Thursday Threads

The trip to Utah got cancelled yesterday, so shall we go deep on the Shark Shootout?  Yeah, didn't think so, though that one Silly Season event just got a little more interesting.

He's In - No doubt you've heard the news, Charlie is back:

TIGER WOODS TO PLAY 2021 PNC CHAMPIONSHIP

ORLANDO, Dec. 8, 2021 - Tiger Woods has confirmed he will return to competitive golf next week at the 2021 PNC Championship, taking place at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club Orlando, Grande Lakes,

Dec. 16-19.

Woods will partner with his son Charlie as they return to the PNC Championship for a second time, having finished tied for seventh place in 2020.

Woods commented, “Although it’s been a long and challenging year, I am very excited to close it out by competing in the PNC Championship with my son Charlie. I’m playing as a Dad and couldn’t be more excited and proud.”

There's a wider range of reactions than one might expect, including this from Morning Read's Mike Purkey that mirrors some of my own concerns (though note that it was obviously penned before the news was official):

So, before you go all breathless about the likelihood or even the possibility of Tiger playing next

weekend, inhale slowly, breathe deeply and consider harsh reality. He’s 9-½ months removed from a car crash that could have easily taken his life and apparently, the odds were only slightly in his favor to keep his right leg, in which the tibia and fibula were pulverized, from being amputated. Doctors, even some who were treating him, feared he might not walk normally again, if at all.

"Does it feel like a risk when you make a swing?" NBC’s David Feherty asked.

"It has before, but if I go at it at what I would say like my old speed, yes, it is," Woods said.

What would make him go at his old speed?  Wouldn't take much in the way of trash talk from Justin Thomas or Charlie, no?

"Playing hit-and-giggle golf, it’s easy," Tiger said cryptically at his press conference last Tuesday in the Bahamas, leading viewers to believe that the PNC qualifies as hit-and-giggle. "You can slap it around, hop in a cart and do whatever. Play nine holes, six holes, pick up, whatever, hit a bad shot, eh, I’ll hit another one, no big deal. But playing Tour golf and being prepared to play and try and shoot scores against the best players on the toughest golf courses then that’s a totally different deal. And I am a long way away from that. So, don’t expect me to be out there at the Tour level for quite some time."

A few holes at home with his buddies while he’s recovering might be reasonable to expect.

However, it seems beyond the realm of realism to believe that Woods would play golf in front of a gallery and millions of television viewers and look like a dollar-store version of his old self. His endless ego and pride wouldn’t stand for that for a single televised minute.

 And yet, here we are....  

The risks far outweigh the benefits. Besides, it would appear there’s only one benefit and it’s not Charlie’s opportunity to play in the PNC. If Tiger does something, even accidentally — stepping into an unseen hole or a sprinkler head — that causes damage to his fragile leg, not only could golf be out of his future but a normal life, as well.

And Charlie wouldn’t be able to play in the PNC until he has a 12-year-old son or daughter.

Gee, Mike, why are you limiting it to only those two genders?

Mike Bamberger came at it from amore conventional perspective.  His first piece on the subject included this amusing ranking:

With all due respect to the gentlefolk at Global Home, the PGA Tour’s gleaming new HQ off A1A in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., here’s a top-9 list* with street cred, a ranking of golf’s biggest events, men’s division:

1. The Masters.
2. The Ryder Cup.
3. The British Open.
4. The U.S. Open.
5. The PNC Championship (aka, The Parents & Kids & Assorted Others Invitational).
6. The PGA Championship.
7. The Players Championship.
8. The Presidents Cup.
9. The Hero World Challenge.

Now, like your humble blogger, you might be curious about that asterisk which, pays off here:

You can call this PNC Championship a casual golfing get-together, and it is. But it’s a competitive golf tournament, too. It’s as important as you make it. It’s on our top-9 tournament list (winking emoji HERE*) not because it’s an important golf competition but because it involves an important competitive golfer. This is a major event because Tiger will care, and because we will, too.

 Which is exactly the concern of Mike Purkey and my ownself.... Mike also had this second piece:

The Tiger Woods Comeback Tour couldn’t start in a more optimal setting

Why?  Well, he's got three basic reasons...

1. The Format

This is a big one. The format for the PNC is a two-round team scramble. That means (1) Tiger will need to play only 36 holes, and (2) He won’t even necessarily need to play every hole in its

entirety. In a scramble, each player hits a shot and then you take the best of those two balls and play your next shot from there, following that routine all the way into the hole. If Charlie, who presumably will be playing from the forward tees as he did last year, busts a drive, leaving he and his father in fine position, Tiger could elect to go without a tee shot and simply start his hole from the middle of the fairway.

On the NBC broadcast from the Hero World Challenge last week, Steve Sands said that at last year’s PNC, Team Woods used Charlie’s tee shot on 15 or 16 holes, or about 44 percent of them. Leaning on Charlie’s tee shots and taking driver out of Tiger’s hands would help take some of the proverbial weight off Dad’s shoulders — and literal weight off his aching leg.

Yeah, but even Charlie will hit a few snarky ones...  though most folks forget that Tiger wasn't in good shape last year.  In fact, he had his fourth highly-successful back surgery shortly after the event.

Yeah, they'll take care of him as best they can:

2. The Rules (or lack thereof)

The PNC Championship ain’t the PGA Championship. With a wide breadth of skills and ages

playing in the event, tournament organizers need to be flexible. Witness the medley of tees which the PNC field employed in 2020. Greg Norman, Nick Price and Bernhard Langer played a shorter course than more youthful players in the field. Annika Sorenstam played shorter tees still, while four other players played from even further up: Gary Player, Lee Trevino, Jackie Langer and Charlie Woods.

Could the event make tee accommodations for Tiger? Certainly.

“Every year we consult with the PGA Tour rules officials and we try to make it as fair and competitive as possible and so we’ll work through that situation in the coming days,” Teo Sodeman, the PNC Championship tournament director, told the Golf Channel on Wednesday.

Also, you can almost certainly expect to see Woods in a cart, something that would, of course, not be available to him in a standard PGA Tour event. It’s worth remembering that to this point in his recovery, we’ve only seen Woods in short bursts: a wedge swing there, a press conference there. What we’ve seen and heard has been remarkable, but we’ll learn a lot more when we observe him over an extended period — like, say, 18 holes. There will be all kinds of tells: how he paces across a green, whether he bends over to collect his ball (look for Charlie to handle that duty), how he interacts with the fans. There is much to celebrate with Tiger’s return to competition but we’d all be wise to keep reminding ourselves that Woods is still in the nascent stages of his recovery.

 Whatever.  

Shall be allocate some pixels to the naysayers?   Alistair Tait sets the scene:

Next week, a 45-year-old man and his 12-year-old son will play in a fun, end of year, silly season tournament and the world of golf go will absolutely bonkers.

Yet again.

There are great parent child teams in next week’s PNC at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club Orlando. Women’s world number one Nelly Korda plays with dad Petr, the 1998 Australian Open champion. Justin Thomas teams up with father and coach Mike. John Daly and son Little John play together. Lee Trevino and son Daniel, and on it goes.

It’s questionable whether any of the other duos will get much airtime given all eyes will be focussed on Woods and wee Charlie, just as they were 12 months ago. In fact, quite why organisers have invited the other tandems is a mystery. They’d probably get away with just televising Tiger and Charlie playing together and many golf fans might not bat an eyelid.

Kind of begs for featured group coverage, no?

But here's Alistair's point:

Which leads me to ask: Will the Tiger Woods bubble ever burst?

I might be an exception, but the insatiable thirst for Tiger Woods stories, any stories, baffles me. We saw it on the Sunday of the DP World Tour Championship, Dubai. A three-second video of Tiger hitting a wedge shot with the words, “making progress” went viral. Golf media outlets probably gave more coverage of that three-second video than they gave to Colin Morikawa becoming the first American to win the Race to Dubai, or Jin Young Ko hitting 63 straight greens to win the CME Group Tour Championship.

It’s always been thus. TV and website coverage of Woods is sometimes so over the top in many tournaments, even when he’s playing poorly, you wonder if some players in the original draw have pulled out given they get so little coverage.

My old employer Golfweek would sometimes plaster Woods on all four frames of the home screen on the website. I sat in several “think tank” meetings where we had sessions on how do we get more Tiger Woods stories on the site? Once again, any Tiger Woods story.

To me, the appeal doesn't require much explanation, though I think he errs in not appreciating that, at least in this case, the fascination includes Charlie as well as Pops.

I do agree that the Tiger-mania is excessive at times, and will inevitably push other stories to the periphery.  But that's the nature of manias, and Alistair's own media is pretty damn culpable as well (which is obviously part of his point).  

My media criticism is less about the fawning coverage as it is about their failure to cover other aspects of Tiger.  Geoff, in this freebie Quadrilateral post, links to a Phil Mushnik piece with this qualified recommendation:

Phil Mushnick, as only he can, slaughters the golf media for its handling of Tiger Woods’ accident. He raises plenty of legitimate points but also lets his loathing of Woods get the best of legit criticisms.

Still...

Last week Woods reemerged to face the media he had conditioned to ask only fawning questions in exchange for same-old-stuff quotes. Reporters had long ago been trained to kiss his fanny at the risk of losing access. Yet this time someone had the temerity to ask Woods to explain what the heck happened in his latest, highly suspicious car-driving saga, from February.

Woods went suddenly sour: “All those answers have been answered in the investigation, so you can read about all that there in the police report.”

No you can’t. The investigation and ensuing report raised far more questions than it answered. For starters, was a legit investigation conducted by California law enforcement as would apply to you and I, or was it given the quick brush on behalf of the one and only Tiger Woods?

I guess you could say he let his loathing get in the way, or you could just remind folks of what an a*****e Tiger could be.  Because this isn't the first such incident:

After all, Woods had previously pleaded guilty to reckless driving when he was found in a drug stupor behind the wheel of his Mercedes in Florida. Hard for Los Angeles cops to miss it; it was in all the papers.

Yet the California authorities failed to administer a blood test that commoners who have inexplicably driven off the road at high speed — over 80 in a 45 mph zone — would have undertaken. Why was Woods issued a free pass, especially given his driving-while-impaired record?

Note the difference between Florida and California... 

Phil does go deep on another story that's never gotten fully investif=gated:

Consider: A since-arrested, convicted for illegal drug-dispensing and defrocked miracle cure doctor from Canada was frequently flown to Woods’ home in Florida to treat his aches and pains.

What was that all about? No one — not the PGA, not the golf media and certainly not the Tiger-reliant TV networks —would dare pursue that one. Woods has been schooled to expect such entitlements and privileges.

The simple facts are that Tiger has now twice behaved on public roads in manner that quite clearly endangers the public.   That he feels no need to explain and express contrition tells me everything I need to know about him.  Others are free to draw their own conclusions.  But the fact that no member of the golf or sports media has attempted to fill in the missing pieces of this story also tells us everything we need to know about them...

GTG - The Backlash - It's easy pickings, but we're seeing some folks (Geoff, but also others) call BS on using the hackneyed "Grow the Game" to rationalize pretty much anything they want to do.  We had Eamon Lynch on this subject on Tuesday, and today we have Bubba justifying his Saudi appearance fee:

Q. Just your thoughts on you're on the list for the Saudi Arabia tournament and obviously a lot of players are just waiting to see what happens or what the Tour says. How are you approaching that part of it?

BUBBA WATSON: Yeah, it's one of those things where I love to travel and I wanted to travel somewhere else.

And Saudi Arabia, they're trying to change.

They started with women's golf, started supporting the women's golf and then they started supporting men's golf. There's women's tournaments already that they sponsor. Trying to grow the game.

They're trying to change industry over there, bring golf, bring tourism to Saudi Arabia with the beautiful beaches that they already have.

It will be interesting to go over there and play, but also see the beauty of other parts of the world that God's created. I can't wait to get over there.

I elided a series of  LOLs and ROFLs that Geoff used to indicate his profound respect for Bubba's thoughts, though this point is of a more substantive nature:

Okay this is not funny now. Someone needs to convey to Mr. Bubba that in the eyes of those paying him lavishly to come see their country, his God did not create those beautiful beaches. And they don’t really like his God. At all.

Well, there is that....

As I've noted frequently, I think we'd all be better off if we'd just give up the notion that these guys are some kind of moral exemplars... For instance, the folks squawking about Bubba playing in Saudi seem to have no issue with him playing in China....   

but anything that punctures the rampant use of "Grow the Game" for the most dubious of activities is an unmitigated good.

End It, Don't Mend It - Shockingly, the Brooksie-Bryson beatdown drew a reasonable audience:

All the numbers are in from the various places The Match V aired—including NHLN and the dreaded TruTV we only use in March—and Brooks Koepka against Bryson DeChambeau did more than fine.

According to Paulsen at Sports Media Watch, the final tally across all platforms gave them an increase in viewership...

— averaged 1.2 million viewers across TBS, TNT, TruTV and NHLN, up 13% from last year’s Black Friday edition (1.0M). Compared to the previous edition of “The Match” in July, viewership fell 29% from 1.7 million.

The July Match is a different beast due to the pandemic, but the increase over Phil Mickelson with Curry, Manning and Barkley is a win for Turner.

Or at least reasonable compared to Tour ratings for Sea Island....

Nick Piastowski has five ways to improve the product, which range for the dubious to the more dubious.  You can decide about his lede idea:

Real money on the line

To date, the Match has been played for charity. And we’re not suggesting that change. It’s one of the best parts. But how about this fix: Instead of sponsor money, make it the player’s own cash. You want Bryson and Brooks looking a little more lively? Ten million bucks would heat things up quickly.

We’ve heard tales of the cash games that are played during practice rounds. (If you believe the stories, they are practically Mickelson’s second job.) And even among the celebrity set.

I don't think that first one was for charity, was it?

But these guys playing for their own money?  Yeah, that's a good one...

But here's a workable premise, maybe:

‘If two 15-handicappers played for $1 million, would you tune in and watch?’

The final thought is one you’ve seen before on these pages, but still is worth considering. Last year, our Alan Bastable pitched the following idea:

“A network announces tryouts for a new reality show for golfers of ‘average’ talent — say, somewhere in the 13 to 17 handicap range. Through that process, the producers identify a couple of players of nearly identical ability and with big personalities that would play well on TV. Weeks later, boom! The producers surprise the two finalists at their homes and tell them that they have 24 hours to meet at the Pebble Beach pro shop. (Any brand-name course would work, but we’re aiming high.)

“Fast-forward a day and the players roll into Pebble looking bewildered. No range time, no practice putts, nothing. Next stop: 1st tee, which is enclosed by a packed grandstand (we’re assuming a post-Covid timeframe). Cameras are everywhere. When they arrive on the box, the contestants are informed that they are about to play one another in match play — for $1 million. Life-changing money. Winner takes all. Oohs, aahs, dropped jaws. But that’s not all! The first-tee announcer reveals that each player will be captained by either Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson, who at that moment stroll on to the tee. Coin flip decides who will captain whom, with another million bucks going to the winning captain’s charity of choice.

“To make things even more interesting, the captains will also serve as lifelines. The players may elect to have their captain step in and play any six shots on each side (with a maximum of three tee shots per nine).”

Why does this work so well? One of the best parts of the second Match was when one of the greatest of all-time, Tom Brady, looked like one of the worst, as he sent shots flying every which way and ripped the backside of his pants down the middle. He was relatable. This concept would no doubt have that.

Please excuse the obscenely long excerpt, but I though the fun was in how long he went with the fever dream.

They have now had five of these puppies and. to this observer, there were exactly two interesting moments:

1. Phil coaching Charles Barkley around the course, and;
2. Tom Brady sucking beyond our imagination.

The amateurs are far more interesting than the pros, though I'm not actually convinced (Like Nick) that that's a sustainable strategy absent Sir Charles.  Even Brady wasn't very interesting to listen to, though the split in his pants was a major bonus.  But unknown amateurs with big personalities?  Yeah, that's the ticket!

I shall leave you to begin your day.  Blogging will likely be on an as-needed basis for the next week or so, though we'll flood the zone for the PNC.