Odds And Ends

Lots of short bits for you on this dreary Tuesday....

We've got much ground to cover, so buckle in...

Scheduling Snafus - Think it's easy being a professional golfer?  Well if we're talking Rory and Rickie, it pretty much is...but for the lower classes, it's gotta be a grind out there.  For example, the ladies were at Kingsmill this weekend, not that anyone noticed, and were plagued by bad weather.  That necessitated a Monday finish:

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) -- Minjee Lee didn't get the dousing with champagne often

Lee, Minjee

afforded a winner on the LPGA Tour. 

Instead, she signed autographs and posed for photos with fans behind the 18th green on the Kingsmill Resort's River Course, waiting to see if her two-shot lead would hold up through the final pairing. 

When it did, the surprise of victory was more than enough for the 18-year-old Australian.

Funny, she doesn't look, you know, Australian... more on that in a bit.  By winning she punched a ticket to the U.S. Open, but what of those not so fortunate?

Lee, Alison

Alison Lee will fight another day for a spot in the U.S. Women’s Open. The U.S. Golf Association granted Lee’s request to switch qualifying sites after a Monday finish on the LPGA caused her to miss her tee time May 18 at Hermitage Country Club in Manakin-Sabot, Va. 

Lee, an LPGA rookie, finished third at the Kingsmill Championship, three strokes behind her friend and contemporary Minjee Lee. The Lees, who are unrelated, met in the final of the 2012 U.S. Girls’ Junior and were co-medalists last December at LPGA Q-School. Minjee was set to join Alison at Hermitage, but because she won the Kingsmill Championship is exempt into the Women’s Open field. 

Lee now will compete in a 36-hole qualifier on Tuesday at Goose Creek Golf Club in Mira Loma, Calif., sight unseen. She flew in early to Richmond for a practice round at Hermitage but doesn't have time for such luxuries at Goose Creek, where her dad will caddie.

Good on the USGA for accommodating the change, but it's a shame that the schedule is so unforgiving.

Wither Phil - Jaime Diaz applies his considerable psychological skills to man-of-the-people Phil Mickelson, asking the important questions...namely, after a crushing triple at the 18th on Saturday that took him out of contention, would he sign?

After driving into the water and then three-putting on the difficult par-4 finisher,

Mickelson wore a tight smile—his public version of a frown—that left no doubt his chili

was running hot. His normally affable caddie, Jim (Bones) Mackay, went straight to the parking lot rather than be part of a glum post-round scene. T.R. Reinman, Mickelson’s longtime publicist, figured the Sharpie would stay holstered. “Triple at the last?” he winced. “I’m guessing no.” 

But after a couple of minutes in the scoring area, Mickelson appeared with his regular smile and walked out to the appreciative throngs leaning against the barricades, and for 15 minutes accompanied his right-handed signature with some eye contact and occasional conversation. “How about that?” said Reinman, quietly impressed by his man.

I've been harshly critical of Phil when I thought warranted, the Ryder Cup nonsense being the best example.  But this is Phil at his best, and it matters in the example it sets for younger players.  It's Jaime, so you'll of course read it all.  His basic thrust is this:

Lately, Mickelson doesn't trend as much as he suddenly spikes.

This is a normal career arc as players age, and in Phil's case there's the added complication of his battle with psoriatic arthritis.  It's completely understandable that normal Tour events don't get his juices going, but peaking at the right moment has its own challenges.  The good news is that it can provide for dramatic viewing, never more so than next month at Chambers Bay (Career slam and all that).

Speaking Of Which... - Local station KIRO provides this teaser 30 days out from the Open:

That road is the key, as it's the only way in and out... we'll definitely hear some grumbling throughout the week from those on site.  As for the golf course, it looks other-worldly...

Media Notes - We recently discussed the R & A's bidding process for the U.S. television rights to the Open Championship.  This is newsworthy because they're doing it a year early, as they hope to award the package before this year's Open but the contract commences in 2017.  That means that ESPN could well be a lame duck for two years, raising the likelihood of a completely unhinged Chris Berman... That'll ruin your day, no?

So, why go to market early?  Obviously the bidding is expected to draw the usual suspects, with Fox (new to the biz) and NBC/Golf Channel (newly without a major) seemingly needing it most.  Ron Sirak outlines the R & A's concerns:

And multiple sources tell GolfDigest.com that the price tag on the Fox deal with the USGA - averaging $93 million a year - has something to do with the timing. 

“They are going to lose their shirts,” a source in the advertising community familiar with the ad rates said about Fox. The fear in the R&A, according to a second source, this one in broadcasting, is that heavy losses on the U.S. Open by Fox would hurt the market value of the British Open.

Translated to English, the premise is to keep Fox in the mix before they realize how much they screwed up on the USGA package.  There's lots of back and forth in the piece about that contract, and also a fair share of USGA nonsense about maximizing the value of the package to fund their grow-the-game initiatives.

But they also may have this wrapped up before the U.S. Open (though, unlike the USGA, they make clear that they won't announce anything during U.S. Open week), meaning that they won't even give themselves the benefit of watching the Fox broadcast.  You know what's also good for growing the game, competent broadcasts of major golf events...

In other media news, Callaway is going into the live broadcast business, as explained here by Harry Arnett:

The first episode featuring Dick Enberg can be viewed here, and rumor has it that some guy named Shackelford will be the guest on E2.

A Work in Progress - The aforementioned Shack has some photos of the work on pebble's 17th here:

He's got more photos at the link, and in an addendum he adds that the new green appears to be an even more severe hourglass shape than the 1929 Chandler Egan versions.

It's Supposed To be a Global Game - John Paul Newport beats me to a subject long on my radar, the differences in handicap systems around the world.  According to JPN, global handicaps are on the horizon:

“The handicap system is effectively a fourth set of rules,” said John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s point man for the initiative. Not all golfers keep a handicap, of course, but for those who do the score-posting requirements enforce a rules-like discipline. Yet those rules deviate from country to country. “We feel it would benefit the game enormously, and add to its enjoyment, if golfers everywhere had a single, portable handicap number that worked the same wherever they traveled,” Bodenhamer said.

It's obviously a complicated subject, but this also ties in to yesterday's discussion of conceding putts,  and the American's allegedly myopic focus on holing out and posting a number.  I'm often asked whether we post our scores from Scotland and Ireland, and the answer is that one can't, because the courses don't have the ratings and slopes needed for posting under USGA jurisdiction.

The other big difference is that players in GB&I only post tournament scores, typically from their monthly medal competitions.  Inevitably that means that handicaps are based on fewer scores and can be quite outdated at times...  

Newport's piece goes into some good detail, and for anyone that wants to dive in deeper I'll refer you to Dean Knuth, who devised the USGA's rating and slope system and is known affectionately in the biz as The Pope of Slope.

Never Up... - We all know the drill, you need to make a putt and end up leaving it short.  It's a trite, oft-repeated event in our game, from the Tour to the fourball at your club... But I think you'll agree that this one is especially agonizing:

We watched Rory McIlroy threaten a round of 59 on Saturday at Quail Hollow, where he 

settled for a course-record 61 to put himself in position for another PGA Tour win. But on the Web.com Tour on Sunday, veteran Roland Thatcher got even closer than Rory to hitting golf's magic number. 

Thatcher stood on the 18th green with a 12-foot putt for a birdie and a 59. It scared the hole, but missed on the low side. "I’m actually ashamed of myself that I left it short for chance at 59," Thatcher said after.

So, he's ashamed about shooting 60?  Frustrated is probably a better word... Video can be seen here. 

A Delicate Subject - In ostensibly non-golf reading I ran across this item:

The desire is multiplied by the millions in her native Seoul, often called the world’s capital for plastic surgery. In a new exhibition on display in New York, Yeo showcases photographs that document the experience of plastic surgery in South Korea, where 20 percent of women have had some form of cosmetic work, compared to 5 percent of American women, according to widely cited data from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons.

This highlights how creepy it is:

In raw numbers, Brazil performed the most procedures overall in 2013, followed by the United States, but the plastic surgery industry in South Korea is legion. The New Yorker profiled it earlier this year, reporting that among the reasons for getting surgery on a questionnaire to prospective patients was "preparing for a job," "wedding" and "regaining self-confidence."

It's obviously troubling that so much cosmetic surgery is being performed on young women...Loyal readers will anticipate the direction I'll go with this, to wit, is it still inappropriate to note that the South Korean LPGA players all look alike, when the country goes to great expense to make their women all look the same?  And, if you're in the shop for a nip and tuck, perhaps you might consider another procedure as well?

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