Like you, I'd mush rather dissect that Bills-Vikings game, but I hear talk that golf was also played....
Houston, We Have a Problem - Not Big Tone, though I'm always happen to have my lexicon expanded. For instance, I'll confess this one was new to me:
Tony Finau boat races field, wins 2022 Cadence Bank Houston Open for fifth PGA Tour title
Hmmm, boat raced? Turns out it's a thing:
To be beaten very badly at something, especially in such a fashion that you were behind from the start and never had a chance. Comes from the Boat Race, an annual rowing competition between Oxford and Cambridge, in which the first side to get ahead can move to the middle of the river (where the current is fastest) and is almost never overtaken thereafter.
My Newspeak Dictionary has been updated accordingly. In any event:
Tony Finau came into the 2022 Cadence Bank Houston Open off a missed cut last week in Mexico in his first start of the season. He said he didn’t take any time off and continued to practice to knock off rust in an effort to bounce back.And did he ever find his form.Finau led or co-led after every round, and kept distance from the field during the final round Sunday at Memorial Park Golf Course. Finau captured the fifth PGA Tour title of his career Sunday, finishing at 16 under and winning by four strokes.After winning only once in his first 188 starts on Tour, Finau has now won four times in his past 30 starts and three times in his past seven.
You'll see references to this being his third win of the year, but that's based upon the archaic Gregorian calendar long ignored by the Tour, although amusingly they've finally come to that realization. Of course, insights are all well and good, though you'll have noticed that the Tour still hasn't committed to a program after August 2023. Which is the impetus for my header:
‘Houston should be worried’: PGA Tour’s new fall plans raise thorny questions
Though that headline writer seems to have lost the plot. It's not that the Tour's Fall plans raise questions, it's that the Tour has no Fall plans, rather a bit tricky for certain sponsors.
The PGA Tour’s announced new non-wraparound schedule and the tentative future of fall Tour events collided this week at the 75th anniversary of the Cadence Bank Houston Open, leaving both players and tournament organizers unsure about how the event will look and when it will be conducted going forward.“I don’t think it’s going to go well,” PGA Tour veteran and Texas native Ryan Palmer said about the Tour’s new schedule. “It hard to tell what it will be like. I know Vegas is worried about the fall, Mexico is worried about the fall and Houston should be worried.”With the PGA Tour’s announcement that it will resume a traditional yearly schedule starting in January 2024, it’s unclear what will happen to fall events like Houston — the second-oldest Tour event in Texas, dating back to the 1940s — in the gap that comes after the Tour Championship in August 2023.
But here's where the story gest weird, at least to this observer. Just a little background, though, because this event has some actual history, as you'll see plenty of references to it being the 75th Cadence Bank Houston Open. Setting aside the typical hilarity about retroactive sponsorships, they've also returned the event to Memorial Park, a public venue that hosted the Houston Open fourteen times from the 1940's into the 1960's, and for which I'm willing to ignore the involvement of the dreaded Astros Foundation.
So, what to do now that the Tour has effed you? The usual:
All the schedule drama is not lost on Giles Kibbe, the president of the Astros Golf Foundation, which has conducted the event since 2018. That’s the year Shell dropped out as title sponsor and the sponsoring Houston Golf Association left as well, surrendering its prime spring date.“Our goal has always been to bring it back to the spring, it still is,” he said. “We are being patient, more patient than we want to be, really, but I still think it’s going to happen. We’re pushing to do it.”The Houston Open’s path back to the spring is complicated by two factors. The first is financial: A prime spring date could come with a demand to jump from the current purse, which is just more than $8.4 million, to between $12 to $20 million in the spring. But Kibbe said that would be doable.
When you say, "always", Mr. Kibbe, I'm guessing that you're unfamiliar with the meaning thereof:
The second issue is a 2018 decision Houston Astros owner Jim Crane and the golf foundation made, which could call for a mulligan.“We are first started talking with Tour, they didn’t offer us any specific dates, but it was clear to us we could have an early summer date if we wanted to,” Kibbe said. “We made the decision to go to the fall instead of early summer and we feel like we made the right decision. It’s just too hot.”The date went to the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit, a PGA Tour event whose success has come with the Houston event still in the fall, on the outside looking in.
Yowzer! Can you say self-inflicted wound? You chose poorly, but maybe if you bang on a few garbage cans, Jay will hear you.
Just a very few years ago, this event was the week before the Masters, remember all that happy h******t about the course set-up mimicking that of Augusta? This might fall more on Shell, but they ceded that date to San Antonio and voluntarily chose the wasteland of November over the heat of May. Well played, guys!. There will be Spring dates available, just eyeball all those non-elevated events, but that's a path to oblivion. Does Crane have the phone number for the Folks at Korn Ferry?
Whoa, Nelly! - It's been quite the wacky season for the ladies, but this was nice to see:
It’s been exactly a year since Nelly Korda won on the LPGA, winning the Pelican Women’sChampionship last year as part of four-win season that included her first major and, on top of all of that, she won the Olympic gold medal.Defending her Pelican crown this year was a completely different experience for Korda. Instead of continuing her dominating play from 2021, she was unexpectedly forced to stop competing back in February. A blood clot was discovered in her arm and it required surgery. She was sidelined for four months and she had not been able to find the winner's circle since her return.That is, until Sunday at Pelican Golf Club in Bellair, Fla.
As 2022 dawned, it was clearly teed up to be an epic struggle for primacy between Nelly and Jin Young Ko, until it wasn't. Nelly got a bit emotional, but who can begrudge her that sense of relief:
“You talked about how scary it was earlier in this year,” Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols began on Sunday after the Pelican. “Could you give us a little insight into what was the scariest moment of the whole ordeal with the blood clot?”“Just not knowing,” Korda said. “Honestly, the uncertainty of everything. Obviously you get diagnosed, and I didn’t know much about it. Like obviously knew I had a blood clot, but didn’t know what the next step was.“For me, the uncertainty of that was the scariest. As a golfer, I feel like my life is planned out. I know where I’m going next, I know what to do next, or you would hope to know, but just getting hit with something like this and just not knowing what to do or what my next step was.”
It's always shocking when something like this happens to someone so young and seemingly invulnerable. But this has to be a huge relief to the LPGA folks, teeing up 2023 with quite the revitalized cast. Of course, with LIV hogging the air supply, it's not clear who will even notice....
LIV Follies - When last we visited the circus, rumors were flying about a certain shirtless Aussie. After we went to press, assurance was received that there's nothing to see here:
LIV Golf representatives are denying a report that said CEO and commissioner Greg Norman could be moved to a different role with a former golf company executive taking over his chief executive duties.The Telegraph reported that former TaylorMade CEO Mark King has been discussed as a possibility for the CEO role, with Norman to be moved “upstairs.’’King became president of TaylorMade in 1999 and in 2014 became president of Adidas Group. He is currently CEO of Taco Bell Corporation."Greg Norman is our CEO and Commissioner. Any suggestion that changes are being made to Greg's title or role is patently false," said Majed Al-Sorour, LIV's managing director.
There's no shortage of amusement to be found in our Great White Pilot Fish twisting in the wind. While Friday's rumors seemed to indicate that he might be fired, it's actually even funnier with the introduction of the concept that the Saudis would kick him upstairs, which one could tastelessly say is what they did to Jamal Kashoggi (no reports on whether there were 72 virgins awaiting).
But a couple of curious takes are to be found here as well. The first obvious question is, why would the Saudis be unhappy with Sharkie's performance?
But Norman has been criticized for his handling of some matters, including downplaying human rights issues associated with Saudi Arabia—the benefactors for LIV Golf. He’s also been combative at times, as he pushed for his league to get World Ranking points.
But isn't that exactly what he was hired to do? To the extent that he angered the Saudis, this report gets it exactly backwards, his crime might be more i8n even mentioning the Kashoggi murder. The question I keep asking is whether the Wahabis like what they're getting for their $2 billion large, a rather different issue.
The second question has always been about his over-promising to the players that defected, most notably his assurance that the Jay wouldn't or couldn't suspend the players.
I also found this bit amusing:
Norman for years has pushed for player freedom, with the right to compete outside of PGA Tour minimums wherever and whenever they want. The PGA Tour requires its members to play 15 events and also agree to get releases to play conflicting tournaments around the world.
Oh, is that what Norman's been promoting all these years? Mostly he's bene promoting Greg Norman, but whatever.... But he seems to have taken time out from his advocacy of player freedom to be CEO of a new tour that requires players to show up at each and every one of their events.... I get it, it's only freedom from Ponte Vedra Beach that's his defining cause.
That last sentence seems curious, as well, at least to this observer. Any interest in explaining why the PGA Tour does those things? They really seem to go the great efforts to avoid the unpleasant fact that those rules of association are the basis on which sponsors put up the big money. A really curious omission given the ironclad requirements of LIV.
Reminds me of the world's oldest joke, here attributed to George Bernard Shaw:
Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?Actress: My goodness. Well, I'd certainly think about it.Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound?Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!Shaw: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.
Got, it, we're just haggling over the price....
Fortunately for bloggers, Pat Perez a man with no filter, has been out and about, shooting off his mouth. First, he takes on the Big Cat, and actually makes some decent points, though I don't think he does himself or LIV any favors. First, a reminder of Tiger's comments:
Perez, one of golf’s more outspoken pros, offered several thoughts this week on the Son of a Butch podcast, hosted by Claude Harmon III, Perez’s swing coach, though most centered on LIV, the sixth-month-old Saudi-backed series. And one comment came in response to a Woods critique in late July at the Open Championship. There, Woods was asked what he thought of players being “tempted” to play for LIV, and he gave about a 450-word response.As part of it, Woods questioned players’ incentive should they join LIV, which, unlike the established PGA Tour, offers its players guaranteed money, regardless of finish.“But what these players are doing for guaranteed money, what is the incentive to practice?” Woods said. “What is the incentive to go out there and earn it in the dirt? You’re just getting paid a lot of money up front and playing a few events and playing 54 holes. They’re playing blaring music and have all these atmospheres that are different.”
Pretty funny name for a podcast, I have to agree....
Pat, are you sure you want to respond quite like this?
“That’s the stupidest s**t I have ever heard of in my life,” Perez said. “That’s one of the stupidest things I think he has said. The incentive is the fact that last place is 120,000, first place is four million. You cannot win four million on the PGA Tour. Now, next year you might; they finally got the perks. But last time I checked, he signed a $40 million deal right out of college, was flying on the Nike jet. He found incentive. He could have shut it down right then.
Again, he's got reasonable arguments that there's always been guaranteed money in golf, but this is weirdly personal:
“He had a lot of guarantees. You know what, and he was the hottest thing. He’s made so much money off the course, he found incentive to go. But again, he only played how many tournaments. He didn’t go — I never saw him at John Deere, never saw him supporting all these events. He played in the majors, he played in the WGCs and that was it. He played Torrey. Never played Riv. But he’s worth every dime. In fact, like I said, he’s two billion short of where he should be, I think.”
I'm sorry, you're concerned that Tiger never went to Quad Cities?
But what is the case that Tiger is $2 billion short? There was that Sportico study showing Tiger as the second highest paid athlete of all time, behind only Michael Jordan, and Pat acknowledges the Nike deal and plane.
But the larger issue is that these guys continually talking about the money is so horribly off-putting, especially since they weren't exactly paupers before the Saudis arrived. Sometimes it's helpful to sit back and ask yourself, why do they hate me? In Pat's case, the answer is contained herin, the unofficial slogan of LIV Golf:
“Yeah, all the push-back, all the negative comments, everything we’ve gotten, at this point I really don’t care,” he said. “I mean, I don’t care. I’m paid. I don’t give a damn.”
I'm really happy for you, and appreciate you clarifying matters. You've made it clear that you getting paid is all that matters. Well, perhaps there's one other thing that matters. Since all you and your fellow LIVsters care about is getting paid, the golfing public has made it equally clear that we don't care about you and your exhibition tour.
But I'm guessing we have more fun ahead of us, as Pat took on a second elder statesmen as well:
On the Nov. 9 edition of Claude Harmon’s podcast, “Son of a Butch,” Perez laid out in no uncertain terms his dislike for Mickelson. Understand, Perez is as outspoken as any player, maybe ever, on the PGA Tour, and he is ultra-comfortable talking to Harmon, who coaches him, along with fellow LIV golfer Dustin Johnson. And this was Perez again at his most honest and acerbic in talking about a man in Mickelson who was one of the most popular players in golf history until his legacy blew up with his defection to LIV and the comments he made in the aftermath.Perez remains hot about some kind of rift between himself and Mickelson that he won’t detail. He first spoke of his beef with Mickelson on Colt Knost’s podcast early in February and called Mickelson's apology about his controversial comments about the Saudis "such horses--t." Perez says now that much of what he said about Mickelson was cut from the show. But he wants to make it clear that he was not criticizing Mickelson for going to LIV, but for the personal matter between them."When it comes to Phil, I have a different hate for Phil than most people,” Perez told Harmon. “People won't know the story—I'm not going to go into the story again—but Phil crossed the line with me that is just uncrossable and unforgivable."He knows that he screwed up. He apologized for the action, but I cannot forgive him for it because I've known Phil for a long, long time. I've known the guy forever. And the fact that when he made this action, not only was it—he had intentions of doing it; he knew it was going to happen before it happened and when he did it—I was hurt, for one. I was like 'How can this guy do this?'"I didn't really go into it on Colt's thing, but I told Colt and said, 'You've cut out all the reasons of why I don't like Phil.' The other side of the coin is that everyone thought that Phil was greedy. No, he wasn't greedy."
As we sit here at 8:30 Monday morning, Geoff has a longish item just up on the golf media ecosystem that I've not yet read, but will likely blog tomorrow. But for today I'll just excerpt this amusing bit on Perez:
The prime community for many of these upstarts to share their work with the world is about to implode. The timing could not be worse for a sport that derives more good than bad from Twitter. And we need more time to flesh out whatever it was that Phil Mickelson did to Pat Perez even though every caddie on the PGA Tour and LIV already knows, as do podcasters Colt Knost, Drew Stoltz and their editor (according to the endlessly idiotic Perez, who said way too much in a podcast to fellow LIV bro Claude Harmon III last week). The PGA Tour’s lawyers must be loving every interview Perez gives to prep for the inevitable Mickelson depositions that are guaranteed to turn ugly (“So Mr. Mickelson, why do you think it is that Pat Perez is not a good fit for the Hy Flyers? Not even a theory?”).
Bones? Anything you care to share with us?
And don't forget the PReed defamation suit.... Good times ahead, but specifically about our Phil, because there was also this tease from Alan Shipnuck:
I bring to life his most thrilling victories. But he has been involved in a lot of messiness, too, and it’s all in there. That’s why I think it is a balanced and fair look at a very complex person.For the smattering of Twitter trolls who have accused me of trying to “ruin” Mickelson, I will just say that I am in possession of some incredibly damaging information about Phil that I have elected not to put in the book because it is highly personal and would cause pain to too many people.It would have been by far the most explosive material in the manuscript. Saudi Arabia, insider trading, Billy Walters, the bust-up with Bones, throwing Tom Watson under a Greyhound, gambling debts, the cold war with the USGA…all of this has played out in public.I’ve just dug deeper and gotten the real story behind it all. But some things are intensely personal, and I’ve respected that.”
So, it's "it's all in there", except for the stuff that's, well, not in there. In a tweet Alan indicated that it involves three stories, so with Perez we're at four bombshells about Phil yet to land.
But what to make of Shipnuck? I'm really unclear, because he's aggressive in responding to Twitter trolls accusing him of trying to destroy Phile. But isn't it closer to the truth to say that he's protected Phil? This is from the Amazon page for his biography of Phil:
In this raw, uncensored, and unauthorized biography, Alan Shipnuck captures a singular life defined by thrilling victories, crushing defeats, and countless controversies. Mickelson is a multifaceted character, and all his warring impulses are on display in these pages:
Alan, you've admitted that it is censored, that you've excluded stories for reasons about which you're being extremely vague. I assume all becomes public over time, but I'd certainly like a refund for purchasing your book.
Gotta run right now, but two good items teed up for tomorrow, so see you then.
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