Midweek Musings

We've got something for everyone today, as long as you like your golf talk with a dollop of snark...

Curried (Tour) Rabbit - Ron Kroichik of the San Francisco Chronicle profiles a certain baller's Web.com debut:

Curry tries to squeeze in one round per month during the Warriors’ season, then many more come summer. He posted 13 scores in June and has added eight more in July

(mostly in the mid-70s), according to the Northern California Golf Association website. 

Curry has improved his handicap index to +0.1, which means he’s very good — though not necessarily ready to compete with tour pros who earn their living on the course. 

In competing against those players for the first time, Curry will climb into uncharted territory. This is completely different than his good-natured outings with famous friends, from former President Barack Obama and Michael Jordan to Tom Brady and Justin Timberlake.

There's an old saying on Tour ranges that "Scratch ain't s**t," which likely applies here.   

It's a nice profile of a young man hooked on our game, who happens to also be a world-class athlete.  So, the fact that he doesn't suck, isn't exactly shocking....

Shack has video of Steph's post-practice round comments here, but it's Geoff's comments that have me a little piqued:

His odds of winning stink but the point of Steph Curryreceiving a sponsor's invite to play the Ellie Mae Classic this week has little to do with winning.

Instead, for anyone sports fan, there is the incredible intrigue of seeing how one of the top three basketball players on the planet pursues his passion for golf against future PGA Tour pros on the Web.com Tour. Unfortunately, with too much golf on the schedule this week and the Web.com playing a traditional Thursday-Sunday tournament, we'll have to rely on Golf Central and social media for reports. 

Either way, maybe seeing Curry discuss what he picked up during the practice round and his admiration for Nick Rousey that will help ease the pain for those grieving at the loss of a field spot and the child starvation that will inevitably ensue.

I just think this is point-missing on an Olympian scale, as Geoff himself would put it....

Maybe he'll surprise us, but while I understand the appeal that Geoff describes in the middle 'graph, the history of these opportunities is pretty dismal.  And the folks telling us that this will pump up the volume on this event, aid the same thing about Jerry Rice, for three years running.

And only now do they inform us that there isn't even any TV coverage, so that promotional bump won't include sports fans around the country...  I'm not saying don't invite the man, I'm just arguing for a higher standard for taking playing opportunities away from actual golfers.  Oh, and perhaps we shouldn't hold those that want to maintain those tee times for actual golfers to public ridicule?

The First Golfer - Alan Shipnuck has been on a roll lately, and he's one of the good guys who writes about our game.  He files this long, mostly fair piece in Sports Illustrated about Trump's increasingly complicated place in the game of golf....  But you know there's a "But" coming....  See if you agree with me that it would have been better if he could have controlled the extraneous nonsense.

The descriptions of POTUS on the golf course, the carts on tees and floating mulligans are well-known by now.  Even kind of endearing in a way.  But take a gander at this 'graph:

Last month Trump got a national championship when the USGA brought the U.S.

Women's Open to Bedminister. Trump spent 2 1/2 days chewing the scenery at the tournament, his obvious good cheer undiminished by a smattering of protesters on nearby roadways and others standing peacefully beneath his aerie looming over the 16th tee. Trump tweeted eight times about the event, more than he has since taking office about opioid addiction, the international refugee crisis and climate change ... combined.

Did Trump really "chew the scenery?"  I certainly didn't think so, as he mostly just stayed in his enclosed viewing booth and watched the golf....  And somehow Alan is offended that he tweeted about a women's golf tournament, because he should have been focused on...climate change?  Sheesh, Alan, you might need to get out more...

There's much of interest, but an overall tone of disapproval over routine matters like contesting property tax assessments and the like.  I especially enjoyed this howler:

In 2008, during the economic downturn, Ossining slashed the taxable valuation of the club by 55%, to $13.5 million. (The Westchester Journal Newsreported that "Trump's legal team had pleaded for relief.")

OMG, he PLEADED!   Take a chill pill guys, it's called a pleading....

But yes, Trump is overly-litigious, not exactly new data....

Also funny is this bit:

The biggest name in golf is now linked to the President through the Trump World Golf Club Dubai, which is slated to open in 2018. "My father and Tiger have been friends for

a long time," Eric Trump told Golf.com in a '16 interview. "They've been very, very close. When you combine Trump and Tiger, it's a match made in heaven." But in a statement to Golf.com, Woods's spokesman Glenn Greenspan wrote: "Tiger is not in partnership with Mr. Trump or his organization and stating otherwise is absolutely wrong. Tiger Woods Design's contract and obligation is to the developer, Damac Properties. Our association ends there. I can't put it any clearer than Tiger Woods Design does not have an agreement with Mr. Trump."

Doesn't one have to still be in golf to be its biggest name?

It's a good piece, it just would have been better had he avoided the gratuitous reference to climate change and the like.  Of course, now Alan will be invited to a better class of cocktail parties.

GPWAM Update -  Old friend Mark Broadie continues on his quest to be the undisputed Bill James of the golf world, providing a systematic approach to the the age-old question of greatest player without a you-know-what:

With all that in mind, my approach to measuring "major greatness" is to use an analytic I'll call expected major wins (EMW). It's the number of major wins that a player "should have" accumulated based on a calculation of expectations going into each major and the permutations of events that "could have" happened. Here's an example: In his prime, Tiger Woods had 1-in-3 odds of winning a major, meaning he was expected to win once and lose three times in four attempts. Based on these odds, Woods's EMW was one-quarter (0.25), or one major win per year. In the same major, an average Tour player might have had a 1-in-199 chance of winning, or 0.005 EMW.

Have your eyes glazed over?  OK, I'll cut to the chase, which is a somewhat surprising result:

Strick?  Can the best player never to win a major be a guy that I never expected to win one?  A guy not known for winning anything much?  

I know Strick is a good guy and a nice little player in his own way, but here are his career wins from Wikipedia:

I get that he owned the John Deere, but his most impressive win was in 1997 at The Western....  But, to be fair, none of the five guys on his list above are all that good on a relative basis.

Mark goes at it from another vantage point, and this guy is a worthy winner:

Lee Westwood is a guy you pray to be paired with in the final round of a major....

Hickory & Wet Tweed - Think I might enjoy this story?

Machrihanish Golf Club sits by the sea at the bottom of a wildly beautiful and lightly

populated peninsula on the ragged west coast of Scotland. With its whistling wind, its remoteness and mist rolling in on its dramatic links land, Machrihanish is a dream course. Which was a good thing for the 40 hickory-golf nuts who convened there earlier this month, all of us trying to channel Bobby Jones. 

We wore what the elegant three-time champ of The Open wore: Dress shirts and ties over conservatively colored plus-twos or plus-fours, the number referring to the inches of drape below the knee. And we played what Bobby played, approximately: Mesh-patterned, 50-compression balls that wobbled in the wind—when you could get the damn things airborne—hit with pre-1935 clubs with leather grips and wooden shafts. We’d have two big competitions: the Hickory Grail, the bi-annual Europe-USA team match, and the Scottish Hickory Championship.

Hickories at Machrihanish?  Be still my foolish heart.... And this:

“May 2006,” said Chris Deinlein, a retired business owner, and a member of Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, N.C., site of the PGA Tour’s Wyndham Championship. 

“December 2014,” said Mark Wehring, a Houston-based corporate compliance officer, and the best player among the American contingent. 

Those weren’t dates of last drinks. Both Deinlein and Wehring had Tennent’s ale in their recent past and near future. They were instead the month and year they’d last hit a ball with what Ingvar Ritzen of Stockholm disparaged as “hollow clubs” (Ritzen joined the woodmen in 2011). Why, oh why, I asked, are you—all of us—making a hard game harder? Some pointed out recent offenses: the preposterous sight of a player looking at a topo map instead of the ground before a putt. How 460cc drivers obliterate the traditional size ratio of clubhead to ball. No matter how much bodacious Brooks Koepka’s biceps bulge, when an average drive in the U.S. Open is 392 yards, or whatever it was, something ain’t right. It’s time to turn back the clock, the uber-traditionalists agreed, to remember why the ancient Scots picked up a club in the first place.

Hollow clubs, I love it. 

I'm not going to excerpt it, but last week Shipnuck had an item that provides the perfect segue here:

A 9,000-yard course would be nuts, but it’s also fast becoming a necessity

It's depressing but true... or will be soon enough.

Tree, Forest -  I think I like the cut of Harold Varner III's jib....  He takes to Derek Jeter's site to give some welcome thoughts:

I mean, you would think I didn’t know it by the amount of times I’m asked about my

race. It’s actually kind of comical at this point in my career … I know exactly when the questions are coming and what’ll be asked. 

“What’s it like being the only black guy on Tour?” 

“Does it feel lonely as the only African-American out there?” 

And my all-time favorite one: 

“Do you think we’re growing the game enough for African-Americans?” 

Well, hell no, and that’s a silly question, too. Because we’re not growing the game enough for Hispanics, Whites, Asians and African-Americans alike. It’s about giving everyone an opportunity, not just African-Americans. But I’m gonna get back to that a little later.

I have it on reliable authority that black folks don't talk like this....  You will kindly stick to the narrative going forward.  So, how did he get started?

Now, you may be thinking these summer playing privileges cost some crazy amount of money — that only rich kids would be able to do something like this. I mean, it’s a good

enough deal to think that. But this program wasn’t really expensive at all: For only $100, I was able to purchase this junior membership to Gastonia. 

It completely subverted the argument that you need to be rich to play this sport. It made playing golf extremely affordable.

That meant the world to my family. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was an incredible deal, not only for what it did for me then, but also what it’s still doing for me now. Without Gastonia, I would’ve never learned to play golf, would’ve never earned a scholarship to East Carolina University, would’ve never made my way onto the PGA Tour, would’ve never won in Australia last December and would’ve never been in a position to help bring more kids into the game.

Varner notes that the specific program at Gastonia no longer exists, but for anyone looking for a model of how to grow the game..... 

Sad News - Though hardly shocking, given what we know about his own struggles:

David Feherty posted some heartbreaking news via his Twitter account on Tuesday: his

oldest son, Shey, had died of an overdose on his 29th birthday, July 29. 

“My first born is gone from me, dying from an overdose on his 29th birthday,” Feherty tweeted. “Bless his sweet heart, I will fight on.” 

Shey William Feherty was the oldest of Feherty’s two sons with his first wife, Caroline DeWit. Feherty, 58, also has three children with his current wife, Anita.

Feherty, a former pro golfer and now a golf analyst who has battled substance abuse himself, has said in the past that alcoholism and mental illness run in his family.

I have no words....R.I.P.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell -  Eamon Lynch asked this via Twitter:

This was the best of the responses:

Hey, I'm sure he had it coming....

I was disappointed to not see a response from Robert Allenby, though it was directed at actual Tour pros....

Early golf tomorrow, so you folks will be on your own.  I do recommend the ladies at Kingsbarns, a great modern links.