Your Friday Frisson

I am on the clock this morning, though I think we should have sufficient time to cover that which you need to know...

Down Time - It's not all glamour on the big Tour, at least not when the weather gods are in a foul mood:

AVONDALE, La. – The Zurich Classic weather delay is approaching the four-hour mark when another lightning bolt flashes across the sky outside the clubhouse at TPC Louisiana.

Water bottles are scattered all around the fringe of the practice green, left behind as players doubled back to stay dry. A caddie who hasn’t moved in more than 15 minutes is sitting in a rocking chair on the patio and makes a soft snoring sound, perking up only after hearing the voice of a Golf Channel anchor giving an on-air update just a few yards away. 

The grounds are mostly empty and have been since Round 1 play was first suspended at 9:41 a.m. CT due to dangerous weather, with the team-format event on hold for most of Thursday. 

The players aren’t really sure what the plan is during the early afternoon, with tournament officials hoping to squeeze a few more holes in before the end of the day. They just know what this means for the rest of the tournament.

It turned into a 7 1/2 hour stoppage, with players trapped awaiting word from the Tour as to when play might resume.  It's for this reason that I often wonder about the wisdom of playing the week prior to a major....

Don't Know Much About History.... - A few unrelated items that we can jam in here....  First, about that greatest comeback ever meme, Shane Ryan thinks it needs to be quantified:

Nicklaus, Woods or Hogan? An extremely 'scientific' look at who had golf's most impressive comeback

Not to be argumentative, but from what did Jack come back?  The calendar?

Shane applies logic to that which is emotional, beginning here:

Category 1: The Lowest Low 

The strength of any comeback must be measured by the depths to which the player had sunk at his lowest moment.

Although he seems to turn it into a game of 5-3-1, which is amusing:

Tiger: There's quite a bit more here. We've got the Thanksgiving debacle, the various

affairs, sex addiction, DUI and injury after injury, to the point that as recently as 2017 he thought he was done for good. Tiger's lows were very low. 

Hogan: Read the litany of injuries Hogan suffered when he threw himself across his wife to protect her from an impending head-on clash with a Greyhound bus in February 1949: Fracture collar bone, left ankle fracture, double-pelvis fracture, chipped rib and blood clots that almost killed him—all of which led to a 59-day stay in the hospital and a nine-month absence from golf. Plus, how good could medical care have been back then? 

It's actually kinda tough to decide between Tiger and Hogan here—Tiger has him by longevity and emotional despair, but in the end I have to give the nod to Hogan for the sheer severity of the wreck, and the damage it wrought on his body.

Hogan 3, Tiger 2, Jack 1.

Two factors that I'd add....  First, Tiger's downfall had that healthy self-inflicted aspect to it, which the reader is free to accommodate as he or she sees fit.  The second, which argues for a higher score for Hogan, is the state of medicine on 1949 vs. 2017....

No spoilers, but Shane's crie de coeur that the science is settled seems unconvincing.... at least to this reader.

Alan Shipnuck's mailbag from yesterday had a query that relates:

When Jack won in ’86 did people know it was a farewell? Or did they think he was ‘back’? -@NaaderBajwa 

I still remember a big SI feature on Nicklaus that came out a month or so after that Masters in which he talked about a renewed desire and focus. That carried him to a tie for 8th at the ensuing U.S. Open, and he made some noise at the ’87 Masters (T7), but he never won again. It was a different era, in which few players were relevant after 40, and prior to the ’86 Masters, Big Jack had been in decline for years, having won only once since 1982, and contended only one time (barely) in the preceding eight majors. So despite the great man’s optimism, I think most fans understood they had witnessed a glorious farewell. 

Tiger is in an entirely different position – he easily could have won the final two majors of 2018, and he closed the season with a victory at the Tour Championship. His game is a lot more ascendant than Nicklaus’ was at the time of their respective Masters renaissances. But the cruel thing about golf is that you never know when you’ve just enjoyed your last victory.

While Alan overstates Tiger's run in the 2018 majors, the obvious fact is that Tiger was considered a far bigger factor coming into this Masters than Jack was in '86, and therefore logically should have more chances.  

Eamon Lynch has been en fuego recently, though on this issue he's a recent convert:

But according to Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch, Woods should already have the record.

Woods grabbed win No. 81 two weeks ago with his one-shot victory in the Masters. It was Tiger’s fifth green jacket and 15th major title.

Snead’s record of 82 PGA Tour victories includes five team events. Woods has none.

“This isn’t a record that should be debatable,” Lynch says. “We’ll just have to wait until Tiger puts it to rest for good. And when No. 82 comes, it will be just like the 81 that preceded it. The work of one man hitting every shot that counts.”

Even some of the individual events that The Slammer has counted are suspect, but such is the nature of comparisons across eras....

The Lords of Augusta - One wishes they could contribute to the game in a more cooperative manner....  The subject being that wonderful ANWA, wonderful except for the date....  Now comes word of who's likely to blink first:

A year later, the reality of the August National Women’s Amateur and its impact on the ANA Inspiration seem clear to tournament producer International Management Group

and sponsor All Nippon Airways: lower TV ratings, lower attendance, a concerned title sponsor and increased talk of moving the ANA Inspiration away from its traditional date during the first week of April. 

“At this point, I think it’s 50-50 we stay, 50-50 we move,” said Chris Garrett of IMG, who serves as tournament director for the ANA Inspiration at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage. 

Any move of the tournament, potentially two weeks later into April which could conflict with the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, would need the cooperation of the LPGA, Mission Hills Country Club and broadcast partner Golf Channel and would require some changes for other LPGA spring tournaments as well.

There is no good answer here, as their traditional date was simply perfect until the green-jacket mafia big-footed them.  Why the ANWA couldn't be contested the week after the Masters remains unanswered.....  unasked, seemingly.

News You Can Use -  Anytime someone tells you the science is settled, hold tightly to your wallet....  But here's the latest installment of "In or Out?"  Golf Digest is the anti-Bryson:

THE 99.9967% SOLUTION 

Based on probability and standard deviation calculations and PGA Tour statistics, the best tour players would strike the flagstick dead-center from 20 to 25 feet about 3.3 

Photo by Todd Detwiler

percent of the time. If you assume the best pros would rarely roll their first putt nine feet past the hole —perhaps one in a thousand times—that would make leaving the flagstick in a benefit on only .0033 percent of all putts from 20 to 25 feet. And that's for the best pros. For a typical amateur, those percentages are much worse.

Putts rolling just off-center and 4½ feet beyond the hole were tested with three flagsticks: fiberglass (the one played most often on the PGA Tour), tapered aluminum and multi-diamater aluminum. All measured approximately one-half inch in diameter at green level. Fiberglass, the lightest, had the least negative results with 61 percent made, followed by multi-diameter (38 percent) and then tapered (36 percent). Each was worse than no flagstick (90 percent).

I had to copy that "Photo" credit above....I'm wondering what kind of lens Todd used....

WIND ADVISORY

In strong winds, the flagstick can bend, creating more space on one half of the hole and less on the other. In tests, that change opened up one side of the hole by an eighth of an inch—or the size of a golf-ball dimple. Seems inconsequential compared to just pulling out the flagstick, which opens up the entire hole.

In my experience, the wind is typically moving the flagstick back and forth, and I want no part of that on short putts.  

News You Can Use, Part II -  You can use this in the unlikely event you're a touring professional or happen to answer to the name "Kooch"....

Undercover Tour Pro: Economics 101 for hiring club caddies

UTP is a little tough on our Kooch with this:

Every week on the PGA Tour there's a discrepancy over money. Somebody hasn't been paid what they think they're owed. Multiple times I've had caddies who worked for me previously call to say their new boss hasn't paid them in a while, and might I nudge that

player? Caddies are a desperate lot. Too often they're so happy to get a bag that they start without a clear agreement. Given the stakes, it's the obligation of the player to spell it out. It's an eight-second conversation to say, “$1,500 for the week, 5 percent of a made cut, 7 percent of a top 10, 10 percent for a win, you'll get a check at the end of the week”—which, by the way, is the most common deal out here. And I've never heard of a caddie walking away because an offer was too low. The pro holds all the power to do the right thing. Or not.

There's wiggle room in the weekly rate if it's a Web.com event or I have a local caddie who hasn't incurred travel expenses—but I believe those percentages are sacrosanct. A human being has thrown his hat in the ring alongside mine. He's passed up other opportunities. Although caddieing isn't rocket science, I'm trusting this person to potentially influence a situation that could alter my career. The least I can do is let him be part of the action. Buddies included. If I'm going to a “vacation” destination like Phoenix or Puerto Rico, often I'll invite a friend to loop. I'm not paying a weekly rate, but I'll cover the airfare, hotel, food and bar tabs. If I make a paycheck, he's getting the same percentage I'd give a full-time caddie. My bud took a week off work to hang with me.

Sacrosanct?  That's not my understanding, nor does it strike me as logical....  and I think he muddies the waters in bringing in buddies who take his bag for a week.

As relates to our Kooch, I believe in the spirit, if not the letter of the UTP comments:

Another element not to be discounted is the power of contagious energy. There are caddie/player duos on the PGA Tour who hate one another, but they stick together because it seems to work professionally. But when a club caddie is issued the bib with your name on it, you'll always see a smile from ear to ear. They're pumped, which gets me pumped to play well. 

You can bet Kuchar's Mexican caddie was a bundle of spirit. Not only because he was excited to be in the arena of the PGA Tour, but because he thought he was part of the team.

El Tucan didn't expect 10%, which makes me think it's far from sacrosanct.  But he expected more than can be fit into an envelope, and a guy that had spent four long years in the wilderness should have understood that.

Mend It, Don't End It -  Not that I care, but you're gonna need some qualification system for majors and WGC's and the like....  Rex Hoggard tells us that there's trouble in River City:

The Official World Golf Ranking is as complicated as it is overlooked. 

Other than the occasional conversation about who is or is not the world’s top-ranked player and the random indignation when a player moves up on the list without even playing, talk of minimum divisors and average ranking points are largely the realm of the few zealots who are mathematically savvy enough to understand how it works. 

Within PGA Tour circles, however, the ranking has become a frequent talking point. At a player-only meeting in February, Tour commissioner Jay Monahan addressed, what’s best described as, growing discontent for the ranking. 

“We went to [the world ranking governing board] at The Open Championship last year and very directly told them our concerns and asked them for a review of the world ranking system. That process is underway,” Monahan said.

And when you've lost the suits in Ponte Vedra Beach...... There's always one result that has us all rolling our eyes, and this is Rex's:

Essentially this is a perception problem for Tour types. Consider that Brendan Jones received more world ranking points (16) for his victory at the Token Homemate Cup on the Japan Golf Tour than J.T. Poston did for finishing tied for sixth at the RBC Heritage on Sunday (10.44). 

Those who question that scale are supported by simple math. The strength of field based on the world ranking for the Heritage was 460, compared with a strength of field for the Token Homemate Cup of 35. Statistically that would make the Tour stop 13 times deeper than the event in Japan, yet the winner at Harbour Town received about four times the points (58) as Jones.

This is an interesting subject to me, mostly because of the statistical ignorance on parade, such as this howler from Rex:

There needed to be a list. But today professional golf is overrun with lists. From the FedExCup to the Race to Dubai every major circuit has performance-based rankings, and one can argue that each list is a much better guide to current competitive relevance. Each list is also immune to the ranking bias, be it real or perceived, that currently dogs the world ranking.

Really, Rex?  There's no bias to the FedEx Cup points list?  Are we talking before or after the multiple resets?

There seem to be two major misconceptions in play, the first being the mistaken focus on the top of the list.  Rex is correct that our focus tends to be on who tops the list, but that has no practical implications.  As the No. 1 slot rotates between Justin Rose and DJ, it's helpful to remember that they both will play in the U.S. Open.  The greater import is around the cut-off number, sixty for the Open, in which players such as Abraham Ancer, Chez Reavie and Emiliano Grillo are duking it out, and the golf fan has little insight as to who is more deserving....  But examples such as the one cited by Rex obviously call into question the fairness of the methodology.

That said, any methodology will at times yield strange results....People seem to naively assume that there's some obvious answer that will yield incontestable conclusions, and that's just not how statistics work.  Any methodology will look foolish under certain circumstances, the best that we can hope for is that it seem logical and transparent.

I'll wish you a good weekend, though if you live near me in the Northeast it might well be golf-free.