Thursday Thoughts

Yesterday was admittedly bleak, so having successfully lowered your standards....

Crutch, Abandoned - Not willingly, of course, but Randall Mell write on an under-discussed rules change:

It’s the end of an era. 

If you’re an LPGA fan and never liked seeing caddies line up players before a shot or

putt, you can rejoice. 

This week’s season-ending CME Group Tour Championship marks the last time you will have to endure it. 

When the LPGA resumes play in its season opener at the Diamond Resort Tournament of Championship next January, the new Rules of Golf forbidding caddies from aligning players will be in effect.

And good riddance to said era....  It was always a horrible look, all the worse because it was only the ladies that so indulged themselves.

Of course, the funniest aspect of it all was that, like the existence of the Yeti or Loch Ness Monster, its efficacy was an article of faith.  Let Brittany explain:

“Everything is going to be all right,” Lincicome said. “I can do it on my own.” 

Lincicome says Pederson doesn’t call her off shots to realign her anyway. 

“Never, ever,” Lincicome said. 

So why do it? For most players like Lincicome, it’s just reassurance. If the rules allow it, why not make sure? For Lincicome, it also has become part of her pre-shot routine. 

“It’s really more like a trigger,” Pederson said. “It’s something she will just have to re-establish for next year. I don’t foresee it being a problem. She plays off weeks and in the off season without me lining her up, and she’s fine.”

That's great, Brit, though all this time you've been triggering me.

Ladies' Day - As long as someone brought up the women, we've been kind of ignoring them lately.  Shall we give them some pixels?  Beth Ann Nichols is the O.B. Keeler of the LPGA, so it's fitting that we'll give her the lede:

But winning on the women’s tour has never been more difficult. 

There have been 25 different winners in 31 events this season, the most since 1995. Of those players, 10 won for the first time. 

Here at the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship, where Jutanugarn won in 2017, only 12 players can mathematically win the $1 million CME Race to the Globe bonus. The overall tournament champion, however, has never been trickier to predict. 

“I feel like anybody can win on any given week,” said Brooke Henderson, a two-time winner in 2018. “They just need that special something.”

True that, though it'll be heartbreaking to see how they screw it up, since they're the Vinko Bogataj of golf tours.  Don't remember Vinko?

As this next item informs, the ladies are getting a nice step-up in prize money for 2019:

LPGA revamps CME Group Tour Championship in 2019: $5M purse with $1.5M first prize, biggest in women's golf

Good for them, but can we do something about the trophy?  What, you haven't seen the trophy?   I do so hate to pick on them, but it just lacks a certain...well, I'm gonna go with subtlety:

They put their best minds on designing the trophy, and they came up with a box of cash.  

A Crowded Fainting Couch - Lots of teeth being gnashed and garments being rended... Just don't mix that up, kids, as rended teeth are quite painful.  Shack has a couple of posts in which golf personalities argue the distance issue, leading with this from one of Brandel's many tweetstorms:

We'll keep this safe for the kids by making it a Peter Kessler-free zone.

Phil Blackmar had this interesting point:

As you can see, handicaps have come down 2 strokes over the past 27 years. Take a minute to consider all the tech advancements I just mentioned plus: better understanding of biomechanics in the swing, launch monitors revealing misunderstood impact relationships and launch monitors providing invaluable feedback. Then, add better agronomy, workout specialists, mental gurus, short game experts and finally the countless articles, books and videos detailing all sorts of methods and philosophies. Add all that up and ask yourself: is a two stroke gain over 27 years significant? Is shooting 86 rather than 88 that much more fun? I don’t think so either.

Shack failed to provide a link, so we don't know what else of interest Phil had to add.  I do think that's an interesting point, one we've thrown out there previously but doesn't get much attention.  It's taken for granted that the modern equipment has made the game more fun for the club player, but to the extent that the game becomes easier the thrill of pulling off great shots is diminished....  

In a later post, Shack checks in with the players at the Australian Open, first Greg Chalmers:

“I'm begging and pleading for the USGA and the R&A to do a better job, I really am,” Chalmers said. 

“They always seem to be behind and I would love for them at some point, and it's probably going to happen in about 10 years, they're going to go, ‘Hmmm, I think the ball goes too far, or the clubs help to hit the ball too far’. 

“So that is something that I am frustrated about because we always seem to be unwinding the clock. 

“We always have to – it started with the wedges, the change in grooves, then we went long putter. 

“They keep unwinding things. Why can't we get in front of things? That's the only thing I wish would happen, they would do a better job sometimes.”

Let me know how that works out for you, Greg, but I wouldn't be getting my hopes up.   

Former Presidents Cup player Bradley Hughes goes the sentimental; route, writing an elegy for that golf course that's failed to keep up with the times:

Now I see it... I feel the extra long tee penetrate my soil much more gently than previous days- teeing the ball up so high you won't even brush my surface when you swing. 

Now I see it.... The oversized metal head- that could feed stations to the cable televison inside our clubhouse. 

Now I feel it...the pain. The agony of defeat. 

You are going to take the blue line route to the destination. 

Go ahead- say it.... I know you are. You can't hurt me anymore 

You are going to dismiss my contours. 

You are going to avoid my white face bunker that used to laugh at you from the tee- now you don't even see it. 

That bunker recently admitted his own lonely existance to me not so long ago also. He feels betrayed too that his prescence is no longer appreciated or acknowledged. 

The beautiful pines on the corner of my dogleg are now an aiming point rather than an obstruction. And yes!!! They are pissed off too!!!! 

I'm hurt.  

Not only do I feel the coldness of the metal, I see the shiny new box of white missiles you brought from your side zipper of your bag.

Really well done... So good, in fact, that I'd have blogged it even without the karmic "Agony of defeat" reference....

Not that this stuff will sway any of the decision makers.....

The Event Formerly Known as The Match - Hey, it's my blog and I can indulge in wishful thinking, but The Match is, thanks to Mark Frost, a matter of record.

Dave Shedloski with some history that I'd not heard before:

The concept for The Match began with a hypothetical question between two Hollywood friends, CAA’s Jack Whigham, the agency’s co-head of motion picture talent, and one of his clients, Bryan Zuriff, a producer whose credits include the film, “Jobs,” and the

Showtime series “Ray Donovan.” 

Zuriff, a golf enthusiast who was a huge fan of “The Skins Game” that used to occupy Thanksgiving weekend, is that creative type who has a million ideas running through his mind at all hours. Apparently, some are quite good, including a new Showtime limited series, “Escape At Dannemora,” starring Benicio del Toro and directed by Ben Stiller (the latter who might make an appearance on the pre-game show). His rough conceptualization for The Match got this ball rolling. 

“He called and asked me, How crazy is this?” Whigham recalled. “I said, Probably too crazy. 

“Basically, we started thinking, Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a golf match that was played the way a lot of us play with our buddies on the weekends? You know, where you bet on everything and talk smack and basically have this continually running dialogue of, pardon the expression, giving each other shit.

But this is the bit that jumped out at me:

In addition to the promise of incessant banter and next-level trash talking— they’ve both had free time in recent weeks to groove a few new one-liners as well as their swings—the most intriguing wrinkle is certain to be the series of side bets that each will throw at the feet of the other, most times with little warning, putting their own money on the line that the winner will shovel towards his charities of choice.

A little clarity on this point might be helpful, a sit's the first reference I've seen to it being "Their own money", whatever that might mean.

The Golf.com crew has watched the HBO feature (which your humble blogger hasn't seen), and offer their detailed reactions, a bit of a split verdict.  First the good:

BEST TRASH-TALK 

DD: I mean, there’s no beating Phil yamming that one tee shot at Shadow Creek and

calling it a “hellacious seed.” That’s the dorky confidence that inspired his Mizzen + Main deal and, frankly, his entire game, too. Not even sure that’s trash talk, though. 

LKD: So many great lines from Phil, I was genuinely laughing out loud at one point. I really enjoyed the back-and-forth about the green jacket ceremony, but my personal favorite was Phil’s tongue-in-cheek comment at the very end of the episode. “Tiger’s grown the game and I’ve benefited more than anyone,” he said. “If I were to lose this $9 million — which I won’t, but if I were to lose — I would almost feel I owed it to him and we would both be winners in this situation.”

 OK, I won't even pretend to understand what that means, though I can't help myslef from laughing all the same....

As for the bad, it's not actually all that bad:

RELATIONSHIP HISTORY 

LKD: I sort of think HBO went a little too hard on the Phil-Tiger “arch-rival” stuff in the early part of the episode and it never quite worked. It felt like the show was trying to force a “rivalry” narrative that just wasn’t really there at the time, because in reality, nobody could rival Tiger in his peak. 

Once the show figured out that these two players weren’t so much rivals as they were different characters whose careers sort of ran concurrently, we got fewer forced anecdotes and more genuinely entertaining ones: Tiger texting Phil after Amy’s breast cancer diagnosis, for example, or Phil’s green jacket anecdote about making Tiger feel it a little bit, having to put it on him. Am I reading too much into all of this?

Meh!  See if you find this Tony Romo story funnier than I did.... 

Golfweek's Martin Kauffmann was less starstruck:

Deploying “24/7” and the theatrical narration of actor Liev Schreiber to preview the match – uh, excuse me, “The Match: Tiger vs. Phil” – feels like a reach. “The Match”

doesn’t seem big enough for the “24/7” brand. It’s like sending an ESPN “30 For 30” crew to Yankee Stadium to chronicle an Old-Timers’ game. 

But that won’t stop our heroes from playing along. There is a persistent effort by Woods, Mickelson and the crew to try to make viewers care about their Nov. 23 contest at Shadow Creek Golf Club. But that’s a mighty tough sell.

Martin effectively skewers that Romo story, saving me the trouble, and closes with some tough love for the boys:

We, as fans, want to see great players compete on Sundays for major championships. But there’s a problem. Woods and Mickelson peaked more than a decade ago. Mickelson hasn’t won a major in five years, Woods a decade. At this point, we’re unsure how much they have left in the tank. 

There’s another problem: They have nothing to lose. We care about sports because wins and losses have meaning for the athletes and, by extension, their fans. But what meaning is there in “The Match”? 

At one point, Woods said, “It’s not only for the amount of money, but it’s also the fact that I’m able to take it off of Phil.” 

News flash, Tiger: You’re not “taking it off of Phil.” Neither of you put up your own money. Instead, it’s just a couple of old warhorses milking gullible sponsors for a big payday.

That's gonna harsh their mellow....Put Martin down on Rory's side, he'd have watched if it happened fifteen years ago.

I'll leave you there and get on with my day.