Late-Week Laments

Happy to be back on skis, though not the best conditions as it's far too warm.  But good to be out in the fresh air and making turns, even though barely a handful felt competent.  I'm not quite as self-critical of my skiing as of my golf, which makes sense considering the absence of the dreaded pencil.

The wife of a good ski buddy works at Park City Hospital and, upon leaving one night, found a few friends waiting for her:

For those effete Eastern intellectuals, that would be a herd of elk.  I've heard talk of moose being visible off one of the lifts, but haven't yet seen for my ownself.

Maui Mishegoss -  Oh, I had it on the tube last night just for those views, though hard to work up any real interest in it:

Our long national nightmare is over, for the days of golf-less Sundays are at last in the rearview mirror. The PGA Tour returned from its holiday slumber on a board-of-tourism day in Hawaii, the type that makes you wonder why you live in a place that snows—and that makes you curse the COVID gods for keeping you confined to your Maui hotel room. Okay, maybe that’s just me.

In more pertinent matters, here are five takeaways from the Sentry Tournament of Champions—which, after one year of letting in all Tour Championship qualifiers, is back to being a truly winners-only event.

If your humble blogger whining about mountain conditions is rightly considered a first-world problem, what do we call a complaint about the PGA Tour's hour-and-half off-season?   

We shouldn't be drawing takeaways from 18-holes after weeks off, but if I had to pick one....

Jon Rahm, Patrick Cantlay showed zero signs of rust

A number of top players essentially skipped the fall season—including Jon Rahm, who explained on Tuesday that his two-month break was prompted not just by his rollercoaster 2021 but an 18-month stretch of hectic golf. After missing the cut in his native Spain, he headed back home to Arizona to spend time with his wife and baby boy, Kepa. During that familial stretch he nearly lost his World No. 1 ranking to Collin Morikawa, only for the young American to stumble down the stretch at the Hero World Challenge to remain at No. 2.

Rahm looks keen on fending off Morikawa for at least one more week. He displayed zero signs of rust in shooting a bogey-free seven-under 66 on Thursday. It was an encouraging start to the year for a player who has sky-high expectations—both from himself and the media—for 2022.

Patrick Cantlay has not played a PGA Tour event since “winning” the Tour Championship and collecting the $15 million FedEx Cup grand prize in September. He hardly played during the break and, as is his habit, stayed completely off the radar by reading books on his couch. After an opening bogey on Thursday he too kicked it into midseason form, playing his last 17 in eight under to post 66. Nice to return from a long layoff and be greeted by the widest fairways on tour.

The commentary crew was, alas, in mid-season form, with an interminable, inane conversation about whether or not the Tour would devolve into a rivalry between the top two players in the world.  There's little case to be made that those two, Rahm and Morikawa, have separated from the pack to that extent, but then they blather on about "Rory could make a run" and I go scrambling for the Mute button.... Good times.

If there is any significance to this week, it's that it ushers in the Model Local Rule era:

Shack goes deep on this subject in a freebie Quad post, including this on the more significant of the two restrictions now in place:

But this week’s changes deliver a monumental line of demarcation in two ways: the two-inch difference in driver shaft maximum length is designed by the governing bodies to get ahead of a

players going to 48-inch drivers. And a local rule on what kind of information players can access on the greens was the idea of some leading players after the governing bodies could not go all the way and eliminate the painful over-reliance on arrow-filled cheat sheets to read putts.

In a document prepared for players with the full support of the PGA Tour’s Player Advisory Council, the green book ban’s rationale was clear:

“The purpose of this Model Local Rule is to return to a position where players and caddies use their skill and judgment, along with any information gained through experience, preparation and practice to read the line of play on the putting green.”

That’s a pretty big deal. Especially since the green reading rule could impact the play of those hooked on the books. There could also be monitoring issues for the rules staff as players adapt to the local rule. A worst-case scenario could see a player accuse another of using disallowed books or topography info copied from a banned source.

I think so to, and am especially happy that the players asserted themselves on this issue.  We don't always applaud their instincts, think JT and backstopping, but this is a positive in your humble blogger's view.

Saudi Shenanigans - That early February date will be good fun, as it turns out that players seem to like those large appearance fees.  We have this from the continent formerly known as Europe:

The DP World Tour – the recently rebranded European Tour – will grant permission to players to take part in the controversial Saudi International next month following weeks of intense negotiations.

By the Monday deadline, between 30 and 40 members of the tour had requested releases to play in the Asian Tour-run event near Jeddah, from 3 February. It is sponsored by the Saudi public investment fund and carries huge appearance fees.

The Saudi International has publicised a field including players such as Paul Casey, Tommy Fleetwood, Sergio García, Tyrrell Hatton, Shane Lowry, Henrik Stenson, Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood. All required DP World Tour grace. It remains to be seen how seriously, if at all, Stenson’s Saudi involvement harms his aspirations of being Europe’s 2023 Ryder Cup captain. Whether or not top golfers are independent traders or bound by membership criteria of tours has been the subject of much debate.

Obviously this has many layers of amusement, not least being that as recently as yesterday this was a Euro Tour event.  Sparing no effort, I took a look at that Tour's website which yielded two interesting facts:

1. The Tour that shall not be named actually has an event that week, the Ras al Khaimah Championship presented by Phoenix Capital, so it's good to know that Keith Pelley learned how to take care of his sponsors at the knees of Nurse Ratched and Kubla Jay.
2. The URL for the DP World Tour remains europeantour.com.  You guys might want to do something about that...

The field strength metrics for the three events that week figures to be awfully embarrassing for two of those tours....

At his blog, Geoff compiles a series of comments from those in Maui that seem to echo the same talking points.  First, Jordan:

So I think for us players on the PGA TOUR, I think that so far it's been something that has kind of helped the PGA TOUR sit and say, hey, where can we look to satisfy our membership and potentially make some changes going forward that, where there's some similarities potentially to a league like that, but while maintaining kind of the integrity, the 501(C)(6) category that the PGA TOUR has.

And I think that going forward, I mean, I guess we'll have to see. But for me to sit here and -- I mean, I can only say from my point of view I think that it's been beneficial to the players to have competition, and I think the TOUR would say that they probably feel that they're in a better position going forward by having to sit back and kind of take a look at things and make some changes.

Then Justin:

I think the idea is healthy for the, it's healthy, could be healthy for the TOUR. I think two competing tours is not healthy for golf, if that makes sense.

I think if the idea of other competition and other tours or whatever happening, I think is a good opportunity for the TOUR to kind of maybe sit back and us players sit back to realize what can we do better on our TOUR and then make our product better, versus having two competing tours to me is not good because you're diluting the product on both sides and it's just not, you're not going to get the best -- it's not possible to get the best players in the world on both tours. They're either going to be one or the other or a little bit of both.

 Got it.  Competition is good, except when it isn't...

But the funniest piece is by someone named Bob Svrulga (Vanna, I'd like to buy a vowel), a sports columnist at the Washington Post, who has harsh words for those heading to the Kingdom:

The stars who assemble in Saudi Arabia — and it’s currently a group that includes Mickelson, the six-time major champion, as well as Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Sergio García — are doing so for the paychecks, which will reportedly be enormous just for showing up. There’s no disguising the fact that it’s blood money.

I understand that Sergio is only going because of his love of their greens.... Anyone remember that?

He takes some well-aimed shots at Mr. Norman as well:

Here’s Norman, in a November interview with Golf Digest within days of his announcement, immediately trying to distance the PIF from the brutalities inflicted by bin Salman.

“[The PIF is] obviously a commercial operation,” Norman said. “They’re very autonomous. They make investment decisions all around the world. They’ve invested in major U.S. corporations because of commercial reasons. They invested in LIV Golf Investments for a commercial opportunity. They’re passionate about the game of golf.”

He’s a self-serving snake-oil salesman but worse. Don’t trust him. Rather, listen to Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a nonprofit that promotes democracy and human rights throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

“The notion that the PIF is some independent financial authority that isn’t used to carry out murders and assassinations at the beck and call of Mohammed bin Salman is just patently untrue,” Whitson said by phone. “He does and has been using the PIF as a fig leaf, as a cover, as an intermediate step between his face on things and Saudi Arabia’s face on things.”

We've been down this path many times, but the lack of self-awareness continues to piss off your humble blogger.   Everything they say about the Wahhabis is true, and always has been.  But where have these people been all those years that the Euro Tour hosted this event.  Where is the criticism of Keith Pelley?

But they can't get this out of their minds, but they ignore their own role in it:

To anyone who doubts that, remember the origination of DAWN, the organization Whitson, a former executive at Human Rights Watch, now leads. The group was founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian journalist and dissident who became a columnist for The Washington Post in 2017.

Khashoggi was a thoughtful and relentless critic of bin Salman and the Saudi government. In October 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his impending marriage. He was murdered and most likely dismembered. His body has never been returned to his family. The CIA concluded that bin Salman ordered the killing.

This guy actually works for WaPo, and can only describe Kashoggi as a "columnist"?  Really, is there anything else about those columns that perhaps we should know:

Slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s Washington Post columns were “shaped” by an executive at the Qatar Foundation, an entity funded directly by the Qatari regime which is at odds with Saudi Arabia, according to an article published by the Post on Saturday revealed.

“Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government,” a statement in the article read.

Although the published article insinuates the Post’s opinion editor doesn’t envision a conflict of interest, such a matter is highly likely to go against the Post’s ethics and policies guideline that is published on its own website, it reads:

“We do not accept payment – either honoraria or expenses – from governments, government-funded organizations, groups of government officials, political groups or organizations that take positions on controversial issues.”

“A reporter or editor also cannot accept payment from any person, company or organization that he or she covers. And we should avoid accepting money from individuals, companies, trade associations or organizations that lobby government or otherwise try to influence issues the newspaper covers…”

And this is only the tip of the iceberg that WaPo admits to...

and please remember, none of these columns have been retracted.  WaPo is apparently in the business of publishing Qatari intelligence talking points, so forgive me if I don't care what they think about golf.

The Saudis are a noxious regime, and always have been.  Alas, so is the Washington Post.

 On that cheerful note, I must leave you.  Blogging will be on a "as I feel like it" basis, as I expect to watch more football than golf this weekend.