Catching Up

Please excuse the unexplained absence, but real life had it's way with us this week.  But we're together now, and that's what's important.

R.I.P. Peggy Kirk Bell - We've lost a lioness of the ladies' game:

Peggy Kirk Bell, one of the most influential women in the history of the game as both a teacher and a player, died Wednesday night at age 95. 

Born Margaret Anne Kirk in Findlay, Ohio, Bell was a top player before buying, alongside her husband Warren, Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Pinehurst, N.C., in 1953. She won the 1949 North and South Women’s Amateur and the 1949 Titleholders Championship, and was also a member of the victorious 1950 U.S. Curtis Cup team. 

As a teacher, Bell was one of the first female teaching pros, and was the first woman inducted into World Golf Teachers Hall of Fame. In large part out of respect for Bell, who won the 1990 Bob Jones Award, the U.S. Women's Open has been held at Pine Needles three times.

Somehow the dry recitation of highlights doesn't capture a truly iconic spirit.  Here's an attempt from a local source:

Bing Crosby serenaded her in the Pine Needles bar. Perry Como played her course. Jimmy Carter stayed at the lodge during the National Governors’ Convention. Rudy Vallee was a guest and she played with Jackie Gleason, Michael Jordan and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Jimmy Carter?  Get me rewrite, stat!  But I'm hoping that Kirk-Bell, Gleason, Jordan and O'Connor was an actual fourball....

Shack's got more links if you'r so inclined, and you could do far worse for company on a Sunday morning.

I'll just leave you with this picture of a younger Peggy Kirk with Babe Zaharias from the Western Open a couple of years back:

R.I.P.

The World Cup - Did you catch any of it?  Unless you're nocturnal, it was tough catching much beyond the first few holes of play each day, but even that had a spark to it.  Perhaps this team thing is catching on?

I can't find a game story, apparently our coddle golf press likes their beauty rest, but Danish hegemony is nigh.  First they threaten to punish the Brits, then for good measure they punish the lot of us for good measure....

No doubt Casa Wally is in mourning as #TeamBEL regressed to its mean....  I like Pieters as much as the next guy, but Colsaerts is the Jean-Claude Van Damme of professional golf.  There's a text out there purporting to show your humble correspondent picking #TeamSWE (which finished a credible fifth), but I was really intending to take Scandinavia in general....

In terms of impact, how about this?

It has drawn rave reviews from the players who have landed in Melbourne – including

six inside the world's top 20 – and Finchem said an Olympics overhaul would be explored in time for 2020.

"The feedback is very positive [on team-based formats]," the PGA Tour's Commissioner said. "We're looking at the formats for 2020 and we like individual competition, but we'd also like to mix in a different competition or two and we're looking at different possibilities.

Ya think? So, who was the guy that gave us nothing but week after week of dreary stroke play?

One event played in the dark of night, and all of a sudden folks wake up....  Mind you I'll take it, but still....  And kudos to those running the Zurich event, who saw the need to differentiate their week.

Now the downer is of course his continuing love of the individual competition....  I know, but old habits die hard.  There's nothing inherently wrong with stroke play...  So, Nurse Ratched got Shack thinking and here's the result:

So here is my final offer: 

72-holes of stroke play from a field of 60. Three medals will be awarded just like we saw in 2016. If you want to shorten the competition days to ten overall between men and women, make the first day a 36-hole first and second round. (Rio could not handle that due to shorter winter days, whereas Tokyo, Paris and Los Angeles will all have plenty of daylight.) 

From that competition, the low eight two-person teams (based on country with pairings pre-determined by world rankings), advance to a two-day match play event. They are broken up into Pools A and B based on seedings from the stroke play competition. (Countries that only send one player or an odd number of three will not be included, sorry.) 

Day one of the two-person team match play is a 27-hole day, with three 9-hole foursomes matches played by each team within their pool. With nine-holes and foursomes, you may be looking at some very quick matches, addressing the speed issue that plagues the game. 

The two top teams advance from those pools to an 18-hole gold medal match, with the runners-up playing an an 18-hole bronze medal match. How ties in the pools are decided, I'm not sure. But sudden death playoffs would be fun. 

So to recap: five or six days of competition, with stroke play while team foursomes match play introduces a shorter, faster, high-pressure format. Both nine-hole rounds and alternate shot are put on an international stage for the world to see golf is not the slog it can sometimes be.

Sold!  Obviously this would be too good to be true, but let me just repeat the obvious caveat.  We need to do something about that field size, which renders the individual competition the equivalent of the Hero World Challenge (how's that for a topical reference?).  

And while those that brought us Olympic Golf are on the first turn of their victory lap, it seems an appropriate time t delve into that legacy thing.  One of the reasons, our betters told us, to support the effort was that the wonderful Gil Hanse golf course would serve to grow golf in Brazil and South America.  Unless:

With so few locals playing and no obvious plan for attracting foreigners, funding is already a problem. 

Neil Cleverly, the Briton who built the course and now manages the upkeep, says the company he works for, Progolf, has not been paid for two months. 

"What happens when we run out of gas or diesel? We've been close," Cleverly said. "None of us know if there'll be a job for us in December." 

A source close to the company who asked not to be identified said Progolf has been given no contract by the confederation and, having been forced to foot the $82000 monthly maintenance operation out of its own pocket, is set to pull out. 

Maybe "next month," the source said. 

If that happens, the confederation would quickly have to find expert replacements before damage set in. 

Without maintenance, "the golf course will die," the source said. "It could take four weeks, three weeks."

Yeah, couldn't see that coming....

 At least 2020 is in a first world country with an actually attachment to the game of golf.  But I fear that the legacy of the 2016 games will be the unraveling of the corruption that allowed this course to be built, and golf will be an unindicted co-conspirator.

Ryder Rahmbosis - Mired in task force hell, John Huggan has a vision of Ryder Cup Hell to come:

MELBOURNE, Australia -- Not that the European Tour needs any more selection controversies when it comes to the Ryder Cup, but in the wake of the Paul Casey and

Russell Knox affairs earlier this year, the meteoric rise of Jon Rahm has the potential to cause another headache. The 22-year-old -- the world’s top-ranked amateur during his time at Arizona State University -- posted two top-three finishes in his first four PGA Tour events as a professional and is many learned observer’s tip to be golf’s next superstar. 

But as of now the young Spaniard is not a member of the European Tour and therefore -- like Casey -- ineligible for the Old World Ryder Cup side. And it is a situation that is not likely to alter any time soon. Speaking at the end of the opening round in the World Cup at Kingston Heath -- where he and partner Rafa Cabrera-Bello hold the first-round lead -- Rahm expressed enthusiasm for the Ryder Cup but sees membership of his “home” tour as something that will have to wait at least a year.

This is the world our leaders have created.  It's so hard to secure playing privileges, that even a guy with these kind of credentials has to commit to one tour or the other.  

Now Rahm refers to the WGC's, so I'm not actually sure whether Pelley's tweak of qualifying events was a one-off, but at a minimum he'd need to find room for five non-WGC Euro Tour events, a major commitment wen you don't have your card locked up on your tour of choice.

Incoming - This will no doubt be Tiger week, and I'll leave most of that for later.  But thought you'd get a chuckle over this guy's reaction to suggesting the unthinkable:

I'm not sure that Tiger agrees, but we'll know far more by the end of this week.

We'll catch up soon, I promise.