Late Week Laments

 Lots going on that demand my attention, but I can always spare a few moments for my loyal readers... Yanno, both of them.

Just gonna throw some things up without much aforethought, then you'll probably next see me on Monday.

Things I Got Right - A continuing (albeit short) list of things your humble blogger nailed.  Shall I go through the entire list?  No?  Really, it wouldn't take but a moment...

Bonesmania seems to have ebbed considerably, and the man has spent more of 2020 as a fill-in looper than as an analyst, though perhaps that's a seniority thing.  In any event, the Bones thing dates back to 2015, when he and fellow looper John Wood were given a go behind a microphone at the season-ending Sea Island event.  

Why do a bring this up?  Because Woodie was better than Bonesy on that given Sunday, and I (sort of) called this:

Jim (Bones) Mackay won’t be the only caddie-turned-broadcaster roaming PGA Tour fairways next year for Golf Channel/NBC Sports.

John Wood, who carried bags on the PGA Tour for more than 20 years, most recently the last five with Matt Kuchar, is joining the network as an on-course reporter beginning in 2021. The announcement came Wednesday, with Wood’s first event set for next month’s Sentry Tournament of Champions, Jan. 7-10, in Maui.

“We’re thrilled to add John Wood to NBC Sports’ rotation of on-course reporters,” Tommy Roy, NBC Sports lead golf producer, said. “John’s experience as a PGA Tour caddie for nearly two decades, combined with his passion and knowledge of the game, will be a great addition to our team during our busy slate of events in 2021.”

A subject we revisited when this news broke:

Though the move marks a career change for Wood, who stopped working for Kuchar in August, it won’t be his first time behind the microphone. In 2015, Wood joined Mackay as an on-course reporter for Golf Channel at the RSM Classic. Two years later, Mackay parted ways with Phil Mickelson and joined the network full time.

Triggered by Wood not immediately hooking up with another bold-faced name....  He's just too experienced to be without a chair when the music stopped.

Wood also was a valued contributor to Golf.com's Tour Confidential panel for a while there, though that turned awkward when the boss stiffed his fill-in looper...  I expect Woodie to be good, though the caveat is always the volume of air-time to be filled.  Can he keep the chatter lively and interesting through the mind-numbing endlessness of week-to-week life on Tour?  It's a big ask...

The Definition of Boffo - How many people would you guess tuned in to The Match III?  Bonus question, can you name them all?

Here's Shack's take:

I have no idea if the organizers find the .21 (18-49) for last week’s The Match 3 a success or not

given the bizarre sports ratings of 2020. As Mitch Salem’s roundup of last Friday’s cable numbers highlights, The Match was just edged out by WETV’s Love After Lockup with the coveted demo and landed 8th on the list of November 27, 2020’s most watched cable telecasts.

After the streaming debacle that was The Match 1, the absolute ratings stunner that was The Match 2—a higher rating than the final round of the rescheduled U.S. Open—the average of a million viewers is probably about right for a celebrity golf match.

Well,  Love After Lockup does capture the zeitgeist, but the funniest bit is this chart of comparable ratings:

If you have hopes of competing against the dogs, better include John Daly in the next installment...  Hey, no one dogs it more reliably...

Since we were talking loopers above, what do y'all think about this suggestion for the The Match IV?

Not sure they have the Q-ratings the promotors are seeking unless, yanno, you include Fluff.

Sure, Blame It On The Kid - Is it a good idea to put an 11-year old in the national spotlight?  Perhaps my thoughts on professional golf are of interest, but for sure my thoughts on child-rearing are of no value whatsoever.  But I was amused that this example of potential parental malpractice is being blamed on the victim:

“Tiger and I talked about it a bunch,” Thomas said in his pre-tournament press conference at the Mayakoba Golf Classic on Tuesday. “He brought it up a while ago that Charlie wanted to play

and Charlie really wanted to play with us. I’ve obviously gotten to know him well, and he knows my dad a little bit as well.

“For some reason, Charlie just always wants to beat me. It doesn’t matter what it is. Although he’s never beaten me in golf or a putting contest, he still talks trash just like his dad. It will be fun. We’ll have that, like, inner tournament within a tournament, trying to shut his little mouth up, but it’ll be fun.”

We're always told that Tiger is the GOAT of trash-talkers, yet his presence on these made-for-Tv events is always a downer.  Like a dog whistle, his trash talk must come in a frequency that the microphones can't capture...

But do you, like your humble blogger, wonder what the third-ranking player in the world is doing at a second-tier, borderline Silly Season event?

Justin Thomas is playing the PNC Championship with his father, Mike, a longtime club professional in Kentucky. One reason Thomas is playing the Mayakoba Golf Classic is to get sharp because he wants to do well.

That may be the single finniest thing I've heard in a while....  Though I think this is a given now:

Still to be determined is whether Team Thomas and Team Woods are in the same group. One last father-son team is still to be announced for the 20-team field Dec. 19-20 in Orlando, Florida.

Unless, of course, Stephen Ames is in the field.

The State of the Brooksie -  2020 was a lost year for most of us, not least our former alpha dog.  It's not that I disagree with this, it's just that a fine seems the least of it:

On his year as a whole: “I don’t know if I could say that without getting fined. Pretty bad.”

What we're all struggling with is trying to understand whether it was the knee injury, or something else.  

To the extent that there's news, it's that he intends to play more during the West Coast swing:

But the comments most are focusing on relate to the psychodrama with a certain former workout buddy:

It his first major championship of 2020, Brooks Koepka made headlines by slighting Dustin

Johnson’s chances. After his final major of the year, Koepka made sure to do the exact opposite.

“I don’t think anybody was going to catch DJ,” Koepka said on Wednesday at the Mayakoba Golf Classic, reflecting on the Masters. “DJ played pretty good. It was kind of coming, I think we all knew that he was going to win more than one major, and the run he had from Travelers until Augusta was pretty impressive. That stretch of golf will probably go down as one of the best maybe six months we’ve seen in a long time.”

Compare those words with the tone Koepka struck before the final round of the PGA Championship in August, when he was less complimentary of his competition.

There were moments on the Sunday front nine when DJ looked catchable, just not by Brooks. 

If we're looking to handicap the 2021,  season, expectations for Koepka is of interest.  The ebb and flow of this relationship could be an amusing subtext, to the extent that the two might be in contention in a major...  As Brooks himself says about that first one on the calendar:

On his T7 at the Masters: “I mean, I’m disappointed, it’s not been the year I wanted, but just got to move on and keep pushing through. Augusta, I wasn’t pleased with it, but I guess I get to go back next year.”

As does former BFF DJ.... though he gets to go back for life.

Use It Or Lose It, Part I -  Open browser tabs are the bane of my existence.  I've got a few that I need to use or lose, beginning with this one:

Ranking golf’s top 20-somethings with the most breakout potential

OK, but I think anyone that can spell "golf" can list the top three, but here is the order for the record:

3. Viktor Hovland (23)

The 2018 U.S. Amateur champion made an impressive early splash on the PGA Tour by winning the 2020 Puerto Rico Open in February by draining a 30-foot birdie on the 72nd hole. The

Norwegian cooled off a bit for the rest of the year, but he’s started the new campaign with three top-15 finishes and he always makes money; his live cuts-made streak stands at 16.

2. Matthew Wolff (21)

When the young man with the hitchy swing played as a teammate Rickie Fowler in May’s TaylorMade Driving for Relief, the casual observer might have wondered, “Who’s that guy?” The astute observer knew that Wolff already had a PGA Tour trophy on his mantle (the 2019 3M Championship). Wolff, as entertaining to anybody, should be known to just about any fan now after he contended in his first major, the PGA Championship (T-4), and led the U.S. Open going into the final round before finishing second.

1. Collin Morikawa (22)

If there’s one round most remembered from this year, it’s probably Morikawa’s dazzling closing effort at the PGA Championship, when he drove Harding Park’s 16th green to take command and win his first major title with a 64. His ball-striking may be second to none on tour, and his 22-event cuts-made streak he put together is second-best only to Tiger Woods.

Haven't these guys already, you know, broken out?   he seems to basically rank them based upon what they've done to date.  That might prove correct, it just isn't all that interesting.  Meanwhile, the class of 2011 qualify as twenty-somethings, so their exclusion seems problematic as well.  Not Spieth's exclusion, for sure, but the other guys like JT.

Perhaps the only bit of interest is the inclusion of one entirely new name, at least to your humble blogger:

6. Rasmus Holgaard (19)

How’s this for being a prodigy: When Holgaard became the third-youngest winner on the European Tour with his victory in Mauritius in December 2019, the Dane was the first champion on the circuit to have been born in the 2000s. Holgaard backed that up with an August 2020 victory in the UK Championship, making him the second-youngest with two career Euro Tour wins.

 New, but not yet twenty... 

Use It Or Lose It, Part II - This one has been open for an eternity as well.  I really haven't had the appetite for the underlying culture war, yet its epic stupidity demands my snark.  So, shall we have at it?

Think of this as a rebuttal to "Get Woke, Go Broke", a truism that's seemingly also true.  But here's what passes for logic in the fever swamps of MSN:

Boris Johnson: Joe Biden piles on pressure at Brexit crunch time

Mike Anthony: Geno Auriemma and UConn players supporting each…

The Masters laid waste to the notion of social justice causing sports' TV ratings decline

Can we stop now?

Can Twitter trolls and media observers and anyone else who has pointed to Black athletes and those that support them being vocal and demonstrative about Black lives mattering as the reason why sports television ratings are down just stop?

Because it’s not true.

It may not have ever been true.

More evidence has emerged that it was nothing but a made-up talking point from those who are offended that Black athletes — also known as “people” and “citizens” — will not bow to their Facebook videos of burned jerseys and pithy statements that they should “stick to sports.”

You first.  With the stopping, that is...

But here's the gist of the argumant:

The Masters, one of the most beloved and homogenous events in American sports, was played this past weekend.

Congratulations are in order for winner Dustin Johnson, but relative to other years, no one watched Johnson’s five-shot win.

Plenty goes into that, of course; the tournament even moved up final-round tee times to avoid competing with Sunday’s slate of NFL games. But that competition for attention has plagued every sport the past few months, and the Masters wasn’t spared.

And it wasn’t because of raised fists, anthem kneeling during songs or BLM pin flags.

So stop.

As American sports go, golf might be more right-leaning than any other, except maybe NASCAR. Jack Nicklaus, one of the ceremonial Masters starters this year, openly supported President Trump’s reelection. Several PGA Tour members have played a round or two with Trump during his presidency. The Masters didn’t allow a Black player to play in the tournament until 1975 and Augusta National didn’t admit its first Black member until 1990.

Can you sense the contempt?  We all understand and accept that golf and Augusta National played a role in the history of our country, and I've no issue with revisiting that.  But take that last point...  It's true to an extent, but it's also true that no black player met the qualification requirements until Lee Elder in 1975, which is a bit of a conundrum for these folks.

But let's try to respond in a mature manner (Ed: Why start now) to her points, first to that bit about "people" and "citizens" above, which is really quite disingenuous.  No one has seriously argued that athletes don't have the same free-speech rights as other citizens.  The bigger pint to me, going back to Colin Kaepernik, is that no one has free speech rights at work.  That's always been the argument against this nonsense.

As for the more comprehensive argument, is the author unaware that we live in a divided country?  Whichever pew you pray in, what is the business logic for pissing off half your customers  What industry can survive that?  Once you acknowledge that fact, what can we conclude about CEOs and others that insist on doing so?  And, as an ancillary point, are you going to advocate with the same vigor for those opinions with which you disagree  Obviously not, it's all about controlling the narrative... After all, clearly Mr. Nicklaus' opinion is not welcome...OMG, he OPENLY supported Trump's reelection....  Openly, for God's sake. Is that still allowed in Amerika?

But, for those whose social justice itch needs scratching, she's got you covered:

And if the Masters’ ratings don’t convince you that we pesky Black people asking for things like not being killed in our own homes while we sleep ...

Or being able to vote without hours-long lines ...

Or seeing so-called public servants try to retroactively negate our votes ...

Or being able to perform a job without being held hostage by a white man questioning why you’re in their neighborhood ...

... is not why fewer people are watching sports on TV, maybe all that plus historically low World Series ratings and a steep drop in Stanley Cup Final ratings will.

Because those leagues aren’t exactly on the vanguard of social justice, either.

You know who is? The WNBA.

Yeah, that's the ticket... They won't stop until they've ruined everything, the bigger question being whether we'll let them.  But I'm focusing on the positive, which in this case means that I can at least close this browser tab.

I'll see you all further down the road.