Late-Week Lamentations

For the record, this is four posts this week, a summer high.  And while I remain skeptical as the the the ability of Olympic Golf to grow the game, it does seem to have had a positive effect on this little blog, which I'm sure you'll agree is the far more important bit.

Olympic Fever - Golf and typhoons are an awkward fit, and this is the best I can come up with for an update on the men's event:

Play was suspended with sixteen players still on the course, mots notably including the local favorite.  If I were a betting man, I'd wager a few shekels that Mito Pereira will regress to the norm quite harshly...

Olympic golf, I've decided, is like spinach...  There's nothing tasty or enjoyable about it, but folks won't relent from nattering on about how good it is for us.  Here's a sample from Alistair Tait, a man who really should know better:

Rory McIlroy never stood over a putt as a child and thought this is to win an Olympic gold medal. Future generations might do just that, especially future generations of Irish youngsters if McIlroy can add a gold medal to the four major trophies he has in his trophy cabinet.

The former world number one is playing in this Olympic Games after missing out five years ago in Rio de Janeiro. McIlroy joined Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson, Adam Scott, Jason Day and other big names on the side lines in 2016 when golf made its return to the Olympic family after a 112-year absence.

Justine Rose didn’t mind: the top stars’ absence it made it easier for him to get his hands on the gold medal. Henrik Stenson picked up silver while Matt Kuchar won bronze. Only time will tell where Rose’s gold medal ranks against his 2013 U.S. Open victory. One thing’s for sure: a bigger sporting audience will recognise the medal he picked up in Brazil more than the one he earned at Merion.

There's a lot to unpack here, though it's hard to get past Rose's joy at being indistinguishable from Patrick Reed's wife.  Though perhaps the most curious bit is Tait's contention that Rory "missed out" in 2016....  Just something that happened to him, I guess.  

I think Rory deserves a modicum of credit for being there, when he clearly doesn't want to be:

"I am doing it because I think it is the right thing to do. I missed it last time, and for golf to be an Olympic sport, you need your best players there. I feel like I want to represent the game of golf more than anything else.''

And that ignores his rather unique decision as to the flag under which he'll march, but I just think bits like this are profoundly silly:

Still, well done to McIlroy for doing his bit to help grow the game by actually playing in the Olympics. Too bad others missing this week don’t see the bigger picture.

Fact is, Rory can help grow golf just by playing in the Games. He can inspire kids to add Olympic gold to their wish lists. Why wouldn’t they? In fact, why would any athlete pass up the chance to win an Olympic medal?

Ummm, because it's a profoundly silly competition?  The contention seems to be that some cave-dweller in , fill in the third-world country of your choice, will happen across Olympic golf and pick up a stick and.... Of course, that guy (or girl) will not be watching the golf, because the Olympics are about swimming, track & field and the like.

Mike Bamberger is a man I turn to for an historical take on our game, and he tries really hard here:

Olympic golf needs to look less like the majors and more like golf’s greatest team event

Olympic golf would do better to takes its cues not from Olympic tennis or weightlifting or boxing, but from Olympic basketball, Olympic water polo, Olympic volleyball. Sports in which the individual is subjugated in the name of team. Every week on Tour, no matter how often Jordan Spieth uses the word we, it’s really about me, me, me. That’s professional golf’s greatness and its weakness. The greatness of the Ryder Cup, of course, is that it is about team.

So, golf should pattern itself after water polo and basketball, which are not now nor have they ever been individual sports...Is Mike actually arguing that there shouldn't be individual medals in Olympic Golf?  That's certainly a minority position...

Unfortunately, while Mike asserts that the event should take its cues from the Ryder Cup, his actual proposal ignores everything we've learned from the Ryder Cup and other team events:

At the Olympics, you could have 30 countries send two two-person teams. Sixty men, 60 women. Each two-person team would play better-ball golf for four days. Yes, better-ball, aka best ball. A game we all know and love. You don’t even have an individual score in better-ball golf, not a meaningful or true one. It’s all about team.

On that basis, Team Austria shot a first-round 61 in Tokyo. Try writing that down, on your piece of paper.

The Paris Games will be here before you know it, but I don’t know if three years is enough time for the IOC.

Mike apparently wants to fix Olympic golf by making it worse... First and foremost, he wants to exclude more American and South Korean golfers and replace them with more players ranked 433rd in the world.  Well played, Mike.

More importantly, team stroke play might be better than that which we have, but only marginally.  Have you watched the Zurich the last few years?  That event only gets interesting when we force the players into the awkward alternate shot, and even that is barely interesting.

Mike references his colleague Dylan Dethier's proposal, which is moderately better than Mike's (and which we blogger earlier in the week):

The individual competition remains the same. Three medals are awarded on each side as each the men and women play 72 holes of stroke play. But there’s an additional team competition, and it’s

modeled after the college game: Four scores (two men, two women) but you take the three highest at day’s end to produce the team total.

This model addresses all three issues raised above. While it’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, it’s imaginative in that it’s unlike anything else we see every four years. For a sport that talks about growing the women’s game, there’s something powerful in packaging the two competitions together, and because of field size it’s a rare tournament week that would allow it to happen.

Dylan has proven an important point, that something can be technically true yet completely misleading.

In this case, it's his citation of the NCAA's, where he completely misses the point.  He is correct that they play stroke play, but for a purpose.  The stroke play team event qualifies the schools into the match-play team competition, and that's where the magic is to be found.

If you're citing the college model, you might actually want to highlight the good part.  The trick here, and Geoff had a far better format suggestion, which does actually follow the NCAA format reasonably closely.  But isn't it funny how people think the Ryder Cup rocks because it's team golf, whereas the frisson comes from it being team match play, a very different animal.

So, why don't we have a better format?  Golf.com reposts this item in which Chief Inspector Dawson explains:

In an interview with “insidethegames,” Dawson touched on all aspects Olympic golf, including

the question most on the minds of golf fans: why the sport opted not to pursue a Ryder Cup-style team format.

“[The International Olympic Committee] wanted the format in the Olympic Games that was prevalent in the sport, not some fancy format for the Olympics,” Dawson said. “And stroke play is the way that golf largely determines its major champions.”

In Dawson’s telling to “insidethegames,” the IOC wanted Olympic golf to be representative of the overwhelming majority of the sport’s events. In other words, the IOC wanted one thing: stroke play.

Doesn't that sound high-minded?  In reality, these IOC blowhards only cared about golf not taking up too many hotel rooms, and most of the negotiation involved making them understand why the guys needed their luggage toters.  

Yet here I actually agree with the IOC kleptocrats:

“They also made it clear, and this is maybe a subject of ongoing discussion, that they don’t want team sports that are simply the addition of individual performances,” Dawson said. “For example, football is a team sport, where everyone interacts. It’s not just the addition of performances, although some sports in the Olympics are still like that and have been for a while.

And that was your opening to put team match play on the table, but you couldn't be bothered...

Even richer is this, which really tells us all we need to know:

The Olympic Committee’s objections weren’t the only issues in implementing a team format. Equally difficult was negotiating a schedule gap to allow for Olympic competition with each of the major professional tours.

Even if the IGF managed to secure approval for a second team-based event (mirroring events like swimming, track-and-field and gymnastics), getting the professional tours to agree to a two-week work stoppage was unlikely.

“We didn’t have the option in the bidding process of putting a team format together,” Dawson said. “And Tours didn’t want to stop play for two weeks for the Olympics, they wanted to stop for one week. So there wasn’t time for a separate team event.”

All these poseurs telling us that the Olympics are critical to the growth of our game prove unwilling to sacrifice any of their goodies for the cause.  To paraphrase Glenn Reynold's take on climate change, I'll believe that Olympic golf is important when those telling me it's important act as it is important.  Oh, and just a reminder, while the PGA Tour is dark this week, in 2016 they played the John Deere in competition to the Rio men's event.

It's On - No formal declaration of war has been issued, but that's where we seem to be:

The PGA Tour will refuse to allow some of its biggest stars to play in the controversial Saudi International tournament next year, Golfweek has learned. PGA Tour members must obtain a

waiver to compete on other circuits and the Tour has signaled to managers that permission will not be granted because the Saudi event is no longer sanctioned by the European Tour, which also plans to deny permits for its members to compete.

The move will be seen as an escalation in a battle for the future of professional golf that pits the PGA and European tours against the Saudi government, which has been pushing a Super Golf League concept that would lure elite players to a breakaway tour with guaranteed paydays of up to $30 million.

Asked to confirm that releases will not be given to players for the Saudi tournament, a PGA Tour spokesperson replied: “You are correct. This follows a PGA Tour longstanding policy of not granting releases to unsanctioned events.”

The buried lede is the prior action of the Euro Tour to no longer sanction the event, though one assumes that the remainder of their Middle East swing would remain intact.  But the Euro Tour is best understood these days as a vassal state, obeying orders issued from Ponte Vedra Beach.

There's two aspects of interest, one of which Geoff ledes with:

On the groundbreaking news of Jason Kokrak’s signing with Golf Saudi, his hopes of collecting an appearance fee may be in doubt.

That seemed especially odd at the time, even without this further news.  But he's not the only our player that seems out of sync with  the powers that be:

“However, given that Dustin has played in the event the past three years and would be returning as their defending champion, I have no doubt he would be quite disappointed if the Tour potentially denied his release.

“I also think it is important to note that he is in a unique position, having played in the tournament since its inception and has, without question, helped put golf on the map in the Kingdom,” Winkle added. “In doing so, I hope he has helped grow the game in a region where golf is still a relatively new thing.”

I don't think that's gonna happen, but the guys will bitterly cling to those large appearance fees.

Interestingly, having been spurned by the Euro Tour, the Saudis have apparently found someone willing to cash their checks:

Multiple sources told Golfweek that the 2022 Saudi International could be conducted under the aegis of the Asian Tour, which is headquartered in Singapore. The Saudis recently made a significant investment in the Asian Tour — ball-parked by two sources at $100 million — in an effort to gain traction for their global ambitions in golf. When asked if waivers would be granted to players if the Saudi International is officially sanctioned by the Asian Tour, a PGA Tour spokesperson responded, “We’d prefer not to speak to hypotheticals on matters pertaining to PGA Tour regulations.”

Specifics on the Saudi investment in the Asian Tour have not been announced by either party. One golf industry executive with extensive ties to the Asian market believes the deal will likely involve guaranteeing purses at a number of regular Asian Tour stops (the prize funds of which are typically around $1 million) with the goal of eventually holding several highly lucrative events for elite stars, with purses in the $15-$20 million range.

Your move, Jay.

Shark Sightings -  So, the topless one hit my radar a few days back, and I was prepared to ignore it mostly because it related to a prior story I had blogged.  We've had our fun with Norman's penchant for over-sharing his topless photos with the public, but apparently he's just a natural kind of guy:

Natural seems to be the key word, except when it isn't.  Today come news of his latest golf course design project, mercifully in a galaxy far far away:

Champion golfer Greg Norman has announced plans to build a golf course shaped like a great white shark.

Norman's company, Greg Norman Golf Course Design, signed a formal agreement for the project on Wednesday with Dean Lukin Jr, the son of gold-medal winning weightlifter and ex-tuna fisherman, Dean Lukin.

I'm sure that we can all agree that nothing screams "natural" quite like a golf course artificially designed to mimic your nickname...

Of course, he'll have to go some to be competitive with Desmond Muirhead, whose "Clashing Rocks" design at Stone Harbor remains the leader in the clubhouse:

Testing Blues - The shame is that this will come as surprise to people, but why are we doing this to ourselves?

More maddening to Rahm is searching for answers on why this happened to him.

“I haven’t had two experts tell me the same thing,” he said.

Andy Levinson, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president who has overseen the COVID-19 protocols, was not involved in any of Rahm’s tests and hasn’t spoken to him. From his experience and working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he said it sounded like what the tour dealt with last summer.

Some players still tested positive for weeks — sometimes months — after 10 days of isolation and no symptoms.

“The reason the CDC does not require someone to test again after 10 days of isolation is it’s very likely that for some period the test is going to detect remnant viral particles,” said Levinson, who also is head of USA Golf at the Olympics.

It's quite obvious that certain folks are invested in keeping us freaked out about this virus, even though Jon Rahm is no threat to transmit the disease (especially on a golf course in the great outdoors).  Yet we continue to use tests with excessive sensitivity, and continue to freak out over positive tests, which quite clearly signify nothing of importance.

I'm now going to try to connect this with the Simone Biles/Naomi Osaka stories, though this might be a bit of a stretch.  here's Rory talking about those other situations:

McIlroy knows about the weight of expectations. He knows what it’s like to be anointed young royalty of a small sport with an avid following and he knows what it’s like to live up to that hype. He knows what it’s like to fall short, too. And he knows what it’s like to have a group of fervent supporters and to try to keep them happy, all the time. To his point, that doesn’t mean he knows what it’s like to be Simone Biles. But he knows enough to offer his unequivocal support for her decision to bow out of competition at this year’s Games.

“Just as I thought Naomi Osaka was right to do what she did at the French Open and take that time off and get herself in the right place, I 100% percent agree with what Simone is doing as well,” he said. “I mean, you have to put yourself in the best position physically and mentally to be at your best and if you don’t feel like you’re at that or you’re in that position then you’re going to have to make those decisions, and I’m certainly very impressed with especially those two women to do what they did and put themselves first.”

First and foremost, I see little in common in the Osaka and Biles' stories.  The common thread though, to the extent there is one, is of excessive emotional fragility, which is not something we expect to see from our hardened athletic heroes.

I have little sympathy for Biles, though that comes out sounding harsher than I intend.  I of course have tremendous sympathy for the pressure and weight of the world that was inevitably on her shoulders, but as the gymnastics GOAT, isn't she supposed to be a warrior?  I get that she ran into issues with her twisties, but athletes suck it up and perform as best they can in the moment.  All Biles accomplished, in my rather harsh judgment, was to let down her teammates.

I have even less sympathy for Naomi Osaka, who seemed to feel that she could perform only that part of the job she liked.  I found her accusations against the media hard to credit, given the extent to which she preened for the media at the U.S. Open, parroting the Antifa and Black Lives Matter nonsense.  So, apparently the media is just fine when they act as stenographers for your juvenile virtue signaling, but not when you actually have to submit to an interview about your tennis.  

Forgive the rant, but in all these stories I see a generation that seems unable to accept the most basic risks of life, those that we naturally incur in our daily existence.  The implications for sports are rather minor, we'll just ask these two ladies to clear the stage for those that are willing and able to accept the terms of competition.  But the implications for society at large are to me especially troubling...

That's a bit of a downer on which to finish but, as the wise man said, it is what it is.  Have a great weekend and we'll catch up on things on Monday.