Weekend Wrap

No time for pleasantries, as we need to clear the deck....

Bay Hill Boogaloo - I broke down and watched yesterday's proceedings, though I'm supposed to know better:  Mike Bamberger lists the seven best bits of the week:

5. The Doc Giffin Press Tent

The press tent here is an actual tent, with a Har-Tru tennis court underneath it. It is named, appropriately, for Doc. The actual name is the Doc Giffin Media Center. A better name would be the Doc Giffin Press Tent. The Sunday-night pizza was better than most, better than most. You’ll hear that phrase, in the coming days, as it is on an endless loop, at TPC. They pump play-by-play greatest hits out of the shrubs there.

4. Lucas Glover, Polymath 

Lucas Glover (T10), who has the best grip on Tour – it’s half a knuckle strong – came out of the scorer’s room on Sunday with a fresh copy of the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in hand. “You can do the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle?” an onlooker said. “Oh, yeah,” Lucas said, smiling broadly. “Isn’t the Sunday puzzle impossible?” he was asked. “Saturday’s harder.” This week, at TPC, Lucas is staying in a hotel near the course, and he’ll do crossword puzzles at night, while others are sharpening their minds via “Shark Tank.”

That's what happens when the winner finishes at 4:30 p.m.  It can work, but the guys behind him have to make a run....  and Rory doesn't seem up to running these days.

Here's the lede to Dave Shedloski's nice profile of the victor:

It was quite inspiring and entertaining seeing that Tiger Woods swinging fist pump on the 18th green Sunday at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Except the flying right-hand

roundhouse belonged to Francesco Molinari, who executed a near-perfect imitation of Woods that signified a knockout of the beleaguered field at Bay Hill Club and Lodge. 

Once again, the Palmer charge proved indisputably effective, even when others try it. With a bogey-free, eight-under-par 64, capped by a monster birdie at the 72nd hole that prompted the burst of emotion from the usually stoic Italian, Molinari overcame a five-stroke deficit to Matthew Fitzpatrick to win by two for his third PGA Tour title. 

Last year it was Rory McIlroy who stormed home with a 64 to cap a huge rally. 

Embarking on his final round nearly two hours before the final twosome of Fitzpatrick and McIlroy, Molinari posted 12-under 276 and watched as all would-be contenders tried in vain to catch him on the sunbaked Championship Course. Fitzpatrick, the former U.S. Amateur champion from England, could only muster 71 to claim second place with a 10-under 278.

Quite the mid-career bump by the Italian, long one of the games most consistent ball-strikers.  We just need a little warning as to the weeks during which he'll putt like Bobby Locke....

As a proxy for this week's level of excitement, the Tour Confidential panel couldn't be bothered allocating a single question to the man that put the "Moli" in "Moliwood".  But this other Euro drew their fire:

2. Rory McIlroy finished in the top six in his fifth straight event on Sunday, but it was also the seventh time in the last 12 months he’s been in the final group and hasn’t won. What’s most prevented McIlroy from picking up his 15th career PGA Tour title this year?

Dethier: It generally hasn’t been the driving, it’s been a combination of everything else. Gawd, he drives it well. But the putter and the wedges tend to trade off as agents of letdown – still, it’s more noteworthy that he has put himself there than that he has come up short.

Dylan, do you have issues with the ampersand....  Both the putter and his wedges are below tour standards...

Bamberger: Golf is hard? And on hard courses, like Bay Hill, harder yet? The line between exceptional (Saturday) and mediocre (Sunday) is razor-thin. I’ll always be rooting for him and believing in him. He’s a megatalent. We’ve been spoiled by Woods, forever.

That's true enough, and yet I have a very specific reaction when I see Rory in the final group on a Sunday..... and it's been some time since I've seen any need to question that instinct.

Steve DiMeglio had this profile of Rory talking a good game:

Rory McIlroy talks a good game. 

Always has, always will. He is approachable, insightful, genuine, honest, sometimes to

his detriment. There is no lying in the Northern Irishman. He says what he means, and he means what he says, and no one gets the sense that when he takes a question and spins it into press-conference gold, the answers were washed through a PR machine. 

Come on, the guy referenced Abraham Lincoln in his Wednesday presser at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. 

But it’s becoming increasingly harder to take McIlroy at his word as the four-time major champion who is but one green jacket short of becoming the sixth player to win the career grand slam can’t extinguish a victory drought of 12 months and has just one win since he captured the 2016 Tour Championship almost 30 months ago. 

One struggles to believe that McIlroy, who has 23 wins worldwide, is not exasperated or on edge as the absence of victory grows longer, especially when he’s put himself in position to win repeatedly.

We've seen this a million time, and it's all good.  Players try to focus on process and limit thinking about results....  My issue is that Rory has several obvious holes in his golf game, and there appears to be no urgency to address them.  I probably overstate its importance, but I use the childhood friend on the bag as a proxy for his level of desire.  Let me know when Harry Diamond is sent home, but until then I don't see why I should taker his career any more seriously than he does.

Ponte Vedra Bound - It's Back To The Future, or I guess more like forward to the past.  The best words I've read on March vs. May comes from this weeks TC panel:

4. The Players will make its debut this coming week in its new (well, old) spot on the Tour calendar. What impact will cooler conditions have on the event? And who’s your pick to win?

Wood: Having been out here long enough to remember The Players in March, the wind direction will have the biggest impact on the tournament. In May, typically we would get somewhat of a southerly wind, somewhere between the southwest and the southeast. Obviously all the holes will be affected, but none more than 17 and 18. Seventeen in recent years has been a litany of gap wedges to 9-irons, and on 18 quite a few players had the option of hitting a long iron off the tee and still get a 7- or 8-iron. Now, 17 will play much more difficult, with the wind moving left to right and coming at you. Judging a crosswind correctly is immeasurably more difficult than judging a downwind. All of a sudden you are going from just blasting a gap wedge to maybe flighting an 8-iron and hitting at the right time for the wind you’ve chosen. And 18 you’ll now see a lot more 3-woods and drivers off the tee and more long irons into that green. Finishing will be a beast. I’ll take Kuchar by a hair.

Wow, I never saw that Kooch pick coming....

Shack tells us that we won't have to bear the suspense until Tuesday, because Phil has confirmed that it tastes just like chicken:

Oh yeah, it's just like Augusta...What ever gets you through the night, Phil.

By statute the Tour Confidential panel is required to lead with a query about you-know-who, so let's get it over with:

1. Tiger Woods withdrew from the Arnold Palmer Invitational with a neck strain on Monday, but said he’s hopeful to remain in the field for this week’s Players Championship(he has a press conference scheduled for Tuesday). Tiger’s never been a bastion of truth when it comes to discussing his injuries, so it’s hard to know the severity of his latest setback. But does the neck tweak sound like cause for concern, and how likely is to diminish his prospects at the Masters and beyond? 

Sean Zak: If he truly was able to compete and half-contend in Mexico, then I’m not really that worried. Also, be sure to take new mandatory-opinion-giver Paul Azinger’s

words with a grain of salt. 

Josh Sens: Tiger’s history of truthiness with injuries definitely clouds the picture, but there’s also the fact that the consequences of injuries are hard to predict. Whatever he says in the press conference, it won’t dictate the future. My own forecast is that this will be a minor glitch that won’t dampen his chances at Augusta. But if you think Azinger’s opinion should be taken with a grain of salt, take mine with half a grain of that same seasoning.

The purpose of this question eludes me, as one assumes that these writers have neither attended medical school nor examined the subject.  Though the reminder of Tiger's prior lack of candor is appropriate, but we'll just have to see how he's swinging when, and if, he shows up.

I'm not sure any of these quotes are new, but if you're interested in anything ever said about a certain 3-Par, this is your item.

On Dan -  The tributes are poring in, but we'll start with this great header:

Dan Jenkins was shrewd, funny, lawless, but mostly he was a natural. He made golf-writing look easy

Lawless?  Please explain.

ORLANDO, Fla. – How Rickie Fowler feels about Arnold is how a lot of us, in the typing trade, feel about Jenkins. Dan Jenkins made it look easy. Arnold made being a 

Am I the only that thinks he looks like Larry Bird?

famous golfer look easy. Also, cool. Jenkins, as maybe the last famous pure sportswriter the world will ever know, did the same. They were both born in 1929. They came of age in the prosperity and peace of the 1950s. And that explains everything. A million cigarettes and more cocktails could not kill them. 

Jenkins died on Thursday, at 89. If you want to have a good time this weekend, visit the websites of Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, the two magazines where he spent most of his career, and lose yourself in his stuff. If I were to point you to one book, it would be The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate. For one story, his profile of George Low in SI from ’64. For a column, his Golf Digest fake interview with Tiger from 2014. You could say it’s awful and maybe it is, but it shows a certain lawlessness that was at the heart of his writing. Arnold’s golf, the same.

This is a rare misfire from Mike Bamberger, at least as far as that fake Tiger interview.  Though he makes up for it with this bit:

I sent him a manuscript and followed with a call in 1986, looking for a blurb for a book I had written, about a brief stint caddying on Tour. It’s impossible that he read it — why would he? I described it to him. With barely a pause he said, “Here, for a change, is an Ivy Leaguer carrying the bags of other people.”

 He should have read it, Mike, because it was good...and this:

When he got into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2012, he said, “To justify my inclusion in this terrific society, I went back and looked at everybody who’s in it and did some statistics. It turns out that I have known 95 of these people when they were living. I’ve written stories about 73 of them. I’ve had cocktails and drinks with 47 of them, and I played golf with 24 of them. So I want somebody else to try and go up against that record.”

I'm guessing that 47 has to be low....

Shack delivers his promised linkapalooza, and I can't help but grab some of the good ledes.  First,  Doug Ferguson:

Dan Jenkins, the sports writing great and best-selling author whose career covered Ben Hogan to Tiger Woods, began with Western Union and ended with Twitter, has died.

Awfully efficient, no?  Let me just note that Jenkin's embrace of Twitter (along with Peter Alliss) was something I enjoyed very much.

And this:

Dan was like a sportswriter who walks out of a movie from the 1940s, slaps a couple of big bills on the bar, and tells the bartender, “Don’t neglect me.” I’m not vamping here. That was his actual line. 

Even by the standards of ’60s Sports Illustrated writers, Dan was a big drinker. But he worked when he drank. When one of his pals impressed him with a good line, Dan would sneak to the bathroom and write it down. Those lines wound up in his copy. He called them “overheards.” It was the original quote-tweeting, minus the quote.

And this:

The lights are dim at Goat Hills this weekend. Thanks for everything, hoss. As someone once mused, nobody ever said it wasn't going to be semi-tough.

And we have no shortage of the man's actual writing, such as this account of Jack's improbable Masters win in 1986.  Sports Illustrated has put up a page of his best work at that magazine, including his immortal homage to Goat Hills:

Goat Hills is gone now. It was swallowed up almost four years ago by the bulldozers of progress, and in the end it was nice to learn that something could take a divot out of those hard fairways.

You see the art... two sentences and you're hooked.  Now go read the rest... Don't worry, I'll wait.  In case you're curious, Jenkins covered his first Masters in 1951.  

 Dave Kindred has some remembrances to share as well, including:

“Dan Jenkins, Dan Jenkins!” an ingénue of a sportswriter said upon meeting him. “I’ve always wanted to be just like you.” 

“What, hungover?” he replied.

And has anyone ever penned a better summary of our game?

He could write symphonies. More often, he wrote little gems. He explained America and golf in 11 words: “Golf is a mental disorder like gambling or women or politics.”

R.I.P.

 Gonna leave you nice folks there.  Tomorrow is a travel day, my last trip to Western HQ.  We'll share the Players from there for the first time, but by the time I return we'll have Augusta in our sights.