Midweek Musings

For those keeping their own scorecard, yesterday's wild weather deposited our hammock into the pool for the second time in a couple of weeks.... 

Trinity In Full - A Tom Wolfe homage for those of you sufficiently well read to appreciate it....  Travelin' Joe with some thoughts on the new Nelson venue:

4. What are the most notable holes?

Where to start? Every hole offers something compelling in the way of options and features, with ground contour being the critical common denominator. Most talked about

will be the drivable, 315-yard 5th, which dishes out a large bunker 40 yards short of the green that obscures much of the putting surface and a green itself that Coore describes as an "evil twin," a small, convex surface that resembles another one close by at the par-4 15th. The turtleback green will repel all but the most perfect judged shots, so while it’s tempting for everyone in the field to go after it, look for the true craftsmen who decide to play it with 5-iron, wedge. 

Par is normally 5 at the 11th, at 537 yards from the tips, but the hole will play as a 471-yard par-4 to the largest single green on the course, and likely the most three-puttable. The monstrous, uphill, then downhill, 630-yard par-5 14th serves up a central fairway bunker that defines the hole. Perhaps the most subtly brilliant use of contour is the spine that edges the right side of the green at the par-5 6th. The right side of the hole looks like a safe, harmless bailout, but miss it there and the subsequent up-and-down is next to impossible, with momentum from the slope and the green running away from you.

Sounds promising, but what to the discerning critics of the Tour think?

Jury's still out but a few players (Zac Blair and Steven Bowditch among them) have already been gushing about it on Twitter. Geoff Ogilvy is one of the Tour’s elite when it comes to opinions and understanding of classic and modern course architecture. His own design firm, OCCM, was a finalist to earn the commission to create Trinity Forest, yet the 2006 U.S. Open winner is gracious enough to acknowledge the superb job that Coore and Crenshaw did. In a series of videos, he breaks down some of the inspired design and playability features that Coore and Crenshaw injected into the layout.

Shack has those videos here, including this about the double green serving the 3rd and 11th holes:

Jeez, don't they know that the hole numbers are supposed to add to 18?  

This figures to get them well out of their comfort zone, which could make it Must-See TV....  

At Golfweek, Shack has this take:

Trinity Forest is most certainly links style and it’s definitely unlike anything the PGA

Tour has ever played. Things may get a little crazy. Maybe even slightly goofy if the wind really blows. But this new addition to the AT&T Byron Nelson Classic will turn heads as the wildest venue added to the Tour since 1982’s debut of the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. 

Most players will not care for Trinity Forest. Expect at least one “they wasted a good landfill” reference to the site’s previous configuration next to the heavily wooded Trinity Forest. The antipathy will surface because this is a design forcing players to play away from the pin to feed balls toward the hole. That kind of golf takes time to figure out and two practice rounds here won’t be enough. 

For some Tour players reared on softer, “right in front of you” and decidedly inland settings, this will shock.

 Of course Geoff is the only guy to take a crack at answering my turf question:

The Bill Coore-Ben Crenshaw design is the closest thing to inland links golf you’ll ever find thanks to a melding of the new Trinity Zoysia turf — named for this place and cultivated by David Douguet in Texas — conspiring with wild ground features that do not look very extreme. The club is dedicated to firm-and-fast golf. This is Coore and Crenshaw’s boldest design in the use of centerline bunkers, discreetly zany design features and enormous greens. 

The average square footage at most courses is around 6,000. Trinity’s clock in at 14,000, with one double green in the 36,000 square-foot neighborhood that takes 45 minutes for two people to mow during tournament week. Meanwhile, the short par-4 fifth is only 5,600 square feet.

Veddy interesting!  Let's see how the ball releases off it.... 

Randall, Ranting -  By now it's apparent that I'm in the minority as to the effect of the Supreme Court's decision on our niche game.  Mots commentators think it will be YUUUUGE!.  Not the first, and certainly not the last time this will occur, though it will take a bit of time to see how truly out to lunch your favorite blogger might be.

Randall Mell comes at it from another perspective:

Legalized gambling will change the nature of professional golf more than it will any other sport. 

Bet on it. 

The game will get a lot richer and a lot less genteel. 

You think today’s golf galleries are growing more unruly? 

Wait until the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, when most states have had a chance to legalize sports betting, if Congress hasn’t already stepped in to regulate it. Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down the federal law that prohibits sports betting clears the way. 

With gambling unshackled, with betting on golf inevitably growing more widespread, interest in the game will evolve. 

Legalized betting will change the nature of galleries, with fans slowly beginning to see their favorite players evolve into favorite investments. 

Nobody likes an investment that loses money.

Maybe.  I'd be worried if these gamblers were out there drinking all day, but the Tour is cutting off alcohol sales at....well, 6:30 p.m.  we've got that going for us....

Schedule Permutations - John Feinstein takes a shot at cracking the code of the revised PGA Tour schedule:

If Houston finds a sponsor, it could still get the pre-Open slot although Minneapolis and

3M are chomping at the bit to take it. That city has put on a successful PGA Tour Champions event since 1993, with 3M as the title sponsor since 2001. 

If Houston survives, the events that are apparently going away are Washington, which arrived on tour with so much fanfare in 2007, and Boston, which has been the second of the four FedEx Cup playoff events. With the playoffs now scheduled to start in early August and end pre-Labor Day, Boston will go away, leaving three playoff events with the Tour Championship still at East Lake in Atlanta. 

Confused? 

There’s good reason to be because the schedule will look very different beginning this fall. At least one summer event, the Greenbrier, is supposed to move to the fall in 2019. There was actually talk about moving the WGC-Dell Match Play to the fall and make it the crown jewel of the early season, but the major point of the schedule change is to keep the premier events—notably the playoffs—away from the NFL. The Match Play will stay where it has been—two weeks prior to the Masters.

Yes, John, I am confused, and you've helped confuse me... First, Washington, D.C. may be going away, but is being replaced by a Quicken-sponsored event in Detroit, no?

Also, Memphis and Akron are now morphing into one event, which you don't seem to hav efactored in....

I'd love to see the Match Play move, to the Fall if necessary, as it's current slot is awkward given the amount of golf that's required from those making it to Sunday.  

I'm as confused as ever, and John added to said confusion.

Kick The Can Down The Road - You know the drill, when in doubt, convene a task force:

The USGA and R&A announced on Tuesday the launch of the Distance Insights project, which will analyze distance in golf through a combination of feedback from

stakeholders, third-party data and research. The results are expected in 2019. 

The announcement comes two months after the USGA and R&A's release of the most recent Distance Report, which found an average gain of three yards across the seven most prominent pro tours. The governing bodies deemed the added yards "unusual and concerning." The PGA Tour, PGA of America and Acushnet later released separate reports in response to the Distance Report's data. 

"The topic of increased distance and its effects on the game have been discussed for well over a century," said USGA CEO Mike Davis in a press release Tuesday. "We believe that now is the time to examine this topic through a very wide and long lens, knowing it is critical to the future of the game. We look forward to delving deeply into this topic and learning more, led by doing right by golf, first and foremost."

Yanno, I thought this was just a way to avoid doing anything, but I see what Mike means about the longer and wider lens....  And, of course, stakeholders, third-party data...did we miss any buzz words?

Here's something I know for sure....  It'll be harder to do something in 2019 than in 2018.  Similarly, it'll be harder in 2020 than in 2019...  So, while I understand that Mike (and Martin Slumbers) find themselves in a really difficult spot due to the strong opposition of the various PGA's, that spot won't get any less difficult as time marches on.

Players Outtakes - Mike Bamberger has a quirky little item on things he didn't report from Sawgrass.  This ties in nicely to the reports on Rick Reilly's return to the golf pressroom:

4. I heard Reilly before I saw him. I was typing in the second row in the pressroom when I heard a most distinctive grunt-chortle-laugh, a single blast of the shofar that could only come from one person. I don't know when I last saw Rick Reilly at a golf tournament. Years. I would pay to read Reilly. His new bosses at The Athleticare figuring the same.

I love it, but have to wonder how many of his readers know what a shofar is?

I may be in the minority on the gambling stuff, but he's way out on this ice on the one:

5. I like Phil's new look, with his long-sleeved shirts. You could see it catching on,

modestly. For fair-skinned people, there is of course a sun-safe benefit to playing golf in a long-sleeved shirt. When I went to the old-line Myopia Hunt Club, years ago, I was charmed to see an old-guard member playing on a warm greater Boston day in a long-sleeved button-collared Oxford-cloth shirt, likely from Brooks Brothers and frayed but only to a point. But if my memory is holding up, this gent had his sleeves rolled up. In warm weather, Phil might think about rolling the sleeves up, especially if he's going for that workingman look. I wonder if he'll wear the shirts for his casual games at home. When Payne Stewart played at home, he did not wear knickers.

True that, about Payne.  I remember not recognizing him at a practice round before the 1993 U.S. Open.

I do agree on this one:

7. What is the opposite of collateral damage? Collateral benefit? Let's give it a try. One collateral benefit of Tiger's play this year is how he brings into focus the guys with

whom he is playing. Young Sam Burns was in that spot when he played with Tiger in the last round at Honda this year. At The Players, Mackenzie Hughes played with Woods in the Saturday round. Both Burns and Hughes played spectacularly well with Woods and handled themselves perfectly. Hughes, a tall, lanky modest Canadian, is a charming person. I asked him about his history playing Alister MacKenzie courses. He said he liked the course at Yale, where he had played a U.S. Open qualifier. It’s a doozy, to be sure, but it’s also a C.B. Macdonald course. We agreed that he had certainly played one very good MacKenzie course — Augusta National. Hughes played in last year's Masters. I wasn't too familiar with Mackenzie Hughes a week ago. Now I'm rooting for him to find his way back to Augusta.

MacKenzie?  Macdonald?  It's all so subjective..... Go easy, Mike, he's a Canuck and his golf season is like an hour-and-a-half long.

WAG's Gonna....Egads! - Golf Digest has a very typical slideshow on the WAG's of the PGA Tour, though the timing may be unfortunate.  Oh, we all love ogling the babes, and we love it even more when silly costumes are involved, such as this one with Paul Casey and bride:

This slideshow at least features some lesser known ladies, though fortunately Krista Glover failed to make the cut.  Though she apparently made some cuts of her own:

PGA star Lucas Glover’s wife was arrested for violently attacking the golfer over his

poor showing at The Players Championship, authorities said. 

Krista Glover was arrested Saturday on battery charges at a home the couple rented in Ponte Vedra, Florida, not far from the competition at Sawgrass TPC, the Daily Mail reported. 

The 36-year-old is accused of causing bodily harm when she “forcefully attacked” the 2009 US Open winner and her mother-in-law in front of their two kids, according to the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. 

When officers arrived at the scene, Lucas told them that, according to authorities, “when he plays a bad round of golf, Krista proceeds to start an altercation with him and telling him how he is a loser and a p—y.”

Can you say performance anxiety?  Think I was kidding about the cuts?

The 38-year-old golfer, however, tried to convince officers not to take his wife to the slammer, according to the Daily Mail. Despite his pleas, deputies arrested Krista because the golfer and his mother suffered visible lacerations.

Glover has already endured one difficult divorce after his signature achievement at the 2009 U.S. Open, and doesn't appear to have done any better the second go around.  More disturbingly, he sounds like a typical battered spouse:

“Regrettably, although Krista was charged, we are comfortable that the judicial system is able to address what actually happened and Krista will be cleared in this private matter,” he wrote on Twitter. “We thank you for respecting our privacy as we work through this situation.”

Writing a golf blog one doesn't expect to be covering such a story, but there it is in front of us.  let's hope it ends happily, though I've not a clue how that might be.

I have a morning game tomorrow, so blogging may not be possible.  but I'll endeavor to keep you posted on the submerged hammock....