Midweek Musings

Sorry for the delayed start to blogging, but Employee No. 2's hip was due for it's 1,000 mile check-up....She continues to recover well, and is now released for serious PT.

Tiger Fallout - Alan Shipnuck ponders the imponderable:

Is this the end? 

It's impossible not to wonder. Tiger Woods's stunning withdrawal from this week's Safeway Open has done more than just render the 2016-17 season-opener mostly irrelevant. It has cast doubt as to whether we will ever again see Woods play meaningful tournament golf. In pulling the plug at the last minute, Woods said in a statement on his website that his game was too "vulnerable" for public consumption. For a man who has spent a career obfuscating, it was a candid and powerful choice of words.

Alan touches on something that I meant to mention yesterday, that the glamour pairing might have not seemed, you know, so glamorous fro a guy with a "vulnerable" game.

Woods's unease with turning up at the Safeway was surely compounded by Phil Mickelson's very public eagerness to play alongside Woods.

No one likes to embarrass themselves in front of their bromantic interest... you'll have to read the piece to see why Tiger reminds him of Pablo Casals.

Shack and The Loop have video of Tiger's swing from yesterday's TW Foundation event at Pebble Beach, the consensus being that it doesn't look ready for prime time.  This guy took time out from grinding his axe to share his thoughts:

That's a man that gets paid to analyze swings, though perhaps he's spent too much time watching Charles Barkley and Ray Romano swing the club.

Mark Cannizzaro asks the  unanswerable question:

How could Woods not have known Friday, when he committed to play, his game was not ready for prime time before withdrawing Monday? 

If this were health-related, his withdrawal would be totally understandable. But it is not.

Was Woods hitting it sideways Friday, when he committed, figuring he’d have it fixed by Monday? This, by the way, after reports a week ago quoted Jesper Parnevik on how Woods was flushing it in practice down in Florida. 

Notah Begay, one of Woods’ small roster of confidants, told the Golf Channel on Monday that “not having enough reps in” prior to the Safeway Open was the issue. Begay said Woods told him, “It’s just not there, man.” 

Was it there Friday and not there Monday?

Like a certain Democratic Presidential candidate, he will never put himself in the position of having to answer those difficult questions.  I can only conclude based upon his longstanding behavior, and here I'm thinking mostly of the last-second commitments to events as well as his famous Sawgrass presser the first day of the Match Play, that he doesn't much care about the effect of his actions.

The Rich Get Richer - Despair not over the Striped One, there's news to warm your heart (or at least mine):

Bandon Dunes founder Mike Keiser doesn’t get mad. He gets even. Exactly one year after announcing that his new Gil Hanse-designed Bandon-area project couldn’t go through as planned, blocked by environmentalists, Keiser has returned with a bold, positive move toward more golf at coastal Oregon’s Bandon Dunes Resort. As first reported by Golf Channel’s Matt Ginella, Keiser is looking to redevelop the Sheep Ranch into a championship layout. Hyperbole aside, this course could top them all. 

"It should happen in the next two years," Kaiser told Ginella. "The site is spectacular. Approval is easy because we already own the land. Irrigation shouldn’t be an issue. But we’re not in any rush."

Let's take a second to unpack the above....  Keiser was involved in a protracted negotiation of a land swap that would have allowed the construction of 27 holes for a public facility south of the town of Bandon.  We don't know that there's any relationship to the two prospective projects except obviously in their timing, but to position this as revenge just seems silly.

Now you might well ask what the heck is the Sheep Ranch, and the best way to answer that is to link you to this wonderful piece by Alan Bastable from a couple of years ago.

Gil Hanse, for whom Keiser was prepared to wait during his Olympic ordeal, has the inside track on this one:

"When Jim Wagner and I were asked to look at the Sheep Ranch as a site for the next course at Bandon we eagerly set out to explore the property," Hanse said. "What we saw was a site that has the potential to be one of the truly remarkable golf courses in the world. With an amazing stretch of coastline, perfect elevation changes, varied vegetation and the opportunity to route holes in every direction, it should yield a course that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the other great courses already at Bandon Dunes." 

The prospects are salivating. Turn Keiser and Hanse loose on possibly Bandon Dunes' most scenic, spectacular terrain, and it could be the resort's finest course yet.

The property is visible from Old Macdonald, and is truly quite spectacular.   The cliff-line along Bandon and Pacific Dunes is pretty straight, but here it features all sorts of nooks and crannies, which should provide Hanse with some spectacular lines for his routing.

Be Like the Professor - I've always been more of a Maryann kind of guy, though I'll bet Maggot went for Ginger.  But the subject here is a different Professor, and this one thinks we've doing it all wrong:

When he won the Web.com Tour's DAP Championship last month, Bryson DeChambeau suggested that his win, the first by golfer on any significant professional tour using single-length irons, might have been “the day the game changed.” 

In the halls of DeChambeau’s principal equipment sponsor, Cobra, however, there’s a hope that day of change is today. 

The company announced two new iron sets, and each of which will be offered in single-length options.

I make no pretense to much of a gearhead, but it's a complicated subject to to the need to maintain consistent swing weight through the set.  Mike Stachura, who is a gearhead, provides all the details you might want on this subject, and it will be interesting to see if these move.

See if this intrigues you:

DeChambeau deeply believes the single-length approach is the game’s new frontier, and Tom Olsavsky, Cobra’s chief of research and development, has made that belief a more palatable reality for the masses. Unlike DeChambeau’s approach, which requires oversized grips and an unorthodox, steep one-plane swing, the King F7 One and King Forged One Length are designed to simplify the game for average golfers by making every club the traditional length of a 7-iron. 

“We see more consistency in both full swings and the short game,” Olsavsky says. “It’s one setup and one swing through the bag. And in our testing we see impacts closer to the center of the face much more often. One other benefit we see is more confidence.”

Perhaps.  It just seems counter-intuitive to me, but I'm an old guy ready to be put out to pasture.  If anyone knows someone who tries these, please drop me a note.

More Losses For The Donald - This pales in comparison to his losses from Atlantic City that were leaked recently, but his mother's native country has treated him harshly.  Shack already called BS on this:

Hundreds also protested about the creation of his Turnberry golf course in South Ayrshire after he purchased the property for £39.5million in 2014. 

His accounts show that Turnberry had a turnover of £11.4million but made a loss of £8.4million for 2015. 

The company said the loss was down to large-scale renovation and investments being made in the resort by the Trump Organisation.

The Ailsa was closed for a significant part of the year, so let's not read too much into this.  But this one remains a problem:

He promised to create 'the greatest golf course in the world' and spend up to £1billion on the development - creating 800 jobs in the process. 

But company accounts reveal the resort has lost money for the fourth year in a row since Trump struck the first ball at the championship 18-hole golf course. 

It made a loss of £1million last year compared to losses of £1.1million in 2014, £1.8million in 2013 and £1.7million in 2012.

That trend line looks promising, no?  Given that he has dramatically scaled back his plans for the accompanying resort, I don't see how he ever makes this work.  Scots simply can't afford the greens fees (and aren't well-disposed to him in any event), and it's far from the most heavily traveled part of the country by American golfers.

But this bit is laugh-out-loud funny:

Donald Trump's Scottish golf courses lost more than £9million last year, new figures have revealed. 

The news of his losses at Turnberry and the Menie Estate came after a US pressure group called for a probe into allegations of 'accounting discrepancies' at his resorts. 

His accounts reportedly reveal that Trump's golf courses did not pay any corporation tax in the UK because of their financial woes.

As with that leaked tax return here, it's economic ignorance on parade.  I'd have thought that the folks at the Daily Mail might know that corporate taxes are paid on profits....  But by all means have your little probe.