In so many ways it's been a kidney stone of a year, so no sepia-toned, wistful reminisces to be found. We don't focus on statistics much here at Unplayable Lies, but this will be my 164th post of the year (and final, presumably), which seems not half-bad for a guy fighting blogger burnout.
We'll spend just a little time amusing ourselves with the various year-end efforts of the golfing press, with a preview of 2022 in certain cases. I'll hope to be with you on Monday (content permitting), but then I'm off to get my ski season started.
The Year That Was - We seem to have moved past the big picture, sweeping odes to 2021, with the most recent offerings being more personal recollections and notebook dumps. Shall we sample a few? First, from the AP's Doug Ferguson, including this from the "Don't Know Much About History" files:
Any trip to Torrey Pines is sure to bring memories of the Junior World Championship, no matter the pedigree of golfer.
David Winkle of Hambric Sports, who manages Dustin Johnson, was 14 when he played the Junior World at Torrey. He missed the cut, but a friend from Dallas was a top junior and in contention, so Winkle stayed to watch. His friend played the final round with Nathaniel Crosby, whose father was in the gallery.Winkle scrolled through his phone and found the photo of him standing next to Bing Crosby, looking smooth as ever in a red cardigan.The photo made the rounds in the media center at the U.S. Open, and one of the younger scribes showed his age. After he finally recognized Winkle with a full head of hair, he asked, “Who’s the guy in the sweater?”
Dissing Der Bingle around the holidays seems so very wrong.... But couldn't you have included the photo, Doug?
Eamon Lynch also has some vignettes, but have very much a 2022 focus to them:
A few weeks later, the PGA Tour faced a reckoning with its new reality, even if the organization shows no outward sign of having grasped the importance of what happened that Sunday afternoon at Torrey Pines. It was hardly shocking that Patrick Reed acted as his own rules official on the way to winning the Farmers Insurance Open, lifting a ball he claimed was embedded before an actual rules official could arrive to deliver a verdict. Video evidence was inconclusive, but far from exculpatory, so PointsBet—an official gaming partner of the Tour—refunded wagers.The scrutiny that comes with legalized sports betting is at odds with the Tour’s generous attitude to questionable on-course conduct by its members, a benevolence long personified by the now-departed rules honcho Slugger White, the Mrs. Doubtfire of the nanny state. An insistence that concerned parties are gentlemen, or a reliance on artful wording about intent, is no defense against punters who are convinced that video evidence tells a different story. When it happens again—and it will—the Tour is woefully ill-equipped for the firestorm. Reed’s ball drop will have ramifications that linger well beyond that other ball drop next week in Times Square.
Fair enough, although I think this is actually a twofer. The Tour in general has long taken a position that the public has no right to know of any disciplinary actions taken, most famously captured by the infamous DJ Jet-ski accident/coke bender. I'll spare you the rant here, but the logic seems to be that we should take their word that the players re all gentlemen (an improbable assertion as relates to PReed), and ignore our own lyin' eyes.
I do agree with Eamon that legalized sports gambling is an awkward fit with the game, and that PointsBet story should absolutely be setting off alarm bells in Ponte Vedra Beach, though I still think the bigger risk going forward is the unique proximity of golf fans to the action and the resulting ability/probability of attempts to influence outcomes.
He points his considerable intellect at the biggest pending story in the game as well, though I can't help but think that he's missing the bigger points:
One thing changed this year with the Saudi Arabian government’s effort to hijack professional golf. They recruited a front man, Greg Norman, who drops vapid jargon and false equivalencies as freely as his employer does missiles on Yemeni civilians. But two things haven’t changed: the proposed Super Golf League still hasn’t signed any players, and the scheme is still solely about normalizing the image of a regime that exhibits contempt for human rights.This reckoning will continue in 2022 and beyond. Oil grants the specter enviable staying power. If nothing else, the Saudis are offering a reminder that the values on which golf prides itself—integrity, honor, respectability—are not immutable, but must be defended against charlatans and chiselers, some of whom are card-carrying members of the PGA Tour.
The problem with critiquing this initiative based upon character references for the Saudis and/or Greg Norman is quite obvious, to wit, that those two entities could be removed from the mix and the same problems remain. The Premiere/Super/Bonecutter League is a horrible vision for our game regardless of whether it's fronted by Brits or Saudis or topless Aussies, and if you disagree then tell me how it differs from twenty years of WGCs?
Mike Bamberger trods the same ground in his offering:
Thirty years ago, the 1992 field at the Pebble Beach AT&T Pro-Am included Mark O’Meara (thewinner in a playoff), Jeff Sluman, Steve Elkington, Paul Azinger, Tom Watson, Ben Crenshaw, Raymond Floyd, Fuzzy Zoeller, Payne Stewart, Lanny Wadkins — and Greg Norman.Yes, of course, all these name players were in the field. It was Pebble Beach, golf’s most celebrated pro-am. You couldn’t make more money playing anywhere else that week, and you might get some good business advice along the way. They came because they were professional golfers. There aren’t many job titles that are preceded by an adjective, but professional golfer is one of them. Pro golfers have followed the money forever.And that’s what will be happening in five weeks, when the Saudi International will be played the same week as the AT&T at Pebble Beach. The Saudi International will look confusingly like a PGA Tour event. The PGA Tour, not happily, has given releases — permission slips, really — to an extraordinary number of name-brand Tour pros to play in the event.Among the American players in the Saudi field are Bryson DeChambeau, Jason Dufner, Dustin Johnson, Jason Kokrak, Phil Mickelson, Kevin Na, Xander Schauffele, Harold Varner and Bubba Watson.
He goes on and on in this vein, and it's all fair game up to a point. But there's a whole world of things omitted that bear on those circumstances in February. First, mike completely ignores what's become of the Clambake, featuring 5 1/2 hour rounds with C-list celebs and worse.
But secondly, this is also an inevitable result of Jay (and Nurse Ratched before him) extending the PGA's calendar beyond reason, leaving no recognizable off-season or room for other tours to operate.
This is also a little silly:
Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, is fighting fire with fire, for now. The Tour has announced that the total purse for all PGA Tour events in 2022 will be $60 million higher than it was in 2021, up to $427 million, from $367 million.(The Tour did not say where the money is coming from, except to say it was in the Tour’s “reserves.”)
Everyone but Mike is aware that new TV contracts have kicked in, so purse increases have been in the cards for some time.
And here he veers dangerously close to a significant point, though pulls back before saying anything dangerous:
In professional golf, money always leads the way. We, the community of golf fans, pay all the bills. There’s nothing really new here.But you could also make the case that a bomb will drop on professional golf before too long here. Because when it’s all said and done, golf is a niche sport with a small following and small supply of elite professional golfers. There’s just not that much supply to go around. How many active, male professional golfers are there in the world that ordinary fans have some kind of emotional investment in? Not more than 100 and likely not even close to that.Tiger Woods likes to say that Father Time is undefeated. Supply and demand is, too.
A much deeper dive on the demand side might be interesting. Because, even with the backing wind of the pandemic driving us to the golf course, golf remains a truly niche sport. You look at those puny ratings and think about the Saudis pumping $200 million into the woebegone Asian Tour, and the payoff seems... well, dubious? Stay tuned.
We touched on gambling above, and in a year-end freebie Quadrilateral post, Geoff has truly depressing news for those already burned out by the commercials, including this excerpt from The Information's Sahil Patel (just realized it's paywalled):
“What’s gonna happen in the next few years is you’ll see a push by sportsbooks to get more efficient with their marketing spending,” said Raphael Poplock, senior vice president of businessdevelopment and strategic partnerships for Bleacher Report, a sports media site owned by WarnerMedia. “There is a reason why a lot of these books are acquisitive, and it’s because they want to build their own ecosystem…and be less dependent on media companies to drive scale and audience.”Sports betting companies will spend $1.2 billion in the U.S. on marketing designed to sign up new customers in 2021, up from about $500 million last year, with that figure expected to grow to $2.1 billion next year, according to a top sports media and marketing investor. Such customer acquisition–focused marketing typically involves performance advertising, which is designed to get users to perform an action, such as downloading an app or clicking affiliate links within editorial content, leading to betting services.
I guess Mike Bamberger can stop wondering where the cash is coming from.... But so much for watching golf live. Here's Geoff's bottom line:
So what does this mean for golf? I’ve lost track of the Tour’s various betting partnerships and certainly am not privy to how media deals work with the major organizations. But to date we’ve only seen Augusta National keep gambling ads off its surrounding broadcasts. Or maybe CBS, ESPN and Golf Channel just assume it’s wise too not poke a Green Coat until Fred Ridley’s seen playing the Laughlin slots and praising the joys of Pai Gow Poker. Call it wacky, but something tells me that’s not happening.According to Sports Business Journal, the NFL has caved to gambling ads this year but restricted its partners to showing no more than one betting spot per quarter, one during the pregame, and one at halftime. Given golf’s Nuke LaLoosh approach to betting so far, don’t expect to see NFL-like restraint.
Can you say TIVO?
Lastly in this vein, Golf Digest's year-end quiz. Your humble blogger got 18 out of twenty correct.
Care for some actual news?
We Have A Winner - More accurately, we have a guy claiming that he's won the Big Kahuna:
— Phil Mickelson (@PhilMickelson) December 29, 2021
Maybe, as Eamon throws a little shade:
Among the issues this presents:
Meanwhile, Collin Morikawa is a dream-demo Open Championship winner, dignified user of social media, and player-of-the-year candidate who will reportedly finish 11th and miss out on last place’s $3 million. Millennials rise up!
Yeah, we don't do dignified any more.... That full top ten will be an eye-opener.
New Course Preview - We're not building many golf courses these days, but both Golf Magazine and Golfweek have articles previewing new courses to open in 2022. You'll be shocked...shocked, I tell you, to know which one has your humble blogger's attention:
THE LIDONekoosa, WIThe allure of the Lido, a long-lost Macdonald-Raynor masterwork on the shores of Long Island, has inspired two projects. The first, Ballyshear, a Lido tribute by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, opened to member play this fall in Thailand. For State-side golfers, though, the simpler trip will be the Sand Barrens of central Wisconsin, where Chris and Mike Keiser Jr. (the siblings behind Sand Valley), have commissioned Tom Doak to build a faithful reproduction, a clone of the original, complete with all the template holes but minus the ocean. Thirteen holes will be open to member play July 1 and all 18 by fall for member and resort guest play. (Note: though the course is private, limited times will be set aside for Sand Valley resort guests.)
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