Late-Week Laments

A late arrival at the keyboard, but that shan't deter us from plowing through the items of interest.

Today in Wasted Sponsors Exemptions - Tony Romo is, by the standards of amateur golf, a good stick.  But, there's a saying on Tour ranges to the effect that "Scratch ain't s**t", meaning that that's not close to good enough out there.  Mr. Romo has proved that adage in his use of sponsor exemptions, as Dylan Dethier recounts:

Romo has proved that he’s a legitimate player. He’s teed it up in U.S. Open qualifying, advanced through the pre-qualifying stage at Q-School, won a number of amateur events

and taken the last two titles at the celebrity-laden American Century Championship in Lake Tahoe. With that said, it would be a shocker if he were to advance to the weekend at Silverado Resort. 

With three PGA Tour starts under his belt, Romo has three missed cuts. He finished in last place at the 2018 Corales Puntacana Resort and Club Championship, beat just a single player at the same event in 2019 and shot 76-74 at the 2019 AT&T Byron Nelson Championship, ahead of just four players.

So, why give him the exemption?  The question just asks itself, no?

At that Byron Nelson the case was made that he'd be the second most watched guy in the field, after local hero and club member Jordan Spieth.  We might have had some fun suggesting that Jordan is equally unlikely to make any given weekend, but I shan't succumb to the cheap laugh line.

But care for a little more evidence that the rich and famous play by different rules than you and I?  Firts, a quick reminder that this same Tony Romo has been allowed to be paid to be the spokesman for Sketchers golf shoes, yet retain his amateur status.  So, you'll never guess who else is bending the rules for the guy:

From the files of “The stars — they’re just like us!” comes Tony Romo, who plans to skip work next week to play golf. 

That’s right. Romo, who used to play quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys but now cuts hit teeth calling NFL games for CBS, is assigned to call the Vikings-Bears game in Chicago on Sunday, Sept. 29. But that same Sunday marks the final round of the Safeway Open, where Romo has been granted a sponsor’s exemption. 

So what gives? According to a report from the New York Post, CBS has a plan in place for an announcer who would call the game in Chicago alongside Jim Nantz if Romo were to make the cut at the Safeway.

There are those that would argue that he didn't take his prior job any more seriously...  And don't get me started on the Corona commercials, a product whose primary application is quite obviously as swing juice.

Today in New Age Statistics - Mark Broadie has a new one for us, naming the BPTNWAM:

The question comes up as often as a sidehill lie at Augusta National: Who’s the greatest player to have never won a major? I’m pretty sure I have the answer, thanks to a stat tool

I call “expected wins.” Works like this: Say Las Vegas pre-event odds has the favorite to win a major at 9-to-1—roughly a 10 percent chance of winning. Knowing that, you’d expect him to accrue one win over 10 majors in which he is listed with similar odds. A player listed as the 10th most heavily favored player, at 19-to-1 odds (a 5 percent chance), would need 20 majors to accrue one expected win. 

Unfortunately, Vegas odds for golf majors aren’t readily available the deeper you look back in history, so in my search for golf’s best major-less player I used a mathematical expected wins model (or win probability). With this method, I simulated each major 10,000 times and counted the number of times each player won to estimate their expected wins per event. Then I ranked major-less players from most to least expected major wins. The better the player, the more expected wins they accrued for each major, making the exercise a cumulative measure of a player’s greatness. To keep the focus on current players, I limited the analysis to golfers who have played in at least four majors over the past two seasons (which eliminated Lee Westwood, who would have otherwise topped the list).

Fair enough, though his list is pretty much the usual suspects:

Fifth on the list of active greatest majorless players is Brandt Snedeker, with 0.47 expected wins. Fourth is Hideki Matsuyama (0.63 expected wins), followed by Paul Casey (0.80 expected wins) and Rickie Fowler (0.82 expected wins). Topping the list is veteran Matt Kuchar. Kuchar has won nine times on the PGA Tour, including the Players Championship. He has 12 top 10s in majors, with a memorable second-place finish to Jordan Spieth at the 2017 Open Championship. Matt Kuchar has played in 56 majors and has 0.83 expected wins. The man is due!

But this is the far more interesting list, including as it does, guys that have won lots thereof:

The same expected wins method can be used to rank the greatest major overachievers, too. Here, players are ranked by their surplus wins (actual wins minus expected wins). This list, from No. 5 to No. 1, runs Martin Kaymer, Spieth, Padraig Harrington, Tiger Woods and Brooks Koepka, who has 3.59 more wins than expected in his 24 major starts. Koepka may have four majors to his credit but was only expected to win 0.41. More proof that he steps it up in majors better than anyone else.

Except for Tiger, those are names I might have guessed...  And if you were able to expand the list back, I'd expect Sir Nick Faldo to be extremely competitive, even excluding the fact that he came up against some noted stiffs down the stretch.  How do you factor John Cook into such a stat?

Shane Ryan doesn't just channel his inner Mark Broadie, but cites his work, in this attempt to identify the best round ever on Tour:

Thus far, we’ve ignored other elements, such as situational pressure (Duval shot his 59 on a Sunday) or history (for whatever reason, it’s easier to shoot 59 today ... there were just three 59s on the PGA Tour before 2000, but there have been eight in the past decade). But the one factor we can’t ignore, and that helps us view each 58 or 59 in its proper context, is the performance of the rest of the field. It has a way of cutting through the clutter; comparing each superlative round with the average play of the entire field accounts for course difficulty, weather and even score relative to par. It boils everything down to a simple, all-encompassing question: How much better were you, on a given day, than your peers? 

Luckily, we have a stat for that, and that stat is strokes gained. With thanks to Tom Alter, Luis Rivera and the ShotLink crew at the PGA Tour, we now know the top-10 individual rounds, by strokes gained, since these stats were first kept in 2004:

Two obvious things jump out, the first being that Furyk's 59 was better than his 58, but also the prevalence of early round scores.  The latter makes perfect sense when you think about how Strokes Gained is calculated, the cannon fodder at the bottom of the field increasing the spred between the best score and the average.

The author then applies his judgment and, spoiler alert, another win for the Ulsterman:

Maybe! But maybe not. My point is, although strokes gained is a terrific tool for answering this question, there’s still room for interpretation. So let me finish this column with my opinion: Rory McIlroy’s Sunday 62 at the 2010 Quail Hollow Championship represents the highest SG total in a final round at least since 2004, and it gave him the comeback victory over the likes of Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler and Jim Furyk. Even better, it was Rory's first win on the PGA Tour. When you consider the stats andthe circumstances, and acknowledging the limitations of our pre-1983 knowledge, that was the greatest single round in PGA Tour history. 

Surely, this will be the most controversial award Rory wins this year.

You see what he did there?  C'mon, I'm not ready to give up the hate over that POY vote.

Scenes From The Sanderson -  A worthwhile profile of defending champion and big-bopper Cameron Champ, which details how his season ran aground due to the usual mix of injuries and expectations:

“I obviously had an extremely hot start to the fall, just playing solid, really wasn’t worrying about much,” Champ recalled in Mississippi on Tuesday. Suddenly he was

thrust into the spotlight of featured pairings and media scrums. “At first I didn’t feel like it affected me. But on the inside I think it did. I had expectations, kind of putting extra pressure, kind of worrying about things I wasn’t worrying about all last year,” he added. 

As 2019 rolled around, things got more difficult. After a T11 at the Tournament of Champions to begin the year, Champ finished T73 at the Sony Open. The next week, he missed his first cut as a Tour member at Torrey Pines. He made the cut at both the Waste Management (T67) and the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (T28) but missed the cut at the Genesis Open. Frustration was beginning to mount. 

“You know, I wish — knowing what I went through, I wish now I know kind of how I could have handled it better because over time it just builds up and builds up, and usually you don’t want to get too frustrated on the course. If I do, I just keep it inside until I’m done with the shot, but throughout the year it just kept blowing over and over, and I’d get mad over things I usually wouldn’t get mad over,” Champ said. 

Then came injury. At the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Champ tweaked his back en route to an 81-70 missed cut. The following week, he tried to battle through at TPC Sawgrass (“I wasn’t going to back out of the Players,” he said) but had to WD after an opening 78.

We've seen this movie more than Casablanca, but the win gives him time to ride it out and get back on track.  It's not just the chicks that dig the long ball.

The Seasons of Life - Yup, it's that time of year again.  Fall is in full bloom back East, but they're all business in The Valley of the Sun:

The Waste Management Phoenix Open is more than four months away but construction

at TPC Scottsdale has already started. 

The Thunderbirds House and Grounds Crew got things going on Monday, Sept. 16, the earliest the construction has ever started, but workers need to get going now because of the time and material it takes to build the luxury suites, grandstands, bleachers and all the other infrastructure for the tournament that draws the largest crowds in golf. 

The first section where construction started for the 2020 event was the scaffolding on the 12th hole. Construction on the famed 16th hole will start Oct. 7 when crews begin the layout.

They build it all anew each year.  So, it's not just the fans that are wasted at the Wasted....

You know my theory.  Build a permanent structure and put cardboard cut-outs in the seats, and pipe music to recreated the Wasted experience.   It's the only reason people pay to play there, so let them get booed when they miss the green on No. 16.

All Shack, All The Time - A couple of items from that well to which I go too often, but what's a fellow to do when he's the only one reflecting my cynical perspective on the world?

First, he has a longer post on the paltry purse for the recently-announced Skins Game in Japan:

Just a few weeks ago, the FedExCup’s $15 million first prize reached a level of excess that appeared to not resonate with fans as expected. 

The original Skins Game, a really important event for many years as a the dreaded “grow the game” staple, but also simply as good entertainment. Don’t forget, in the 1984 Skins, Jack Nicklaus made a putt for $240,000 and threw his putter to the sky.

“Even old unemotional Jack got excited,” a smiling Nicklaus said. “I threw my putter high in the air because . . . well, it was exciting.” 

While purse strength is rarely of interest to fans, dollar figures are vital in Skins because the amounts can add up. That builds tension and the entire point of Skins is to have carry overs and big putts for big dollars. The format also ends up having players take different rooting interests in the name of friendly competition.

In other words, Skins is dependent on a purse that gets the attention of players. This is no easy task in today’s game and likely why the annual Thanksgiving weekend event stopped attracting top stars.

So it was a little strange to read that the first real stab at Skins from “GolfTV Powered By The PGA Tour” will feature a lower purse than the 1983 Skins Game. Given that the “golf Netflix” international streaming channel has committed to a multi-billion 

investment in distributing the PGA Tour internationally, the Tiger-Rory-Jason-Hideki launch event is their first high profile property in eight countries. Playing for $350,000 over 18 holes is modest, at best. With the last hole worth $100,000, that leaves only $10,000 per hole for the first six.

A $360,000 purse—the first Skins bankroll-is just under $1 million in 2019 dollars.

The money has lost its ability to shock us but, interestingly, that lack of money hasn't.

Did you catch the story about Scott McNealy holding a fundraiser for Trump?  Scandalous, for sure, but it made Geoff's mind go in a strange direction.  First a reminder that McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems, is another golf-made CEO, fortunate given that his son Maverick is an aspiring Tour pro (not to mention the boy toy of Danielle Kang).

Your humble correspondent is old enough to have forgotten when the path to salvation for our game was something called Flogton:

The group behind Flogton (Notgolf backwards) wanted to sell you non-conforming equipment to make the game more accessible. They believed excessive regulation by the USGA was stifling growth.

Some of their ideas sound incredibly absurd just eight years later and in a world more open-minded to distance regulation: 

"Probably the best aid right now is a low-friction face, created by either lubricating the face of the club and ball or by applying a stick-on face to the driver. By simply reducing the face/ball friction, you can reduce slices and hooks by over 50 percent."

Ah, a lubricant. Why didn’t I think of that? 

"Flogton has test wedges that increase spin 100 percent, just by improving the grooves and adding friction-inducing surfaces. With new, soft-but-durable-skin balls, we believe we can give “the rest of us” the ability to stop a well-hit ball on the green just like the pros."

The entire push faded fast. Which should be an important reminder for the governing bodies this fall when issuing their distance report: golfers want to play a version of the game in line with the traditional golf as we know it. The majority value rules to protect a reward for skill.

Flogton failed because the founders were attempting to profit off the game and blow a hole in the rules for a buck. Golfers, or aspiring ones, were not attracted to a dumbed-down, Al Czervik-friendly version of the sport.

It’s heartening to know something so short-sighted was a failure. It’s even more heartening that just eight years later, the array of “solutions” praised at the time no longer seem welcome now that so many more realize the game’s issues have more to do with time and cost than with ease of play.

So where is McNealy’s in 2019?

When you want to read about flogton from the AltGolf.org site it has vanished.

I always more of a Hack Golf kind of guy....

It's always amusing when folks want to save a game that's endured for centuries into something that isn't a game that's endured for centuries...  Seems pretty basic, and yet we keep having this conversation.

Have a great weekend and we'll catch up on Monday.