Midweek Musings

The traffic numbers continue to astound....  The only changed circumstance that could account for another hundred sets of eyeballs each day is our move to Fairview, though to date I've met about eight of the guys.  Though I was quite taken back when one of the kids in the open-air bagroom (sorry, that's an insider reference) told me he loved the blog and that everyone there was reading it.

I'll admit, though, that it puts a fellow under a little pressure....  I feel I need to be especially trenchant in my comments....  What's that?  Why start now?  Good question....

In The Bag/On His Feet - We don't do a lot of equipment blogging here, but the Nike exit has left some very prominent players homeless.  One of those appears to have found some new sticks:

Following months of speculation about when or where Nike’s biggest-name staffers might switch equipment after the company's decision to exit the golf-club business, it

appears Rory McIlroy is ready to replace some of his Nike clubs. Golf Digest's Tim Rosaforte reports that the 26-year-old was warming up for the WGC-HSBC Champions in China on Tuesday with a TaylorMade driver and fairway woods in the bag.

The M2 driver that Rory was spotted practicing with is similar to the Nike Vapor Fly Pro, which Rory had previously been using, in that it offers a simpler, relatively limited amount of adjustability. Both M2 and Vapor Fly Pro feature an adjustable hosel only, no adjustable weighting. There’s also a similarity in that both drivers feature a channel in the front part of the sole designed to enhance the way the face flexes at impact. The Vapor Speed fairway wood and M2 fairway wood also have a similar channel.

 Like Rory, I much preferred the M2 to it's sibling, though these numbers make me suspect we weren't swinging the same shaft:

Carry Distance: 310.9 yards. Club Speed at Impact: 122.3 m.p.h. Initial Ball Speed: 181.9 m.p.h.

I top out just a little under that....

Of greater interest is his footwear, also a great moment in product branding.  For a few years Nike has been going with Lunar Control as the name of its golf shoes and last year introduced the Vapor Fly branding of its woods.  Now out of the club business, why let a good name go to waste?

Submitted for your approval, therefore, is its unwieldy-named new shoe, The Lunar Control Vapor:

According to Nike, McIlroy put the shoe through extensive testing in the Bahamas in

August. In a nine-hole on-course session, he hit shots from various uneven lies, as well as bunkers. The shoe appears to have passed his test. 

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve played golf in spiked footwear, and up until two years ago those spikes were metal,” he is quoted on Nike's website. “Through its drive to innovate and bring the sport to new places, Nike has created a new traction system that provides me with a stable base to push off the ground and deliver the distance I need off the tee.” 

Nike says the sole was inspired by the tread on snowmobiles. The upper is lightweight microfiber with a two-year waterproof guarantee.

It's just a mouthful, no?  I've found the Nike shoes extremely comfortable, but this one looks like a snowmobile....

Trading Up - Good news on the horizon in Tour venues:

DALLAS — Trinity Forest Golf Club, a new Bill Coore-Ben Crenshaw design south of downtown, will play host to the PGA Tour's AT&T Byron Nelson Championship in 2018, a year earlier than expected.

The scheduling change was confirmed to GOLF.com by senior members of the sponsoring Salesmanship Club. The formal announcement will be made at Trinity Forest on Wednesday and will include Dallas resident Jordan Spieth and Andy Pazder, the Tour's executive vice president and chief of operations.

This is a highly-anticipated new course, and I'll give you a little more, if you promise to ignore the "L-word":

Trinity Forest sits on a reclaimed and remediated plot of land owned by the City of Dallas. Coore and Crenshaw built a links-style layout with no trees and little water, but the layout features undulating terrain and intriguing hole designs.

Members of the USGA's championship committee, including Executive Director Mike Davis, have toured the property and were impressed with what they saw. The club is actively seeking the U.S. Amateur, which has never been held in North Texas, and possibly the U.S. Mid-Amateur. There has also been discussions about the course landing a FedEx Cup tournament or perhaps even a PGA Championship.

It's not a links, OK?  I wish they wouldn't do that, as heat-resistant grasses make it impossible to create a links.  But Bill Coore is one of the good guys in golf course design, so let's just enjoy it for what it is...

But the appeal of this news is that the Tour will be leaving Las Colinas, one of the worst venues in their rota.  It will also be interesting to see if the new venue helps revitalize this event, which has become a sad imitation of itself since we lost its namesake.  

It's In Their Nature - The header refers to the parable of the scorpion and the frog, but I had options aplenty.  I could have gone with politics is show business for ugly people, or the most dangerous real estate is that between a U.S. Senator and a microphone.

Today's installment of Senators Behaving Badly is this:

A group of U.S. Senators is calling on the U.S. Golf Association to move next year's

U.S. Women's Open from Trump National in Bedminster, N.J. 

Senators Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Dick Blumenthal (D-Conn.) signed the letter addressed to Mike Davis, USGA executive director and CEO. 

“The decision that the USGA makes is more consequential than simply the geographic location of a golf tournament,” the Senators wrote in a letter dated Tuesday. “In declining future association with a brand that degrades women, the USGA and LPGA have an opportunity to make clear to the world, and most especially young Americans, that our nation will not tolerate nor do business with any company that condones or excuses action that constitutes sexual assault.”

Sigh.  This is the business of the U.S. Senate because...... well, that escapes one, doesn't it?   Because they're so good at their chosen line of work?  Nah, it would need to be something else....

This is far from our first item on this subject, and no doubt our Mr. Trump brings it upon himself.  But it's a golf tournament, and is it possible that we could have, what do the kids call it, a safe space from politics?

Oh, and do the ladies have any say in this?  Because in a recent item we found out that the LPGA players quite overwhelmingly want the event to stay at his course, because he's been a big supporter of their Tour.  So posturing gadfly Senators, do we believe the women?

Competition for Van Cynical - Alan Shipnuck is reviving his old mailbag feature, and this first go has a few items of note.  Apropos my earlier post, he had this when queried as to who in the current Top Ten would make the HOF (Rory excluded):

I expect Jason Day, Dustin Johnson, and Jordan Spieth to comfortably play their way in. Adam Scott, Henrik Stenson and Bubba Watson are, as of this writing, strong maybes. Of course, who will make it and who actually deserves to be in are separate questions. The basic problem is that the Hall of Fame enshrinement has become a glitzy spectacle, and every two years a handful of warm bodies are needed so the show can go on. Therefore, almost every marginal candidate is likely to get in sooner or later. Dominance is hardly required, or even otherworldly talent; a good, solid, long career is now pretty much all it takes to pile up the requisite credentials. If the bar continues to be lowered and the Pavins and Zoellers get in, then Stenson, Scott and Watson become better bets, too.

You know who else is in?  Zach Johnson by current standards....  I know, no other-worldly talent there.

Forgive me for not including the questions, but they're from Twitter and the copy-and-pasting is tedious.  Asked whether the PGA would ever adopt the Euro's social-media friendly andtics Alan had this:

The Euro tour has perfected the art of having fun. The pre-tourney festivities are so absurd they're made for social media, and the tour employs some very clever lads who know how to make the most of these photo (and video) ops. Hard to imagine similar hijinks catching on over here because a) the players are a lot more uptight and b) the PGA Tour doesn't pay appearance fees as is the custom on the Euro tour. The players over there have hundreds of thousands of reasons to put up with the silliness. On the eve of the 2014 Shanghai Masters I attended a spectacularly cheesy night-time gala at which a handful of top players were forced to mingle and then hit ceremonial tee shots from a platform hovering in the middle of a lake. There party dragged on forever and at one point I turned to Lee Westwood and said, "Whatever they're paying you, it's not enough." He shot me a devilish grin and said, "Oh, but it is."

I love the Westy bit, but I don't really think it's the appearance fees.  They're the Avis of the golf world, and they have to try harder....  But I alos think that's a bit due to our Tour's leadership, specifically the criminally humorless Commissioner Ratched.  

And this in response to the Spieth Masters hangover:

It is clearly a major setback from which he is still trying to recover. If Spieth had nabbed the green jacket he would've been a year ahead of Jack Nicklaus's pace for career majors and only the fourth man to win back-to-back Masters. He would have been on the greatest major championship tear since Tiger Woods around the turn of the century. That moment is long gone. Beyond the lost opportunity to make history is that Spieth's self-immolation in Amen Corner destroyed his hallowed position among his peers. His brand had been built on possessing the clutch gene, being a closer, having the best head in the game, etc. Now Spieth has a lot to prove, to himself and his competition. The fact is that Day, McIlroy and DJ have so much more firepower than Spieth. He can still beat them but from top to bottom his game has to be razor-sharp, as it was throughout 2015. This season there was just a little bit of slippage and Spieth was a non-factor at all of the most big events post-Augusta. He's too smart, too talented and too driven to not remain an important factor in this game but the hard truth is that Spieth may never again recapture the kind of career momentum he had through 63 holes at this year's Masters.

Boy, I'll bet he doesn't write many short letters (read the prior post if that goes over your head).

But lots of good stuff, so give the hard-working man a pageview.