Midweek Musings

You didn't expect me here every day during ski season, did you?

The Golf Ball Wars - One of our recurring themes her eat Unplayable Lies is the "Sky is falling" nature of the ubiquitous obituaries for our game.... while our game faces challenges, the facts are rather less interesting.  Our game endures because of its unique hold on those that play it, but we remain a niche sport as ever.

I've always felt that sales of golf balls, as opposed to clothing and clubs, was the best metric for the health our game.  So what do we make of this from Shack:

Bidding more for a dozen of Costco balls than the top-priced ball on the market? 

America the beautiful!

The ebay prices are giggle-worthy. However it's mostly the notion that Costco, which sells a lot of vice-worthy items in bloated sizes, had its website bog down Tuesday as golf junkies jammed the servers trying to order the new low cost ball that has tested well. 

Reader Guy reports that the 11 am-to-1 pm ET sales window today did offer the opportunity to buy the ball, but as many noted below, the website was lagging badly. Imagine that, bogging down a site that sells almost anything, only larger. 

Who says golf is dead?

Twitter is exploding over a value-priced golf ball, and it's December!   Some of the funnier tweets:

But will you use your Costco nball, my bad, your Kirkland Signature ball, when you land that ANGC tee time?

Ummm, who said it was named after Mr. Kirkland?  Kinda misogynistic, no?

And as Geoff notes, the E-bay prices are YUUUUUGE!

Rio Loco - To the surprise of no one, prospects for the Rio Olympic Golf Course are flat-lining:

RIO DE JANEIRO — Rio de Janeiro's Olympic golf course took three years to build as

the project was slowed down by environmental lawsuits, Brazilian bureaucracy and stop-and-start funding by a billionaire real estate developer. 

Four months after golf's surprising popularity at the Olympics, an even larger test remains: What to do with an acclaimed course in a country where few play the game, and in a city that can't pay to maintain it.

"You know that it's not going to be easy," Paulo Pacheco, head of the Brazilian Golf Confederation, told The Associated Press. "It's challenging. It's not easy to do. It's very hard. I think it's the only opportunity we have to improve golf in Brazil."

Fair enough, but improving golf in Brazil, a country with the most tenuous of connections to the game, belongs way down the list of priorities, below basics usch as feeding and housing your citizens.

Isn't this the crux of the matter?

Another problem: Who will pay to keep the course running? Out-going Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes says the city can't pay. He has said repeatedly he would not have pushed to build the course were in not for the Olympics. 

"It's not a popular sport in Brazil," Paes said last year. "But there are some things you need to do when you deliver the Olympics." 

Last week, a state court froze Paes' assets as a public prosecutor investigates whether he improperly waived an environmental tax for the course builder. The builders' assets were also frozen.

Remind me of how golf is helped by its association with the corrupt oligarchs that run the Olympics?  At the very least, wouldn't it have been better to wait for 2020, when the games are held in a country with an actual connection to the game (not to mention suitable venues).

Billy v. Rory, The Outtakes -   Remember Little Billy's interview of Rory?  If you've already been doing a deep dive into the eggnog, here it is:

Good fun.... In fact, Alistair Tait had this reaction from Rory to the grilling:

“I definitely had to put my thinking hat on a couple of times to try to wiggle out of a couple of them as best I could. 

“It was going nicely at the start with a couple of hairstyles. I thought, ‘that’s actually not too bad, I don’t mind laughing about this.’ Then he got on to some other stuff and I thought: ‘Oh, Christ!’ 

“We were supposed to do it for half an hour and I was there for an hour and a bit. It was all good fun and I had a great time. It’s great to do things like that. It’s nice to be able to show people I can still laugh at myself.”

When we speak of the Euro Tour players seeming to enjoy themselves more, this is exactly the kind of thing we have in mind.  While I'm still disappointed that we don't know who Rory's current favorite woman tennis player is, it speaks well of the man to laugh at his missteps with us all.

With the interview going viral, it was perhaps inevitable for them to release this "The Making Of..." video, which is also good fun:

PXG, Unplugged - Mark McCluskey has a deep dive on PXG that's worth your time, if gear is of any interest to you.  It's billed as a review of the clubs, but it's also a history of the effort and much more.

This is the bit that's been most excerpted:

The company has grown to 70 people, and Parsons says the response has been beyond what he had hoped. He predicts that the company will finish the year at a $60 millionannual run rate. The challenge will be to continue to innovate, and fight a market that’s usually driven by an annual set of new gear to entice golfers to spend more. 

“We don’t have a product cycle,” says Parsons. “Our product cycle is that we have to make sure that we have breakthroughs in performance. When we do, we’ll release something new. Who knows when that will be with our irons?” Until then, he’ll sell the same model.

That's actually pretty impressive, from a standing start.  Here's his bottom line on the sticks:

So, after all of that, how do PXG’s clubs perform? In my experience, they perform very, very well. The standouts in the set are those innovative irons. As you stand over the shot, the top edge of the club offers the appearance of the thinner blade irons most pros prefer, but the hollow construction gives the clubs much more forgiveness than those models. When I would catch a shot off the toe of the club, I’d still get the majority of the distance that I expected, and they held their line well.

I hit them once, on the back range at Willow Ridge with reduced-flight balls.  I can tell you that the clubs look and feel great, though unlike the author I couldn't see any yardage gains versus my Mizunos.  His take on the rest of the bag isn't as enthusiastic:

The other clubs in the set suffer in comparison to the irons. It’s not that they aren’t good clubs—in fact, the driver, 3 wood, and hybrid club are all terrific. It’s just that they aren’t the sort of leap forward that the irons represent; they’re much more similar to other clubs on the market, especially some Ping clubs, which comes as little surprise given Nicolette’s involvement with those clubs. 

I was less enthusiastic about the wedges. Again, they’re beautifully designed and built clubs, but they come in a limited number of lofts and bounce angles, which is the grind of the sole of the club. Wedges are a club where players have a lot of idiosyncratic preferences, and the PXG wedges just never really fit my eye when I was preparing to hit a shot.

A fun read, but no reason to break the bank to have these in your bag, methinks.

'Tis The Season -  We'll be all over the place with year-end reviews and gift guides....

It's An Honor Just To Be Nominated - Shack and Gary Williams review the nominees for Trick Shot of the Year, and the winner is.... Hey, no spoilers here, give Geoff a click.  He's also got some late submissions....

While You Were Sleeping - Golf Wire has a year-end trivia quiz, which starts with this important question:

Thanks for playing, Peter.

Joel Beall has a more conventional and therefore less interesting quiz as well.  Ryan Herrington has this slideshow of fifteen things we undoubtedly forgot happened in 2016:

In the days leading up to his Northern Trust Open victory at Riviera C.C. in February, Bubba Watson also 1) passed a kidney stone, 2) filmed a cameo on the TV show “Girl Meets World” and 3) went to a Clippers-Warriors basketball game.

The thing is that after Riviera, it was a kidney-stone of a year for the Bubbameister.

Doug Ferguson has an interesting take on the year-in-review identifying the best shot with each club in the bag.... The thing is, though, that page is jumping around so much on my new laptop that it's making me nauseous.  perhaps your viewing experience will be better....

It's The Thought That Counts - Shack is in the middle of his nine days of Christmas bit, and it's quite the mixed bag.  There was State Apparel Fairway Pants and Athletic Collective's layering pieces, which are fine suggestions and at least he didn't go back to the Lululemon well.....

But candles, Geoff?

But let's ignore that classic bit of satire and focus on the product of 12-year-old, Shark

Tank-inspired entrepreneur Lily Green. She has created a line of golf candles evoking scents based on the game, including a special edition sold by Seamus Golf, and her candles are all lovingly packaged with Josh Smith-art of Cabot Links' 16th hole. 

So in maintaining the annual Christmas gift guide theme here, buy yourself a golf candle or be bold and gift a collection of candles at a better price. And support a young entrepreneur.

Geoff put his money where his mouth is and ordered for himself, and posted this:

**Received my candles today and they get A+ on all fronts: packaging, scent and longevity. The fescue definitely stands out if you're looking to provide a golfer a distinctive gift.

Fescue?  Egads, there's even a candle named after William McGirt...  I just can't imagine who besides Employee No. 2 would appreciate that.

 Far more conventional, considering the source, is this:

So while the new Simpson & Co. biography published by Rhod McEwan is one that you can proudly gift, I'm fairly certain that golf architecture aficionados will be placing this

stunning production alongside their collection of classics. Scoop up a copy while they last! 

Written by the late Fred Hawtree, the book is embellished by Donald Steel's foreword and afterword along with a long list of contributors featured in the Acknowledgements. The resulting sense of finding a fun visual or factual surprise on every page is befitting of Simpson's rich-but-mysterious life. 

McEwan has put together a sturdy volume which, as with his other golf publications over the years, will age gracefully. Best of all, we have a highly readable, visually engaging tribute one of golf architecture's least understood characters.

Sounds wonderful, though my pile of unread golf books is a tad too tall as of now...

This last one (for today) I find oddly wonderful:

I was especially glad to hear Marty single out a multi-purpose gift from Digest.com's annual slideshow of products: the Golf Sketch Swing The Club Decoupage Glass Tray from BensGarden.com. 

Besides the cleverness, originality and versatility of this tray subversively laden with every swing thought imaginable, this classy piece could serve as an intervention tool. A glass tray that saves lives!

That's a bit of a stretch, but I just love the look:

Any of you that haven't yet bought that special gift for your favorite golf blogger can use those links above.