Back In The Saddle

I go away for a couple of days and things just go to heck in a hadbasket...

Panning The Globe... - C.T. Pan?  Gotta admit, I didn't see that one coming, though I'm thinking that this is a bit much to put on our DJ:

Dustin Johnson fails spectacularly to rescue the RBC Heritage from Masters fatigue and Tiger's absence

Can anyone explain to me what he's going for here, since this event has long been the week after Augusta and has never had Tiger in the field?

For golf not to devolve again into a tour of the haves and the have-nots, the latter tournaments with fields sans Tiger, it needs the best players in the world to do their part to ward off apathy when Woods is not there to do it for them. 

This was what the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head, S.C., was facing. Masters fatigue and Easter weekend double-teamed the tournament, which seemed to effectively counterpunch with the best player in the world rising to the top of the leader board. 

But if the RBC Heritage was a test, Dustin Johnson, World No. 1, failed spectacularly, a week after tying for second at Augusta. Johnson took a one-stroke lead into the final round, was tied for the lead after an indifferent front nine, then played a five-hole back-nine stretch in seven-over par, including consecutive double bogeys. 

Has anyone seen the remote?

I assume he was there only because it's the closest thing to a home game for the native of South Carolina, as the course can't possibly be to his liking...  It's almost reassuring that he ran out of gas, almost as if the disappointment the prior week mattered to him....

Dylan Dethier attempts to quantify the suckage:

68 — Johnson’s Sunday rank in strokes gained tee to green — out of 70. He lost 4.86 shots to the field from tee to green and 5.31 overall. 

1 — Johnson’s weekly rank in strokes gained off the tee. Despite losing 1.49 shots to the field on Sunday, his mighty tee ball had been so ridiculously good the first three days that he still gained 4.68 shots off the tee, better than any other competitor. Our Jonathan Wall notes in this week’s equipment roundup that Johnson has been gaming a new driver shaft. 

3 — Times Johnson has shot 77 or higher when holding the 54-hole lead. No other PGA Tour player has accomplished that feat more than once in the last 15 years, per Justin Ray. Johnson also stumbled at the 2010 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach and lost a big lead at the 2017 WGC-HSBC Champions.

Gee, and I had been reliably informed that DJ is too stupid to feel pressure....  No really, that was a thing back around that 2010 U.S. Open.

But this was the coda of that first item:

So the tour is on to New Orleans and the two-man team event, the Zurich Classic. The field has Brooks Koepka (teaming with brother Chase), Jon Rahm (with Ryan Palmer) and Bubba Watson (with J.B. Holmes) to elevate it in the absence of Tiger. 

The onus, in the absence of Woods, now falls to them.

Hey, what about the Class of '11?  Or those new rules that were going to make our game millennial-friendly?  Tiger is going to play much less than he used to, so folks better be prepared to deal with it.

But as an aside, the Spieth-Ryan team seems to have been disbanded....  Jordan is losing partners all over the place....

Your Daily Downer - Eamon Lynch has a decidedly dark take on this summer's Open Championship:

Golf nourishes itself with low-hanging narratives, those saccharine, feel-good tales about lives redeemed or neighborhoods rejuvenated thanks to the royal and ancient game. 

Stories of golf as a power for good often hold a seed of truth that eventually reaps an acre of corn. Eighty-seven days from now, folks who peddle this kind of claptrap will have a field day as the 148th Open Championship kicks off at Royal Portrush Golf Club in Northern Ireland. 

The parables are so predictable that they write themselves long before a single shot is struck. 

Golf as a unifying force in a bitterly divided land. 

Major-winning players from differing religious traditions in whose success warring neighbors found common cause. 

The mother of all majors as a richly deserved reward for the good people of this benighted little place who moved beyond conflict and toward reconciliation.

I'm guessing he's built this straw man for the sole purpose of torching him:

Eamon is justifiably distraught over the death of journalist  Lyra McKee, but let's cut right to the chase:

But the Open shouldn’t be a masquerade ball that presents Northern Irish society as something it is not. Much has undeniably improved in the 25 years since I emigrated, but not even the Open can obscure the melancholy reality that Northern Ireland remains a society hostage to those who are, in the memorable words of Belfast songwriter Paul Brady, “still trying to carve tomorrow from a tombstone.”

But perhaps you wouldn't have to emigrate today....

I think it's useful and appropriate to have a reporter such as Eamon remind us that these tribal differences still affect Northern Ireland, despite the far calmer surface.  But perhaps Eamon is instinctively too hard on his countrymen, who have at least moved beyond the war zone that existed when Eamon left.

It's not the role of sports to solve the ills of society, but it's a marker of progress that the event can be held there safely.   And the appearance of this wonderful venue on worldwide television can't help but promote more visitors, which really can't be a bad thing....  Baby steps, Eamon.

Tiger Scat - It's got legs for sure.... Geoff introduces the Masters quad supercut with this screen shot:

Full quad here:

Pretty much guaranteed to make one dizzy....

Jeff Haggar does his usual shot-counting thing, and heads will explode:

For the sixth time, I tracked the number of strokes that CBS televised per player during the Sunday round of the Masters. The telecast began at 9am ET (after tee times were moved earlier to beat the storms) with players grouped in threesomes. I counted a total of 450 televised strokes. The final putt dropped at 2:27 resulting in an average of 1.38 strokes per minute which was slightly less than the rate of the 2018 Masters, but still the third highest of all major tournaments I have tracked since 2014. 

CBS covered 69 of the 70 strokes from winner Tiger Woods (skipping only a tap-in putt on hole #1). Francesco Molinari actually received coverage for 70 shots. His final score of 74 included two penalty strokes, so CBS only bypassed two of his shots (a layup on 15 and his tee shot on 17). Brooks Koepka and Tony Finau were spotlighted for 59 shots each. Those four players accounted for 57% of the televised shots.

But that lay-up on No. 15 was highly significant, so shame on CBS for that.  They've taken some heat for the absence of DJ, who ended up T2, but it took a late surge for him to threaten relevance.  I'm not at all reluctant to criticize CBS, it's just that this is the one time it's hard to make a criticism of the broadcast being overly  Tiger-centric to stick.

 The Tour Confidential panel paid no attention to Hilton Head, but rather led with this:

1. Now that we’ve had time to adjust after the craziness of Tiger Woods winning his 15th major title, let’s take one final look back at Masters week to cover some things we might have missed. TV ratings were off the charts, and Woods’ sponsors like TaylorMade and Bridgestone had plenty to smile about, too, but who most stands to benefit from Woods’ win?

Just spitballin' here, but Nike?  Lots of swooshing in those last two groups....

Michael Bamberger: Sam and Charlie, because they’re in good shape for show-and tell, plus some other things. I’m not pretending to understand the family dynamics, but in some sense Tiger’s work since April/May 2017 (the win was a byproduct) had to be at least in part for them.

Good one, Mike.  I assume that ESPN has another 30 for 30 in the works on show and tell....

Josh Sens: Anyone watching the majors. The most historic hunt in golf is back on.

Dylan Dethier: Nike had a killer week of ad campaigns, starting with the Frank the Headcover mayhem at the start and finishing with that hair-raising commercial post-win. Make that five major champions in a row who have won wearing the swoosh on their shirt.

There's two additional Tiger queries, if you're so inclined, though to me this is where they get a little more interesting:

4. What was the biggest non-Tiger development that came out of the week at Augusta National? 

Bamberger: Broadly, the mystery of golf. Specifically, how did the moment and the promise it represented becoming get bigger than Frankie Molinari’s big, beautiful brain? The tee shot on 12. The first three shots on 15. If someone who has all the best words can enlighten me, I would be most grateful. Yes, his golf was shaky-ish from the start. But he was getting it done. The Masters was his, until it wasn’t.

They're unbeatable, at least until they get beat.... here's a couple more takes:

Sens: We’ve poked some cheeky fun here at the chip on Brooks Koepka’s shoulder. Augusta was further evidence that it might be justified. In this space, and in many other places where predictions were made, Koepka was all but overlooked. Despite his three major wins, there was still the unspoken assumption, I think, that his brute power game lacked the subtly for a place like Augusta. Once again, doubter proved wrong.

Dethier: The list of contenders who just seem to keep winding up atop major leaderboards, at least the last four: Tiger Woods. Francesco Molinari. Dustin Johnson. Brooks Koepka. And Xander Schauffele. That’s your big-game crew right now, with apologies to plenty others.

Don't miss this gallery of Augusta photos using vintage cameras.... So apt for an event won by a vintage golfer:

On the left is Gary Player at his first Masters in 1957, recreated a mere sixty-two years later....

The Camel Sutra - Admittedly a strong contender for my worst pun ever, but Geoff Ogily has an interesting take on the new rules of our game:

I must admit the process didn’t get off to a great start when I saw someone taking a drop from ‘knee height’. I thought it looked ridiculous. “What,” I thought to myself, “is wrong with anywhere above the knee? How does anyone have a problem with that? And what was wrong with what we were all doing before?”

All of which brought me immediately back to the notion that the idea of simplifying rules almost automatically makes them more complicated. That it is what almost always happens when a committee decides something.

There were so many contingencies because a committee was involved. And it seems to me the same thing has happened with this ball-dropping thing. Nobody in the world now knows how to drop the ball properly. So we have a more complex situation than we had on December 31, 2018.

I do think he's onto something here, but it certainly because a source of confusion for your core golfers.... Geoff has many interesting reactions, with which I mostly agree:

Still, some have argued that an aura of suspicion is only going to be encouraged by some

of the new rules. There is, for example, no penalty for kicking or moving your ball accidentally when looking for it in long grass. All you have to do is recreate the lie as well as possible and move on. Okay, but the more cynical observers see this as a licence to create a lie slightly better than the original. That view is disappointing in a game that has always had to trust the participants to do the right thing. 

Moving on, I’m not sure the reduction in time you can search for a ball for five minutes to three minutes is too significant. What was wrong with five minutes? Rounds of golf are not taking five hours because players are allowed to look for balls for five minutes. That has nothing to do with pace of play. So, while I don’t necessarily disagree with three-minute searches, to what end have we made this change?

Yes to the last, especially when you consider the severity of the penalty....

But Geoff seems reluctant to make the killer point, which is that having failed to control equipment and distance, which adds immeasurably to pace of play, they're instead nickel-and-dimed us on lost ball searches and dropping from the knees...

And Geoff, how do you feel about their changes to the language of our game?  But we can't have millennials dealing with complicated terminology such as...well, all-square.

An Existential Crisis - See whatcha think of this header:

Is the Zurich Classic’s team format still fresh in Year 3, or is it already tired?

Seriously?  Two of the Golfworld writers take it on, with decidedly mixed results.  The guy taking to con position argues for...wait for it, match play:

Without match play being brought into the equation, the Zurich Classic team format loses much of its appeal. The fun of the Ryder Cup (and yes, even the Presidents Cup) is the idea of pitting two two-man teams against one another, with every match mattering

and both teams in full-attack mode. Take that away and I’m not so sure watching Anders Albertson and Seth Reeves play alternate shot together in the second round is all that exciting. 

So what’s the answer? I think a 16-team bracket could be very interesting, with each round alternating between fourball and alternate shot. You can keep the 78-80 teams in the field now and have one day of fourball or alt. Shoot stroke play, and the top 16 teams advance and get seeded based off that. I’m basically making the argument for what the WGC-Dell Match Play should be like, but since that’s probably not changing, why not use it for this event?

So, without bring match play into the equation, you'll recommend match play...Mind you, those team events work (under the loosest possible definition in the case of the Prez Cup) because, and try to stay with me here, because they're team match play events.  But like the Dell, this will require an awful lot of golf for our pampered Tour pros....

Mind you, the guy that's Pro-Zurich suggests a worst-ball scramble or giving Tony Romo a sponsor's exemption....  This event may not rock your world, but can we not agree that it would be even worse as just another 72-hole stroke play event?

I'm going to leave you here, but I've got some fun stuff teed up in open tabs for tomorrow.