Monday, May 17, 2021

Weekend Wrap

Here's the plan.  We'll dispense quickly with the weekend's golf, cover a couple of loose ends and then gently tip our toe into the Kiawah waters... 

Byron's Bash - On the bright side, it wasn't TPC Los Colinas....  Hey, that's all I got:

Who won? K.H. Lee (6-under 66; 25 under overall)

How it happened: On a rainy Sunday in Texas, the PGA Tour crowned a first-time winner. K.H. Lee, a 29-year-old from Seoul, South Korea, won his first-ever event on North American soil by

three strokes at the AT&T Byron Nelson, joining a pair of fellow countrymen to win the Texas event (Sung Kang, Sang-moon Bae).

Lee, who entered Sunday part of a crowded leaderboard chasing 54-hole leader Sam Burns, vaulted into the lead with the help of a red-hot front nine, recording five birdies to only a single bogey. The back nine as dominated by fits of rain and a thunderstorm that eventually cleared the course for 2.5 hours. When he came back to address his 15-foot putt on the 16th green, Lee missed and made bogey, opening the door for Sam Burns just a touch. But it was settled on Lee’s very next swing, where he hit his approach on the par-3 17th to inside four feet. He made the putt, striped a drive, found the par-5 in two and two-putted for another birdie on 18. Piece of cake.

It was apparently his 80th start on Tour,  which will take many, myself included, by surprise.  This seems a bit of a stretch, though:

Why it matters? The win was the first PGA Tour victory of Lee’s career, and only the fifth win of his professional career to date (the previous four came evenly split between the Japan Golf Tour and the Korean Tour). In addition to the tournament’s beefy winner’s check, Lee earns a customary three-year exemption to all PGA Tour events and entrance into the Masters and this week’s PGA Championship at Kiawah Island.

Oh, you meant why it matters to HIM?  Fair enough...

Before moving on to more important things, this event clearly deserves a high ranking on the Tour's Endangered Species  Act.  It's most obvious problem is the passage of time and the increasingly tenuous linkage to the events namesake.  Mike Bamberger has a lovely ode to the great man here, but I can't imagine that many of the younger generation saw any reason to seek it out.  Byron's legacy is further complicated by the fact that he stubbornly insisted on living his life as he chose.  Once he had earned enough to buy a farm for wife Peggy and himself, he rode off into the sunset largely (he'd show up at Bing's clambake, hence The Match, and the Masters, but that was about all, denying him the gaudy lifetime win totals that might communicate to the youngsters.

Further complicating this event's continued existence is that it's in the one market that has two Tour events, and that other one has the more iconic venue, plus a similar tie to an all-time great.  Also an issue, a potential changing of the guard at its title sponsor (h/t Shack):

AT&T Inc. is preparing to spin off its media business and merge it with Discovery Inc. in a tax-friendly deal, according to people with knowledge of the matter, a surprise reversal for a company that spent $85 billion to acquire the assets less than three years ago.

A deal could be announced as soon as this week, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The transaction will be structured as a so-called Reverse Morris Trust, or a merger with another company that’s structured to be tax-free, one of the people said.

The idea is to combine Discovery’s reality-TV empire with AT&T’s vast media holdings, building a business that would be a formidable competitor to Netflix Inc. and Walt Disney Co. Any deal would mark a major shift in AT&T’s strategy after years of working to assemble telecommunications and media assets under one roof. AT&T gained some of the biggest brands in entertainment through its acquisition of Time Warner Inc., which was completed in 2018.

Seems this calls for a PGA Tour Dead Pool, no?

Perseverance -  You know the joke about beating your head against a wall?  Well, the best-named Euro Tour rabbit has had his moment in the sun:

At 46, Bland became the oldest player ever to graduate from the Challenge Tour.

At 48 years and 101 days old on Saturday, Bland became the oldest European Tour first-time winner. At the Betfred British Masters, his 478th tournament across a 20-plus-year career, he was finally a champion, after making a 3-footer for par on the first hole of a playoff at the Belfry.

Barter, also an analyst for the tournament’s broadcast, asked Bland seconds afterward to describe his emotions.

“Next question,” he said. “Uh, yeah, just, I’ve done it.”

This emotional moment is well worth your time, but you have to forgive a little journalistic license, as the interviewer is Tim Barter, who also just happens to be Bland's coach:

It's a great story and one can't help being happy for the guy.  Was it a great life move to devote decades of his life to this quest?  That's more than a little above my pay grade...

The Tour Confidential panel graded Bland's accomplishment on the Perseverance Scale:

6. The year of the long-awaited victory (Spieth, Hideki Matuyama, Lydia Ko) may have seen its biggest one yet this week. Richard Bland, at the Betfred British Masters, won for the first time — at the age of 48 and in his 478th start, making him the oldest first-time winner in European Tour history. Where does Bland’s victory rank on pro golf’s persistence scale? Anyone rival him?

Bamberger: Well, for persistence there’s Mac O’Grady’s path to a Tour card. (Believe he went to Tour school 17 times.) There’s Tom Lehman grinding it out in AAA for a decade. There’s Hogan after the bus crashed into his Cadillac. But it’s spectacular. It will motivate many.

Zak: Bland’s win has to be on the Mount Rushmore of persistence! What I love is that there are many, many derivatives of Bland’s win that play out all the time in pro golf. Joel Dahmen winning in the Dominican Republic. Jordan Spieth winning for the first time in four years. Adam Scott’s persistence with the putter. This game asks you to quit constantly. Constantly!

Sens: Maybe we could get our stat-guru, Mark Broadie, to come up with a metric so we can rank persistence. Bland’s certainly seems right up there. I’d say that Brendon Todd showed an epic degree of determination while fighting through the full-swing yips for years. Those are the kind of woes that would have had a lot of guys curled up in the shower in a fetal position. And who says persistence has to be the hallmark of an unsung player? Tiger Woods’ comeback surely belongs on the Rushmore of Persistence, too.

Piastowski: It’s very up there. The Hogan and Todd answers are good ones. It’s pretty incredible how Bland kept going to the well, kept thinking — for 20-plus years — that maybe that next tournament would finally be the one. It’s pretty incredible, too, how his family never gave up on him, either. Those are the best sports stories.

While anything that prompts a reference to Mac O'Grady is to be encouraged, Mike Bamberger's comparison to Hogan should require a lengthy internal exile, perhaps on the Frisbee Golf beat.  Can you say, Category error?

It's one thing to talk about great players like Hogan and Spieth that have setbacks (I know, very different kinds of setbacks, but fight to regain the summit).  Bland is a different animal entirely, a man with no particular gifts who stubbornly refuses to give up the dream.... Tom Lehman might actually be the best comparison, though he had a good long stretch of actual success on Tour.

It's a great story but, were he my son, he'd have been the recipient of some strong advice to the contrary.

Take The Fifth - I think the Hale America Open is a fascinating story, though I'd not have thought it sufficiently deep to support a book-length treatment:

From the Amazon listing:

In 1942, the United States Golf Association (USGA) cancelled its four golf tournaments for the duration of World War II. But then it did something different in only that year—it sponsored the Hale-America National Open on the same weekend as the cancelled US Open. The great Ben
Hogan won that tournament and went to his grave believing he had therefore won a record five US Open titles.

In The Open Question, Peter May turns his attention to this controversial, colorful Hale-America National Open of 1942. While providing an in-depth look at the tournament itself, May champions Hogan’s claim to five US Open titles and debunks some questionable assertions that the tournament was not worthy of a US Open. Set against the backdrop of World War II, May also tells the stories of other professional golfers in the tournament and the impact of the war on all their lives.

The USGA has never recognized the Hale-America Tournament as an official US Open and remains firm in its stance. It was a decision that bothered Ben Hogan for the rest of his life. The Open Question shows how dominant Ben Hogan was against some of the biggest names in golf, and reveals why he deserves to be recognized as a five-time US Open winner.

The most interesting question in all this is why the USGA doesn't consider this an Open.... Hogan also thought he'd bagged a fifth Open at Olympic, tossing the ball he finished with to an USGA Official for Golf House (the USGA museum).  Jack Fleck made two late birdies to tie Hogan, then beat him in a playoff the next day, resulting in a very different book.

The LPGA To Fail in 3,2, 1 - Ironically, the LPGA is staring at a binary choice.  They can appease the Gods of political correctness and be welcome at all the right cocktail parties or they can, yanno, continue to have a women's tour.  Pick either of the above:

It was, by all accounts, an unforgettable day for Hailey Davidson. On May 13, Davidson drained
a 5-footer for par on the 18th hole to win her first professional title, topping LPGA player Perrine Delacour in the process. That same day she also received an email from the USGA stating that she’d met the organization’s Gender Policy eligibility criteria and can now compete in its championships. She hopes to soon hear similar news from the LPGA via a reciprocity agreement.

“I’m not just going to be stuck on mini-tours,” said Davidson, who is believed to be the first transgendered woman to win a professional tournament in the U.S.

Davidson, 28, works in social media for NBC’s Peacock division under the Golf Channel umbrella but has dreams of competing on the LPGA. In January, Davidson underwent gender reassignment surgery, a six-hour procedure. She’s been undergoing hormone treatments since Sept. 24, 2015, a date that’s tattooed on her right forearm.

This is a very touching story, but there's no shortage of willful blindness involved.  The author is Beth Ann Nichols, and there's been o stronger advocate for women's golf in recent years.  But given the item immediately preceding, all I can think is that at least Hogan saw the bus coming at him:

“We are currently reviewing Hailey’s application to participate in LPGA Tour events under the LPGA’s gender policy,” said Heather Daly-Donofrio, the LPGA’s chief tour operations officer. “The policy is designed to be a private and confidential process between the LPGA and the athlete.”

In 2010, the LPGA voted to eliminate its requirement that players be “female at birth” not long after a transgender woman filed a lawsuit against the tour.

One can simultaneously have sympathy for an individual suffering from gender dysphoria, while also understanding that allowing biological males (and kids, that is what they are) to compete against women will be the death of women's sports.  Life is filled with inconvenient, yet immutable facts, and gender is very much one of those.  The question is whether your fetishization of inclusions rises to a sufficient level as to require the destruction of women's sports.  The answer, at least from early returns, seems to be "yes".

Also Not Helpful For Women's Sports - Before moving on to Kiawah, I just wanted to excerpt the TC panel's reaction to that cancelled NCAA women's regional:

4. In a controversial decision, a rain-plagued NCAA Division I Women’s Golf Championships regional event in Baton Rouge, La., was canceled Wednesday without a single shot being played. After taking on 7 inches of rain, the course was deemed to be “playable but not championship level.” To say the least, the decision was met with a good deal of frustration. “Thank you for ending our careers!” one player shouted as it was announced. The NCAA was hammered on social media for nixing the event. Any way to justify the decision?

Bamberger: If there’s a will, there’s a way. The players and their coaches surely had the will. The NCAA bureau chiefs clearly did not. So, without knowing much, no.

Zak: The rule book is the only way, as in the NCAA bylaws rule book and the specific number of days the regional was allotted to finish the event. It’s a ridiculous hill to die on, but the committee was clearly ready to do so. It’ll follow them for a while, I’d think.

Sens: What’s that old rule of thumb? Oh yeah. Everyone would have been playing the same course. That’s the rule they should have followed.

Piastowski: I just don’t think that there is. I can appreciate the fact that the officials wanted only the best for the players in terms of a course — but what then got lost is the actual best thing for the players, which was an opportunity to play for a championship. Following up on what Sens said, it’s not like one group of players would play the course differently than the others. Adjust the course as need be and play on.

It takes quite the bizarre mind to conclude that not playing is better than playing, regardless of the compromises necessary.   

Kiawah On Our Minds - We'll lede with this feature on how it all came about back in 1991:

Though still an arduous test of golf, the Ocean Course has undergone modifications in its 30 years to make it more playable. In 1991, it was a rough-hewn enigma, a typical Pete Dye torture chamber. “At the time, the opinion was you could never hold a medal-play tournament there because you would never finish,” said retired CBS broadcaster Peter Kostis, who as swing coach for Mark Calcavecchia played several practice rounds with some of the American players prior to Ryder Cup week. “Seriously, the guys were so relieved it was match play.”

“I remember everyone asking, ‘Why are we going there?’ And then when we got there, everybody was asking, ‘Why are we here?’” recalled Roger Maltbie, who was still a tour player but worked his first Ryder Cup for NBC that year.

“You have to wonder,” wrote one magazine columnist in the run-up to the matches, “why in the world the PGA of America would take the Ryder Cup to an unfinished golf course in a mosquito-infested swampland designed by an architect that players universally despise.”

That was the essential question.

The answer could be found, for starters, in the California desert.
The original routing signed by Pete Dye.


This comes with a mandatory irony alert:

On Aug. 7, 1985, the PGA of America announced that it had awarded the 29th Ryder Cup to its western outpost, PGA West, and the yet-to-be-opened Stadium Course. It was to be the third Ryder Cup held in the Coachella Valley of California and the first since the 1959 matches at Eldorado Country Club in Indian Wells.

Dye’s latest design, which opened in early 1986, immediately was utilized for the fourth edition of the Skins Game, won by Fuzzy Zoeller, and the following year it became the host venue for the Bob Hope Classic, one of two 90-hole tournaments on the PGA Tour. Corey Pavin went on to win the title. The rest of the field went on a rampage.

Already notorious for his design of the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, Dye drew sharp criticism for another Stadium Course that was, basically, “just too damn hard,” according to one competitor. Players didn’t just hate it; they hated the thought of it. They wanted nothing more to do with it, and about 100 tour members eventually signed a petition demanding that commissioner Deane Beman remove it from the rotation.

It's an irony twofer...  The obvious bit is that the pros were complaining that PGA West was too difficult, so they moved the Ryder Cup to Kiawah, which was even more of a torture chamber than PGA West likely would have been.  But to be fair, as you'll read if you click through, many of the pros wanted PGA West out of the Hope's rota because of the Pro-Am format:

Zoeller at least kept the criticism light. “The big bugaboo about PGA West is that it’s not fun for the amateurs,” he said. “It’s depressing to see guys leaving the course crying.”

“That was exactly the point I was trying to make, and I got in trouble for some of my comments,” said Maltbie, who at the time was a member of the PGA Tour Player Advisory Council. “My job in a pro-am format, along with trying to play well, is to make sure that my amateur partners have a nice day and enjoy the experience. That’s what they paid for is to enjoy the golf to whatever level they can. Forget the high scores we were shooting. The amateurs couldn’t play it at all. It just didn’t work.”

 Which seems an appropriate concern...

It's quite a story, with a huge cameo by Hurricane Hugo.... I'll just leave you with this from David Feherty:

“We had a chance to play the course before Ryder Cup week, and we hated it. Everybody hated it,” said Paul Azinger, one of the stalwarts of the U.S. team. “We kept asking, ‘What are we doing here?’ And we kept asking it. I use the word hate, and you can’t say that about too many courses. But that’s not too strong of a sentiment. Then, the wind blew, and it made it nearly impossible. So that didn’t help our disposition, either.”

Appearing in his only Ryder Cup, Northern Ireland’s David Feherty, who like Azinger now works for NBC Sports, made headlines when he remarked rather succinctly that the Ocean Course, “is not like something from Ireland or Scotland, it’s like something from Mars.”

Feherty's participation in that event takes many by surprise, as does the fact that he dusted Payne Stewart in Sunday singles.

 Unsurprisingly, that TC panel as Kiawah-centric:

1. Welcome to PGA Championship week. We’re not without several juicy storylines. Rory McIlroy, fresh off a victory at the Wells Fargo Championship, returns to the site of one of his four major championship wins. Jordan Spieth, a winner this year for the first time since 2017, seeks the one major that has escaped him. Bryson DeChambeau, the longest hitter on Tour, tackles what is expected to be the longest course in major championship history. There are dozens of other stories that we’ll no doubt track on the mighty Ocean Course on Kiawah Island. Which one most intrigues you this week?

Michael Bamberger: Of the stories that are waving their hands and screaming, it’s got to be Jordan Spieth. Career grand slam is some statement. On the less obvious stories, the fellas will play a course moving toward 8,000 yards, and it still will play short (or shortish) in the early-morning calm: What can golf do to make 7,200 yards meaningful again?

I've been a Spieth skeptic, though I do have to acknowledge that this week might set up unusually well for him.  It figues to be a week with an emphasis on scrambling, and that's his signature move.

Sean Zak: Spieth is the right answer, so kudos to Bamberger for logging on first. Excuse me for beating a dead horse, but Bryson will still be fascinating to watch. We thought his golf might work only at certain places, but then he went and contended at TPC Sawgrass. We didn’t really expect him to play well at Harding Park, but then he grinded and grinded and finished T4. I think he’s more fascinating to watch this week than at Augusta National. The toughest courses seem to bring something out in him.

Josh Sens: Which Dustin Johnson will we see? The dominant DJ of 2020, or the enigmatic DJ who has been mostly a non-factor this season. Something tells me he’s going to shake off his recent slumber.

You'd want to know more about the condition of his knee, no?   

Nick Piastowski: I’m genuinely fascinated by the Rory arc over, really, just the past month. At the Masters, he, in order, hit his dad (!) with an approach, shot 76-74, missed his second straight cut and was surrounded by rumblings of how his game looked lost. And then he won his next time out, and he’s now one of the favorites. What a spike! He won at Kiawah in 2012, but which version of McIlroy will show up this week?

The good news for Rors (and the negative for Jordan) is that long-range weather forecast calls for fairly modest breezes, all seemingly in single-digits.  No rain whatsoever, with the possible exception of a stray shower today.

 The TC gang does veer off on this unsuccessful tangent:

2. When the wind blows on the exposed Ocean Course, there are few tougher tests in golf — as evidenced in the second round of the 2012 PGA when the wind blew 20-30 mph and the scoring average ballooned north of 78. What course across all the majors do you think gives the players the most anxiety?

Bamberger: Carnoustie. You know it’s Carnoustie because all the really good golfers like it.

Zak: If they visited Kiawah more frequently, I think that might rank highest. Oakmont comes to mind mainly because it feels straightforward. Few hazards to be found. Just play good golf and hit straight shots, right? Wrong. Something at Oakmont will always trip you up.

Sens: Winged Foot. Sure, Bryson cut through the rough like it was butter at last year’s U.S. Open. But he was the only guy under par for the week.

Piastowski: Shinnecock, in 2004 conditions. If you want to have some fun, just Google Shinnecock 2004 and read the headlines. And I’m gonna go with a close second to Augusta National. It’s the one constant course — meaning it’s on players’ minds all year round. And the Masters is maybe the tournament players want to win the most — meaning it’s on their mind since the second they picked up a club.

 I'm not sure any venues scare these guys any longer... 

The next tangent is range finders:

3. Range finders will make their major debut at the Ocean Course, and more than a few players, including Justin Thomas, Webb Simpson and Bryson DeChambeau, said they believe they will actually slow down play. Agree?

Bamberger: Can Thursday-Friday golf on a long course with wind be slower? No, I don’t think slower. But it’s another kick in the shins to ye olde game. Let us use ’em; let the fellas figure it
out on the ground. It’s worked well for a long time. The introduction of technology into golf, broadly speaking, has not served the game well. As Exhibit A, I offer you the electric cart.

Zak: Yeah, we debated this exact topic in this exact fashion months ago. It won’t slow them down much, but it won’t really improve the pace much either. Figuring out the carry distance over a bunker can actually be easier with the sprinkler heads than with the range finder. Don’t know how? Ask a caddie.

Sens: In theory, it should make things faster, and I suspect it will for the pros this week. But at the risk of sounding like the grumpy luddite that I am, technology also has a way of delivering the opposite of what it promises. That’s been my experience in recreational golf, anyway. For the most part, the gadget-happy golfers I’ve encountered have been snails. Maybe it’s the type of personalities who are attracted to data-tracking — they get obsessed with information-gathering when they’d probably be better off just eyeballing the distance and swinging. OK, boomer rant over. Now, you other kids, get off of my yard!

Piastowski: Yes. With a major championship on the line, I would totally get my number from my caddie, double-check it with my range finder, double-check a potential new number with my caddie — and then maybe swing. Of course, there is a shot clock, but we’ve seen how that’s been enforced.

It'll be a story the first day, then a yawn.

Andy Johnson at The Fried Egg has a five-parter up on the Ocean Course at The Fried Egg, including this intor on the wind:

The site was a narrow strip of oceanside land that reminded Dye of the British and Irish links he
admired and studied. His routing, therefore, had some of the out-and-back flavor of courses like St. Andrews and Royal Troon: the front nine ventures out to the northeast before looping back around, and the back nine treks to the southwest before returning to the clubhouse. The holes are perched above the underlying sand dunes and, as at most great links courses in Great Britain and Ireland, exposed to the wind.

The wind is the Ocean Course’s single most important feature. It’s always a factor, even on relatively calm days. Pete Dye was well aware of this fact, and his design maximizes the influence of natural elements. During construction, at the suggestion of Alice Dye, he raised up the holes on the back nine in order to give golfers unobstructed views of the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so, he augmented the impact of the wind on play.

In addition, Dye incorporated both subtle and abrupt changes of direction into the routing of the Ocean Course. Each tee shot, each approach has a different relationship with the wind. Considering how small and elevated the targets on the greens are, a player’s ability to adapt to both big and small changes in wind direction is critically important.

Yes, that's very true, yet.... The first thing you need to know is that locals insist that there is no prevailing wind, that it comes from all directions.  The second thing you need to know is that Dye's routing results in stretches of holes in  similar directions.  The first four play away from the clubhouse (east, I believe), Nos. 5-13 head back towards and past the clubhouse, and Nos. 14-18 back on the compass direction of those early homes.  You'll recall that at that '91 Ryder Cup, the finishing holes were dead into the wind, whereas we played them downwind in early April.  You'll need to know the wind direction to know how the course will play each day...

 Johnson introduces an important point, though he doesn't seem to do much with it:

Perched Greens:

So the story of the 2021 PGA Championship will be how the best players in the world handle the sheer force and variety of the natural elements at the Ocean Course. The wind can be uniquely

relentless here. Fans may remember the 2012 PGA Championship, which Rory McIlroy won by a record-setting eight shots. What fans may not recall, however, is how difficult the Ocean Course played for anyone not named Rory McIlroy. Only 20 players broke par, and only McIlroy finished more than five under.

This happened in spite of relatively benign winds and soft conditions for three of the four rounds. It was on Friday that the Ocean Course truly showed its teeth. In windy conditions during the second round, 30 players failed to break 80, and there were more scores in the 90s than in the 60s. Afterwards, Vijay Singh—who shot 69, the round of the day—told reporters, “After a while you don’t really think about your score. You just think about each hole, each shot, and try not to mess up.”

Courses like this are an odd fit for their windy environs.  Most of the greens are raised, and combined with hot-weather grasses, it proves an awkward fit in windy conditions.   They look like they should be links, but they're not and that's problematic...

In Part II, Andy tackles the variety of the one-shotters:

Ocean Course architect Pete Dye was uniquely skilled at creating par-3 variety. His secret sauce was routing each one-shot hole to play in a different direction.

As covered in part one of this series, the most important characteristic of the Ocean Course, besides its setting, is the wind. It's rarely calm on Kiawah Island, and the wind doesn't have a prevailing direction. This means that holes of the same scorecard yardage can play to very different actual yardages if, say, one goes east and the other west. So by laying out each par 3 at the Ocean Course in a unique direction, Dye allowed Mother Nature to provide ample variety. Couple this routing trick with four distinctive hole designs, and you have a set of par 3s that could be considered the best of Dye’s career.

Most folks, remembering that Ryder Cup, will expect No. 17 to be a beast.  But if it plays downwind, as it did for us, it won't be that much of an issue.  But keep an eye on this boy:

Hole 14 - 194 yards

If all it had was its location, the 14th would be one of the most memorable holes at the Ocean

Course. It’s the first hole that runs right along the beach, and it kicks off the course’s iconic closing stretch. But the design of No. 14 has real substance. It’s almost exactly as long as the 8th, but it travels in the exact opposite direction. The green, according to Dye’s own account in Bury Me in a Pot Bunker, was modeled on the famous Redan template, running away and to the left. If the pin is in the back, players must land their tee shots well short in order to get close. Misses short left will find a deep bunker, and anything short right will leave uncomfortable recovery chips. The best mistake is to go long, ensuring an uphill chip or putt.

You can call it 194, but I walked back to a new tee that extends it to 240 yards....  Watch where they place the tees each day.

As for that 17th:

Hole 17 - 221 yards

This imposing penultimate hole has seen its share of disasters, most notably at the 1991 Ryder Cup. (Mark Calcavecchia and Bernhard Langer can tell you all about that.) A long par 3, the 17th

plays over a lake that Alice Dye, Pete’s wife, recommended in order to add a dramatic element. On one of the most difficult courses in the world, this is arguably the most demanding shot. It’s long, and it has a wind direction that players haven’t seen yet. Plus, the green is angled from left to right between the dunes and the lake, punishing the typical misses for right-handers: short right and long left. Unlike the 5th and 14th, the 17th rewards a left-to-right ball flight. Par is a tremendous score.

All depends upon the wind direction and strength.  Downwind in 8 mph breezes it's probably an 8-iron....

More as the week progresses.  Check back early and often. 

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