to boot. 

Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is expected to caddie for his son, Maverick, 18, who finished third in U.S. Open sectional qualifying at Lake Merced Golf Club and the Ocean Course at the Olympic Club in Daly City, Calif., on Monday to earn a trip to Pinehurst. Scott was on Maverick’s bag then, too.

Not sure about Maverick as a name, but the senior McNealy has always been an avid golfer.

And you won't be surprised to find that Adam Scott liked what he saw:

Lastly for our Open thread, Gary Van Sickle provides his 9-item gripe list about U.S. Opens.  All the usual suspects make an appearance, such as:

2. The recovery shot. One thing that is frequently missing from U.S. Opens is recovery shots. The Open often grows such thick rough that missed fairways mean slogging a sand wedge 50 yards back into the fairway. There’s no skill in that as opposed to having just enough rough to tempt a player into going for the green and then getting into worse trouble. A great player, like Seve Ballesteros or Tiger Woods, might be able to pull off a shot that most others couldn't. 

4. The rough. All right, put an asterisk next to this one because apparently it’s taking a year off thanks to Pinehurst. Normally, the rough is brutal, and hacking out of it is not fun and physically demanding.

It seems to me that Van Cynical would have been spot on a few years ago, during those dreadful years when Tom Meeks was setting up the venues.  But during the Mike Davis era, which started with the 2006 Open at Winged Foot, the relentlessly boring wall-to-wall rough has been replaced by graduated rough, making the penalty fit the crime, as well as tightly mown chipping areas and, of course, driveable Par-4's.