Weekend Wrap

We survived the arctic blast and actually got some golf in yesterday....

Kizzire Under the Elms - It's always a good day for the blogger when that guy with the readily punable name wins:

PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico (AP) — Patton Kizzire won his first PGA Tour title on Sunday by beating Rickie Fowler in a 36-hole marathon in the rain-plagued OHL Classic

at Mayakoba. 

Kizzire closed with rounds of 66-67 for a one-shot victory over Fowler, who fell four shots behind at El Camaleon Golf Club until staging a late rally that again fell short. Fowler had rounds of 67-67 on the final day. 

Kizzire won in his 62nd career start on the PGA Tour, and it required some steady nerves on the back nine when it could have gotten away from him. Leading by four shots with seven holes to play, Kizzire saved par with an 8-foot putt on No. 12, a 10-foot putt on the par-5 13th and an 8-foot putt on the 14th.

I caught the last few holes and the excitement was....  well, let's just say it was well-contained.  I was parked in the man-cave flipping back and forth between Mayakoba and the Giants-49ers game, lest you ever envy the exciting life of your favorite blogger.

The Tour Confidential panel held what has to be one of the sillier confabs ever, with not a single question about this event or the Charles Schwab Cup denouement.... Worry not, we'll get to that hot mess in a moment.

But they were asked this important question:

1. Rickie Fowler came up short in Mexico, losing to Patton Kizzire in a 36-hole final. Fowler’s six wins across the PGA Tour and European tour include a Players Championship but not yet a major title. How would you assess his career as he begins his ninth season on Tour?

I've got a more pressing question, what the heck was he doing in the field?   What part of off-season does he not get?  Here's a sampling of their responses:

John Wood: In a word, poised. Poised to win more and win majors, soon. At the risk of

sounding like a broken record (does it scare anyone else that most of the guys we write about don’t know what a record is?), winning anything out here against PGA Tour competition is hard. In my opinion it’s harder than ever to win on tour than ever before. The fields are so deep, the competition so close, that anyone in the field any given week is good enough to get hot and win. Remember when everyone doubted Phil, and why he couldn’t win the big one? On a smaller scale, same thing here. Rickie has shown himself to be clutch. Just look at his first win at Quail Hollow in a playoff, at his win at The Players, with a blinding finish and playoff performance, at his first Ryder Cup, where he birdied the last four holes in his singles match to come out with a half. He isn’t lacking anything. He puts himself where he needs to be time and time again, and those Big Victories will happen. And when they do, I suspect he won’t have done anything different.

Michael Bamberger: They don’t know about records, they don’t know about LPs, they don’t know about 78s—but they know about spin rates. Rickie Fowler is having a fine career. Our expectations of who he is as a golfer are outsized because of the way he has been marketed.

While Mike's point is fair, I still think the Orangeman's career is a bit of a disappointment.... David Duval thinks he has the best swing and best putting stroke on Tour, shouldn't that combo win more often....

Let's Ask Chuck - On Friday I took a brief look at the first round results from the Charles Schwab Championship, not to be confused with the Charles Schwab Cup, and it seemed promising....  All of the name brands, and remember that Scot McCarron is now a name brand, were clustered at the bottom of the leaderboard, so mayhem was assured....

PHOENIX (AP) — Kevin Sutherland finally broke through on the PGA Tour

Champions, taking the season-ending Charles Schwab Cup Championship — and topping the yearlong competition, too. 

Sutherland closed a 5-under 66 on Sunday for a one-stroke victory over Vijay Singh at Phoenix Country Club, the tree-lined course hosting its first tour event since the Phoenix Open left for TPC Scottsdale in 1988. 

"I don't even know. It's like a whirlwind thing. It's amazing," Sutherland said. "I mean, the names on this trophy are incredible. I've seen it, and to be on that list is just, I can't even put words to it, it's just amazing."

Amazing, inevitable, whatevah.....

Shack has a pretty good rant on the subject:

The dreaded "reset" reared its ugliest and most comedic head yet by depriving Bernhard Langer of the 2017 Schwab Cup.

On the list of hideous crimes this one will not register and Langer's amazing season will not in any way be minimized by a ridiculous algorithm or playoff points reset. However, for a sponsor like Charles Schwab, an association with a goofily rigged competition should not be allowed to continue. Unless Schwab wants to stand for rewarding distant-second excellence. 

A season-long points race loses credibility when a player has 16 top-10s, 21 top-20s and 7 wins in 22 starts (including the first two playoff events and 3 of 5 majors!), but fails to beat someone whose playoffs went like this: T47, T27, 1.

Which would matter, perhaps, if anyone took it seriously.  Jay Monahan certainly has his hands full, but at least we'll be spared any more of those smirking Bernhard Langer commercials.  Though expecting the sponsor to fix this seems like magical thinking...

Shack also links to a couple of quotes that crystallize the absurdity, first this from Will Gray:

This is Sutherland's first tournament victory since his lone PGA Tour title at the 2002 WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship. It marks the first time since 2013 that someone other than Langer won the season-long trophy on the over-50 circuit.

As John Wood would say, he was poised....and this from Kevin Casey: 

Overall, Langer fails to capture the Schwab Cup despite a season that included more wins than his last two Schwab-Cup-winning campaigns combined.

Nothing to see here, folks....

 Shanshan in Full - The young lady is on quite the roll:

Shanshan Feng made history on her home soil. The 28-year-old from Guangzhou won

for a second consecutive week on the LPGA and is projected to become the first golfer from China – male or female – to rise to No. 1 in the world. 

“I finished first in China, so I actually claimed the world No. 1 in front of all the people at home,” said Feng. “So I’m really happy about that, and I hope all the Chinese are going to be watching me, and the Chinese can play golf. Hopefully there will be more Chinese getting on the tours and more world No. 1’s coming up from China.”

She will take over the No. 1 ranking from a rookie named Sung Hyun Park, thereby relieving us all from learning that name, though the respite might prove to be temporary.

Those comments from the winner seem to me rather pro forma, though Shack credits her for a rather droll commentary on the schizophrenic approach of the Chinese authorities to our little game.   You be the judge....

Nicky to the Rescue - I saw no urgency to blog last week's announcement if Nick Prices nomination to the USGA Executive Committee last week , but this Tim Rosaforte feature on Mike Davis has quite a few interesting nuggets, beginning with this:

Price’s interest and passion resonated with members of the the USGA Nominating Committee, who added him to their 2018 slate for the 15-person board that will be voted on at the USGA Annual Meeting next February. Iconic amateur golfers Francis Ouimet, Bobby Jones and Fred Ridley, the new Augusta National chairman, have previously sat on the committee, but never a tour professional of Price’s caliber. That’s why Price rates this honor ahead of winning the USGA’s Bob Jones Award and the PGA Tour’s Payne Stewart Awards for service to the game.

That seems curious, no?

Davis pointed out that it was the same when Ben Hogan was playing, and players like Gene Sarazen and Jones were lamenting going from hickory to steel shafts. 

“The concept of courses continually having to expand [due to] equipment is the wrong

thing,” Davis continued. “It needs to be the opposite. Equipment has to fit courses. There is no other sport that changes its playing arena to fit equipment.” He used the Green Monster at Fenway Park as an example, and how the Red Sox would have to move the wall back 100 feet if aluminum bats were legalized. 

“But that’s exactly what’s happened in golf,” Davis said. “You learn from the past, but for us, it’s looking forward.” 

Of course Davis is coming off a U.S. Open venue at Erin Hills that could have been stretched to 7,800 yards and was annihilated by Brooks Koepka, who shot 16 under to win by four strokes, and Justin Thomas, who shot nine-under 63 in the third round, the lowest score in relation to par in U.S. Open history. But he seems more concerned about sustainability and the cost of water going up four-fold between now and 2030. It’s those issues at the recreational level that might just be more pressing.

But Mike, remind what organization had responsibility for ensuring that this didn't happen?   Nick is a really good guy who loves our game, but Mike is the guy on the hot seat.

So what exactly are we prepared to do?

Paramor, Paramount - I'm a fan, though I do think this Shack intro is a bit over-the-top:

Legendary European Tour rules official John Paramor, who restored order during the chaos of Jordan Spieth's errant Birkdale tee shot and who has no patience for slow play, talks to Golf World's John Huggan about his four decade career. Among the topics are rulings he's given, rules he'd like tweaked and his input on the upcoming rules revision.

If "legendary rules official" isn't an oxymoron, I don't know what is.... And order st Birkdale?  It took a bit long for me to assign too much credit for that....   When those Gentlemen of Leith codified the original rules of our game, I'm guessing that the Seve exception wasn't established:

“On another occasion,” Paramor recalls, “Seve was telling me he could play a shot in such a way that his stance would be affected by an obstruction. So I told him to demonstrate what he proposed to do, all the time thinking there was no way he could persuade me. But he did. And I gave him a free drop. He had one foot in a ditch, the other above the ditch. Then he turned the club round and swung left-handed. After a couple of practice swings, I was convinced. He could have hit it like that. But there is no way any other player would even have thought of it. Seve was different though; I knew he was capable of such a shot. He was a genius. So he got his drop.”

Should the rules official interpret the skills of an individual player in the decision to grant relief?  Beats me....

Now this is likely the most substantive comments to come out of the item:

Then there are the so-called “green books” you see people using when putting. Paramor

has opinions there, too. “I recently asked Phil Mickelson what he thought about them. He feels they are a good thing. They are good for pace of play. They clear up a lot of the questions a player might have. Which is a valid point.

"But I have to say I think they are a de-skilling of the game. Part of this game is making your own judgement about how your ball is going to roll across a green. It’s not for you to find that out on a piece of paper.”

Good for pace of play?  That is arguable, to put it mildly....

 Lots of fun stuff, so give it a click...

Fair Use Be Damned - We play a little loose with the laws governing Fair Use, but I'm pretty sure I'll never hear from Geoff's lawyers for the crime of grabbing a screen shot of the entirety of this post.  The subject is a celebration of the one-week anniversary of the announcement of Greg Norman's new pimped-out golf carts:

What's your point?

I'm going to leave you here, but we've got lots teed up for tomorrow....  Consider it appointment blogging.