Thursday Threads

OK, that rock hasn't gotten any smaller in the last 24 hours....

World Ends, Women Golfers Hardest Hit - The outrage industry is there for us 24/7, and Shack plays Aggregator-Elect...  Who says there are jobs that Americans won't do.  I'm sure it's just coincidental that these howls for respect appear when they do....  

First this from the even-tempered Guardian by a woman named Anya Alvarez (I know, a twofer), allegedly a former Big Break contestant.  Because I'm a more sensitive soul, I'll give her more time to make her case, which starts reasonably enough:

Golf media has a complicated relationship with women: it simply does not know what to do with them. Golf Magazine, Golf Digest and the Golf Channel are all guilty of 

The author, during her Bronze Era.

reducing women to their looks alone. Women Crush Wednesday was a regular feature on the Golf Channel website, highlighting aspiring female golfer pros with racy Instagram accounts; Golf Digest has only had 23 women on its cover in its 66-year history (nine of those covers were shared with men, and three were given to non-golf pros: Sonders, social media starlet Paulina Gretzky and model Kate Upton); Golf Magazine shares the same problem of rarely featuring female pros on its cover and usually gives them coverage when the focus is on physical beauty, rather than athletic accomplishments.

 I don't really quibble with that, assuming of course her data is accurate.  But she does go on, and her grasp on reality becomes increasingly tenuous:

I played on the LPGA tour for one season and the developmental tour for two years before that. During my time on tour I felt better coverage for female golf pros could actually help grow the game for women. Since golf is male dominated, and the recreational golf population is only 20% female, golf media focuses on appealing to men. Perhaps magazines and websites think that if they started providing real coverage on LPGA golfers men would lose interest. Maybe they’re right, but they would no longer be marginalizing women. Women make up 50% of the population, so in business terms it does not make sense to completely undermine us by only viewing us as bodies to be objectified and gawked at.

Fact Check:  Virtually every LPGA event is, in fact, televised, and about six people tune in.  No word from Anya as to whether federal subsidies are indicated.... 

Oliver Brown (in The Telegraph) takes Holly Sonders to the woodshed.... I speak metaphorically of course:

Sonders, predictably, took to Twitter to say she was “humbled” by the accolade. My

colleague James Corrigan countered, quite rightly, that she ought to feel insulted. For if Sonders postures as a progressive force for women for golf – and she does, openly – then she should perhaps question, firstly, why not a single top-50 active player merits a mention in this risible list and, secondly, why an influential magazine insists upon ranking according to aesthetic rather than athletic virtues.

The crassness is overwhelming. In football, Sepp Blatter was all but flayed alive, with some justification, for suggesting that women’s matches could be more enticing if the protagonists deigned to wear tighter shorts. Golf, however, makes a veritable industry out of this casual objectifying.

Does Holly "posture"?  To be honest, since she moved to Fox she's probably relieved that anyone remembers that she's still in the golf industry....  

But it's not just Holly in that woodshed....  Mr. Brown goes after Jerry Tarde as well:

In May 2014 it decided that, all things being equal, it was high time to find a female cover star. There was an eclectic array of contenders: teenage phenomenon Lydia Ko was on the rise, while Lexi Thompson had just electrified audiences in America by becoming the second youngest women’s major champion in history. Instead, the brains trust in residence alighted upon the figure of Paulina Gretzky, whose towering contribution to this great game was that she happened to be the fiancée of Dustin Johnson. Plus, she was glamorous – and amenable to the idea of seductively bending over her club in a sports bra. 

The specious flannelling that Jerry Tarde, the editor-in-chief, used to justify this selection was priceless.

“Paulina ranks at the high end of the golf celebrity scene today,” he argued. “She has a compelling story to tell.” 

Seriously, Jerry? A compelling story? You might care to study what one of your own writers said about Miss Gretzky, in another hit parade headed 'WAGs of the US Open’, to form a fuller sense of her exotic hinterland.

“She is known for posting scantily-clad photos of herself on Instagram,” the caption reads. “And, well, that’s really it.”

Mr. Tarde is in the business of selling magazines, and I understand that it's disheartening to some that Paulina moves more mags than Shansheng Feng....  But Jerry is accountable, and our social justice warriors are not.  Men like pretty women and men buy sports publications, deal with it.

I suspect that the folks at Golf.com thought they would get praised for including several more elderly ladies, such as Julie Crenshaw and Jan Stephenson....  Yeah, good luck with that.

But your favorite blogger missed the funniest aspect of the aforementioned Jan Stephenson photo...You remember, the tub filled with golf balls.  Here's the original:

It made quite the stir back in the day.... Of course, that was pre-Paulina...  And here's the new version:

Kudos to Shack for noticing the comedy gold that your humble servant missed....  Do you see it?  Anyone?  Bueller?

That grab bar is just priceless....  please tell me it was intentional!

Hope Happenings - I know, hard to get too excited, but how about a history lesson?

Every year a Christmas card from Fred Couples arrives at the Nieporte home in Boca Raton, Fla., and therein lies a story about the last club pro to win a PGA Tour event 50 

Make the Hope Great Again!

years ago at the 1967 Bob Hope Desert Classic (now this week's CareerBuilder Challenge). 

Couples was a hotshot Tour rookie when he arrived at the 1982 Hope where a big rope separated the pro section of the range from the amateurs. When he couldn't find an open spot, Couples noticed an older guy hitting striped range balls on the pro side — not the balatas the pros used — and he cockily sauntered over to him. "Excuse me, sir," Couples said. "This is where the pros hit balls. The amateur side is over there."

Tom Nieporte looked up from his bucket with his steely blue eyes and said, "Sonny, I am a pro. I won this tournament in 1967."

At least he called him Sir!  Lots of good detail to be found, so do give it a read....

And while the events field is mostly B-to-C players, there's at least one piece of good news:

Although Phil Mickelson cautioned that playing this week at the CareerBuilder

Challenge was going to be a "last-minute decision," many assumed the five-time major winner would be watching from the sidelines. Mickelson had undergone two hernia surgeries this offseason, and with off-the-course duties as tournament ambassador this week, the setting didn't seem conducive for a comeback. 

Yet, after a successful practice round, the 46-year-old is ready to make his 2017 debut in La Quinta. 

“I feel good and I want to play," Mickelson told the PGA Tour's media staff. "I don’t know where my game is, but I figure the only way to find out is to play.”

Let's hope he can hang until the weekend....

Twitter Spat du Jour - You know that Brandel can't resist, right?  Luke Kerr-Dineen with the details of the Hatfields and McCoys of the golf world:

Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee is a bit like Skip Bayless. Bold, smart, and never wary of sharing his often bold opinions. 

Being that Rory McIlroy is among the very best golfers in the world, he's a frequent topic of discussion for Chamblee. The two bumped heads last year when Chamblee criticized Rory's workout habits, and now, their Twitter feud is flaring up again. 

It started when Chamblee claimed that the best drivers of the golf ball actually hit "down" on the golf ball, rather than "up" on it. That may sound stupid and wonky to non golf nerds, but it's actually a pretty contentious take in the golf community. Then, he tried to prove his point by sharing this picture of Jack Nicklaus.

You'll have to click through to see the tweets, the surprise being that they're fighting over swing mechanics as opposed to Rory's lifting regimen.  But Brandel, taking on Rory on the subject of driver swings is like playing Jeopardy against Ken Jennings....

And do give Shack a click just for the gif of Rory taking Brandel into the boards.... 

Can't we all just get along?

Euros Go Wild - What will these wacky Euros do next?  

Looking relaxed in his black shorts and ankle-length socks, Thongchai Jaidee took aim at the range and hit a shot into the cloudless sky to the backdrop of "The Zephyr Song" by

the Red Hot Chili Peppers. 

Minutes later, the playlist had moved on to a dance song by Scottish DJ Calvin Harris.

Welcome to the modern-day European Tour. 

Music is being played on the range throughout the week at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. The intention also is for music to be played on the walkway to the first tee, giving it a feel comparable to the build-up to a boxing match. 

The soundtrack to golf will no longer be just the thwack or ping of club on ball, or the ripple or roar of applause from the galleries.

What's not made clear to me is whether, as in baseball, the players will be allowed to choose their own walk-up music...  That might be some fun, as long as Enter Sandman is off limits.  Because, you know, Mariano...

But, of course, it's a generational thing:

"I didn't like it on Tuesday," said Paul Lawrie, a 48-year-old Scot who won the British Open in 1999. "When they turned it down, it was fine. But before that, you couldn't hear your caddie." 

Lawrie is on the tour's committee that approved music on the range. 

"You need to try (these ideas) to see if they work or not," he said. "Everyone seems to quite like it but I'm just old. I'm old-school."

Look at the bright side, Paul...  If this hadn't come up, we'd never have known that you're still on tour.

 On The Cheape - The St. Andrews Links Trust has a wonderful page on the restoration of the highly strategic Cheape's bunker:

Our winter programme has been blessed with some pretty kind weather, so much so that

the recent cold snap and sudden arrival of winter hasn’t impacted greatly on our schedules. Over the low season months one of our main projects on the Old Course was to revisit and restore Cheape’s bunker to a shape more akin to what historical records showed the bunker looked like back in the 1800’s. Positioned on the 2nd fairway, this is the first significant bunker acting as a bearing point. ‘Cheape’s’ defines the leftmost side of the hole, sitting on the corner of the dogleg of the 17th. Named after the family who once owned the land on which the Old Course sits, players are mindful to steer right of this hazard from the tee.

It's one of the few twofer bunkers, affecting play on the 17th as well:

It's right at the dogleg of the famed Road Hole, but it's a must to avoid off the second tee and one of the few times one can get in trouble by going left on the Old Course.

Now they're restoring it to the look of the 1800's, a time when they played the course in the opposite direction.