Weeked Wrap

Yeah, it's been a while.  Where have you all been?  Though now might not be the best time to tell you how much golf I've planned for this week.  

Rahmbo Reigns - Actual drama there at the end, though much had to be ignored:

OLYMPIA FIELDS, Ill. – Jon Rahm vanquished any potential demons Sunday with a playoff-winning putt from the heavens at Olympia Fields.

In a battle of the world’s top two players in the BMW Championship, Rahm made a 66-foot putt for birdie on the 18th hole to topple world No. 1 Dustin Johnson, who had made a 43-footer to force the playoff and then watched his 30-footer to extend the extra session to a second hole finish one inch to the right.

“I still can’t believe what just happened,” Rahm said of his Sunday miracle. “I think we all want the flashy finish, but not the stress that comes with it.”

Yeah, though the more telling moment was when DJ sank his snake in regulation, and the nation collectively muttered, "rut roh", assuming this would cost him the win:

Rahm couldn’t believe what happened on Saturday when he had a brain cramp on the fifth green and picked up his golf ball without marking it and was penalized one shot. He said after the round he just hoped he didn’t lose by a shot. He didn’t because he kept his composure after the gaffe and lit up the leaderboard the rest of the way on a course playing more like a U.S. Open than a PGA Tour event.

“I don’t know if I would have won had it not happened,” Rahm said. “It kind of made me mad at myself, and I just went on with my focus after that and was able to play amazing golf and stayed aggressive. Maybe if I hadn’t I would have two-putted and maybe stayed complacent. I don’t know because I had such a good start. I can tell you after that two-putt, making that six-footer for bogey, I was like, OK, that’s it, no playing around, go. That’s kind of what mentally did it for me.”

So, what did we think of it all?  Even in a world without other sports to distract us it fails to linger on the palate methinks.  And save your e-mails, I know that some other sports are reputedly being played, I just don't know a soul that's watching...

Shack seems especially cranky, and this week's Tour Confidential panel sets new heights for...well, just being strange.  For instance, this is the only question they have about Rahm's allegedly dramatic win:

1. Jon Rahm dropped a 66-foot birdie putt on the first hole of a playoff with Dustin Johnson to claim the BMW Championship on Sunday. Where does Rahm bomb rank among the all-time great putts, non-major division?

OK, I could see this as an exit question, especially as that "non-major" qualification limits us to putts about which we don't care.  So, what do they come up with?

Josh Sens: Similar territory to Rahm’s eagle bomb on the last at Torrey. Reminiscent of Tiger’s “better than most” at Sawgrass. Rahm got robbed in the sense that there were no fans. For the first time all year, I found myself missing spectators. Those last 25 minutes would have been good, loud fun.

I like the former better as a comparison, merely because of its walk-off nature, as Tiger's was on the Saturday.  And yes, at Torrey there were still golfers on the course behind Rahm, the bomb merely made the lead secure (of course, no one will remember that Rahm didn't actually need the putt at Torrey).

Dylan Dethier: Just ahead of Collin Morikawa’s putt at the Workday, I suppose, given it was double the length and difficulty! And ahead of Justin Thomas’ putt at the same event, given he didn’t win. One stat I saw declared that Rahm was 20 times as likely to three-putt as one-putt from there. That’s a solid make.

OK, Dylan makes a small point, to wit, that the biggest difference between Colin's and Jon's putts was what happened with the other guy...

Michael Bamberger: Tiger, 18, Sunday, Bay Hill, 2008, packed house, Arnold watching, four majors coming.

Anyone know what the heck Mike is going for with that "four majors coming"?  I'll just note that there were only two coming for Tiger in 2008, coincidentally the number we have "coming" in our present moment.

Nick Piastowski: It’s up there, for sure. My favorite is a personal one. A few years back, I was 2-over through seven holes. On the 8th, a par-5, I hit a drive down the middle, then a 5-wood to maybe somewhere around 120 feet away. I putted the third. It went up a ridge and down a ridge, and then my buddy’s hands went up. Eagle. I parred 9. First and only time I shot even-par for nine holes. The all-time great putt, non-major division, TBH.

Nick, I simply have the available vocabulary to make you understand the extent to which America could not give a rat's ass about your eagle.  Your failure to understand that is trouble... The absence of editors to enforce that understanding is likely fatal.  

To be fair, I do think Alan nailed this one well:

Alan Shipnuck: Just slightly ahead of DJ’s crazy bender to force sudden death!

Well, duh! 

Do you care who's going to East Lake?  I know, I'll try to limit the passive aggressiveness, but this time of year could actually be good fun, if we could only let it...Read this if you care:

FedEx Cup Playoffs: 8 bubble players who are in (or out) for the Tour Championship

Amidst the tedium and drudgery of Steve Sands, there was a moment of actual interest.  To wit:

Mackenzie Hughes: In

Hughes entered the week in 36th place but crept up the leaderboard and needed to par 18 to

secure his spot inside the top 30. His approach went into the greenside bunker, and he needed to get up and down to head to East Lake. If he bogeyed, he’d drop to 32nd and miss next week.

“If this was just a Wednesday practice round, nine times out of 10 he’d get it up and in,” said NBC analyst Paul Azinger. But this wasn’t any Wednesday practice round.

Hughes splashed it to five feet and rolled in the putt, which led to an emotional fist-pump and 28th-place finish in the standings.

To me, that was the only pure moment of the day.   left unsaid was the the young man, quite obviously aware of where things stood, had that moment where all he had to do was make a simple par and he'd greatly enhance his status in the game.  That shot can be the hardest in the game, and he failed to pull it off.... yet presumably gave himself a talking-to, bucked himself up and got it up and in.  More like this, please.

Back to our curious lads at golf.com:

2. The 30-player field is set for the Tour Championship at East Lake next week. Several notables are on the outside looking in, including Tiger Woods, Patrick Cantlay and Adam Scott. Who are you most surprised didn’t make the cut?

Surprised how?  Surprised when?  

Sens: Cantlay. Both Tiger and Scott had played such limited schedules heading into the playoffs. Tiger had battled back issues. Scott always battles the putter. Cantlay was the one with no obvious vulnerabilities.

Dethier: Ditto. Cantlay has seemed more or less rock-solid the past couple years, his results held together by elite ball-striking. Woods and Scott have played incomplete schedules and have plenty of excuses, but Cantlay feels like he should be there, without question.

Bamberger: Tiger. He’d like to get that Sam Snead record out of the way. Winning events on courses he knows with small fields is the best way to get that done. #letthelegendgrow #Clapton: let it grow, let it grow, let it blossom, let flow. If Tiger gets to East Lake, he has about a 10 percent chance of winning. But he had to get there.

Piastowski: Tiger, Cantlay and Scott are all surprising. They just didn’t play enough. Gary Woodland is also a bit of a surprise – six top 10s this year, the most of any player to not make Atlanta, and more than some who did.

Shipnuck: After Scott won at Riv, I thought he was going to have a renaissance. Alas, he never refound his mojo after the restart.

Alan does remind us that before the world went crazy Adam Scott seemed headed to a different type of season, though he chose to wait an awfully long time before teeing it up post-Corona.

Let me just note that Cantlay is becoming an interesting case... Many have pegged him to break through and the back story makes us want that to be the case, but it's getting a little late, no?  Maybe not late, but I had expected to see more from him by now.

Of course, their Tiger-myopia might require some kind of intervention:

3. Does missing out on East Lake and having more time to rest improve Tiger’s chances at his next start, the U.S. Open at Winged Foot, or would he have benefited from four more rounds to work out the kinks?

Really?  What exactly was it about seeing him lapped by the field that makes you like his chances at The Foot?

You guys can click through if you want, I'll just excerpt the usually logical Alan Shipnuck:

Shipnuck: Playing three weeks in a row is a non-starter for Tiger at this point so I’m glad he’s getting a week off. But I’d love to see him peg it at Silverado to straighten out his putting.

 Alan, if three weeks in a row is a non-starter, why was Tiger grinding this week for the sole purpose of qualifying to play for the third week in a row?

It begs the question that I've posed previously, why is Tiger even playing these events?  He shows up in San Francisco rusty as heck, yet is willing to subject his back to the Bataan death March for the FedEx Cup?  Obviously Tiger wants to get his 83rd win and clear the halve with Snead, but wouldn't you think that his primary focus at this stage would be padding his total of majors?  We saw the same thing last year after the Masters win (I get the hangover and I'm sure he would have been better served by the PGA staying in August), but if he doesn't care about the majors, why should we?

Hold on, I lied...  I can't possibly not excerpt this priceless GMTU moment:

Sens: At this point, I would think the time off is more likely to do him good than harm. Does he really need more reps at this point? Don’t think so.

Bamberger: At this point, I would think the time off is more likely to do him harm than good. Does he really need more reps at this point? I think so.

A little clever on Mike's part, though kind of undermines the premise of the writer's confab.  To me, it reinforces that Tiger's willful refusal to share any information about the condition of his back renders opinions irrelevant.  My own idiosyncratic reaction is that, since I can't know his physical condition, I just stop caring about him as a player and cease expecting anything from him.  Oh, and I get a little peeved at their inability to move on to more interesting topics...

OK, so I mentioned that Shack was cranky.  Taking them in reverse chronological order, he was first a bit tough on the NBC crew:

Oh, and that amazing putt helped Rahm claim the BMW Championship in a thrilling finish over Dustin Johnson, who also made a doozy to send the tournament into overtime.

But I digress. Why focus on the BMW when the real story is next week’s Thursday leaderboard? While we’re in the midst of this playoff let’s send it down to Steve Sands for more. Will JT be four back or two back next Friday? Could Rahm cut into his deficit next week with a win this week? Inquiring minds do not need to know.

Fourteen years into this FedExCup, we’re still subjected to the hard sell. I realize there is a gargantuan sum of money at stake. And a season-long sponsor demanding full value for their investment even at the expense of other sponsors trying to have their moment. Yet once again, a compelling final round on a penalizing parkland course was mostly overshadowed by the effort to push FedExCup narratives that no sane individual cares about in the best of times. During a pandemic, it’s nails-on-the-chalkboard stuff. Especially with a fascinating final round featuring a better-than-most variety of characters.

As NBC’s Paul Azinger noted on Saturday, the FedExCup is a “pretty prestigious” competition. That was an apparently slight he mopped up after an 904 area code undoubtedly popped-up on someone’s screen. This overall demand to focus on the perennially lame “playoff’ race was more of a shame than normal. The NBC team really never got to go deep on any topic or even do something mildly in-depth on the difficult setup conditions. There were just too many non-BMW obligations to juggle.

Even Mackenzie Hughes’s putt to get into the Tour Championship, while dramatic, felt like NBC’s team turning it into Ouimet beating Vardon and Ray. The hard sell brings down genuinely great moments.

Producer Tommy Roy was working without several once-normal production values that would have made this “playoff” event better. Yet the final putt replay sequence was vintage NBC stuff, yet not having an aerial shot of a few key tee shots getting amazing kicks off of trees turned out to be a huge storytelling miss we’re not used to with NBC. Particularly with CBS now mastering that element over the last 11 weeks and Winged Foot looming in two weeks, we can only hope the accountants loosen some purse strings. (NBC’s 2006 U.S. Open coverage was so epic in part thanks to aerial’s of Phil’s 18th hole adventure.)

Mercifully on this Sunday, we had Dustin Johnson and Jon Rahm to thank for an unforgettable 2020 BMW finish.

The fault lies in that 904 area code, but we've been having this discussion for many a year.  They've doubled down on crazy with that bizarre staggered start to the Tour Championship, with the added frisson that this all makes even less sense in the year of the pandemic.  

The other source of his crankiness was the golf course, though it was interesting to this observer how many folks took comfort in the tougher conditions.  Admittedly, there was quite the stark contrast, DJ winning in Boston at -30 and securing a playoff sot at -4 the following week.  Here was Shack's take on the Tom Meeks era throwback:

Since 2003 I’d somehow forgotten what an absolute snoozer Olympia Fields can be on TV. As in,

get out the hair dryer-to-deal-with-pillow-drool-dull, confirms the blogger coming off two amazing BMW Championship afternoon power naps.

That said, if par-protecting-fests-to-make-up-for-the-apparent-indignity-of-Jim-Furyk-winning-your-U.S.-Open, Olympia Fields is certainly a contrast from last week’s birdiefest. However, with a logjam of masterful venues in the queue, the USGA likely shrinking things down to a rota, several bigger name classics offering restored designs, Olympia Fields is not getting a U.S. Open anytime soon.

I hadn't forgotten,but you guys know how I can latch onto a grudge... I find the golf on such a venue unnecessarily boring, though it does seem we've reduced this argument to a binary choice between the last two weeks....  But I'll mercifully leave that argument for another day...

Rory had an interesting take, interesting because he applauded conditions obviously unsuitable to his golf skills.  But in so doing, he trigger your humble blogger:

Asked if Olympia Fields could be a good U.S. Open venue, McIlroy said yes and added this zinger: “I think what they could do is hire the Western Golf Association to set (it) up. Yeah, this would be a wonderful test for a U.S. Open.”

 Ah yes, the Western Golf Association?  Didn't they once run an important event in our game?

There's a rant coming, but first a couple of notes from Geoff:

The course was softened in 2003 by weather but more notably, the PGA Tour rules and agronomy staff oversees the setup this week. So I’m not entirely sure Rory’s punch landed.

Ironically, the event ushering in this whole players v. USGA was at Shinnecock Hills a year later. Not all believe that’s a coincidence.

Similar, the Massacre at Winged Foot was the year after Johnny Miller torched Oakmont for the 63 he mentioned every now and again...

Let me acknowledge that reader Mark W. has previously warned me off this rant, but it's not my fault that they keep triggering me.  Did you happen to catch the multiple references to the 117-year history of the BMW Championship?  Did that strike you as off-putting as it did your humble correspondent?  First, there's this kinda obvious point:

Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, commonly referred to as BMW, is a German multinational company which produces luxury vehicles and motorcycles. The company was founded in 1916 as a manufacturer of aircraft engines, which it produced from 1917 until 1918 and again from 1933 to 1945.

Yup, match remains hard, but it seems a company founded in 1916 has been running a golf tournament since 1899....  These guys are good.

The reality is closer to this:

The penultimate tournament of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoff, the BMW Championship replaced the venerable and much respected Western Open on the schedule in 2007. The Western Open was played nearly continuously since 1899 and at one time would have been considered one of golf’s Majors.

Yeah, there's a howler buried in there.

The reality is that the PGA Tour dumped the Western Open to create space on their schedule for the FedEx Cup events, seemingly indifferent to the history involved.  The Western was the second oldest professional golf tournament in the U.S. (the oldest obviously being the U.S. Open), a legacy that you'd think stewards of the game might see the value in retaining.

It's only in the last few years that the Tour and/or NBC have sought to alleged connective tissue between the two, an almost comical assertion when taking the event to Philadelphia.  My point is to reject the Tour's attempt to rewrite history.  You killed the Western Open because you didn't see the value, and replaced it with the hot mess that is the FedEx Cup, which has zero history prior to 2007.

Just a couple more items and I'll let you go.

Wither Phil - That Tc panel did note Phil's senior moment:

5. Phil Mickelson debuted on the Champions Tour and destroyed the Champions PGA Tour, shooting 22-under over three rounds and winning by four shots. (Tiger Woods speculated at the BMW Championship that Mickelson could win every event on the Champions.) With an eye on Winged Foot and Augusta, how much can you read into Mickelson’s form by his play on the senior circuit?

Sens: Not much. Mickelson had played some pretty strong golf on the regular Tour already this year. It’s pretty common for just-turned 50 stars to dominate when they debut on the senior circuit. The surprise would have been for him to show up in the Ozarks and NOT do well.

Bamberger: Absolutely agree with you, Josh. You can’t compare a wide-open short course with slow greens and easy pins against a field that is not at your level with Winged Foot for a U.S. Open or Augusta National for a Masters against the best players in the world. Plus, 54 holes. You gotta play 72 in majors. You have to get to the house. That’s HARD. I recall Bernhard winning a senior event by eight in a winter event in Florida. I was there. I asked Craig Stadler what, if anything, it said about Bernhard’s chances for the Masters. “Not a thing,” Stadler said.

Dethier: Disagree. You could play the easiest course in the world, and I would still be impressed if you shot 61 — so for Mickelson to do it with all that added pressure was super impressive. It was a reminder that when Phil’s feeling himself, he can still do something very special on the course. Winged Foot? I don’t see it. But I could see him making some noise at Augusta. …

Piastowski: Golf is a game of confidence. Winning, anywhere, was better than sitting at home, or getting pulverized by Olympia Fields.

Shipnuck: Phil driving it 350 yards and straight is a dangerous fellow. I can see him using the Senior Tour to rejuvenate his confidence and then take that with him to the flat-bellies.

A good moment for the game and especially for that Tour.  There's no downside to winning, it's just that Phil seems an especially bad fit for Winged Foot....  

Of course, the question is, how much will he play on that tour?

How much will Mickelson hang around his fellow seniors? That is the real question, and the answer would seem to be not much. At least for the foreseeable future.

In February, before he nearly defended his title at Pebble Beach, Mickelson said he didn’t want to, “hurt the Champions Tour in any way, and if not playing the Champions Tour is going to hurt it, I’ll play a couple of events. I’ll probably play one, two or three events a year because I want to support it; I want it to be successful.”

I assume the answer will be driven by how well he plays.  If he stays competitive on the big tour, a handful of outings to stay sharp makes sense.  But if his play underwhelms, he'll have to decide between this tour and the broadcast booth...  Unless he just wants to sell coffee...

55! - I'll leave you with this guys rather good day:

It’s been said that seeing good golf shots breeds good golf shots. If that’s the case, Alexander Hughes must’ve been watching Scottie Scheffler shoot a 59 last Friday at the Northern Trust.

Hughes, a former player at Central Oklahoma, tied the Guinness Book of World Records’ lowest score in a single round of golf with a 55 on Thursday at South Lakes Golf Course in Jenks,

Oklahoma.

After making par on the first hole, Hughes made a hole-in-one on the 155-yard par-3 second, followed by another par. Then he got hot, birdieing Nos. 4-8 with an eagle on No. 9 to make the turn at 9-under 26. His birdie streak ended on No. 10 with a par on 11, but the four-year letter winner at Central got to 10 under with a birdie on No. 12.

Hughes appeared to finally cool down with two more pars on Nos. 13 and 14 before making eagle on No. 15 and ending his round on a three-hole birdie streak to finish his back nine at 7 under 29, bringing his total to 16-under 55.

One assumes he'll shoot 80 next time out, but wow.

Apparently he just missed chipping in on No. 18 for 54....

See y'all tomorrow.