Flotsam and Jetsam™ - New Years Edition

Wow, you folks were really bored yesterday....I haven't had that many pageviews since....well, maybe evah!  Who knows, since I don't spend much time look at the blog stats.  Too depressing, yanno...

Out With The Old... - Tis the season for wistful nostalgia...  Let's lede with Cam Morfitt, who assures us that 2015 was The, Best. Year. Ever.  After the obligatory Tiger and Phil-centric table-setting, he gets down to business:

You wouldn't have held out much hope, right? And yet here we are at the end of a season 

in which we barely paid attention to any of those guys. That's because it was a season that entertained from start to finish, gave us a compelling narrative named Jordan Spieth as he nearly made it three-quarters of the way to the calendar-year grand slam, and forced us to look at the game and the foreseeable future in a whole new light.

"I used to worry about Tiger Woods going away," Tour veteran Will MacKenzie told me before the recent RSM Classic. "But I'm not worried about that anymore."

OK, I thought Mackenzie's issues were more with DJ, but, yanno, bygones.  You know from the picture where he's headed, and it was, indeed, a fine year of golf.

Alan Shipnuck files this amusing item on the rigors of the golf beat:

I am typing this poolside on New Providence, an island in the Bahamas. It’s 81°, and a

pleasant breeze is tousling my hair ever so slightly. I am perched 15 feet from the edge of the sea; occasionally a wave crashes with enough force to spritz me with a refreshing mist. The sunshine caresses me…wait, hold on a second, I need to accept a mai tai from (and flirt with) my waitress, a green-eyed beauty with a lilting accent. Um, where were we? Oh yes, the rigors of the golf beat. I am here in the Caribbean for you, the reader. It is a life of service.

There’s a reason the Ben Hogan biography was called Follow the Sun -- professional golf is a warm-weather sport. The PGA Tour visits nice places, and we ink-stained wretches get to tag along. If you cover the NFL, you spend a lot of time freezing your Spaldings off in Green Bay or Buffalo or Foxborough or Cincinnati. NBA writers are compelled to winter in Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and Oklahoma City. The first five months of my year typically go like this: Maui, La Jolla, Scottsdale, Pebble Beach, Santa Monica, South Beach, Augusta, Hilton Head, St. Augustine. This year’s majors included glorious trips to the Pacific Northwest and St. Andrews.

Thanks for your service, Alan.  Actually, there's more than gloating involved, as Alan references some more exotic and occasionally dangerous trips and links to some of his better articles, a better use of your time than continually hitting F5 on this page (which seems to be how you spent New Years Day).

Golf.com and Golfweek filed the obligatory item on the best stories of 2015, and there's many a nit to pick.  For instance, the latter had this at No. Seven:

7. Robert Allenby fires caddie midway through first round in Canada: Add another line to Robert Allenby’s forgettable PGA Tour season. The year began with a reported mugging and robbery at the Sony Open in Hawaii, and Thursday at the RBC Canadian Open, it continued with a caddie altercation.

C'mon, guys, that's not even the best Allenby story from 2015.  Fortunately, we'll always have Hawaii... Hmmm...., does anyone know if he's in the field for the Sony?  I can't help but hope so...

Alex Myers credited Jordan Spieth with the perfect year-end tweet:

I certainly see his point, though this one was more to my taste:

I don't know the gent, but I like the cut of his jib.

In With The New - That Van Cynical guy picks a fight with his colleague Cam Morfitt:

Name a better, more exciting year of golf than 2015.

What's the matter? You can't do it?

I can. Try 2016.

It's certainly teed up well, but tell us more:

There are also a million ways that 2016 can go right and I like the odds. For 15 years, we got tired of hearing the same old refrain: Tiger Woods needs a rivalry. Yes, Phil Mickelson was his rival but they never had a Duel In the Sun moment like Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson or a U.S. Open playoff moment like Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer at Oakmont. Tiger and Phil, in fact, rarely went head-to-head in regular PGA Tour stops, much less majors. 

They were rivals but they weren't the Nicklaus-Palmer-Watson-Gary Player rivalry we hoped for. 

This is why 2016 could be even better. Now we’ve got the New Big Three. With Spieth, Jason Day and Rory McIlroy, the odds are better that we’re going to have some in-your-face, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better big moments.

And as Gary goes on to relate, below the top three is a wealth of talent waiting to break through.  I might watch, if I don't have to wash my hair or something important...

Joel Beall shares Nineteen Brazen Predictions with us, and his first has my brazenometer immediately in the red zone:

Dustin Johnson will have his major breakthrough 

I've been particularly hard on DJ, and at age 31, he's not the spring chicken that we envision. However, it's easy to forget that, at this juncture last year, Johnson wasn't even playing golf. In that purview, Johnson's 2015 -- a win at Doral, 11 top-10 finishes, fifth on the money list -- is impressive.

Well, I suppose it COULD happen.... interestingly, he uses Phil's early major struggles as the benchmark, and there are no doubt parallels in their careers.  But, to the best of my knowledge, Phil steered clear of the Bolivian Marching Powder and otherwise applied himself to his trade.  

Now I wish Joel would have specified where the breakthrough might occur, because he takes the seemingly most likely opportunity off the table with this:

Rory McIlroy completes the career grand slam 

Meaning McIlroy wins the Masters. 

Since his infamous meltdown at Augusta National in 2011, Rory hasn't come close to competing for the green jacket. Even his fourth-place finish last year was six shots behind Spieth. 

But McIlroy's length and precision iron game are built for Augusta success. Now that McIlroy has found a putter to his liking, the rest of the field may be rendered patrons.

He won't be the only one predicting this.  It's hard to imagine that Rory won't have a strong bounce-back season and this is the one he wants most.  But I need to see more from his putting to get fully on board.

Joel has lots of interesting thoughts, including that Tiger skips the year entirely.  He also predicts that Spieth repeats as POY, which I'll throw a fiver up to take the contrary position.  Not intended as a knock on Jordan, there's just so much talent there and I'm just guessing he's due for some disappointment from our cruel game.  Just a hunch...

Joel also comes up with 18 golf-related resolutions for the new year, including this:

Keep an open mind regarding golf's return to the Olympics 

I'm all for ripping the Olympic committee, a group so corrupt it makes Spiro Agnew look like Robin Hood. But while many are lukewarm on golf's return to the, ahem, "amateur" games, give it a chance. The format won't facilitate the strongest field, yet any event boasting the likes of Spieth, McIlroy, Jason Day, Rickie Fowler, Justin Rose and Dustin Johnson is worth watching.

You're about three years too late on that one, my friend.   It's a huge unforced error, and it does no good to sweep it under the rug.  It's going to be BORING, and we all know who to blame.