Weekend Wrap

As the old song goes, rainy days and Mondays bring me down...but what happens when it rains on Monday?  In this case I'm OK with it as long as it doesn't rain on Tuesday.  More on that in a bit...

Bae Watch - Let's get this out of the way as quickly as possible.  Your FedEx Cup leader is Sang-Moon Bae, so you can go back to sleep.

Bae Sang-moon set a big goal for the new PGA Tour season. He wants to end it at home

in South Korea by playing in the Presidents Cup. 

He couldn't have asked for a better start. 

Bae won the season-opening Frys.com Open on Sunday by stretching his lead to as many as six shots in the hot sunshine of Napa Valley, leaving plenty of room for a few mistakes that only made it interesting for a short time. 

I've not previously seen his name in that order, but perhaps they know more about Korean names than I at Golf Magazine.   Since he first borke through a few years ago, Bae is one of those guys from whom you expect to see more high finishes, but per the Golf Channel announcers he hasn't has so much as a top ten since his breakthrough win in 2013.

I thought the Silverado course looked beautiful, but given the calendar I suspect about twelve people had tuned in.

And while were on the subject of the Tour schedule, Peter Kostis had this report card:

The Tour's first wraparound season is complete, and my grade is in -- but let me first offer my observations. Every major sport (especially team sports) has an off-season dedicated to rest, rehab and skill improvement. It's important for baseball, football, basketball and hockey players to have some downtime. Both their bodies and their brains need some tender love and care. Without an off-season, I'll bet injuries would increase tenfold. 

Guess what? Golfers are athletes, too! They also need some downtime, or else the injuries will pile up. But wait a minute. The injuries are piling up.

The wraparound schedule is ridiculous because it's, you know, ridiculous.  And while there could be a long-term concern about injury, the cases he cites, most obviously Tiger, aren't relevant to his case.  Obviously Tiger didn't play any of the Fall events last season, but it's equally true that they've always teed it up in the off-season, it was either a Silly Season money grab or they'd go to Australia or the Middle East.

How about we circle back to this subject when we see the depleted fields on the West Coast Swing?

This Week in Video - Canadian Geese have little to offer polite society, and many clubs use sheep dogs to encourage to encourage them to find other restroom facilities.  But upon further review, perhaps they do indeed make a contribution to society.  Submitted for your approval, a man and his unnecessary and annoying drone:

Kudos for the slo-mo capture of impact.  I do think drones have a vital contribution to make to our sport.  For instance, at our last holiday weekend mixed event, our club manager was flying his own drone.  As a selfless soul interested only in protecting the field, I offered him $100 to fly it over the team that included the club's most notorious cheater.  You know the type, a guy who's played golf for fifty years and never had a bad lie...

Dots, Connected - The ranks of U.K. golf writers have been substantially culled, but James Corrigan at the Telegraph is one of the stalwarts.  But since we type without fear or favor here at Unplayable Lies, I did have to gently chide him last week for his class-warfare take on the Dunhill Links Championship, which like the better-known Crosby Clambake Pebble Beach Pro-Am, allows well-heeled amateurs to tee it up for 3-4 days with touring pros at some of the great links of Scotland.

Proving his immunity to irony, this is the next Corrigan piece to come to my attention:

The European Tour is fighting to save the World Matchplay Championship after the

circuit’s oldest sponsor revealed it was withdrawing its backing for the famous event, which celebrates its 50th anniversary next week in Kent.

The news comes as a huge blow to the Tour, particularly as Volvo is also pulling out of the Champions tournament, which since 2011 has kick-started the year. The tournament was due to take place in the second week of January, probably in Durban, but is now in doubt.

While the loss of that $4 million (£2.5million) event would be keenly felt – and would lead to some last-minute scrambling before the calendar is announced – the demise of the matchplay would be of wider concern and that is why the Tour and the promoters IMG have vowed to bankroll the event for at least one year.

Perhaps James needs to get out a bit more... as the old saw goes, he who pays the piper picks the tune.  If you want big money sponsors, you have to keep them happy.  I've always been a skeptic about golf sponsorships, as I suspect the "value-proposition" is pretty marginal for most sponsor-advetisers (Cialis being an obvious exception).  

It's easy to moralize when you're ont affected directly by the ramifications.

Grand Slam, Slammed - The Grand Slam is the kind of event that put the silly in the Silly Season.  In its original incarnation it was occasionally watchable, as it combined Tiger, Phil and prime-time coverage from spectacular Poipu Bay after we've put our clubs away.

Now it's only noteworthy when something goes wrong, this time Tropical Storm Fay hitting Bermuda and disrupting travel plans.  Not much to speak of here, unless you're consumed by stories of Tour caddies being stuck in airports:

Delta Air Lines flight 656 was en route to Bermuda on Sunday morning when it turned around, just before it reached the Atlantic Ocean, and returned to Atlanta. The pilot informed passengers that the international airport at Bermuda had been closed due to flooding and that it was expected to remain closed for at least six hours. Scores of passengers on that flight were headed to Bermuda for the Grand Slam of Golf, among them Ted Scott, the caddie for Watson

All three of the 2014 major winners are playing, with Jim Furyk the lucky fourth on account of Rory's two majors.  But if you're going to go Bermuda, I'll need you to move the event to Mid-Ocean to pique my interest.  

Speaking of Rory - Despite the occasional issue (Caroline, rules violations, et.al.), I get the sense that young Rory is a very decent, likable young man that hasn't let success change him.  Here's a couple of items of a confirmatory nature form the last week, first Alisdair Reid in The Telegraph:

You would probably sue the architect if he came up with anything quite so barmy as the Loop, that cat’s cradle of holes where the Old Course turns away from the Eden estuary

and back towards St Andrews. But the singular geometry of that part of golf’s most famous track does at least provide the opportunity for some unexpected encounters between players.

Most, admittedly, are preceded by a loud cry of “fore!” and sometimes followed by a few angry words as well. But the meeting of Oliver Wilson and Rory McIlroy at the 10th on Sunday was a quieter affair, almost unnoticed as the leading players braced themselves for the closing stretch of the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. It did, however, say rather a lot about them both.

For a start, it was an act of staggering sportsmanship by McIlroy to break away from his own round to offer encouragement and best wishes to Wilson.

I'm very glad the Ried wrote about this, but I think he actually diminishes it by his grandiosity.  It's a small gesture, but a very human and thoughtful one.  If character is what one does when no one is watching, then this speaks well of Rory.  But "Staggering sportsmanship" is simply over-the-top.

In another item of a distinctly small nature, Doug Ferguson tells us that Rory has evolved as relates to The Old Course:

Rory McIlroy wouldn't describe his affection for the Old Course at St. Andrews as love at first sight. 

"Hated it," he said last week at the Dunhill Links Championship.

McIlroy first played the Old Course in 2005 when he was 16 playing in the St. Andrews Links Trophy. 

"Thought it was the worst golf course I've ever played," he said. "I just stood up on every tee and was like, 'What is the fascination about this place?' But the more you play it and the more you learn about the golf course and the little nuances, you learn to appreciate it. Now it's my favorite golf course in the world."

Like any of us would have, Ferguson tells the story of Bobby Jones picking up on the famed 11th in 1921, only to come to be a favorite son of St. Andrews and win both an Open (1927) and a British Amateur (1930, part of his Grand Slam) there.  

Again it speaks well of Rory that he's paying attention and willing to learn and adapt.  Well played, young man.

Tackling Slow Play, Slowly - Dave Shedloski devotes a bunch of pixels to the PGA Tours new and improved slow play enabling:

Beginning with this week’s 2014-15 season opener, the Frys.com Open in Napa, Calif., the first player who has the honor in each group is allowed 50 seconds to complete his stroke. Previously, the first player to hit was given 60 seconds. The remaining players in each group are given 40 seconds to play, no different from past years. 

Additionally, a slight alteration has been made to defining whether or not a group is out of position on a par-5 hole.

I've spared you the details on that latter policy change, but you'll get the gist of the enabling going on here.  As usual in this kind of piece, Slugger White is quoted and he makes a point on which I have sympathy:

Not Slugger's best look.

“Flow” is the operative word here. Slugger White, a vice president of Rules and Competitions for the tour, thinks little can be done to quicken pace of play with fields of 144 or 156 players because the golf course is simply congested. “Geoff Ogilvy said it best,” White said. “It’s like rush hour on the L.A. Freeway. It’s going to be slow because there’s no room for all the cars. That’s what we have with a field of 144. We don’t have pace-of-play problems at Bay Hill or Memorial with 120-player fields.”

Since the Tour has become a closed shop under Commissioner Ratched, limiting field sizes is not the way we want to go.  But unless you're prepared to deal in penalty strokes, then you're just running out the clock (heh) on this issue.