Weekend Wrap

Before we get to the main event, he's a short video by ski buddy Bob of your humble blogger enjoying the deep stuff from early last week....

Perhaps after viewing that demonstration of motor skills you'll be a bit more tolerant of the typos in my posts.... Or not.

Rahmadan Comes Early This Year - The latest can't-miss amateur has been out on Tour for about an hour-and-a-half, and I think the incumbants just might have noticed.  Before we get to the events of yesterday, a short precis on the lad's career to date:

He won the Ben Hogan Award his final two years at Arizona State as the top college

player, along with the Jack Nicklaus Award his senior year as the best golfer. He spent 60 weeks at the No. 1 amateur in the world. Two years ago in the Phoenix Open, he tied for fifth while still at Arizona State. 

And when he turned pro last summer, he earned his PGA Tour in four starts, tying for third in the Quicken Loans National at Congressional and finishing runner-up by one shot at the Canadian Open.

That pic above was from last year's Phoenix Open, playing to the home crowd on the 16th hole....  Think they crazies will react to him later this week?

 This win qualifies as unexpected, but shame on Golf.com for not having his image available for their leaderboard:

It seems he bears a striking resemblance to C.T. Pang.... In case you missed it, here's a description of his back-nine pyr0technics:

Rahm made two eagles over the final six holes, the last one a 60-foot putt from the back

fringe on the par-5 18th hole for a 5-under 67 to win the Farmers Insurance Open by three shots for his first PGA Tour victory. 

Rahm, who turned 22 in November, beat Phil Mickelson's mark as the youngest champion at this tournament. He also became the first player in 26 years to capture his first PGA Tour title at Torrey Pines. 

Starting the final round three shots out of the lead, Rahm made up ground in a hurry.

He hit 4-iron into 18 feet on the par-5 13th and holed the eagle putt to tie for the lead. He stuffed a wedge into 5 feet on the 17th to take the lead, and he finished with his long eagle putt that broke hard to the right and peeled back to the left and dropped in on the side of the cup.

Ummm, so much for those layers and layers of editors and fact-checkers, the lad shot 35-30-65, including those two eagles on the incoming nine.

For those of you weary of the hype surrounding the high school class of 2011, please say hello to the class of 2012.... do you feel old yet?

I don't often post the Tour's highlight video, but this one is pretty special:

Hmmmm...Sunday red?  Didn't that used to be a thing?  A 30 on the South's back nine is just sick,

It was a funny week, indeed, and I suspect that the ratings will be on the feeble side.  Most of the name brands were slamming trunks on Friday (including that featured three-ball of Woods, JD and DJ, but also Fowler, Walker and Koepka), and local hero Phil faded on the weekend.

The Tour Confidential panel was asked to assess Rahm's potential and had these responses.... I've occasionally been tough on Joe Passov, so I'll graciously excerpt his victory lap:

Bacon: I think Rahm is in that Brooks Koepka-Tony Finau camp, an extremely talented power player that will catch fire once or twice a year and give himself a good shot at winning. It's nearly impossible to judge where these guys are headed considering how difficult it is to win multiple times a year anymore, but Rahm has insane talent and rare power that makes him a major threat in this generation's PGA Tour.

Passov: There are clouds in every crystal ball...but if you go back to this forum from Oct. 9, 2016, we were asked for "one big, bad, bold prediction for the 2017 season." I tossed out three of them, with one being that the breakout star of the year will be Jon Rahm. I suggested that he had the length, game, and swagger to bag multiple wins in 2016-17. I'm halfway there.

But shame on whoever formulates the questions each Sunday night, as it took until the third question to ask about Rahm's win...  You'll no doubt guess the first two, but be patient as we'll get there in a bit....

 Before we leave, here's Phi'l's take on the young man:

Mickelson knew it was coming. His brother, Tim Mickelson, was Rahm's coach at Arizona State and now is his agent. 

''I think he's more than just a good young player,'' Mickelson said. ''I think he's one of the top players in the world. I think there's an intangible that some guys have where they want to have the pressure, they want to be in that tough position, they want to have everything fall on their shoulders. And he has that.''

And while we'll be taking CBS to our woodshed below, I did enjoy Gary McCord's commentary on playing with Rahm at Whisper Rock, where he gets five a side from the young Spaniard....

Other Torrey Takes - As I watched yesterday's coverage, I was taken by the lack of spectators by the 12th green and 13th tee.  Now those are out a bit from the clubhouse, but it was still a Sunday on our....

It turns out that I wasn't seeing things, as Shack explains:

As was noted earlier in the week, the Farmers Insurance Open has made strides since nearly becoming extinct. But the operation, at least for the average paying customer,

A Ghost-town in LaJolla....

leaves much to be desired. 

With a daily ticket price of $50 ($35 for senior), the event does not offer a single grandstand for general admission fans to sit on a green and watching play. Even worse, there is only a small 50-yard long area right of the 18th green for standing to watch action, leaving play to conclude, at a public golf facility, to finish in front of only corporate customers. 

Compounding the problem: many of the corporate guests came dressed as empty seats, even on a gloroius Sunday with a stacked leaderboard. It was that way all week, but here's how it looked when the third to last group was approaching, not long after Jon Rahm's stunning eagle:

Fair use be damned, here's the remainder of Geoff's rant:

This might be moot if Torrey Pines had stadium mounding or even a green complex or two that were not raised surfaces. They do not and with all of the closing holes off limits to fans, this leaves surprisingly few places to comfortably watch action. 

At the $50 general admission ticket price, the Farmers could be the worst tournament experience in golf. Growing the game, it will not.

The event obviously needs to generate revenue to pay off debts and surrounding holes 14 through 18 with corporate tents helps sell premium tickets and expensive packages. But at a public facility that the people of San Diego sacrifice for a few weeks, the anti-grandstand gesture seems in poor taste. And given the game's need to add new fans and keep old ones coming around, is it too much to give people a place to sit down once in a while?

Geoff has frequently written about the on-course fan experience, and this does seem a low point....  Over to you, Jay Monahan.

Lastly, everyone seems to love this video posted by Harold Varner, III, though it's not much until the lout falls flat on his face

Alex Myers notes a couple of better examples of the genre here.  I think he screwed up the link to the Peter Alliss commentary on the streaker at the '85 Open Championship....  It goes instead to amusing footage of a young Nick Faldo abusing his caddie at what looks to be the Old Course at Sunningdale, but this Kevin Harlan football call is pretty priceless:

The high point of a dreadful game.....

Haters Gonna Hate - But how should we react, when the subject of the Twitter hatestorm is, you know, so very deserving....

Shack has a compilation of tweets here, but I'll let Brendan Porath explain in way more than 140 characters:

The broadcast ... it stunk. I’ve tried to slow down and not indulge the constant critiques of golf broadcasts because sometimes that’s a Twitter ball of groupthink that just starts

rolling downhill and we lose perspective of what’s actually happening. CBS is always the primary target of this frustration, which often escalates to anger. They’ve been crushed in recent years for showing minimal golf shots, ignoring contenders entirely, and filling the broadcast with fluff segments and commercials. I sometimes think it’s not as bad as the hysteria on Twitter would have you think and that it’s just more yelling on a social media platform prone to angry yelling. 

With that said, there’s no debating that CBS’ return to PGA Tour coverage this weekend was an unqualified disappointment. There was way too much focus on the scenery, which is a trap you can fall into when you’re at a beautiful oceanside venue like Torrey Pines. But they showed surfers and paddle boarders and whales wayyyy too much, neglecting a bunched-up leaderboard that demanded rapid-fire movement from hole-to-hole to keep the audience informed. That ridiculous 30-minute coverage gap also exists, which became more than 30 minutes as college hoops went way over its block, a predictable and continued problem. On Sunday, we went more than 50 minutes before TV coverage came back on the air. The PGA Tour has fortunately just started putting the world feed up for free online during this blackout stretch as the coverage switches from Golf Channel to CBS. They should be commended for it but it’s still no excuse for TV being absent during critical moments in the middle of a final round in the year 2017.

The reason for that thirty minute gap eludes me, but with their slate of college B-ball games always running into the golf coverage is quite annoying, even when I'm mostly fast-forwarding though it on my DVR.

But, after watching a fair portion of the first three days, I like many had no idea that Jon Rahm was even in the field....

All the commercials, flora and fauna shots, and limited universe of players being shown left you with no real sense of the round or flow of the day. In the end, that has to be judged a failure. I don’t enjoy writing so much about the coverage and I won’t dismiss CBS wholesale, the prevailing sentiment on golf Twitter. But they’re on notice with three more strong events and great venues to cover on this west coast swing before going back in hibernation until the Masters.

The worst bit in my opinion was when they planted Dottie Pepper and Peter Kostis in front of video screens....  again for purposes that elude me.

Before we leave Brendan, I'd like to share some of his thoughts on the golf course:

Is Torrey Pines meh?

Yes.  Next question....

So Torrey’s South Course is a major championship venue with a ton of history and an impressive resume. The assumption is that it’s one of the best courses on the regular PGA Tour rota, which is dotted with monotonous TPC setups. The Rees Jones redesign of this course, however, has been widely panned and it’s conventional wisdom now that he ruined a pretty good thing. What we have now is just a bunch of elevated greens protected by bunkers and a whole lot of pin placements that are tough to access. 

We don’t demand birdie-fests every week and a tough test may have been what we needed after multiple sub-60 rounds in the preceding two weeks. But there’s a difference between being a tough test that’s exciting to watch and one that just becomes a sputtering slog. This also came up on Twitter among regular keen golf watchers.

 All true, and shockingly not all Rees Jones' fault.....

I've played Torrey many times, both prior to and after Jones' U.S. Open doctoring....  I always tell people that the property is a ten, but the golf course(s) are barely a six.... Amazingly, the original design of the course was alarmingly bad, failing to utilize the spectacular bluffs on which it sits.  Rees did good work in remedying this weakness, moving greens at Nos. 3, 4 and 14 to bring the Pacific more into play.

His reconstruction of the greens has been far more controversial, with local boy Phil especially critical.  Rees attempted to create more back hole locations, creating what look like Mouseketeer ears on several of the greens.  I don't like them particularly, but I also understand the challenges of making a course able to withstand the best players in the world.

I'll also add that the course plays far better as a U.S. Open track, because in June they can get it running firm and fast.  In January that's a tall order, and this year's heavy rains made cutting the rough difficult.  But the routing is unimaginative, the green complexes are repetitive and one-dimensional, and the holes not easily distinguishable, especially on TV.  In a perfect world they'd bring in Tom Doak or Gil Hanse to blow all 36 holes up, and let them strat from scratch in routing the courses.

But, as you might have noticed, the world we inhabit is somewhat short of perfect...

Life In The Time of Trump - Shack links to this NPR article on a current environmental dispute, and it's refreshing to see that source treat a serious issue with such even-handedness.  Not so much:

In 2015, under the Obama administration, the EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finalized the Waters of the United States rule to apply clean water regulations to thousands of new streams, lakes and wetlands. 

Under the rule, the Blue Monster — and all golf courses in the U.S. — would be subject to closer federal regulation. 

The rule is opposed by a long list of industries, including manufacturers, farmers and golf course owners like Trump.

Would it be a terrible bother, NPR, to explain why all those folks oppose this rule?  Apparently, because they're content to let you think that such folks prfer their water polluted...

Now their basic premise is fair:

Donald Trump is not only the U.S. president; he's also a golf industry giant. And like other golf course operators, he has a stake in the legal wrangling over a new environmental rule that could dent industry profits. 

Here's where Trump is different from his peers: He gets to name the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and this week, the president may appoint a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, which soon will hear a case involving the environmental rule.

But of course when the Clinton State Department was urging the sale of a significant portion of our uranium supplies to the Russkis, it was "nothing to see here" mode....

If you're interested in the outrageous power grab involved in the EPA taking jurisdiction over bodies of water the size of potholes, here's a primer.   As for this assertion by the good folks at NPR, well their fidelity to the law of the land seems to have arisen around noon on January 20th:

For the Trump administration, overturning the rule isn't something that can be done through executive order. The EPA would have to restart the lengthy rulemaking process, according to Jon Devine, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

"Repealing a rule requires a full public process and has to be justified by the law and the evidence available. And in the case of the clean water rule, that's going to be rough sledding for the Trump administration," he said.

Please be patient:

May I recommend a version restore to January 20, 2009?  Or, better yet, to the factory settings....

Back to the TC panel, for whom this was the second question:

2. The first 10 days of the Trump presidency were rocked with controversy. Given the spate of protests we've witnessed across the country, is it time for the USGA to move the 2017 U.S. Women's Open from Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.? And with Trump's name all over the game, what should golf's other governing bodies be doing?

Of course it was....  but controversy is merely that of which they don't approve.  Some answers:

Ritter: I had hoped last year that golf's poo-bahs would unite against Trump for his views on Muslims, Mexicans and immigrants. This week he began keeping his campaign promises, and many citizens hit the streets (and airports) to respond. There's also a faction of Trump's base that supports his orders. What side is golf on? The time for fence-sitting has expired. This week the USGA should release a statement explaining why they're staying in Bedminster, or announce that they're out.

Bamberger: The time for golf to make a statement about Trump's views and now actions and whether they are an offense to the values of the game and whether his courses deserve to be venues for major championships has come and gone. It had to be done before the election. To pull these championships away from a course because it has the name of the president of the United States on it is I think an affront to the presidency and to the democratic process that elected him. And I say that appalled, as millions of us are, by some of the things he said during the campaign and some of the things he has said and done since the election.

I don't particularly like the guy much, but watching heads exploding has become immensely amusing.   Perhaps when California secedes, the Tour and USGA can move their operations there.  How about this though, that golf's organizations conduct their events without regard to the politics of the individuals involved?  I know, an idea so crazy it just might work....

 A Teachable Moment - I'm a fan of the TC panel and blog their thoughts frequently, but this lead question is kind of pitiful:

1. His chipping prowess aside, Tiger Woods had an uninspiring performanceat Torrey Pines, shooting 76-72 and missing the cut by four shots. Now he's headed overseas for the Dubai Desert Classic. What constitutes a good week?

OK, it's a bunch of middle-aged men stuck in the early aughts, but when Tiger leaves the premises Friday afternoon he's not the most importan subject Sunday night.  And uninspiring?  Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations....

Fortunately those answering seem to get the current state of affairs better than those getting bold typeface:

Shane Bacon: Tiger is so far from contending with his current game that I say making the cut is a great week for Woods. Tiger can say he shows up to win, but that golf swing and two-way miss isn't winning anything right now. Get to the weekend, play in tournament conditions for four days and reassess, but a made cut is a win right now for Tiger Woods.

John Wood: I think it's a successful week if two things occur. One, of course, is making the cut. He needs to play four rounds, obviously. The second is nebulous. It's not a score or a swing or a stat. In my mind, it's if there is a moment when you're watching him on the weekend, and you say to yourself (or he says to himself), "Hey, I can win this tournament." Whether he's leading by four or one back or eight back, it's if he shows that moment when he strings together a stretch of holes that has competitors feel his presence and viewers sit up wondering again.

He's not remotely close to contending.... He's Tiger Woods, so he's earned a little time to see if he can play his way back to the elite level, but let's focus, shall we, on those young guns that made last weekend fun.