Tuesday Tastings

It's follow-up day, in which we present addenda to previous items...  Don't fret, we'll have a couple of new bits as well...

Russian Rebuttal - It didn't take long for the paper of record to respond to yesterday's non-smoking firearm:

Eric Trump on Sunday condemned a report that claimed his father got funding for his golf courses from the Russians. 

“It’s a recollection from some guy three years ago through a third person,” the president’s son told The Post, in reference to an interview that golf writer James Dodson gave to the Boston public radio station, WBUR-FM, about the alleged backing from Moscow. 

“We own our courses free and clear,” Eric said, insisting that the report was “categorically untrue” and “complete garbage.” 

“We have zero ties to Russian investors,” he added.

There wasn't much there there, even if the story was true....  And just a reminder, folks, that Russian influence didn't seem to be a problem until the morning of November 9th. 

Grayson Murray, Unhinged - When we last saw Grayson Murray, he was picking fights on Twitter with his peer group... wait, correction, he was punching up against those with actual success on the PGA Tour.  

Unfortunately, he's taking all of the drama out of the contest for the Robert Allenby Lifetime Achievement Award:

WILMINGTON, N.C. — After sliding down the leaderboard and falling out of

contention at the Wells Fargo Championship, Grayson Murray decided to part ways with his caddie – mid-round. 

Murray, and his caddie Mike Hicks, got into an altercation on the ninth hole Sunday in the final round at Eagle Point Golf Club in Wilmington. Hicks then dropped the bag and handed his smock to a replacement caddie selected by Murray from outside the ropes.

According to sources, the replacement caddie was a friend of Murray named Alex. 

The altercation came following a bogey on No. 8 that sent Murray to 1-over for the tournament. Murray then bogeyed Nos. 11, 15 and 18 to finish the event at plus-4.

That's an amazing homage to the late-period Allenby....  I'm just in awe of the young man's maturity and situational awareness.... I do hope he'll be in the field at The Sony, as the Amuse Wine Bar is his kind of place.

Wither Taylor Made - OK, so this is making the rounds:

Golf's newest newlywed, Rory McIlroy, appears to have a new TaylorMade driver in his bag in advance of this week's Players Championship.

On Sunday, he posted an Instagram video of himself swinging what appears to be TaylorMade's M2 driver. Before taking time off for his wedding, McIlroy had been playing Callaway's Epic Sub Zero driver. The game's ultimate free agent has been experimenting with various clubs since his former sponsor, Nike Golf, announced last summer it was exiting the equipment arena. 

On Monday morning reports surfaced that there might be more to the world No. 2's driver swap than a simple trial run. Both Golfweek (subscription only) and Geoff Shackelford are reporting that McIlroy will be announced this week as a TaylorMade brand ambassador. McIlroy would continue to wear Nike apparel under the reported 10-year contract he inked with Nike earlier this year.

They certainly seem to be maintaining their aggressiveness in signing players, even those that will be swooshed from head to toe.

But from February via the Waybac Machine:

The golf division that Adidas announced was for sale last May — which includes golf club maker TaylorMade, and the much smaller Adams and Ashworth brands — is losing between $75 million and $100 million a year, according to sources close to recent deal talks. 

That is quite a fall from 2013 when TaylorMade was posting $1.7 billion in sales and a healthy profit, sources said. Today, sales are a little better than $500 million.

When I was back at Willow Ridge a couple of weeks ago, John Reeves (head pro and long-time TM player) said that his rep was say that they're doing quite well.  You'll notice a certain inconsistency there, combined with inactivity on the sale front...

Social Media, The Dark Side -  No doubt we should have seen this coming.... Young women sharing personal information over social media.  What could go wrong?

Funk also warns against players posting too much private information about their

schedules. Geotags, for example, make public the real-time GPS location of a player’s whereabouts. 

Though in the case of four-time winner Wie, something as innocuous as a Tweet about a sunrise practice session at the LPGA stop in Portland, Ore., a few years back turned alarmingly bizarre. 

It didn’t take long for security to notice the man in the powder blue suit and floppy hat at 6 a.m. Turns out he took a bus from Iowa to Portland to propose to Wie. 

“We took him to the hotel and put him on a bus back to Iowa,” Funk said. The man showed up once more in Rochester, N.Y., but hasn’t been heard from since.

So, did she accept?

You see the recipe for disaster no doubt.  The struggling tour looking for inexpensive ways to promote themselves...  You could see where this young lady would be at the epicenter of it all:

Natalie Gulbis was the first LPGA player to join Twitter in 2008. Gulbis’ P.R. firm advised her to join Shaquille O’Neal and Jimmy Fallon as early users, saying she’d land a back-page story in the Wall Street Journal if she tweeted. 

Now she’s entertaining 142,000 followers on Instagram in addition to the 263,000 on Twitter. She’s been the victim of identity-hacking issues on social media as well as cyber-bullying. Gulbis prefers the kill-them-with-kindness approach when addressing Internet trolls and keeps a healthy perspective on how few followers really seek to spoil the fun. Still, she’s quick to delete the ugliness from her page. 

“My mom reads them all,” she explained.

Not a side of humanity anyone should have to see.

A Quick Look at Slow Play -  New Commish Jay Monahan spent some quality time with ESPN's Bob Harig, and generated some buzz with these comments on pace of play:

"I'm not so sure I agree that anything beyond what we're doing is going to deter the behavior you're asking us to deter,'' Monahan said. "As it relates to slow play, a lot has

happened behind the scenes in the last 12 to 18 months. We've developed a Shotlink dashboard for our rules officials where you can at any point in time see where a player is relative to time-par, see where a player is relative to their own historical averages. And we disclose all that information to the players, and so the players are well aware. (Players are only given information about themselves, not other players.) They have access now. 

"And we're in the midst of a comprehensive review on pace of play. It's not something that we just say it's our policy and that's how it's always going to be. We recognize that with technology, we can be far more intelligent about what's happening. Now what do you do with it? I would venture to say at this point we are taking a good hard look at it.''

It's hard to know how to interpret this, as He's previously brushed off any suggestions to address this issue.  But color me surprised that the problem is really that the guys play too quickly:

"In pockets, there are problems,'' he said. "We have a mechanism in place to address it. The question is really, where are you trying to get to? If it's 3:45 (for 18 holes), what is the time frame you are trying to get down to? What is the balance? In the last couple of weeks, ironically, we've been playing too fast and finishing too early. Relative to the world at large via television, that's not good, either.''

That's actually easier to fix....  Just send Ben Crane out in the first group and that pesky issue will be resolved.

To me there's a far bigger issue that he addresses, and it's one on which I strongly disagree:

The PGA Tour almost never discloses discipline of its players for transgressions outside of failing a performance enhancing a drug test, often leaving it open for criticism given the lack of transparency. 

If a player tests positive for recreational drugs -- or gets arrested or runs afoul of various tour regulations -- the penalties are not disclosed. This is in contrast to the major U.S. sports leagues that not only reveal penalties, but often announce them before any appeal is heard.

 If it's important enough to test for, then it should be disclosed....  Let him finish his thoughts:

"I think we look at player discipline as a family matter,'' Monahan said. "If a player is not representing themselves and is not representing the tour well on the golf course through their actions, then we have a system in place that corrects that. This system has worked very well. For us and I think for the player. Our players are well aware there are consequences for their actions. 

"Because we don't disclose it, we tend to get a lot of questions. But you have to ask yourself, what is in the best interests of the player and the tour? And I think that the way we're handling it -- particularly as it relates to player discipline and what's happening inside the field of play -- we handle well and we're comfortable with. But I understand the criticism. It's something we talk about and think about for that reason.''

While I'm guardedly optimistic about the new Commish, so much so that I've refrained from giving him a nickname, I do hope this is an area that he can see his way to parting with his predecessor.

The libertarian in me wouldn't mind if they stopped testing for recreational drugs, but incidents like the DJ "Jet-ski accident" put the lie to their process.  They're not just keeping things in the family, they're lying to us....

And I love that assumption that the best interest of the tour and the players are simpatico.   If after DJ's first violation for recreational drugs he had been named and shamed, would there have been a second and third?  We can't know, but combined with the refusal to do blood testing, it all seems rather well-designed to maintain a certain fiction.....

He's still quite new at the helm, and I'm prepared to let him feel his way along for a bit.

You want to know what offended me most in the piece?  TPC Sawgrass is closed for play, yet Harig and Monahan played the empty course.  Jay, a word to the wise...  If it's closed to the public, you shouldn't be out there.  Bad optics...

The Distressed South Side - It turns out that there's more to concern us in the Chicago project combining a Tiger-designed golf course with Obama's Presidential Library.  That would be the library itself:

A discarded Chinese take-out box. The backside of a Star Wars sand crawler. The Washington Monument with the interesting bits lopped off. That’s what sprung to mind when confronted with the initial design of the Obama Presidential Center. 

In addition to the tall stone museum with notches and windows cut out at random, the proposal calls for a low-slung forum and library with greenery on the roof. It will be built in Jackson Park in Chicago’s South Side, not far from the Museum of Science and Industry. 

According to the Obama Foundation, this will be much more than a mere presidential library. “Through participatory and immersive experiences,” the website says, “the Center will tell Barack and Michelle Obama’s story, while lifting the hood on the mechanics of change and inspiring visitors to spark their own.” 

No, I don’t know what that means either.

I wanted you to read that before seeing the image....  We shouldn't be eating Chinese take-out in any event, because cultural appropriation.

Here's what it looks like:

Jon nailed it, no?  Now Gabriel is not an agnostic when it comes to Obama, so take it for what it's worth.  Jon penned (though that's perhaps not the word) the single best tweet of the eight years of Obama:

That's a lot of RT's.

I'm off to finish my root canal....  Try not to be too jealous.