Tuesday Tidbits

Tomorrow will be a travel day, so let's have at it...

There's Got To be A Morning After - Ah, the sweet life of a Tour pro... No sooner do they hand you that trophy in the shape of a falcon....

The wheels of Fowler’s commercial jet left the ground at 2:30 a.m. in the United Arab

Emirates, and when they touched down again nearly 17 hours later in San Francisco early on Monday morning, the buzz in the golf world already had turned to ditching the current “Big Three” by adding another member to the club. 

"Fab Four?" 

“It’s really cool,” Fowler, 27, said after the clinic he co-hosted with first-year PGA Tour pro Hunter Stewart. “It’s somewhere that I haven’t been before. To be inside that top five is pretty special.” 

Fowler vaulted from sixth to fourth in the rankings, passing his good friend at No. 5, Bubba Watson. Spieth, Jason Day – who is defending his Farmers Open title this week -- and McIlroy are in front, but Fowler has closed the gap with top-10 finishes in seven of his last 14 starts.

Fab Four?  Where have I heard that before?  But which one is Ringo?

This need to define specifically the elite grouping alliteratively remains amusing, though I prefer to embrace the uncertainty.  Yes, that top grouping, be it whatever number, is quite impressive, but there's a wealth of young talent still on the outside looking in.  

 A well-earned victory lap but pace yourself folks, this is just the appetizer....

Forward Press, Distaff Edition - Shack uses his weekly feature to preview the LPGA season:

The LPGA Tour begins its season this week and the big news? There is no news. 

Sure, World No. 1 and all-around lovable star Lydia Ko is passing because she’s launching 2016 in her native New Zealand. But even her absence speaks to the stability that is the LPGA Tour. 

In a golf world focused too often on getting bigger, grander and cooler, LPGA Commissioner Mike Whan conveys a sense of vision that knows his tour’s strengths and limitations, something longtime PGA Tour tournament directors grumble about privately when hearing Tim Finchem’s constant growth mantra.

Whan has done a nice job, and the Tour is in a better spot than it's been in many years.  Of course he needs a product to promote, and there he's been blessed.

Now, Mike, about that fifth major?

The Jokes, They Write Themselves - Our Shack is everywhere these days, here discussing the USGA's pace of play initiative:

PASADENA, Calif. -- The deliberate push by the USGA to speed up the game moved west to California’s Brookside Golf Course for its third Pace of Play Symposium. The best data revealed over two days has begun to help the USGA’s smart team target the ways both tournaments and facilities can make pace-of-play strides. 

Just give it time.

Hence the header....

There's some interesting results being shared:

Early research unveiled at the seminar definitively showed that better tee-time spacing will eliminate bottlenecks, whether it’s in LPGA Tour tournaments (where rounds were eliminated by as much as 22 minutes) or at the everyday golf facility. A solid 50 percent of golfers surveyed say that bottlenecks are more bothersome than the overall length of a round.

Eliminated?  That smells like an auto-correct fail...Moving on, here's where the rubber meets the road:

Course operators don’t want to give up precious times, with only 18 percent believing any solution to pace issues is possible. To get their attention and show how the USGA is coming at this from all angles, speakers Henry DeLozier and Stephen Johnston of Global Golf Advisors revealed findings showing a younger generation of golfers are willing to pay more for golf if they feel a course is making an effort to solve pacing issues.

To me it's got the feel of a doctorate thesis....there's interesting data but those of us in the trenches crave something a tad more tangible.  But given Geoff's optimism, give it a read and draw your own conclusions.

The Wind Cries Herbert -  Have you read any Herbert Warren Wind?  Sheesh, and you call yourself a golf fan...

Wind's New Yorker pieces were an integral part of my infatuation with our game, specifically his North, To the Links of Dornoch provided my first recognition that the game was played differently over there.  

Joell Beall informs us of a coming anniversary under the guise of six things you didn't know about HWW:

Yet only one is considered godfather of golf literature: Herbert Warren Wind. 

Wind began covering golf for The New Yorker in 1941, and over the next five decades, described the game with an avant-garde style that has since been imitated, but never duplicated. During that span, he also worked for Sports Illustrated and contributed to Golf Digest, his contributions making such an impact that Wind became the first writer to win the USGA's coveted Bob Jones Award, and was selected to the World Golf Hall of Fame posthumously in 2008. 

August marks the 100th anniversary of Wind's birth, and his influence on the game remains evident. To introduce Wind to another generation, Open Road Media is releasing seven of his books digitally, the first time the writer's work has been made available on eBook platforms.

He was a special man and made an immeasurable contribution to our game, though I'm hard pressed to consider his style avant-garde.... His articles were lengthy, but one never rushed through them... I always thought that his pacing matched the languorous feel of the game he was describing.

Read Joel's piece but, more importantly, is you're unfamiliar with The Master, why are you denying yourself that pleasure?

Imitation, Flattery - You know the old saw, but that's when you copy someone else...  Gary Koch had an interesting short feature on the Sunday broadcast of the back nines of Pete Dye's two stadium courses.  Here's Shack's take on it:

There are two ways of looking at Golf Channel's analysis from Gary Koch comparing TPC Sawgrass and PGA West.

You could say that Pete Dye was merely rehashing a proven formula in the desert, or you could say he was cleverly importing his eastern concept, with a western spin for clients who wanted another version of Sawgrass.

Alas, you'll have to click through to watch the video, as the best I can muster is this screen shot:

The similarities are quite surprising, especially in the three finishing homes.  Given that both properties were blank canvasses with no interesting features to be utilized, you might have thought that Pete would consciously mix it up a little.  Good work by Gary, though.