Friday, Briefly

A last minute audible called by Bobby D. has me playing this morning, so I'll just lay a couple of quick reads on you.

An Interesting Loop - Buried deep in the Unplayable Lies archives are my tales of looping for Kent St. Charles, in which I alternately distinguished and beclowned myself.  Hey, I had a good excuse for that lost 8-iron...  We'll lede today with this man's account of quite the loop:

Over the years, we’ve heard plenty of players recount the unforgettable sensation of playing golf for the first time alongside Tiger Woods. But what’s it like to caddie alongside him? For one man, it was the opportunity of a lifetime — and then it got a bit complicated.

Two weeks ago, Derrick Payne, who owns and operates several Miami-area golf academies, got a call from his friend and business partner Alex Fernandez. Fernandez had a packed teaching schedule coming up and wanted to know if Payne would caddie for his son Jonah, who was hoping to play in his first event as an 11-year-old. Payne doesn’t often caddie for his students — he doesn’t want to appear to be playing favorites — but helping Fernandez is different.

The nine-hole tournament was scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 15. When the field list came out that Tuesday, one name jumped out at Payne: Charlie Woods. That was cool.

Then on Thursday, the pairings came out: J. FERNANDEZ was listed under the same tee time as C. WOODS. At his academy that afternoon, Payne’s mind started to race. What if Tiger would be there? It wasn’t just that Payne was excited about proximity to a celebrity athlete. Tiger Woods, very simply, had changed his life.

You'll no doubt be glad to hear that Tiger was just looper Dad for the day:

After just a few holes, though, walking the fairways alongside Woods started to feel — normal. On some basic level, Payne is used to parents eagerly watching their kids play golf. That’s what Woods was there to do.

“It really just didn’t seem like he was Tiger Woods there,” Payne said. “This was just Tiger, dad.”

So what’s Tiger like as a caddie? Did he say anything memorable? Payne said it wasn’t anything Woods said that stuck out — it was how he acted.

And this:

“He let Charlie play. He didn’t get in Charlie’s way. He wasn’t over there arguing about what club Charlie was choosing, he wasn’t lining him up, saying, ‘Hey, let’s do this or that.’ He stayed back, enjoyed it and let him play golf.”

Of course, it's Tiger and it can't be completely normal, though seemingly not from anything Tiger might have done:

But then one of his friends shared an article with him that featured one of the photos he’d posted: Jonah and Charlie walking in front of him and Tiger. Another article popped up. Then another. ESPN. CNN. The Washington Post. The Today Show. Sports blogs. News blogs. He knew there was general curiosity about Tiger’s son’s game, but this?

“Somebody took it off my page,” he said. “I never had that thought of, ‘Wait a second. This might not be something Tiger wants shared publicly.’ I wasn’t intending to show it publicly.

“People kept asking me, ‘Can we have your picture to use?’ I said, ‘No, no, no.’ I didn’t get Tiger’s permission, after all. But it didn’t matter.” The stories were also inaccurate; almost all of them conflated the photos of the day with a different event, on Aug. 9, which Charlie won by five shots at Hammock Creek in Palm City. (Woods was playing in the PGA Championship that day.)

Payne changed his account from public to private, and his page was flooded with new follower requests, some 4,000 or more. He declined them all. He took down the initial post, which included the now-viral photo of the four of them. He reposted just the photo of him and Tiger, expressing his mixed emotions in the caption.

“I want to apologize to Tiger and Charlie for not being more respectful of their privacy. I just wanted to share with my followers how WONDERFUL and down to Earth people you BOTH are,” he wrote.

Quite the experience for sure, and glad that Tiger can just be Joe Dad.  By the way, Charlie is reportedly quite the stick, so that will play out in an interesting fashion I suspect.

Justice Denied - These kids today are all about social justice, so I expect they'll be taking to the barricades over this slight:

In terms of strokes-gained, there has been no player better than Daniel Berger since the PGA Tour’s restart in mid-June. He may not have multiple wins (including a major) like Collin

Morikawa, but as a PGATour.com list revealed on Wednesday, Berger edged out Morikawa in total strokes-gained by 0.676 during the 11-event post-quarantine stretch.

Berger’s red-hot play continued on Thursday at TPC Boston, where he shot a five-under 66 in the opening round of the Northern Trust, the first event of the FedEx Cup Playoffs. It’s his 13th round of 67 or lower in the 18 rounds he’s played since the restart. During that span he’s had a victory at the Charles Schwab Challenge, a T-3 at the RBC Heritage, a T-2 at the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational and a T-13 at the PGA Championship.

But this resurgence of sorts for the three-time tour winner began before the COVID-19 pandemic, starting at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, where he tied for ninth. He immediately followed with consecutive top 5 finishes at Pebble Beach and the Honda Classic. Since February (and maybe even before that), Berger has played like a guy who belongs at Augusta National this November.

Unfortunately, that won’t be the case for the former Florida State Seminole, as the Masters field was set back in March. The World Rankings were frozen in place, with the top 50 earning entry into Augusta and the other spots being filled via a number of different exemptions. Berger, who was ranked 106th in the world after the Honda Classic, did not meet any of the Masters criteria.

Look, he's currently the 18th ranked player in the world, so obviously he's deserving of a slot.  But you can see the logic of how we got here, the ANGC folks appropriately wanting to preserve the slots for those that had qualified for the original April date (and Berger's win at Colonial assuring an April 2021 tee time).

And while the Masters has always overstated their need for a micro-field in order to maintain their golf course, we can't ignore that in the face of November's short days.  The slack should be found among  the former champions, but we'll see how this evolves.  I'd suggest that Mr. Berger consider winning that little event at Winged Foot, as that would make him quite difficult to exclude.

A couple of interruptions have further limited blogging, so these paltry offerings will have to suffice.  I'll encourage you to tune into the Ladies' Open from Troon.  American Lindsay Weaver is contending, paying with a pushcart and no caddie.  Normally you'd expect her to grab a local caddie for the weekend, though it's not clear that can happen under their unique quarantine rules, whereby they're joined at the hip with their caddies...  I can't remember the names involved, but one of the girl's caddies is married to another player, but must shelter in place with his client.  With no conjugal visits, we can all agree, It's Awkward Out Here™.

See you Monday.