Monday Finish

An extremely late arrival at the keyboard, but I sorta, half-heartedly promised to wrap it today.  The delay was unfortunately not result of life-forms in my lap, I just slept later than I have since the Carter administration.  Appropriate, no, since on a global basis we seem committed to reliving those Carter years....

All I can say is, that was really fun!  I know folks are taking their shots at it, I'll add a couple of my own, but your humble blogger found it unbelievably entertaining.  I also think there's an important lesson to be drawn from the week, and I'll likely beat you over the head with that a few times.  Shall we dive in?

While Geoff's Quad post is paywalled, he includes a generous tease, with which I'll lead:

It started off with such promise.

I think it was a month ago when Commissioner Jay Monahan confidently took back the leverage,

put the ball in Phil Mickelson’s court, and set the stage for fans to focus on the 2022 Players Championship.

If only the week could have ended then.

Draw a line through this one if you’re looking for a harbinger in a year the men’s game has a Masters approaching and stellar venues ahead. Send extra beer to the maintenance facility for Jeff Potts and crew. Salute Cameron Smith for winning and Anirban Lahiri for hanging in.

A harbinger of what, exactly?   To me it was a gloriously chaotic week, one that tested players in unusual ways.  We'll talk about that leaderboard, but people seem to forget it's an outdoor game over which the authorities have limited control.

That’s the best way to remember a dealt a heaping mix of rain, wind and cold on the worst of all

possible days: Thursday and Friday.

Even Monday’s not-forecasted final round downpour merely confirmed the jinx status for this Players. The radar when skies opened up for ten minutes on the leaders:

The high-rough setup reinforced the tendency of a March Players to not tell us much about Masters form. Advocates for more tall stuff to slow down distance won’t want to look at Smith’s stats. Still, we’ll start with the worthy winner, then get to other stuff like the move from May, player notes, the Gold Man debacle and TV notes.

First of all, not by any stretch the worst possible days, because your humble blogger was on an airplane on Thursday and busy on Friday....  What, it's not all about me?  I might need a second opinion on that.

Secondly, I wish I could find a similar weather map from a Thursday tweet.  There was a 300-mile band of nasty weather over Jacksonville, and it was the only bad weather over the entire lower 48.  So, yeah, localized to the wazoo....

I mostly agree with Geoff about the rough, although that inevitably entails a discussion of how to keeps the guys from shooting 57's, perhaps best left to another time.  I'll just note the early wave on Thursday, who played in optimal scoring conditions, wherein no one went lower than -6.  

Shall we sample from the Tour Confidential panel?  Sorry, that was rhetorical...

1. After five days of stop-and-start golf at rain-soaked, windblown TPC Sawgrass, Cameron Smith finally prevailed at the Players Championship, closing out his career-biggest win with a gutsy tee shot to four feet on the watery par-3 17th hole followed by a shaky bogey on the par-4 closer. What jumps out at you about how Smith took down what is the strongest field in golf?

Michael Bamberger: I knew he was good but never appreciated him at close range before. Love the way he goes about his business, the no-fuss decisiveness, the rhythm with every club, most especially putter.

Zephyr Melton: The oldest cliche in golf says “Drive for show, putt for dough,” and today, Smith proved it to be true. His performance on the greens was so impressive all day, and he closed it out with eight one-putts over his final nine holes. Putt for dough indeed ($3.6 million, to be exact).

Alan Bastable: Those last three holes will stick with me, in particular the sniped tee shot at 16 (par), the stuffed (but blocked) tee shot at 17 (birdie) and the unfathomable punch-out water ball on 18 (bogey). It wasn’t exactly a slam-the-door finish, but then again, he made just about every putt of consequence. Guy is a ruthless assassin on the greens.

Josh Sens: Putting has always been Smith’s strength and it was again this week. But you don’t win an event like this without a tough mindset. Smith showed that. That tee shot on 17 was pushed, for sure, but he was still playing an aggressive line. And then he pulls driver on 18 when he could have easily played a safer shot. Lots of confidence and swagger. I’d expect no less from a man bold enough to wear that mullet and ‘stache.

Dylan Dethier: The best putters in the world aren’t necessarily on the PGA Tour, but once you narrow down golfers based on elite ball striking ability (the true determinant of Tour pros) then the best and hottest putters will dominate. This week Cameron Smith was both an elite irons players and whatever is better than elite with his putter. He set the record for strokes gained putting at TPC Sawgrass while also ranking fifth in the field approaching the green. That more than offset an uneven performance with his driver. This is all a long way of saying that Smith blew my mind with his Sunday putting performance and I couldn’t believe where he hit his tee shot on No. 17.

​​James Colgan: What jumps out to me is how bold it was. Smith never backed down from a shot — including the ones he definitely should have backed down from (17, 18 tee). I’m not sure if that makes him a genius or just very lucky, but I was impressed by his fearlessness.

OK, you say potato....wait, wrong blog.

You say confidence and swag, I say rank stupidity.... Pulling driver on No. 18 with three-shot lead is about as idiotic as one can imagine.  There's just no way that shot is not pushed, especially after the smother-hook on No. 16.  Did he not have a caddie?  Just look at the golf hole and see how much room he has for an iron or hybrid, versus threading the needle with the big boy.  Lahiri had not putted on No. 17 when Smith teed off on No. 18, but the only way he can lose is if he makes a six.  Which club off the tee does he maximize his chances of making six?  The question answers itself...

But, Dylan, where do you think the best putters in the world are found?  Back to Geoff:

🔥 Cameron Smith - A 71st hole birdie was his tenth of the round. Smith said “he would be lying” if he didn’t admit he pushed the tee shot, then saved bogey at the 18th for his biggest victory. His putts per round: 27-23-27-23. Smith finished the week first in strokes gained putting picking up 11.52 strokes on the field. High rough advocates to reward accuracy? Smith finished 68th of 70 players in strokes gained off the tee, losing -5.189 strokes to the field. Smith was a 22-1 favorite for the Masters prior to the start of the Players. He’s bound to move up given the T2 and T10 in his last two trips up Magnolia Lane.

He averaged 25 putts per 18!  And he needed every single one of them.... Yes, of course he pushed the tee shot on No.17, but let's not forget that he also pured it.  Hold that thought....

Now let's get to that teachable moment I referenced above:

2. The top end of the leaderboard was notable for its lack of star power; a host of big names — Collin Morikawa, Patrick Cantlay and Jordan Spieth among them — didn’t even make the cut. Was the surprising leaderboard more a result of the challenging, uneven conditions or merely the big guns not bringing their best stuff?

Melton: Golfers are creatures of habit, and this week’s routine was anything but ordinary. I’m willing to chalk it up to the stop-and-start nature of the event, combined with brutal conditions when they actually did get to play.

Sens: A combo, I’d say. The draw was huge this week, obviously. But as Justin Thomas showed us, it was possible to slog through the brutal weather if you were at your absolute best. Spieth, to cite one example, looked like he was searching for something that might have been missing even in good weather. Conditions were nasty. But I doubt any of those guys who missed the cut would blame the weather alone for how they finished.

Dethier: I think they actually would have a fair case to blame the weather. The very worst micro-wave (fun term!) to be in was essentially playing No. 17 at the very beginning of play on Saturday. That meant Brooks Koepka, Xander Schauffele and Scottie Scheffler in one group; it meant Collin Morikawa, Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas in the next. Koepka, Schauffele and Morikawa missed the cut, while McIlroy and Scheffler made it on the number. We can praise Thomas’ superhuman efforts while also acknowledge his compatriots got the absolute worst of the weather.

Bamberger: More than I can ever remember before at Sawgrass, you had to drive it in play and hit an iron hole high and pitch it and chip it with finesse. It was a time-machine tournament.

​​Bastable: And we thought Bay Hill would be the toughest test on the FLA Swing! What a two-week stretch. It was so fun to watch the guys have to manufacture shots, and as Bamberger suggests, a taste of what a tech rollback might look like. Intriguing, right?

Colgan: Honestly, I think it was a matter of expectation. Golf’s best players expected a firm, fast test, and they were too slow to adjust to the uber soft, slow conditions that greeted them. To Dylan’s point though, the tee times did them ZERO favors.

First, just for amusement, let's relive that Saturday start when Scheffler's group started on No. 17, which was just the ultimate cold open.  Then turned around and had to experience Groundhog Day 2 1/2 hours later.  A tough draw for sure.

A minor point about the draw this week that I can't resolve.  It seems logical that some of the best players in the world would get caught in the nastiness, I'm just not clear on why ALL of them seemed to.   The question I've posed, but am unable to answer, is whether the longer TV window resulted in the alpha dogs all being in the middle of the pack, thereby uniquely whacking them all, at least as compared to a run-of-the-mill Tour event.

One of the points I have made repeatedly about the Phil-Saudi Axis of Evil is that it's a horrible vision for our game.  People are naturally predisposed to wanting to see Tiger v. Phil, ignoring the fact that it's out of character for our game, in the same way that the FedEx Cup is inauthentic.

Here's your final results:

Were this a Premiere/Super/Bonecutter League event, Cam Smith would not have had any need to get up-and-in from the water on No. 18 to secure the biggest win of his life, for the simple reason that Anirban Lahiri would have been watching at home.  As would Keegan and Doug and Sepp and, look, I'm too lazy to look each of these guys in the OWGR.

Simple fact about our game is that a 48-player field is not a serious golf event.  We love and play a crazy game, but without a deep field it's a borderline exhibition.  Awkwardly, that rule applies as well a certain event in Georgia, but let's not harsh our mellow right now.  

Back to Geoff for his comments on the aforementioned No. 322-ranked player in the world:

Anirban Lahiri - His four starts coming into the Players: MC-MC-MC-T74 capped off by a final round 82 at Bay Hill. The 34-year-old came to town ranked 322nd in the world and leaves with a second place finish, $2.18 million and a projected rise to 89th in the world.

I know nobody turns on their TV to see Lahiri, but that's the inherent drama that our game provides.  Seeing that world ranking, this answers my first question:

Lahiri, who hails from India, is 34 years old, and he has status on the PGA Tour this season after finishing in the top 125 in the prior season's FedEx Cup points list.

I'll come away surprised that, regardless of how poorly one plays, that he could drop that precipitously that quickly....

You'll want to talk a little seventeen, won't you?

3. When the conditions were at their wildest, windiest and wettest, the famed 17th hole gave players fits; on Golf Channel, Brandel Chamblee argued that, in strong winds, the hole becomes unfair, because there is too much luck (or bad luck) in play. Did this week change your opinion, for better or for worse, of one of the game’s most iconic holes?

Bamberger: It’s an odd one-off hole. It’s terrible and fun. My opinion didn’t change. I wouldn’t want it on my home course. But at this point in the proceedings, it’s earned its place in the game. It’s embedded in the culture of golf and, like the over-the-top fans in Phoenix, has not inspired a lot or really any notable copy-cat behavior. If you had to, you could chip one off the tee and play an 80-yard second. Or figure out some way to keep it dry.

Yeah, I think that's an apt comparison and framework to appreciate the hole, about which I've always had these very mixed feelings. 

Melton: I thought the chaos was lovely. Carnage is fun!

But I think this from Josh Sens is spot on: 

Sens: If you believe that great designs should offer options, then the 17th has never been a great

hole. But it’s always been an entertaining hole, and this week maybe more than ever. It has actually seemed more unfair to me in some years past, when the green was kept so firm and the collar so shaved down that many good shots bounced off the green into the water or spun back in the drink. This week, at least, it was all nature’s doing. I’m willing to call a course setup unfair. Bad weather is just the luck of the draw.

Bastable: Right. Love me some Brandel, but not this take. He was stuck on the notion that random wind gusts could unfairly punish otherwise well struck shots. Well, yeah, but that’s the nature of golf, whether you’re playing an island-green par-3 or a coast-hugging par-5. Mother Nature is as much an opponent as the other 143 players in the field. It’s a cruel, unfair game. Ask Paul Casey.

Dethier: The hole is what it is. There’s no redesigning it; it’s an island green. And the entire point of the island green is that sometimes, guys will hit the water instead of the island. I thought that watching golfers try to flight different types of shots into the wind made for incredible theater. I was also glad it wasn’t me out there. It didn’t look fun and it wasn’t always fair, but that’s the game.

Colgan: As a kid growing up in the Tiger era, the 17th at Sawgrass was one of the few holes I knew by heart, and one of the first I wanted to see with my own eyes. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize its architectural significance leaves a lot to be desired, but let’s let kids be kids.

There's a reason that Tom Doak calls "Fairness" the F-word.  But the point I'd like to reinforces is how many God-awful golf shots were struck under these trying conditions.  It turns out that you can take Touring professionals out of their comfort zone and make them mishit the ball, and I'd like to see this more often.  

4. What Players Championship storyline didn’t get the attention it deserved?

Bamberger: Shane Lowry’s ball-toss. What an arm!

C'mon, didn't he grow up playing baseball like we all did. 

Melton: The sheer absurdity that was the Golden Trophy man reenacting the “Better than Most” putt on the telecast. Wild to see what’s possible with modern tech.

Sens: The fact that I had HIdeki Matsuyama in my pool and his back gave out on him. Talk about unfair!

Dethier: The fact that Keegan Bradley played such spectacular golf that he was arguably the best in the field through 70 holes were it not for an extremely bizarre two-stroke penalty. Also the fact that Dustin Johnson went from 59th to 9th in the final round with a nine-under 63.

Colgan: Knew you’d find a way to reference Keeg here somewhere, Dylan. Anirban Lahiri gets my vote. He played impossibly tough golf over two very long days at a laughably unforgiving golf course, and he didn’t even lose the golf tournament — he got beat. Made a fan out of me and much more importantly, $2.2 million in the process. Good for Anirban.

Do we think Anirban has heard from Greg Norman in the last 24 hours?

I did elide one answer from the bit above, because it highlights my favorite moment of the week:

Bastable: It’ll get more attention in the coming days and weeks but the drama around the Daniel Berger drop was delicious. It’s unclear from the footage where his ball crossed the hazard line on 16 so all we’ve got is one player’s word (Berger’s) vs. two (Viktor Hovland’s and, to lesser a degree, Joel Dahmen’s). You can expect more litigation on this matter, and please, please, give us a Berger-Hovland singles match in Rome.

Geoff has a full post on this at his blog, including this:

Another rules incident was reported but not shown on NBC’s broadcast of the Players, this time involving Daniel Berger being openly questioned by playing partners Joel Dahmen and Viktor Hovland.

It would have been tough to go into great depth with the tournament coming down to the last few holes and Berger having fallen out of contention. Still, this uncomfortable one comes on the heal of similar sticky situations at Bay Hill the previous week.

Thanks to PGA Tour Live and a more progressive Tour posting such things, you can view the Berger shot and lengthy discussion between the three, joined too by chief referee Gary Young who ultimately left things up to the players.

 And this graphic:

This is not in the category of transparently bad drops such as Sung Kang or Tiger on the 14th at Sawgrass in 2013, though there is an amusing bit player in this saga.

Here's Berger:

"I've never taken a bad drop in my life and I’m not about to take one now"

A fellow is gonna bristle when his integrity is questioned, but could we agree to add the word "knowingly"?  There's no reason to think Berger was trying to get away with anything, so let's not think it.

Here's Viktor:

Both Berger and Dahmen declined to speak to the media after the round, but Hovland answered a few questions on the subject.

“It’s not a fun conversation, but when you strongly believe in something, you kind of have to stand your ground,” Hovland said. “It’s not like we’re trying to dog on Daniel and trying to screw him over. It’s just, that’s what we believe, and he obviously felt strongly the other way. It’s just what it is. I’m not accusing him of anything. The golf ball is in the air for a couple seconds, so it’s tough to exactly pinpoint where it crossed and not. But Joel and I saw it in one way and he saw it differently.”

The presence of Joel Dahmen is delightfully ironic, given his involvement with the far more egregious Sung Kang drop a few years back.  Though it does seem that Hovland was the more assertive this time.

My larger point is that this is what Viktor is required to do, given what he thinks he saw.  He has an affirmative obligation to protect the field, and if Berger doesn't see it that way he can pound sand.  I've ben frequently distressed that the modern player, and I'm talking to you, Justin Thomas, doesn't seem to understand their obligations herein.

This one seems to feature transparency, which is never a bad thing:

At least in this case there were social media postings by the PGA Tour sharing the episode and a close viewing would suggest both sides scored legitimate points. The video evidence supports Berger’s belief and ShotLink may lean a bit toward Dahmen and Hovland’s view. That we got to see it via social media is progress and in a weird way, the transparency seems beneficial to all of the players.

This account I find strangely intriguing, accounting for the back-and-forth among the three players.  It sounds to me as if they were all trying to do the right thing, so I do hope no one is pouting in the aftermath.  But in the Sung Kang matter I thought the Tour referee abdicated in his responsibility, basically allowing Kang to do whatever he wanted.  You could call this abdication as well, but I actually think it's the right approach, unless the TV coverage was definitive:

Young was of little help in settling the matter, placing the responsibility on the players to reach consensus and trying to broker a compromise. “You guys had the best angle on it, so you’ll have to decide that amongst yourself like you normally would,” he said.

I think it was well adjudicated.  Sure the b aby got split, but life is messy and imperfect, but I'd be pleased to rehash this over a beer with all three of the gents.

 That's it for today.  Not sure of the blogging schedule going forward, but check back early and often.