Friday Follies

Spanning the globe to bring you the wide world of...well, whatever.  We've got stuff piling up, and there seems to be an emphasis on the silly, so let's go with that:

Trick Shots, Putter Edition - We had some fun a few days ago with the hundred-foot 3-footer, so this guy from Australia figured anyone can do it with a single golf ball:

The guy from Elie (a quaint old links not far from St. Andrews)  swears he got that one on the first take, but this Aussie admits it took a few attempts:

"Brookwater has a heavily sloped practice green so I thought 'why not?' The putt was about six feet, but I hit it about 20 feet past, up the hill and back in the hole. It took me about 10 attempts."

And when the two balls finally dropped into the cup?

"The people on the club balcony thought I was a bit weird when I high-fived myself!" Field said.

From the extensive "These Guys are Better than Us" files, comes this long-drive competition between the two best German golfers on the planet (Sorry Sandra Gal, you're only the sexiest).  Mercedes Benz sponsored this and, not surprisingly, the younger man won with a long drive of 232 yards.  Wait, I hear you saying, I can hit it that long...did I happen to mention what club they used?

My favorite part was when Langer decided he needed more loft.

This Week in Golf Commercials -  The problem with watching too much golf....correction, one of the many problems with watching too much golf is the shear repetition of the commercials.  For instance, if Omega wants to run a Rory spot 612 times over one weekend, couldn't they at least cut more than one version of it?

Though for the record, Employee Number Two is a big fan of the Cialis al fresco side-by-side bathtubs that seem to materialize out of nowhere, because isn't that just like your life?  Digressions aside, Shackelford gives a shout-out to this well-made HSBC golf commercial with the premise that golf is everyone's game:

It's really quite well done, with a great series of short clips of golf and faux golf in the widest raage of environments.  How it's effective in selling banking services, well that eludes me.

Timing is Everything:  Two items have appeared that appear to be perfectly timed, the more substantive of them being the posting at Golf Digest of excerpts from Mark McClusky's new book, Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them.  One of the subjects he covers is te introduction of the ProV1 golf ball:

The first week the new Pro V1 model ball was available for tournament play, in October

2000, forty-seven players switched from their previous ball. That sort of wholesale equipment change was unprecedented in the history of golf. How fast was the transition across the sport? At the 2000 Masters, fifty-nine of the ninety- five players used a wound golf ball. One year later, only four players used one. By the end of 2001, not a single tournament champion on any of the world’s major professional tours had won using a wound ball; the rout was so comprehensive that Titleist stopped making them at all.

 Like many breakthrough advances, Titleist didn't even know what they had happened upon:

The invention of the Pro V1 started out as a little bit of an accident. The company’s engineers were just trying to combine some of the technologies in their balls for amateur golfers with the ones in their pro models, and they stumbled upon the construction of the Pro V1. From that point, its refinement became a process that involved five years of prototypes and endless testing at the company’s facility in Massachusetts. “We didn’t have a clue what we really had at the time,” recalled Bill Morgan, the company’s head of golf ball development, in a 2013 interview. It took a day in which a hundred of the company’s sponsored pros used the prototype ball -- and gave it rave reviews -- for the company to fast-track it into production.

That's often the way these things go with research.  Now we all know the significance of the ball in the distance explosion, but there are some that believe it's all that time in the gym.  Surprisingly, one of those science -deniers is Augusta National Chairman Billy Payne, who must be looking forward to stretching his wee golf course to 8,000 yards with this from an interview while he was in Australia:

“You know the kids keep getting longer. I really think for a four or five-year period we blamed it on the equipment,” Payne said. “I really think it’s the conditioning of these young kids.”

“You know they come to the game now much more athletic than they were in the past.”

Nothing to see here folks, please move along.   Shack uses gym rat Chesson Hadley and his 291 yard driving average as a rebuttal, but I'd remind folks that many have vested their hopes in Augusta National to save us from this mess by introducing a controlled Masters tournament ball.  I'm guessing that we can rule that out at this point, since the lads would only spend more time at the squat bar.

Sawgrass Tree, RIP - Seems like only yesterday that we lost the Eisenhower Tree, now comes word that we've lost the oak that overhangs (overhung?) the 6th tee at TPC Sawgrass:

The overhanging Live Oak to the right of the No. 6 tee box, which has impacted tee shots

over the years, recently developed a large crack in its trunk due to old age and disease and became a safety concern due to the weight of its overhanging limb, thus necessitating removal of the tree today. 

"The Live Oak on the sixth hole was one of the more recognizable trees on the golf course and influenced the tee shots of amateurs and professionals alike from the time the golf course opened in October of 1980," said PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem. "Unfortunately, over time it became more fragile and susceptible to disease. Just recently, a significant fissure developed in its trunk, making it a safety concern. There simply was no way to save it, as much as we would have liked to."

It was a great tree, one that really shouldn't effect amateurs tee shots and yet did all the same.  Mostly it induced a pull, not beneficial to a scorecard.

The World According to Freddie - I'm not sure whether this helps or hurts his chances of being named Captain, but this was our Freddie after his Pro-Am at the Charles Schwab Cup:

With the U.S. team having lost six of the past seven Ryder Cups and the PGA of America creating an 11-man task force to right the ship, Couples' name has been thrown out as a potential captain. 

The 55-year-old is definitely interested, but also thinks everyone is overreacting to American failures in the event. 

"I don't think anyone should panic. I don't think we need a 'task force,'" Couples said, employing air quotes. "I don't think we need the PGA of America straining about this. What I really think they need is to get players that have been on a lot of these teams to get a feel for what kind of captain they need."

What, no video of the air quotes?   Freddie himself would be the low-ket, just let the guys play kind of captain, and we could do a lot worse.

'Tis the Season - It's Halloween, and Golf.com has noted the date with a monster mash of a gallery Golf's Horror Stories that'll induce a few chuckles.  There's no consistency to their themes, as it spans the range of human indignity from Scott Hoch (as in, you know what) to Joe Daley (boy, they get a lot of mileage out of that one) to lighting striking players.  But it remind us of the epic meltdowns of Norman and Calc, not to mention Pablo Larrazabal's improvised swim in Malaysia after being swarmed by hornets, so it's good fun.  

Pablo Larrazabal takes "relief."