Friday Frisson

Another week, another successful back surgery....

Tiger's Back - Yeah, that can be taken one of two ways... From TigerWoods.com:

Tiger Woods announced today that he has undergone successful back surgery to alleviate ongoing pain in his back and leg. 

His choice of pic, folks, not mine.

"The surgery went well, and I'm optimistic this will relieve my back spasms and pain," Woods said. "When healed, I look forward to getting back to a normal life, playing with my kids, competing in professional golf and living without the pain I have been battling so long."

Due to previous herniations and three surgeries, Woods' bottom lower-back disc severely narrowed, causing sciatica and severe back and leg pain. Conservative therapy, which included rehabilitation, medications, limiting activities and injections, failed as a permanent solution, and Woods 

This seems more on point.

opted to have surgery. The procedure was a minimally invasive Anterior Lumbar Interbody Fusion (MIS ALIF) at L5/S1. The surgery entailed removing the damaged disc and re-elevating the collapsed disc space to normal levels. This allows the one vertebrae to heal to the other. The goal is to relieve the pressure on the nerve and to give the nerve the best chance of healing.

The operation was performed by Dr. Richard Guyer of the Center for Disc Replacement at the Texas Back Institute.

OK, Jack holds the record for most majors and Sam Snead has the most Tour wins, but who holds the record for most successful back surgeries? 

A reminder that just two days previously he was out and about pimping his new course in Branson, MO, and had this in response to a question about the status of his back:

“The back is progressing,” Woods said in Missouri. “I have good days and bad days. I’ve had three back operations and that’s just kind of the nature of the business unfortunately. That’s all I can say.”

Can?  Will?  Whatevah....

The nugget of actual news contained in this story is that didn't return to the surgeon that performed the first three successful surgeries, in my adopted winter home of Park City, UT.

 You're on your own with this bit:

"If you are going to have single-level fusion, the bottom level is the best place for it to occur. Some individuals are born with one less vertebrae, which would be similar to someone who had a single-level fusion," Guyer added.

So, you're saying there's a chance?

Doug Feruson has a summary of the various surgeries.... correction, successful surgeries, and captures some quottage from the ever-elusive Steiny:

“You see him in the Bahamas, and he looked pretty good,” said Mark Steinberg, his agent at Excel Sports Management. “And then you see him in Dubai. It can happen any time. You heard him say two days ago, ‘I have good days and bad days.’ This surgery, we hope, eliminates the bad days.”

But you assured us it was only spasms....and this:

“He had consulted with a number of top people that had recommended this was the way to go if he wanted a clear and final path,” Steinberg said. “Everything he had done in the past was a temporary fix, so to speak. At that point, they thought there were other alternatives than fusion.” 

Steinberg said they were advised fusion surgery was the best option if Woods wanted an active lifestyle and was willing to sit out the rest of the season. 

“He should be better than he’s been in the past five years,” Steinberg said. “He’s pretty encouraged.”

That's setting the bar pretty damn low!  We'll get back to our Steiny in a minute...  First, the long-term outlook?  I'm gonna go with blindingly obvious....  Jeff Babineau (linked above) has this:

But the stark reality is this: Woods knows that every day he is not competing on the PGA Tour is one more milepost farther away. And now he sits six more months away from just starting up again. It’s a brutal cycle. These kids today taking his place at the big events are good, very good, and they’re fearless, mostly because they learned from the best. 

But time waits for no one, and will make no exception for a 41-year-old whose star continues to fade to a point where it is barely visible in golf’s sky. If this indeed is it, it was one heck of a run.

 Sean Zak is still in the denial stage:

Tiger Woods has undergone yet another back surgery, and the rest of his 2017 season has been placed in question. 

Woods announced on his website Thursday that another back surgery—his fourth since September, 2014—was necessary to "alleviate ongoing pain in his back and leg." 

According to the release, which did not specify the exact date of the surgery, Woods' procedure will require him to rest for several weeks before more therapy and treatments. It added that patients recovering from similar surgeries typically return to full activity in about six months.

In question?  Wait'll Sean hears about Santa Claus...

I'm sometimes accused of hating Tiger, which is a bum rap....  What I do hate is being lied to, and there's been way too much of that from Team Tiger.  As a secondary issue, I don't see what Tiger gains by being so guarded....  Backs are notoriously fickle and most of us have had enough incidental back pain to feel sympathy for a professional athlete enduring it.

But it was less than a month ago that Brian Wacker wrote in an article that Tiger hadn't been seen practicing and would no doubt miss the Masters.  The great Steiny saw fit to publicly excoriate Wacker's journalistic ethics while maintaining the fiction that Tiger might well play.  Who ya gonna believe, Steiny or your lyin' eyes?

Pay No Attention.... - Richard Deitsch, writing in Sports Illustrated, provides a fun look behind the curtain at CBS' coverage of Sergio's winning putt last week:

Milton said during the live coverage of Garcia’s winning putt, he went through a familiar sequence for a golf director: First, you go wide, then you go tight. The goal is to capture

every reaction you can from the scene.

“I was lucky in the sense that Sergio gave those primal yells after the putt went in,” said Milton, who also serves as the lead director for SEC football on CBS. “Then he composed himself and we went wide, so you could see all the crowd celebrating. Then he composed himself to shake Justin Rose’s hand. We stayed on Sergio for quite awhile because I did not want to miss any emotion coming from him after trying to win this thing for 20 years.”

Milton said the CBS production compound at the Masters (which sits next to the Par-3 course) had roughly 12 staffers in the main control room working the final holes. There was also an adjacent room with 12 people working on graphics. As the final shot was made, Barrow and Rikhoff were filtering the best replays. Rikhoff watches all the isolation shots directed by Milton and notes what will work for replay; Barrow decides in what order the replays will sequence to create narrative.

CBS has always been great with the visuals....  it's the commentary and the lack of actual golf on the broadcasts that draws the venom...

Shack assigns a higher degree of difficulty than I in his commentary:

It's easy to forget the role television production plays when a moment like Sergio's comes off so seamlessly, particularly given the difficulty of covering golf courses.

Add in Augusta National's 18th hole limitations--no crane, blimps, helpful topography--and covering the moment becomes a huge challenge. Oddly, the best shot may have been the view from down the fairway with Sergio and putting surface just a blip amidst the patrons (screen captured).

Yes, covering a golf course is a huge undertaking, but covering the 18th green at Augusta, with more buried cables than the White House Situation Room, is far less so....  My point:

​CBS had 12 cameras available for replays at Hole No. 18 and Milton said the scarcity of other golfers on the course meant they could stack cameras and get all the angles needed. Levitt was able to freelance during the final holes with only Rose and Garcia in contention to get the great wide shots you saw. Will Baker, an on-course camera operator, was on the green when Garcia won. He got the great shots of Garcia embracing Akins. There was also a camera available on the ninth hole that was tall enough so CBS could get an additional wide shot at No. 18.

But this is equally true:

“Of course, you still need Sergio to make the initial putt because that provides the bigger moment of exhilaration,” Milton said. “It was good for us that the putt went in because of everything that happened after that. He could have just two-putted and we would not have had the same reactions from the crowd.

Though a three-foooter coming back might have been, shall we say interesting, in the Doug Sanders-Scott Hoch meaning of that word.

And, just because it's a whole lot more fun than ranting about Tiger, Shack posts this highlight video:

 To which he adds these reactions:

The last minute or so of this CBS highlight reel captures the incredible coverage work described in Deitsch's story. Also, seeing these clips again makes you realize (A) how much of a slope the 16th hole cup is on (B) how long Rose's putt was on 17 for par, (C) how close Rose's in-regulation putt on 18 was to going in, and (D) how great Sergio's final putt was both in execution and in ending the Masters on a high note.

Mine is consistent with my thought above, how far would Sergio's putt have run out trundled by if it hadn't caught the cup?  Oh, and Rose's putt wasn't that close, though I agree it likely influenced his par putt twenty minutes later.

420 Day? - I never knew that was a thing, did you?  Forgive the digression, but CNN has an amusing history of the alternative explanations for how it came to be Weed Day, including this:

The legend of the Dylan song 

This one is a nod to Bob Dylan's song, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" and its lyric, "Everybody must get stoned." 

Multiply 12 by 35 and you get 420. 

Seems a bit of a stretch. And Dylan himself has never confirmed any link.The story that appears to hold the most water is ...

Hmmmm... stoners and math doesn't seem like the best fit...  here's their most likely explanation:

The legend of the Waldos 

According to Chris Conrad, curator of the Oaksterdam Cannabis Museum in Oakland, California, 420 started as a secret code among high schoolers in the early 1970s. 

A group of friends at San Rafael High School in Marin County, California, who called themselves "the Waldos," would often meet at 4:20 p.m. to get high. 

For them, it was an ideal time: They were out of school but their parents still weren't home, giving them a window of unsupervised freedom. They met at that time every day near a statue of Louis Pasteur, the scientist who pioneered pasteurization.

The Pasteur touch is priceless....To celebrate, Golf Digest has reposted their 2014 article on pot and golf, including graphics such as this:

This was shortly after Colorado had legalized recreational use, and doesn't do anything more than ensure a couple of clicks.  But the one subject I still find unbelievable is the allegations of use among Tour pros:

No doubt there are some players who light up, though. In 2010, Matt Every served a three-month suspension from the tour after he was arrested on a misdemeanor possession charge—a charge that was later dropped. "Honestly, man, I know more people who smoke marijuana than who don't smoke marijuana," Every told reporters. "I know that's probably not the politically correct thing to say, but it's the truth. It's not a big deal to me." 

Robert Garrigus told Golf World he'd smoked pot while competing on the Nationwide (now Web.com) Tour. "There were plenty of guys" who did, he said in a 2011 interview. Former tour caddie Michael Collins suggested in a Golf Channel interview that it's happened on the PGA Tour as well.

OK, I'm not surprised that pros kick back with a doobie at night, but there was also a player a few years ago that said you couldn't use a Porta-Potty on the Web.com Tour without it reeking of Mary Jane....  Guys smoking while they're competing and in front of galleries, that's amazing to me....

What's His Handicap? - British Pathe has an amazing archive of golf newsreel footage of Open Championships and the like, but you'll agree that today's offering is inspirational, yet a bit weird:

OK, I'm going to hate myself for this, but who will volunteer to inform him that the R&A has outlawed the anchored putter?