Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Midweek Musings

We've got a rich mélange of items teed up for today, including our first foray into that little event in Georgia in a mere eight days....  Hold that thought, though we'll start at that same small town in Georgia.

The Ladies Take Center Stage - It's the week before the Masters, so The Event Formerly Known as The Dinah takes center stage....  Sort of, as there's a wee complication.  Dylan Dethier notes it in his Monday Finish feature:

Three things to watch this week.

1. The ANA Inspiration. The year’s first major has been arguably its most compelling in recent years; this tournament feels like it goes to a playoff every time and features some incredibly

dramatic risk-reward shots coming down the stretch. With some of the game’s best players getting hot at the right time this should be the event of the week. (Oh, and with the attention elsewhere, maybe Michelle Wie West will be warmed up and ready to rock…)

2. The ANWA. Yes, in a perfect world the ANA and the ANWA would have acronyms that weren’t so similar, and in a perfect world they wouldn’t happen the exact same week, but on the bright side we get an absolutely incredible fortnight of big-time golf. The best female amateurs in the game will take on the most famous golf course in the sport and it’s going to be awesome.

I personally am not obsessing over the similarity of the acronyms, since that seems limited to both beginning with the letter "A"...  Of course Dylan elides the relevant bit, which is that the top tier of those female amateurs could be seen taking on BOTH the most famous course in the sport AND the most famous course in the women's version of the sport.

This is an issue that Mike Whan seems to have gone out of his way to hold his peace on, because it has to be maddening from the LPGA perspective.  But the effect is deeper than perhaps realized, because that small share of the golfing press set aside for the ladies is also overwhelmingly focused on the amateur event, to the exclusion of the most notable of the women's majors.  Of course, the guy dissed is in line to run the USGA, so we'll see how those dynamics play out over the long run.

James Colgan tees up the teenagers:

By virtue of its very existence, the Augusta National Women’s Amateur is a historic event. The second-ever ANWA will be played this week — a three-day, 54-hole stroke play event split between Champions Retreat Golf Club and historic Augusta National in Augusta, Ga.

In addition to signaling the return of golf to Augusta, Ga. in the month of April, this week marks two years since the inaugural playing of the event. In that tournament in 2019, Jennifer Kupcho outdueled Maria Fassi in a dazzling final round en route to becoming the first-ever ANWA champion. In March of 2020, the Covid pandemic forced tournament organizers to cancel the event for the year, dashing the tournament hopes of many of the game’s top amateurs, who had plans to turn pro within the following 12 months.

The 2021 ANWA will look different from both its predecessor and successors, and not just because of pandemic-era precautions. Augusta National has modified its qualification requirements to honor those who’d earned a spot in the field in 2020 (so long as they retained their amateur status), meaning this year’s event will feature more than a dozen more players than the 2019 iteration.

Fair enough, and I'd personally like this aspect of the event to go bye-bye:

1) Who makes the cut?

Each player who participates in the ANWA gets to play at Augusta National, but not everyone gets to play a competitive round. With the first 36 holes of the tournament at Champions Retreat, just over half the field at the ANWA (some 52 players) will be eliminated before the tournament reaches Augusta National. This is due to the cutline, which will more than halve the field following the completion of play on Thursday. At that point, the top 30 players in the field will advance to the final round at ANGC, with playoffs deciding any ties.

While the cutline sets the stage for terrific drama on Thursday afternoon, Friday is (mostly) about fun. After the final-round field is cemented at Champions Retreat, the tournament participants will head down Magnolia Lane, where each ANWA attendee is invited to participate in a practice round at Augusta National. For those who don’t make the cut, the round will mark an opportunity to enjoy an afternoon stroll around some of the golf world’s most-hallowed ground. For those who do, it’ll be the final opportunity to learn the contours and challenges of Alister Mackenzie’s design.

The event benefits from being this week and having the Masters entrants around the grounds.  That said, the ANGC majordomos are quite chintzy in the access the ladies are granted, so why not stage it the prior week and let them all play the storied venue in competition?  Only 30 players is unnecessarily limiting (what, they think they're the Olympics), but so is the day off in the middle of the event.

Colgan buried his lede by having this last, though it seems that Ruse was able to have her cake and eat it too, thanks to the pandemic:

6) Rose Zhang returns among the favorites

Rose Zhang enters the ANWA the reigning U.S. Women’s Amateur champion after a heart-stopping win in August, and fresh off earning low amateur honors in her first top-20 major finish at the 2020 ANA Inspiration. Zhang, who is still only 17 years old, enters her second ANWA the top-ranked women’s amateur in the world. She heads off to Stanford to play golf in the fall, but first the Irvine, Calif. native will look to close out an incredible high school run with a win at Augusta National.

Of course she got a watered-down Dinah, though she'll have memories of that blue wall to last a lifetime...

Good luck finding a preview piece for the Dinah ANA.  We have a couple that touch on it, first this on a certain woman that missed The Great Wall of Dinah:

Sophia Popov travels the high road en route to her ANA Inspiration debut

Sophia Popov, with her stunning victory in the AIG Women’s British Open last summer,
conceivably might have considered it tainted with a broad brush of rancor directed at the LPGA. Condemnation of the tour in the aftermath was swift and unsparing.

The general tenor of the reaction was summed up succinctly by this headline to a column in the Guardian: “Sophia Popov snub is as extraordinary as it is shameful for women’s golf.”

The hostility was unleashed by the LPGA’s decision not to deviate from protocol that granted nonmembers (of which Popov was one at the time) who won a major championship only a two-year tour exemption rather than the five years given to members. The tour also declined to grant Popov an exemption into the 2020 ANA Inspiration that had been postponed from March to September, claiming the field was set and that Popov’s ANA exemption technically didn’t begin until 2021.

Yet the 28-year-old German native declined to allow it to taint one of the best golf stories of 2020, a woman ranked 304th in the world, winning a major championship, the pivotal point of a career that finally found some traction.

 Yes, they couldn't see their way to deviating from protocols that were an hour-and-a-half old.  It says something discouraging about the human condition that, having been forced by the pandemic to make everything up form scratch, they considered those improvisations somehow to be inviolable.... Strange.

Though this 'graph had me doing a spit-take:

Popov also called it “a fun major to watch,” which she has done onsite, when it was still called the Kraft Nabisco Championship. She, too, was part of its television audience in September, and it convinced her that had she been given a choice of playing it then or in April, she would have chosen the latter. “I think that made that part easier for me.”

Yeah, we all felt that way about the damn wall...

The only other evidence of this event is this Golfweek interview with the lovely Judy Rankin, though it of course buys in to that great myth of our game:

The ANA turns 50 this year. You won the fifth edition of the event. What’s your favorite memory from your victory here in 1976?

I think just winning because I had sort of taken up the feeling that the actual winning of it was for somebody else. I think around the last three holes, I finally was slapping myself in the face and saying somebody has to win this, and it might as well be you. I birdied the 15th hole which kind of got me going pretty well, and then I hit a really good long iron into 16. But you have to understand, 15 and 16 were different holes than they are today. … There have been tweaks and re-dos over a lot of years. Not everything was exactly the way you see it today, but regardless, I won it on a really difficult day. It was very cold and very windy. I think I shot 68 in the final round. I was pretty happy with the round that day. I was just overwhelmed to have won it.


Reminds me of the Hollywood wag who once said that he was so old that he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin....  Not only was that event Judy won in 1976 not remotely akin to the ANA Inspiration moniker, it was a happening the nature of which has been swept under a very large area rug:

How a Small Party in the Desert Became the Biggest Lesbian Festival in America

The Dinah might be the coolest thing to ever come out of a golf tournament. What is now the largest annual gathering of queer women and their female allies, started as one of a number of small after-parties thrown over the weekend of a ladies professional golf tournament in Palm Springs. In 1991, nightlife promoter Mariah Hanson booked a local museum space to throw a party, and her event turned out to be such a hit that she kept bringing it back, watching it grow larger each year. This month (March 28-April 1), the now five-day extravaganza is set to attract well over 15,000 attendees.

Just to be clear, the lesbian haj to Palm Springs predates 1991.  Most of us know and are fine with this part of the events history, though they sure seem to go to much effort to hide it.

It's also another example of golf's inconsistent treatment of its history.  For some reason this event has been granted retroactive major status, though others (the dreaded Evian, for example) have mercifully not received that treatment.  

This actual preview piece just hit Golfweek's website, focused on their 18th hole in the absence of The Great Wall of Dinah:

Will a true island green create more drama at the ANA Inspiration? That's up for debate.

Depends on your definition of drama...

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – The ANA Inspiration celebrates its 50th anniversary this week, and the 18th green has gone retro. No grandstand. No Great Wall of Dinah. Just an island of drama.

Or will it be?

“I honestly find it a bit boring,” said Madelene Sagstrom, who believes not many will go for the green in two, even with a forward tee. Tournament officials typically move the tee up on two days during the ANA Inspiration.

Mel Reid will likely go for it with a 5-iron in hand because she’s that kind of aggressive player, but she too believes fewer players will take on the risk with greens as firm as they are and the grass mowed down in the back and nothing there to stop it. Not to mention the yellow hazard stakes.

Wow, talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.  Some how it's considered dramatic for a professional golfer to over-club into a green, knowing that an artificial wall will stop the ball.  

Of course fewer of the women will go for this green, but that only tells us that they only did so because the really bad options had been taken out of play.  So, we'll get fewer headcovers removed in the 18th fairway.  But, as a compensation, those that do take it on will be taking an actual risk, the outcome of which won't be known until the balls come to a rest.  That, I might argue, is actual drama, not the ersatz kind that was peddled last year. 

One other unrelated note, though still on the ladies.  Fortunately, both U.S. Opens (non-round-belly editions) had not been scheduled for Neanderthal states without mask mandates.  No, we're lucky enough to be going to The People's Republic:

There will be no fans allowed on-site at the Olympic Club in San Francisco for the 2021 U.S. Women’s Open, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

 The tournament is scheduled for June 3-6.

The Chronicle’s report says that state and local public health officials made the decision in coordination with the United States Golf Association and LPGA and that only a limited number of Olympic Club members will be permitted on-site during the event.

“It is important to have fans attend the U.S. Women’s Open,” said USWO championship director Matt Sawicki in a statement provided to Golfweek earlier this week, “but health and safety protocols for all attendees remains our first priority. We are working closely with the City and County of San Francisco as well as the State of California to create the best environment possible.”

Two weeks later and the men play their Open at...wait for it, Torrey Pines.   Seemed a good idea at the time...

A Quick Note on Slow Play - There's action in this sphere for sure, though one still suspects that the will to change is absent.  First, an actual meaningful penalty, though still not of the sort that will actually change behavior:

Yealimi Noh is only 19, yet already she has made news for the right reasons and now has done so
for a wrong reason. Noh, here to make her debut in the ANA Inspiration, received a $10,000 fine for slow play at the Kia Classic last week, the LPGA confirmed.

Noh, a Korean American who won the U.S. Girls Junior in 2018, had been fined for slow play in her LPGA debut at the Gainbridge LPGA last summer, and twice received a slow time in a round at Aviara last week, according to a report by Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols, before she was assessed the substantial fine for one who tied for 61st and earned only $4,247, resulting in a net loss of $5,753.

“I can’t appeal because it’s obviously my fault,” Noh told Nichols here on Tuesday. “A couple rookies got fines. Like OK, it’s a heads-up for us rookies to catch up or whatever.”

Noh is a very talented young player, though that's quite the rap sheet she's assembled in short order.

I do believe that dollars could affect behavior on the LPGA, noting her money-losing week.  Only on the LPGA would this be an issue:

It was especially difficult for the teenager to explain the lost wages to mom and dad.

Just a lucky thing that tour has no history of domineering parents....

The bigger issue though is that no monetary fine will affect behavior on the PGA Tour.  New Tour rules may be well and good, but until slow play affects their scorecards, they simply can't be fined enough to matter.

As if on cue, Daniel Zeqiri has a deep dive on slow play in The Telegraph that has much to recommend it, and not just the bits where he agrees with your humble blogger:

Fans grew frustrated with the PGA Tour's reluctance to issue stroke-penalties for slow play, relying too much on a system of warnings and fines. Given the average PGA Tour player has a figure resembling a telephone number in their bank account, financial punishments are unlikely to cause much concern.

In fairness, the PGA Tour did announce a new, more stringent pace-of-play policy at the start of 2020. This involved keeping an unpublished list of its slowest players based on timings from data provider ShotLink. Players go on and off the list based on a 10-tournament rolling period and are expected to meet a 60-second average for all shots. If they take more than this, they can be 'put on the clock' independently from their rest of their playing group.

They also introduced the concept of an Excessive Shot Time, to be issued if any player takes more than two minutes to hit a shot without good reason. If a player does this twice within the same tournament, officials have the option to issue a one-stroke penalty. Previously, players had a clean slate at the start of each round, now they are judged across a tournament.

Unless and until J.B. Holmes is banished from polite society, we'll continue to assume it's all a show.  But Zeqiri does have a certain talent for focusing in on the weakest link:

In 2019, there was a change in the rules to prevent caddies from lining their player up on the greens. The reasoning was that alignment - a player's ability to align his body and feet with the target - was a fundamental golfing skill. Quite right too, although even this straightforward change brought teething problems with Haotong Li issued a harsh two-stroke penalty in Dubai when his caddie appeared to walk away before he took his stance.

There is an argument that reading greens is also an integral part of the game and a skill in itself. While players will occasionally 'call in' their caddie to help them read the break of a putt, they will pride themselves on their ability to read greens. It is part of what separates great putters from the merely good. Any player who backed themselves to be an above average green-reader would welcome the guides being outlawed.

It's a little more than a mere argument, no?  

Like I said, just a quick take for today.  No point getting over-invested here, when there seems so little will to change.

Match-Play Notes -  Folks seemed to like it, though for the purists it was more of a mixed bag.  Shack's header on the ratings is a tell:

2021 Dell Match Play Ratings Fail To Drop As Much As They Should Have

Should have?  I don't know about that:

Slow, uneven golf featuring only-a-mother-could-love finalists who often clashed with aggressively placed corporate tents, somehow failed to deter an average of 2.6 million people from tuning into the 2021 WGC Dell Match Play, reports ShowBuzzDaily in its weekly sports ratings wrap.

Taking over four gruesome hours and apparently as much time as they wanted to get around 17 holes, the Billy Horschel v. Scottie Scheffler final drew a 1.6 final round rating on NBC, down from a 2.18 in 2019 (the 2020 event was cancelled). The match took place against the NCAA basketball tournament games involving Gonzaga and Michigan.

OK, folks were all over the slowness of that match.  But it was the first day of serious wind on a very tricked-up Pete Dye track, so I'm inclined to be a bit more charitable.

Perhaps Geoff (of all people) is ignoring the fact that match-play itself is the appeal, with the players being a bit more...well, fungible.  It also may be that, despite its obvious limitations, it's a welcome break from the mind-numbing week-to-week blandness of 72 holes of stroke play...

Or maybe Billy Ho is more of a draw than any of us considered.  Nah, that's got to be the liquor talking...

Dylan Dethier has a couple of interesting notes about the event in that Monday Finish linked above.  First, bashing the TV coverage is always emotionally satisfying, though it's hard to post much of a score in light of the low Degree of Difficulty.  But the Match-Play event places a truly unique strain on the broadcasters, with 32 matches to somehow cover.  I thought Golf Channel made an interesting decision, basically ignoring anything that happened on the front nine and picking up the matches basically as they made the turn.

Obviously, this allowed them to focus on the holes where matches were being decided, though 32 is still a lot of place to be simultaneously, so we know some, nay many, will have to be shown on tape.  But still, with all the focus on "Every Shot Live", you'd expect that a match settled on the 18th hole by the shot of the tournament would be shown, right?

WHAT WE’RE (UNFORTUNATELY NOT) WATCHING

 The video that wasn’t!

At the time, it was the shot of the tournament. Bob MacIntyre arrived at the 18th hole 1 down to Adam Long and on the outside looking in in terms of advancing through pool play. Instead, the entire scenario flipped with one shot. While Dustin Johnson was putting, MacIntyre’s massive tee shot rolled up the hill in front of the green, around the embankment and got so close to the hole that Johnson had to borrow a marker from the crowd to get it out of the way.

The wild combination of factors — the moment’s high stakes, the intrigue of the hole design, the fact that it happened just as the Johnson-Na match was wrapping up, the cool downslope-to-upslope slingshot thing that must have happened and the fact that it was a 371-yard tee shot to two feet — made this one of the most memorable match play shots I could imagine. The only problem? It wasn’t on video! British pro Eddie Pepperell was among those dismayed by the lack of coverage.

Aren't the cameras supposed to be running the whole time, just for this reason.  The DJ-Na match drew us in for sure, but this shot put McIntyre into the single-elimination draw.  Admittedly, it was a weird scene for the Johnson brothers up at the green:

And, since someone brought up Kevin Na, Dylan has quite the alternative take on that situation:

WHAT ELSE WE’RE WATCHING

A video!

Plenty of ink has already been spilt on this Kevin Na-Dustin Johnson scenario, so I’ll just add the latest development, since Lou Brown of Twitter was kind enough to clip some video of the original moment in question.
In some re-tellings of the event, Johnson had swiped away his ball before Na even had the opportunity to give it to him. That’s clearly not the case; some eight or nine seconds elapse before Johnson lopes to his ball. But that doesn’t mean Na was intentionally gaming him, either. Anybody who has played match play golf knows you sometimes space out on immediately giving away a putt.

One final word on this: Johnson shouldn’t have swiped away his putt, as other pros including Jordan Spieth attested. Nor should Na have confronted him on the putting green so publicly. I’m guessing if he had another chance he’d have mentioned something to Johnson as they walked to the next hole. Instead the entire incident looked very awkward, drew more attention — and possibly violated rules, too. Let’s move on.

Yeah, Na's reaction screamed "Virtue Signaling" to me for some reason, and he was most certainly wrong to bring it up with DJ before they left the green as we discussed at length on Monday.  But he certainly was slow to concede the putt, or at least slowish.  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

And this one last note from Eamon Lynch:

Lynch: Looking to eliminate Cinderella finalists at WGC Match Play? Stop inviting them.

Which distills down to this nut 'graph:

Golf is a fickle mistress and match play its most mercurial format. That is apparent not only in every edition of this tournament, but in Ryder and Presidents Cup play too. If Tour and TV executives want to ensure brand names feature in the Sunday final of the WGC Match Play — don’t expect an official acknowledgment of this desire — there’s only one way to accomplish that: invite only brand names to participate. Because if you prize Goliaths, you’d best stop inviting Davids to the party.

Less so in those Cups, but that only highlights the difference between match-play and team match-play.  I think Eamon is dead-ass wrong, that the event generates far more excitement than the average Tour event.  But that said excitement is distributed through the week in a different manner than we are used to expecting, as per Dylan Dethier:

The final vs. Scheffler was hardly must-see TV, in part because the pair …combined to hole exactly zero birdie putts (Seriously — there was one chip-in birdie and one conceded 34-footer. That’s it!) Nonetheless, this event always has an element of anticlimax Sunday afternoon. But that’s okay! We’re conditioned to Sunday afternoon representing a golf tournament’s pinnacle. But the WGC-Match Play peaks early, sometime during the early-round chaos of 32 concurrent matches during the week or Saturday’s elimination rounds. It’s a terrific event, even if it tends to finish with a whimper.

We should give these guys a little fairer treatment.  Not only was Sunday a far more difficult day to play and score, but the guys are running on fumes by the final.  It's the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the only way to change that would be to go to Eamon's elite 4-person field, but that wouldn't qualify as a World Golf Championship.

But Eamon seems to be arguing for a 4-player draw, or at least there seems no limiting factor.   

The Most Intimidating Bunker in Golf - Not the Road or Hell Bunker, nor the Alps at Prestwick.  The most intimidating bunker in the world can be found at St. Enodoc Golf Club on the Cornwall Peninsula, a place the bride and I visited en route to Wales a few years back.  

Known as the Himalaya bunker, it looms along the right side of the par-4 6th hole of the Church Course at St. Enodoc Golf Club, in England.

That’s no slam-dunk feat; the Himalaya measures roughly 60-by-100 feet and tops out at a height of 140 feet (that’s just 10 feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty).

It did, anyway, when the architect James Braid first routed the layout in 1907, threading its holes through the heaving coastal landscape (and around a church that gives St. Enodoc its name).
Golf courses, though, are like living beings. Their natural features age and change, buffeted by winds and rain, overrun by native grasses, trampled by foot traffic. As with so much else, time takes its toll.

Such was the fate of St. Enodoc’s Himalaya bunker. Over the decades, it shrank in stature. Though still impressive, the Mt. Everest of sandy hazards evolved into something closer to K2.

For a glimpse of how the Himalaya bunker morphed through time, check out these before-and-after images, which St. Enodoc management posted recently on the club’s Instagram account.

 Well, everyone by now knows about shrinkage...

We played it as it looked in that photo on the left... It's just a wedge over the bunker, not an issue as long as ones eyes stay shut.  Your humble blogger cleared without incident, though not sure when I'll ever see the retro version on the right.

Masters Stuff - We're in tease mode for sure, but just pretend you hear the first couple of notes of a certain Dave Loggins tune in the background.  This will get you in the mood:

Masters 2021: Are these 9 famous Augusta National myths real or urban legends?
Is this photo of cattle outside Augusta National's clubhouse real or fake? Read our story to find out.

I'll go with "real", final answer... Though it didn't work out so well:

Cattle roamed the club grounds during World War II to maintain the course

When the club closed shortly after the 1942 Masters, it remained closed for several years due to World War II as many members and employees joined the war effort. With the club not financially secure at the time, co-founder Bobby Jones bought 200 cattle, figuring that not only would their grazing keep the grounds in acceptable condition, but that they could later be sold (see photo above). On the surface, a solid idea. However, according to Masters.com, “Things did not turn out as planned. With the Club closed, workers stopped the annual planting of winter grass, and as the bermudagrass on the grounds became dormant it provided little in the way of food and nourishment for the cattle. That led to a problem: the cows started eating the famous azaleas and the bark off young trees at Augusta National.” Ah, the best-laid plans …

If it had been anything but the azaleas...  Though lots of myths there:

The club lays ice on the azalea beds to help them bloom for the tournament

The Masters is known for its abundance of spring colors, and none is as synonymous with the

tournament as its azaleas, resplendent in their bright pink, red and purple colors. And what would the Masters be without them? So, it stands to reason the club would spare no expense to get the timing of the bloom for the second week of April, right? Um, no. Come on, be serious. For starters the ice would either shock the plants or melt fast, plus you’d pretty much have to have your own ice-manufacturing facility to make enough cubes to cover so much ground. While this rumor ran pretty hard for a number of years, thankfully most—but not all—Masters patrons have come to their senses.

Just look at them... they can't hardly be real.

I had forgotten about this one:

A patron once was arrested for stealing sand

In 2012, Clayton Baker wasn’t looking to pull off a heist, but he was seeking a unique souvenir—a cup of sand from one of Augusta National’s pristine bunkers. Walking back up the 10th hole after Bubba Watson won in overtime, Baker slipped under the ropes and made his way to the famous free-form bunker and grabbed a cup of sand. This would be the definition of a bad decision. By the time he made it to the 10th tee, he was handcuffed and arrested, setting off a chain of events that ultimately would cost him some $20,000 in various legal fees and other costs associated with the stunt.

Is he out yet?  Even Kamala wouldn't bail this guy out...

This might be of interest to anyone looking to read up on the event and club:

The best Masters books: 8 great reads about Augusta National and the Masters

  It's an odd format that's hard to excerpt, but this is the one I recommend:

The Making of the Masters, by David Owen

$16.99

Author David Owen received access to Augusta National archives and records to tell the story of how the prestigious club, and tournament, came to be. An enlightening look at the club’s early years, founding and beyond.

That subtitle is quite telling, as the portrait of Clifford Roberts is quite captivating.  Often dismissed as a bigot and interloper, I can promise you'll come away with a much fuller portrait of the man that made the Masters.  Yes, he couldn't have done it without Bobby Jones, but it's equally true that Jones couldn't have done it without him.

Our last Masters bit concerns the Holder, a man typically immune to emotion.  It turns out that that November Masters romp wasn't as carefree as it might have seemed:

“I had come down to have some coffee and my breakfast, and I had a really hard time eating my breakfast,” Johnson said with a laugh. Breakfast for the best player in the world is normally a sizable omelet and a hefty bowl of oatmeal with some fruit. But on Masters Sunday, it was just a
couple bites of each. “I barely ate anything.”

Johnson tends to keep things low-key during tournament weeks, spending time with his sons when he’s away from the golf course, not watching much golf on TV. But on Sunday morning holding a 4-shot lead, if there’s no breakfast to be eaten, what else is there to do but head to the course? That’s exactly what DJ did, except he traipsed out the house without grabbing the mid-day snacks his personal chef had prepared. (Chef Michael Parks made a special trip to get the almond butter and jelly sandwiches to ANGC, as he discussed on a recent podcast.)

“I was really nervous, too, on the first tee.” Johnson said. “Obviously I’ve got the (54-hole) lead in the Masters for the first time. I mean, I was feelin’ it.” With only members and their guests on-site, just a couple dozen patrons watched as he smoothed a shot with his 3-wood into the fairway. After two-putting for par, DJ says, he was able to settle himself down.

We tend to forget that DJ had gone out of his way to bring the field back into it:

But it wasn’t long before Johnson’s 4-shot lead had been trimmed to just one over Sungjae Im. After a birdie on the 3rd hole, Johnson bogeyed both 4 and 5. “It still didn’t rattle me because on 4 I felt like a made a good swing, just caught it a little high on the face. Came up a little short,” Johnson said. “Probably should have chipped that ball, but after the chip I hit on 2 …”

 Johnson had paused for a second to chuckle about that chip on 2. After short-siding himself on the par-5, he chunked his chip into a greenside bunker. Then on 3, his short chip skidded 10 feet beyond the hole. He looked at his caddie brother confused. Understandably, he put the wedge away on 4 and putted from off the green, but missed the par-saver. Golf Twitter was abuzz with the idea of another Masters meltdown.

He's human, despite all evidence to the contrary...

As long as we're on DJ, Dylan Dethier picked up on the strange wil-he-or-won't he Valero:

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

A field list!

One very interesting thing is happening at this week’s Valero Texas Open: Dustin Johnson is playing. After edging out Adam Long, tying Bob MacIntyre and losing a strange match to Kevin Na in Austin this weekend, the world No. 1 made a last-minute schedule addition. After three lackluster performances in a row, the defending Masters champ has decided he wants to play the week before the tournament.

Why is this interesting? For one, the timing. Had Johnson made the weekend, he likely wouldn’t have played the Valero — hence the last-minute addition. And what that suggests is that Johnson isn’t quite where he wants to be with his golf swing, specifically his driver. The best club in his bag last November has been decidedly uneven his last three starts. It would hardly be shocking to see DJ roll into Augusta and play like a world-beater. But it’s increasingly clear that he doesn’t quite think he’s ready. Time will tell if he’s right.

UPDATE: So much for that. You have my permission to 50 percent disregard the last two paragraphs. I’m still perplexed why he signed up and then un-signed up, but here we are.

This highlights the effects of the Match-Play on the events around it on the schedule, because of the wide disparity in how much golf the guys will play.  But for once I agree with DJ, at least to the effect that his heater seems to have certainly waned.  I'm not liking his chances much at Augusta, not that I think that going to San Antonio would help much in that regard. 

I do have a little trip planned that will affect Masters blogging somewhat.  I'll tell you about that on Friday.  Otherwise, I'll leave you until then.

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