Friday Forensics

Just a few items for today, and I'll let you get on with your lives....

Ryder Remorse - They all come around to my way of thinking.....eventually.  Doug Ferguson notes the schadenfreude sweeping this side of the Atlantic:

One week into the Ryder Cup auditions for the captain's picks, Davis Love III should

have no trouble identifying the hot player. 

Trouble is, Rory McIlroy plays for the other team. 

The Deutsche Bank Championship, where McIlroy rediscovered his putting stroke, was the first of two big tournaments that essentially allow Love and the Americans to buy time so they can decide how to use three captain's picks that will be announced Monday. 

Love will get a fourth pick after the FedEx Cup ends on Sept. 25, presumably before the boarding door closes on the flight to Hazeltine.

No one seems to have noticed the man that put the Horschel in the Horschel rule....  He's done exactly what since those tow wins in  2014?  The prosecution rests its case....

But how rich is this?

But is this really an audition? 

Not according to Phil Mickelson, the senior member of the U.S. team who serves on the Ryder Cup task force. 

''I think the picks are fairly obvious,'' Mickelson said before the first shot was struck at the TPC Boston. ''If they're not, or if we get a guy like Billy Horschel who just gets a hot hand and we need that hot hand to give us the best chance to win, then we have that option. For the most part, I think it's fairly obvious who the picks would be without even naming them.'' 

Maybe it's obvious to Mickelson, and perhaps to Love.

Got it.... Whatever DLIII decides, Phil has his six....  Unless it goes bad, and then Phil will have the shiv handy.  Back to Doug:

Europe filled out its team with three captain's picks last Tuesday, two days after qualifying ended. Too soon? It might look that way with Alex Noren winning in Switzerland and moving up to No. 27 in the world. At least it has a team of 12 for a month leading to the opening shot on Sept. 30. 

The Americans won't have a full team until they arrive at Hazeltine. 

They were giddy about their trip to Gillette Stadium last week, even though only two-thirds of the team was there. It led to one awkward moment when someone asked Kuchar how he liked the home of the New England Patriots and the speech from 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey captain Mike Eruzione. Kuchar wasn't there. Neither was Fowler. Or the other ''obvious'' pick.

Doug is worth reading in full, as is this Jeff Babineau piece on the top ten candidates.  Jeff notes the obvious drawback to J.B. Holmes, that the man is not very talented with the flatstick, and our Shack has some disjointed yet revealing thoughts as well:

For all of the team bonding nonsense we'll have to hear about ("a real team room guy"), this build-up that leaves team players off the team until the last minute seems contradictory.

Furthermore, in watching the banter on social media and Golf Channel, I've started to grow uneasy listening to how players are disparaged as folks are making cases against them. (Jeff Babineau posted this more level-headed-but-still-opinionated take on the possible candidates at Golfweek.com.) 

The hate for Jim Furyk has been particularly strong and strange, especially given how much time he missed and his strong play at the U.S. Open. Oh, and a 58. Yes, his record is not great in the Ryder Cup, but the United States, for a change, seems to have very solid options for its final four spots, especially if you remember way back to August when Reed, Kuchar, Watson and Fowler all showed enough signs in the Rio Olympic Games. 

Speaking of Fowler and Watson, two players cited as not up to the task. Both are top ten players in the Official World Golf Ranking. That will set one interesting precedent should they be left off the team. 

Finally, there's J.B. Holmes, who has his caddy lining him up over three footers this week at Crooked Stick (and it's not pretty). Should that negate his strong year in the major championships or impressive showing in all cup matches he has played?

 I didn't see any of yesterday's golf, but that image of J.B. is pretty horrid....

Lastly, this Coleman McDowell header had me smiling, but that's only because I mistakenly inferred a second "S" in the sixth word:

The Ryder Cup Task Force Reigns, But Can You Win By Committee?

 Coleman reminds us that this:

Two weeks later, the PGA of America created a Ryder Cup task force; the 11-person group consisted of PGA executives, players and former captains. It was nothing less than a desperate attempt to change the fortunes of Americans in the biennial battle that it used to dominate. The press release read: "The Ryder Cup is our most prized competitive asset, and the PGA of America is committed to utilizing our utmost energy and resources to support one of the biggest events in all of sport." That only begged the question: What had the PGA been doing before?

Begat this:

Four months later, task force member Davis Love III was named U.S. captain for the second time. (Love led the 2012 squad, which lost in the Miracle at Medinah after a Sunday singles collapse.) For all the talk of a new and fresh approach, Love, who will surely be a fine captain, represented a decided in-the-box strategy. It was an unimaginative choice at best, especially after witnessing at Gleneagles the effect a captain can have.

But they're all forgetting what begat this:

The horrible play of guys like Phil.... Our guys need to play better, Full Stop!

Rumors of Its Demise.... - John Strege has an alarmingly calm take on the state of our game:

The headlines for golf’s health, notwithstanding Tiger Woods’ declaration that he intends to take the game up again competitively next month, have been disturbing. 

“Golf is back in the Olympics. Too bad no one plays it anymore,” a Washington Post headline said a few weeks ago. 

“Why golf has gone the way of the three-martini lunch,” Dow Jones’ MarketWatch declared last week. 

“Is the sky falling? Is this a death knell? No,” Jay Karen, CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association said on Wednesday. “It’s interesting how golf gets treated in mainstream media different than other industries. If the number of restaurants in a particular town go from 20 to 18 is the restaurant business dying?

I realize that such an article can't omit the "T-word" entirely, but in the lede sentence?  Otherwise it's spot on, especially this:

Yet there is no denying that the number of courses have declined substantially in recent years. Both Woolson and Karen cited the same reason, economics 101, supply exceeding demand. 

“Golf courses got overbuilt,” Woolson said. “There really wasn’t any feasibility given to would this golf course be successful if we put homes here? Will they sell? Not one thought was given to the viability of the golf course.” 

A rule of thumb, he said, is that a third of people inside a golf course community will join the club or play the course. Most, he said, “just like a nice big green backyard.”

“We can’t get around the fact that you have to look at why so many courses built in the ‘90s and into the millennium, that it’s true courses were built to sell more houses,” Karen said. “That’s not a highly sustainable market for the golf industry. We do have this strange anomaly of this golf economy, that the spike in supply was not in response to demand.

The Chicken Littles of the world should be forced to write that last sentence on a chalkboard one hundred times.

 Olympic Fatigue - Did you catch Justin Rose's meltdown last week?  Here's the skinny:

From 11 under and in contention through nine holes in Round 4 of the Deutsche Bank Championship, the Englishman crashed down the leaderboard with an emphatic thud. Forty-five strokes over the last nine holes — a double and two triples did the trick — sent Rose from T-3 to T-57 quicker than you could say Tropical Storm Hermine.

I'll add that as one of most consistent ball-strikers out there, Justin would be far down your list of likely candidates to implode so dramatically.  But since the FedEx Cup is little more than a weak opening act for you-know-what, here's the implications:

But just as there is a calm before the storm, for Rose there’s a silver lining to the collapse: A week off that he feels he sorely needs. 

“It wouldn’t be the worst thing; I hate to say that,” said Rose, when asked if not qualifying for the Tour Championship (Sept. 22-25) would be beneficial to his mental health.

When Rose crashed over the final nine holes at TPC Boston, it dropped him to 50th in the FedEx Cup standings, which means he has to do something pretty special at this week’s BMW Championship to get into the top 30 and earn a spot into the Tour Championship.

Same goes for Henrik, though in that case he's also injured.   Just way too much golf...

Oops! - The PGA Tour couldn't allow the USGA's dominance of rules fiascoes to go unchallenged:

Wednesday is an odd time for something to happen that alters the landscape of a pro golf

award. But before a single shot was hit this week, the race for PGA Tour Rookie of the Year changed drastically. 

Up until Wednesday, it was a lock that either Emiliano Grillo or Smylie Kaufman would win the honor. Then Si Woo Kim became a rookie -- and things became a bit more blurry. 

The PGA Tour decided to re-classify Kim as a first-year player with just two FedEx Cup Playoff events remaining before the 2015-16 season wraps up. Confused, Smylie?

On the one hand, huh?  On the other, who cares?

Today's Golf History Lesson -  Who's the best golfer you've never heard of?  Lots of candidates, but submitted for your approval is Chick Evans:

Three years ago, the American golf hero Francis Ouimet was celebrated for the

centennial of his landmark victory in the 1913 U.S. Open at The Country Club. This week, another maker of a memorable moment in U.S. golf history gets his due. Today is the eve of Charles (Chick) Evans becoming, a century ago, the first golfer to complete the “Double Crown” of winning the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur in the same year. 

While Ouimet’s feat showed Americans could beat the best international players, Evans’ achievement proved a homegrown golfer could dominate America’s key events. One hundred years later, Bobby Jones is the only other golfer to have accomplished the feat, winning the U.S. Open and Amateur in his Grand Slam year of 1930.

The item is well worth your time if you enjoy golf history.  At the time, the Amateur was the more prestigious event, a fact that's hard for today's golf fans to appreciate.   

Jaime Elaborates - Sam Weinman scores an e-mail Q&A with Jaime Diaz, and I'm guessing that this will be the most copied-and-pasted bit:

In your story you delve into some deep stuff, particularly the concept that some of his physical pain might emanate from emotional anguish. If that's the case, can the opposite be true? If Tiger, having missed the game in the past year, can rediscover some joy in playing, could his body respond favorably as well? I ask this question of course acknowledging you are not a doctor, a psychiatrist or, as far as I know, a spiritual healer. 

It’s a tricky area, because when it comes to the source of Tiger’s pain, since he has never

shared any medical specifics, is all speculation. It was revealing to me that Tiger’s agent, Mark Steinberg, said in our story that Tiger had not considered nor was considering exploring whether his pain could have psychosomatic origins. It suggests that just as Tiger has declined to comment publicly about his scandal or the toll it might have taken on him, he has not addressed the embarrassment and humiliation as a source of stress that could be responsible for part of, or even all of, his lower-back problems. The theoretical inverse of this — again, speculation — would be Tiger coming to terms with the damage his scandal and subsequent divorce did to his psyche, and acknowledging that its effect was psychosomatic pain. Extending this line of thinking, if Tiger got to that point, his body and mind could heal to the point that he could regain the mental and physical skills that in recent years have dramatically declined. The best chance for Tiger to play with joy again is to understand and resolve the sadness and regret he’s likely been carrying in recent years.

Jaime has been eloquently discussing this thought for some time now, and there's much that intrigues in it.  But there's one question I'm begging to ask him, and I'll even put the beers on my Unplayable Lies expense account.  

How does his unified theory of moral shame account for Y.E. Yang?  Which was, folks seem to forget, at least three months before the Escalade made contact with the fire hydrant.

That's all for now....I'll see you when I see you.