Loose Ends

Just another day in the nuclear winter that is New York in late April... a few minor items for you as I work on a longer post, and hopefully take a few swings later.

This Day n Swinging Skirts - Late yesterday, specifically post-nap but pre-dinner, I was wathing the ladies from beautiful Lake Merced Country Club when from the kitchen I heard this, "They don't really call it the Swinging Skirts, do they?"

Well, yes they do though it's not at all what you might assume....mind you, it's still quite silly, just not as patronizing or misogynist as initially  feared:

About five years ago, several deep-pocketed Taiwanese golfers formed an unofficial

Lydia, Natalie and Yani promote the event.

social group. They loved the game, played at the same club and began wearing matching clothes on their golf outings. The group started with 10 people and soon grew to 30 and then 60, including men and women.

“Because golf originated in Scotland, and back then they wore kilts, they wanted to honor this tradition,” said Carol Su, managing director/Taiwan for IMG Golf. “That’s how they started to wear kilts and call the group, ‘Swinging Skirts.’ They basically wanted to honor the origins of the game.”

OK, though those kilts were rather tighter-fitting and I'm not sure they actually wore them when playing golf gawf, but at least it's alliterative.

A couple of notes, including a 37 38 year age gap between the two leading scores:

Off the course, Lydia Ko trails Juli Inkster by three-and-a-half decades in age – even with her 18th birthday falling on Friday – but, on the course, Ko holds a one-shot advantage at the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic. 

Ko took the 18-hole lead at Lake Merced Golf Course in San Francisco with an opening 5-under 67. Inkster, 54, used a back-nine surge to card a 68 and join a group of three at 4 under that includes Ha Na Jang and P.K. Pongkrphan.

In our biz that's called Burying the Lede, because forget the scores, our little Lydia is growing up.  She turns eighteen today and I didn't get her a thing...  Maybe she'd like some glasses?  OK, I'll get over it...

In honor of thew festive day, Beth Ann Nichols treats us to eighteen things we might not have known about the lass:

• This week marks Ko’s 50th start on the LPGA. She has yet to miss a cut. 

• In seven starts this season, the player known as “Lyds” has four top-3 showings, including a victory at the ISPS Handa Australian Women’s Open.

But is she sure about this one?

• When she retires, Ko fancies a career in photography. The first big purchase she made after turning pro was a Canon EOS 70D.

We had heard she was going to retire at thirty and become a therapist...Really, I can take my own pictures.

Rumors of Its Demise - You all know the Mark Twain line, but we seem to get another one of these "Golf is Dying" story every day that ends in a "Y"...this one started by this tweet:

Darren RovellVerified account‏@darrenrovell

Sales of golf clubs down a whopping 21% in 2014 vs a year before, says @TheSFIA

Really, 21%  Because that's circling the drain territory...

Mike Stachura, one of the Golf Digest equipment gurus, had this rather minor clarification:

Now while it may be true that the sporting goods business, particularly sporting goods

stores, saw a decline in golf sales last year, it isn't a complete picture of the golf business. A more accurate portrayal of the health of the golf business, which never will be confused with running shoe sales or basketball purchases, might be to focus on golf-specific retailers, which in most surveys are preferred three to one over sporting goods stores as the place where golfers are buying products.

In fact, a check of golf industry research firm Golf Datatech’s sales figures for 2014 paint a slightly different interpretation. Sales in 2014 of just the core hard goods in golf (woods, irons, wedges and putters) were down, but only by 3 percent (2.97, actually). In fact, the $1.413 billion in sales of those four categories marked the seventh highest annual sales figure since Golf Datatech began tracking the golf business in 1995.

Repeat after me, guys, it's a niche sport with relatively flat participation rates.  Crisis averted...

The Babe as Golfer -  At the time of the Crosby Clambake AT&T in February, Alex Myers posted an item on Babe Ruth as the original celebrity golfer.  Alex is milking this bit, but he provides your humble blogger with a mulligan as I had read this elsewhere but neglected to blog it:

Have you ever seen a golfer tuck a glove or something under their arm during practice and hit balls? Probably. In fact, there's a good chance you've tried it yourself on the range. Here's the King of Practice, Vijay Singh, doing it:

We're not sure if Ruth invented the drill, but he certainly played a large role in it spreading through the golf community. You see, Ruth played on the Yankees alongside a player named Sam Byrd. During that time Ruth taught Byrd the trick, using a handkerchief, in order to keep his left or front arm (for Ruth, it would have been his right arm since he played golf lefty) connected to his body throughout the swing. 

Byrd retired after a mediocre seven years in baseball, often serving as Ruth's pinch-runner, and then had a solid career on what would become the PGA Tour. He won six events and finished third at the 1941 Masters and runner-up to Byron Nelson at the 1945 PGA Championship.

During his time in baseball Byrd was known as "Babe Ruth's legs."  Here's a longer excerpt from a profile of iconoclastic instructor Jimmy Ballard of how the drill was passed on:

Byrd, Ballard says, was Babe Ruth's roommate on the road, "and it was Ruth who taught Sam the trick of holding a handkerchief beneath his left arm in order to keep his left arm 'connected' to his body throughout the swing." Byrd also became convinced that a good golfer, like a slugger, "braced" with his right leg on the backswing, moved the head slightly to the right as the body naturally "coiled," and obtained power by "firing" the right side of the body at the target. "One swing was on a level plane, the other on a tilted plane," says Ballard, relating Byrd's gospel. "Other than that, they were totally identical. When Grantland Rice, the great sports writer, suggested to Sam that they write a book comparing the two swings, Sam just laughed, explained all of this, and said to him, 'That will be a damn short book.' " 

It was Byrd, according to Ballard, who first told Ben Hogan about the handkerchief and a proper coil, ideas that clearly had a major impact on Hogan's thinking about the swing. Before Byrd, Hogan had suffered from a chronic duck hook, which nearly caused him to abandon the professional game and resign himself to being a club pro in Fort Worth, Texas. Instead, armed with Byrd's ideas about connection and his own dogged persistence, Hogan went on to become the finest shotmaker in the game and author (with Herbert Warren Wind) of maybe the best swing-instruction book ever: Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. That book is the spiritual antecedent of Jimmy Ballard's bestselling How to Perfect Your Golf Swing, published in 1981 by Golf Digest and now just out of print.

We don't need no stinckin' six degrees of separation here.... Ruth to Byrd to Hogan....we nailed it in two.

Rory, Delayed - But I had June completely blocked out...

EA Sports announced Thursday that its newest golf video game will be available July 14, the Tuesday of British Open week. 

Originally due out last month, the game was re-branded with McIlroy's name in March before being pushed back to June and now July. In a post on the game's official website, EA explained the new release date "allows us to deliver a fully-featured online offering including online tournaments."

I guess EA didn't get the memo from Sports Illustrated.... It's now officially the Jordan Spieth era.  Well, there was this:

Details about the game have been slow to emerge but EA did confirm Masters champion Jordan Spieth as the game's second playable character earlier this week. Confirmed courses thus far include TPC Sawgrass, Wolf Creek and Royal Troon.

Do we think they delayed the release to add Jordan after his Masters win?  I'll be really disappointed if video game Jordan doesn't yell at his golf ball...

Luke Kerr-Dineen fills in some gameplay details:

But Thursday proved a significant development. EA officially finalized its July 14th release date, and released a new trailer showing graphics and some actual gameplay features. There will be three different playing options, the hardest being the “tour” mode. In that setting, users won’t be able to zoom into the green, and they’ll use the analog stick to control the power of their shots.

I need a teenager to help me with the blog, and I might add this to their list of duties.... Here's the trailer video: