That golf game I mentioned yesterday might still happen, though negotiations are in progress to push the tee time back towards midday. Win-win, baby!
The Trinity Trinity - Well it's the third consecutive day as our lead.... Shack has this take on the venue:
Time For Trinity Forest: One Last Preview Of Minimalism's Big Moment
Heh, I see what you did there.... I think Nora Desmond had it right when she noted that, "I'm still big, it's minimalism that's gotten small".
We linked to this Shack item from Golfweek yesterday, but are back with more today:
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 fortwo people to mow during tournament week. Meanwhile, the short par-4 fifth is only 5,600 square feet.
And mostly everyone will just talk about the rollercoaster ride that is the 17th where the “Crenshaw Village” tent will become the best seat in the house. There will be aces and eights.
Aces and eights got nothing on Engineers' Two or Twenty Hole....
But this might just be the key bit:
Aesthetically, Trinity Forest will not impress on television due to the harsh Texas sun and traditional camera stands which flatten out the ground features. And that’s where this momentous debut for the minimalist design movement becomes fraught with danger. After all, for every reference you’ve heard about Coore and Crenshaw or Hanse or Doak or Bandon, the this is the first course by this tribe of old-school thinkers to be built with big-time Tour tournaments in mind.
Hopefully the Golf Channel and CBS crews will go to the effort of explaining the concepts and challenges... Oh, never mind. Who am I kidding?
Trinity Forest is Space Odyssey: 2001 in 1968. It’s Camden Yards in 1992. Chuck Berry playing Johnny B. Goode in 1958.
I might have gone with Michael J. Fox playing Johnny B. Goode to his patents' sock hop.....
Yet if players, fans and folks at home keep an open mind, they are in for some seriously wild golf viewing. There will be balls funneling to holes and balls landing in places that look like bad shots that turn out perfect. And there will be balls getting thrown into the forest out of frustration.
If allowed to breathe like a fine wine, Trinity Forest should prove to be another major step in golf’s movement to return to its architectural roots, only with a bunch of eye-opening new twists.
Golf balls on the turf is always exciting..... well, almost always.
Shack has this follow-up informing that the Tour has dialed it back from eleven for this week:
The Trinity Forest chatter boils down to a takeaway no one saw coming: players areadapting to a design far different than they are used to playing outside of the United Kingdom and many are even wanting to see the course play firmer and faster.The PGA Tour, however, is taking a more cautious approach to this extremely fun, extremely zany inland links featuring some of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw’s boldest design elements.
The 150 or so members at Trinity Forest play the course firmer and faster than players will experience in this week’s AT&T Byron Nelson. Even the caddies, who played a preview event here a year ago, said they are surprised how much slower the course is playing.
The contributing factors are are mowing height and some recent spring weather finally sending the Trinity Zoysia on its merry warm-weather growing ways.
That's probably wise... we want heads exploding, but only figuratively.
Roll-Back, Deferred - The usual suspects are having fun with the Kick-the-can-down- the- road project announced by the USGA and R& A, including that most usual of suspects:
Here goes another year in the distance discussion, all because the two PGA's have decided they want to be in the rules business. I'm pretty sure we know what the input will look like ("Don't blame the ball! "-Wally, Fairhaven, MA).Anyway, if they must, but Senator you can have my answer now: do something.
Hmmm... haven't we heard from Wally on this subject before?
But the funniest thing I've seen is this Global Golf Post interview with the USGA's Rand Jerris, in which interviewer Steve Eubanks challenges the governing bodies to pry his ProV1 form his cold, dead hands:
The Post: Everyone’s perspective is based on their own life experiences. For example, there’s nobody left who can tell us what the distance impact was like when the game transitioned from hickory to steel shafts. And there was very little data accumulated at that time. So, how do we have this overarching discussion about distance without a legitimate, verifiable and texted data set?
Anyone care to enlighten me as to what a "texted data set" is? I'm struggling to see any relevance, though Jerris actually has a pretty reasonable answer:
Jerris: There are various sources of information at which we can look. One is aerial photography thanks to the United States government. We can look at the evolution of the footprints of golf courses around the country over long periods of time, not just in terms of length but in terms of breadth and how much space they’re taking up. Because we can look at the times of those changes, hopefully we can determine what elements of those changes are directly attributable to distance.
To which Eubanks goes full Area-51:
The Post: That last point requires a logic leap. Yes, you can see where the footprints of courses have changed over time. But how do you make the leap, based on that evidence, that those changes were attributable to distance?
As opposed, say, to sunspot activity? Global warming? Racism?
Though this question is spot on:
The Post: Going back to the report that we receive in February, the changes in distance have been remarkably small. The incremental increases, and in some cases decreases, surprised a lot of people. A lot of that was confirmation bias. Everyone you see seems to be hitting if farther, so we believe that there must be these huge jumps in distance. But when you look at the data we’ve seen so far, that doesn’t appear to be the case. To launch this program under the aegis that ‘We know distance is an issue,’ doesn’t that fly in the face of the data you’ve already collected and analyzed?
Hoisted on their own petard, they are.... That's because of the pains they've gone through to minimize the reported distance gains, most notably starting their data set just after the quantum leap resulting from Wally From Fairhaven's introduction of the ProV1.....
Said differently, who ya gonna believe, the USGA and R&A or your lyin' eyes?
Also Measured in Grams - Did you know that the shafts on your golf clubs are empty? This Aussie saw no need to waste that space:
Golf-club shafts are often associated with speed.
But coke...?According to police in Western Australia, a suspected drug smuggler was nabbed at Perth Airport with a set of golf clubs allegedly loaded with a kilo of cocaine.
Police said they they noticed the man “acting strangely” while holding a set of clubs. When they checked his sticks, they found something surprising: the 55-year-old was allegedly trying to smuggle cocaine in the shafts. Police did not provide the make or model of the set, but did provide photos of one shaft cut open and another that had been x-rayed.
I've heard of shafts denoted as "S", "R" and "XS", but never a "C".
Strokes Gained, A Qualification - Shane Ryan pens an homage to Mark Broadie and his Strokes Gained statistics, a useful read for those unclear on the calculation methodology. That might sound unnecessary, but I've been questioned on that by a number of avid golfers.
Shane makes a further point that should be obvious, but probably bears noting to the masses:
Even as an extremely amateur stat geek, 17 strikes me as a huge red flag. Day’s place atop the rankings has been mentioned quite a bit this year, on TV and elsewhere, but 17rounds to base that on simply isn’t a large enough sample. Think about it—Day is averaging 28 putts per round, which means that his SG number is based on fewer than 500 putts. That may sound like a lot, but a glance at his closest competitors reveals a significant disparity. Phil Mickelson (also on pace to break the overall record, in a Sosa vs. McGwire parallel) has 32 rounds measured. Webb Simpson, in fifth, has 41, and ninth-place Peter Malnati has 43. Meanwhile, Kiradech Aphibarnrat (seventh) has just 14, and Branden Grace has 18.
Those are some serious discrepancies, and it raises a tough question: Are these averages really comparable? Or is someone like Day, with fewer rounds, destined for a correction? Is Mickelson’s number necessarily more legitimate because it’s backed up by more data, and if so, should writers and announcers really be touting any strokes gained rankings in the middle of a season?
Regression is a very real phenomenon, and a quick comparison to baseball might be handy—at this point in the 2018 season, one quarter of the way through the schedule, Mookie Betts and Odubel Herrera are batting above .360. Since 2010, no player has ended a season with an average above .360, and only Joe Mauer has done better than .348. That tells us that in all likelihood, Betts and Herrera will also finish below .360—perhaps well below. So it would be stupid, from a statistical standpoint, to compare their current seasons to players who finished all 162 games.
With any statistic, nothing is more important than sample size....
For instance, we had some Keegan Bradley sightings last weekend at The Players, where he finished T7. For the week, Keeg's gained .832 strokes/round on the field, but these are his stats for the year:
A little hard to read, but the results are God-awful, 200th in Strokes Gained: Putting. So, unless we receive word that he got a putting lesson from Brad Faxon (and that didn't really have legs, did it?), I'd be betting on Keegan regressing to his mean.
The Best of C&C - In honor of Trinity Forest's debut , Stephen Hennessy lists his top ten Coore-Crenshaw designs.... All I can say is that you'd probably be delighted to play Nos. 11-20.....
The Plantation Course at No. 10? Colorado Golf Club at No. 9. No. 9, No. 9? Friar's Head and Sand Hills barely crawl into the Top Five?
I'll just focus on this one:
2 . Cabot Cliffs, Inverness, Nova Scotia, Canada
On Cabot Cliffs, Golf Digest's 2015 Best New honoree, Whitten wrote: "This is the second coming of Cypress Point, which in my mind was previously unmatched in its beauty, variety and thrills." For a man not known for hyperbole, that is the highest praise. Cabot Cliffs was No. 9 on our most recent World 100 ranking.
September, baby!
He's Baaack - Has anyone told him about the new cell phone rules?
Aaron Baddeley has a familiar face on his bag this week at the AT&T Byron Nelson: Hall of Fame caddie Steve Williams.Williams, best known for his 13-major-title tenure with Tiger Woods, has emerged from retirement to try and give Badds a boost."Just think about all the people he has caddied for," Baddeley, 37, said Tuesday from Trinity Forest, the new site of the Nelson. "He has worked for Norman and Floyd and Tiger and Scott and won with all of them. This is such a great teaching tool for me. There is no way this can't help me and the entire team. That’s why we wanted to do it."
Ironically, he won't have much to add about the venues.... But I s'pose the best news is that he won't run into a certain former client at either of these venues. Speaking of which....
I'm Shocked, Shocked I tell You - Tiger has confirmed that which we all assumed:
Tiger Woods will play in the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio,and he drew strong praise from host Jack Nicklaus ahead of the event.
The tournament announced Woods’ commitment Wednesday. It runs May 31-June 1 with Nicklaus serving as host on a course he designed. Woods has won the Memorial five times and will be making his ninth start of the season. It will almost certainly be his final tournament before the U.S. Open June 14-17 at Shinnecock Hills.
Woods will be paired with former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning for the Wednesday pro-am.
And Jack thinks he's good enough to someday win his event......The joke being that Jack has said that about every player he's ever spoken with....
The Solution for Pace of Play? - You might think hot lava is overkill, but I'll bet these guys didn't toss any grass to judge the wind direction:
Not a bad day's work, considering I hadn't planned on blogging.
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