We're going to span the globe today...so buckle in and enjoy the ride:
Looking Forward - We're in the trough of the golf schedule, somewhat mitigated by the one-off Match Play next week.... but we have much to anticipate, as per yesterday's St. Andrews video. Staying with the Auld Grey Toon, we have a couple of minor notes, first regarding spectators:
It may be the Old Course, but a part of it will have a new look this summer.
This is a 2014 photo, probably during the Dunhill Cup.
The Open Championship at St. Andrews will boast the event’s largest grandstand arena in the tournament’s history. The grandstand, which will seat nearly 10,000 people, will be constructed near the 1st, 17th and 18th holes for the 144th British Open, which is July 16-19.
The grandstand expansion was spurred by the popularity of the horseshoe seating at Royal Liverpool last year.
Those who have denied themselves the pleasure of visiting St. Andrews will not understand the complexity of accommodating spectators on a golf course that starts and ends within town. As much as we love our Open Championships on the Old Course, it undoubtedly accommodates fewer spectators than at any other venue in the rota. Though this has me concerned:
The 18th green will feature a two-tiered grandstand, and an L-shaped grandstand will be erected around the 17th green (the Road Hole). The course will have more than 21,000 grandstand seats total for the tournament.
I'll await comment from Mark W., but an L-shaped grandstand would have to be placed on the inside (golfers' left) and long, because even Peter Dawson wouldn't dare take the road out of the Road Hole. But that has to look hideous, no?
And one of the nice things about the five-year cycle of St. Andrews Opens is that past champions can plan for the appropriate send-off:
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| Must be one of the caddies in the middle... |
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland – Like Tom Watson, Nick Faldo will end his Open Championship run at the Old Course at St. Andrews in July.
Five-time winner Watson will exit 40 years after winning his first Open in his 1975 debut. Faldo, meanwhile, will bow out of the game’s oldest major championship 25 years after winning his second Open at the home of golf. The Englishman also won the 1987 and 1992 Opens at Muirfield.
It will be Faldo’s 37th start in the Open since first appearing in 1976, and Watson’s 38th appearance. Faldo, who last made the cut in 2005 and finished T-11, turns 58 on the Saturday of the Championship. Watson, who has made three of five cuts since losing a playoff to Stewart Cink in 2009, is 65 and in his last year of eligibility.
Watson of course won Opens everywhere but St. Andrews, most famously losing to Seve there in 1984 (giving rise to perhaps the greatest fist pump in golf history). Faldo won impressively on the Old Course, dusting Greg Norman in a highly-anticipated Saturday pairing, though we now understand that Greg won the "Tournament of Life."
Suitable Swilican Bridge photo ops should be anticipated...
Lastly, the U.S. Open will be similarly linksy, as these aerial photos of Chambers Bay attest:
I'm actually of mixed minds on this... I love links golf more than life itself, it's just the greatest version of our great game to be found. On the other hand, links are scarce in these parts since we don't have the necessary combination of turf and weather, so it seems odd to play our national championship on a links. Just sayin'...
Golf In The Dark Ages - As you'll recall, one of the USGA's rationales for moving its broadcasts from NBC to Fox was to inject a breath of fresh air into the broadcasts, though of course it was never explain what deficiencies had been identified with the incumbent.
Richard Deitsch at Sports Illustrated hosted a written round-table discussion of sports broadcasting that elicited this rant from John Buccigross:
Golf telecasts are woefully behind the times and in need of a major overhaul. Shot tracer needs to be utilized on nearly every swing and way too much putting is showed. Also, every major should have 18-hole, four-round coverage. I can watch every Patrick Kane shift, every Marshawn Lynch carry or every Mike Trout at-bat in every game they play if I choose. I should be able to watch all of Tiger Woods shots at a major on my big, beautiful TV. If I have to shell out $29.99 to watch it I will pay it. Golf is concerned about growing the game yet they restrict access to their best golf courses and restrict access to its best players on television.I can't watch Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy play all 72 holes of a major live here in 2015?
I do think we need to interject some realism here, as a golf tournament unfolds over 300 acres of turf, creating all sorts of logistical issues in coverage. I'd further add that majors are further complicated by the fact that a U.S. Open, for instance, returns to Oakmont (again, for instance) once every thirteen years or so, rendering the creation of permanent infrastructure a financial challenge.
But as the man says, we're going to get expanded coverage at least of the U.S. Open, we'll see how much we avail ourselves of it...So, what will Fox do that's different? Mark Loomis didn't give much away in this interview:
Q: How do you do that (show different angles)
TV towers behind the 18th green at Chambers Bay ?
A: A lot of times golf is covered from the green back to the tee, because that’s where your biggest cameras are. One of the things we've put some energy into is figuring out if we can give you a little better look at what the golfer is seeing. Kind of look from the tee toward the green.I think we are trying to take advantage of some of the new technology … (such as) drones. Audio has always been a staple for Fox and how can we make the sounds of the golf course better.You always kind of lose the audio on the green. … How can we get on the green and hear a little bit more about what’s going on?The main focus is, how can we tell the story about what’s going on on the golf course better? Not just come up with cool tricks.
Q: But there will be cool tricks, right?A: There is kind of an old saying: “There’s nothing new in television. It’s just people doing the same thing in a different way.” I think the answer to that is that we’ll take some of the technology that people have used over the years, like the tracer.One of the things we've talked about is whenever you see a green on your TV it looks flat, whether it is or isn't. So, how can we do different things to make the greens come to life so you see them the same way you would if you were standing on them?
There's nothing objectionable in there, but there's also not much that's new...I would argue that, ProTracer aside, the most notable improvements in recent golf telecasts relate to the audio...Also, NBC had some way cool graphics of the Pinehurst greens, so that Fox contract might have been about the Benjamins...
But this just leaves me cold:
Cleatus Interruptus. Q: Is Cleatus (Fox’s CGI robot used to promote its NFL coverage) going to be at Chambers Bay?
That’s funny; I asked the same question. I think Cleatus will not be there at the beginning but I think if we find a good way to use him down the road it’s not out of the question.
No crashing robots? I thought the USGA would have written that into the contract.... Next thing you know they'll tell us that Chris Berman isn't available...
Golf In The PRC - We've devoted a number of posts to this awkward relationships, though the issue du jour is water... Oh you thought we were talking about China? As it happens we'll get there, but first let's start with a Peoples Republic closer to home, as John Strege informs that golf courses are taking the heat for California's drought:
It is easy to see why. A story in the Daily Beast about Bermuda Dunes in the Coachella Valley east of Los Angeles carried this headline: “Town with 11 golf courses is sucking California dry.”
Hmmm...I wonder if the author of that Daily Beast column mentioned that the valley is served by an aquifer? I needn't have worried...Admittedly, the Coachella Valley's consumption does now exceed the capabilities of its aquifer, but his point that folks should be living there is off base.
It also fails to mention this:
A point that tends to be missing from any discussions of golf courses and water usage ina drought that has entered its fourth year is “the importance of golf to the economy,” Connerly said.
“It’s a $13 billion industry and employs 128,000 people [in California]. Golf courses uses less than one percent of potable water. So be careful what you ask for. If you want to take away that one percent, are you prepared to put 128,000 people out of work and send a $13 billion hit to state’s economy?”
But if you want to understand how droughts are really created, then I recommend this Daily Beast article by Joel Kotkin, that doesn't even mention golf. There's so much good background here that I can't do it justice, so if the subject is of interest you should read the whole thing. I did like this 'graph though, because it gives a peak at how misguided the priorities are:
But ultimately the responsibility for California’s future lies with our political leadership, who need to develop the kind of typically bold approaches past generations have embraced. One step would be building new storage capacity, which Governor Jerry Brown, after opposing it for years, has begun to admit is necessary. Desalinization, widely used in the even more arid Middle East, notably Israel, has been blocked by environmental interests but could tap a virtually unlimited supply of the wet stuff, and lies close to the state’s most densely populated areas. Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere. This piece of infrastructure is so irrelevant to the state’s needs that even many progressives, such as Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, consider it a “ridiculous” waste of money.
The choo-choo to nowhere is so true....they call themselves Progressives, but have you ever noticed that their solutions are so 19th century? I've told you about this previously, but it bears repeating:
And there needs to be, at least for the short term, an end to dumping water into San Francisco Bay for the purpose of restoring a long-gone salmon run, or to the Delta, in order to save a bait-fish, the Delta smelt, which may already be close to extinct. This dumping of water has continued even as the state has faced a potentially crippling water shortage; nothing is too good for our fish, or to salve the hyper-heated consciousness of the environmental illuminati.
Yup, they're still dumping precious water into the Pacific Ocean... because environmentalism. Now you'd logically think that before denying scarce water to Central Valley farmers that they'd have a handle on the status of the Delta Smelt... you'd be wrong, of course, but that's how they roll in California.
Here's Kotkin's conclusion:
What we are witnessing the breakdown of a once-expansive, open society into one dominated by a small group of plutocrats, largely in Silicon Valley, with an “amen” crew among the low-information donors of Hollywood, the public unions, the green lobby, and wealthy real estate developers favored by Brown’s pro-density policies. This coalition backs Brown and helps maintain the state’s essentially one-party system. No one is more adamant about reducing people’s carbon footprint than the jet set of Silicon Valley or the state’s planning elite, even if they choose not to live in a manner that they instruct all others.
One of my favorite bloggers has a line he falls back on frequently, to the effect that he'll believe it's a crisis when the people telling him it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis. True that...
As for that other PRC, they continue their schizophrenic approach to the game, as per recent pieces in the N.Y. Times and on CNN (the latter by Dan Washburn who literally wrote the book on golf in China). From the former:
HONG KONG — President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on vice and corruption in China hasgone after drugs, gambling, prostitution, ill-gotten wealth and overflowing banquet tables. Now it has turned to a less obvious target: golf.
In a flurry of recent reports, state-run news outlets have depicted the sport as yet another temptation that has led Communist Party officials astray. A top official at the Commerce Ministry is under investigation on suspicion of allowing an unidentified company to pay his golf expenses. The government has shut down dozens of courses across the country built in violation of a ban intended to protect China’s limited supplies of water and arable land.
It's hard to root against a crackdown on corruption, but washburn clearly articulates the whiplash effect:
Mr. Washburn, the author, said golf would continue to be buffeted by the contradictions of a country that has embraced market forces even as it continues to describe itself as socialist.
“There are alternate realities in China,” he said. “One day you’ll read headlines about a war on golf, and the next you’ll hear about China’s future Olympic golf stars.”
The obvious problem is that you can't prudently invest in a new facility without buying the necessary protection, but in the midst of a crackdown your official might not stay bought (or out of jail).
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