This And That

How great were those aerial shots from Kapalua yesterday?  For sure the course is far too soft and there was no wind for most of the day, but the humpbacks seemed content... and no, that's not a Patrick Reed reference.

More On This? - The wonderful Jaime Diaz has a new Golf Digest piece that covers the Ryder Cup fiasco.  There's only a few tidbits that can be called new, but he does a great job of demonstrating the inevitability of the Watson-Mickelson friction, including this from months prior to the event:

Potential discord was evident in July 2013 at The Greenbrier Classic. Through the caddie

A great graphic, no?

grapevine, it got back to Mickelson that Watson had told his playing partners, "I won't be afraid to bench one of these prima donnas." The consensus was that he had been talking primarily about Woods and Mickelson.

I've noted several times that many commentators, your humble blogger included, correctly warned that this old-school-new school cage match might not play all that well.

Diaz fills in some of the behind the scenes details of the most fateful of Watson's mistakes, playing Phil in Friday's foursomes:

The unease continued during the matches. Mickelson and Bradley won their opening four-ball (best-ball) match on Friday and were expected to rest during the afternoon foursomes (alternate shot), mostly because the thick rough wasn't conducive to Mickelson's often-erratic driving. But late in the morning match, Mickelson told Watson that he had charted his foursomes matches over his last five years of Ryder Cups and Presidents Cups, and claimed that on his driving holes he had missed only three fairways. 

It was a classic Mickelson exaggeration, but Watson sat the young and eager Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed to go with Mickelson and Bradley, 4-0 at that point in two Ryder Cups. They would go on to lose, 3 and 2, and Watson admitted the decision was a mistake. He had been peeved when he caught up with the match on the eighth tee and learned that Mickelson and Bradley were 3 down and had yet to hit a fairway. Watson approached the pair and needled them: "When are one of you [expletives] going to hit a fairway?"

There's no shortage of irony here, and nobody comes out looking all that good.  Watson was said to autocratic ("Rarely right but never in doubt"), but here he clearly bends to Phil's pleading and looks quite indecisive.  And this was the key mistake, because it created the chain reaction, beginning with the decision to bench Phil in the Saturday morning fourballs, a format he was born to play.

As for our Phil, his transactional relationship with the truth has to be noted.  He wears down Cap'n. Tom and succeeds in convincing him to let him play Friday afternoon, stinks up the joint and then stares the world in the eyes and says at the infamous Sunday presser that "None of us up here were in any decisions."  All righty then...

Read the whole thing as it fills in some important color on how good people can go so wrong.  All I can do is ask, Freddie, are you sure you want in on this?

Power Ratings - Something that I've been staring at continually jumped up and announced itself during this morning's reading rounds.  The Golfweek home page has a sidebar called the Golfweek/Sagarin Ratings that piqued my curiosity and perhaps you'd like to join me on this ride.

In clicking through, it turns out that the ratings are created by a gentleman named Jeff Sagarin and this detailed methodology is provided:

Jeff Sagarin’s rating system is based on a mathematical formula that uses a player’s won-lost-tied record against other players when they play on the same course on the same day, and the stroke differential between those players, then links all players to one another based on common opponents. The ratings give an indication of who is playing well over the past 52 weeks.

The following list is an explanation of each category Sagarin uses to formulate his rankings.

POWER RATING: This is NOT a stroke average. The rating is calculated using a player?s record, stroke differential and connection to all the other players in the database. The difference between two ratings predicts the difference between two players in a typical round.

SCHEDULE STRENGTH: The average strength of each event in which the player has played, calculated using the power ratings of every player in every field.

SCHEDULE RANK: The player’s schedule is ranked by difficulty among the entire database.

RECORDS: A player’s won-lost-tied record, based on head-to-head competition, in each category. The winner in a 156-player field has a record of 155-0-0, the runner-up is 154-1-0, etc.

 Let's stipulate that any ratings methodology will have anomalies, and the Official World Golf Rankings kinda suck.  But here's Sagarin's current rankings...let's see if you have the same reaction as I did:

Boy that race for the top spot is tight as a drum, and it's easy to see why:

1. Rory won two majors in 2014 and Jim won one.....in 2003.
2. Rory won four big-time events in 2014 and Jim won.....errr....can I get back to you on this one?
3. Rory led the Euro Ryder Cup team to a resounding victory, demolishing Rickie Fowler in singles and Jim.....errrr...was allegedly there as well.

I'm sure Jeff Sagarin is convinced that all his assumptions and methodologies are logical, but the result is not.  Not only is Rory the best player on the planet, but in no way should it be remotely close.  Equally puzzling, his model would seem to overstate high finishes vs. "W's" given the lofty rankings of APF (Alas, Poor Furyk) and Sergio, but what in God's name is Rickie doing buried at No. 22?  His high finishes, after all, were in majors.

Weird Items, Accumulated - While we're on APF, the not-best golfer in the world channels his inner LeBron:

See if you can tell the original from the imitation:

Next, they say that a bad day on the golf course beats a good day at the office, but in this case it was truly a bad day:

A longtime Geneva resident was found dead Friday afternoon at a golf course in the western suburb. 

John A. Gaines, 74, was found about 1:30 p.m., lying facedown in a creek near the sixth hole of the Geneva Golf Club at 831 South Street, Geneva police said in a release.

See how bad golf journalism can be...no mention of whether the stakes were red or yellow, and where the next-of-kin's nearest point of relief was.

Back in the good old days, cocaine was the telltale sign that you had too much money.... today, it's starting a golf equipment company:

Bob Parsons is not a name known in golf equipment circles, but it’s about to be. The founder of web domain registrar GoDaddy, owner of Scottsdale National Golf Club and an avid gofler, Parsons started his own golf venture, Parsons Xtreme Golf (PXG), last year and has already produced an inaugural set of prototype irons.

Parsons is an eccentric bird.  Shack has had good fun reprinting letters to the Scottsdale National members encouraging them to leave...

Those who go back to my Ballyliffen blog days will remember my fondness for quirky signs of all types.  Here's one to add to the list:

On the other hand, it boasts 100% compliance.  Location and background can be found here.