Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Tuesday Treats

A typical blogging day involves a gazillion open browser tabs compromised by a 60-Minutes style clock ticking in the background.  Today we find ourselves in Bizarro World, with time to burn but little actual news....

'So, whatcha want to talk about?

News, Made - We never finished counting down Golf Digest's Newsmakers of the Year, so we ought to be able to find a few bits of interest there.  For those keeping a scorecard at home, I can inform that you have to count backwards up to the ninth slot to find an entry, Scottie Scheffler, that's not LIV-centric (and even there you could argue that his not defecting is newsworthy).

So, which caught the idiosyncratic eye of your humble blogger?  Well, leopard, spots:

No. 21: Patrick Reed's lawsuits

It wasn’t the most productive season of Patrick Reed’s career on the course—he fell out of the top 50 in the World Ranking for the first time since January 2014—but when it comes to taking people
to court, it was a downright historic year for the 2018 Masters champ. In August, Reed filed a $750 million civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Houston against Golf Channel and Brandel Chambleealleging the defendants conspired with the PGA Tour to defame him by misreporting information “with falsity and/or reckless disregard for the truth.” Reed subsequently withdrew the case and refiled it in September in a District Court in Florida, adding Golf Channel broadcasters Shane Bacon, Damon Hack and Eamon Lynch, as well as their media companies Golfweek and Gannett. In November, Reed filed another defamation suit, this one for $250 million, against Fox Sports, the New York Post, Hachette Book Group and the Associated Press, as well as author (and Golf Digest contributor) Shane Ryan and AP journalist Doug Ferguson. That’s $1 BILLION in damages being sought by the nine-time PGA Tour winner, who managed to earn more than $12 million playing for the 4 Aces after jumping from the PGA Tour to the upstart Saudi-backed circuit in June. Reed’s personal legal efforts have been panned by golf fans on social media, and a judge dismissed Reed’s initial complaint against Golf Channel and Chamblee in November, requiring him to file an amended one this month. But before we get wrapped up in one of these, we’re going to stop talking … Just to be safe … —Alex Myers

Blogger is in one of it's pissy moods, as you can tell from the formatting issues above.  I've already spent five minutes trying to correct it to no avail....

Of course, there's no need to read the full 'graph, because everything you really need to know is captured by the use of the plural noun in the header.  Or is it?  Because, while I had thought PReed had limited himself to defamation claims, according to this (h/t Shack) Patrick is a far more well-rounded athlete than we realized:

Palm Beach Court Denies Motion to Dismiss and Case Now Heads to Discovery Depositions of Jay Monahan, Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods, Davis Love III & Others on the Horizon

Say what?  How come we haven't heard previously of this lawsuit?

(Palm Beach, Florida, December 9, 2022). Yesterday, Larry Klayman, the lead plaintiff on behalf of his public interest foundation, Freedom Watch — formerly known as the International Center for Economic Justice — defeated the motion to dismiss filed by the defendants, the PGA Tour and its commissioner Jay Monahan, in the consumer class action complaint filed in Palm Beach County, Florida. Freedom Watch's mission, in addition to pursuing justice, is to promote free and fair economic competition.

The Second Amended Complaint at issue in the case styled (Klayman v. PGA Tour et. al 50-2022-CA-006587, 15th Jud. Cir., Palm Beach County) can be viewed at www.freedomwatchusa.org. It joins along with the PGA Tour and Monahan the DP World Tour, the Official World Golf Ranking ("OWGR"), and NBC's Golf Channel, for allegedly colluding and conspiring in violation of Florida's antitrust and competition laws, to restrain trade in the golf industry. As the Second Amended Complaint alleges, due to the Defendents' anticompetitive conduct, Klayman and other golf fans, who are consumers in Florida, have been harmed due to the reduced competition, causing the price of admission tickets and concessions for and at PGA tournaments to increase greatly for the golfing consumer.

Patrick suing over the price of a beer at The Honda might be the funniest thing you hear today, so take a moment to enjoy it.

But depositions could be fun, so I'm maintaining a topped-up strategic popcorn reserve in both Unplayable Lies offices.

 This one COULD be interesting, although the timing is unclear:

No. 20: Netflix jumps into golf

The success or failure of the upcoming, still-untitled Netflix documentary on the year in professional golf will inevitably be compared to the breakout hit “Formula 1: Drive To Survive,”
which transformed how the world—and especially America—saw F1 racing. It will be tempting, in fact, to believe that it was “Drive to Survive” that was the direct inspiration. In fact, Chad Mumm, the chief creative officer at Vox, dreamed of making a golf-themed show since at least 2014, when, as the head of Vox's ad agency, he lost out to Skratch in a bid to work with the PGA Tour. Having maintained his relationship with the tour’s media team—they played golf together each year in Las Vegas at a tech conference—he finally got his shot in 2019. By that spring, it was starting to become clear what Netflix had on its hands with DTS, and even if it didn't necessarily assist with Mumm's initial pitch, it helped with everything that came after, from signing players to securing Netflix as the platform of choice.

With the first audio recorded at Tiger’s Hero World Challenge in December 2021, and shooting starting the week of Torrey Pines in 2022, Mumm’s teams have been behind the scenes, chronicling a year in professional golf, whatever that might entail (and in 2022, it involved more than they ever expected). Among the “cast” of signed players are Rickie Fowler, Brooks Koepka, Ian Poulter, Tony Finau, Matt Fitzpatrick, Scottie Scheffler, Justin Thomas, Mito Pereira, Joel Dahmen, Max Homa and Sahith Theegala.

The biggest "character" of all, though, might be the one they weren't expecting: LIV Golf. Whether the schism in the sport is good for the game is up for debate, but controversy and drama of that type is never bad for a film crew, and in that sense the Netflix team couldn't have picked a better year to start its project. 

What’s to come is an eight-episode series that debuts early next year, and if it reaches anywhere near the dizzying heights of DTS, it will be a coup not just for Vox and Netflix, but for all the stars of the show and the sport of golf itself. A few years ago, it might have sounded hyperbolic to say that a simple documentary could transform an institution like golf. Now, we've seen what it can do for a niché sport, and we know that the so-called Netflix Effect could be seismic. —Shane Ryan

We can all agree that they picked the only year since 1744 that could make golfers even remotely interesting.... Amusingly, Shack also has an update for us here:

🎥 Justin Byers says Netflix announced a January 13th launch date for its tennis version of Drive To Survive. Still no word on a drop date for the golf version filmed all of last year.

Amusing because, with the success of Drive to Survive, Netflix has quite obviously decided to trot out a knock-off anywhere they can get access.  I understand that the coming series on cornhole has some devastating material...

Will it be entertaining and enlightening?  I don't know, but why start now?

And is this merely an post facto, or a portentous omen for 2023?

No. 11: Cup Upheaval

In an alternate universe where COVID never forces the Ryder Cup onto an odd-year cycle, the PGA of America, which runs the Ryder Cup, would have been the first to confront an uncomfortable question: Should the organization do a solid to the PGA Tour and risk damaging
its headline revenue-generating event by prohibiting LIV Golf participants from being on the teams?

Instead, that burden fell on the Presidents Cup, set for September at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. Given the PGA Tour runs that match, it didn't hesitate banning LIV golfers. For the U.S. team, this was a largely incidental decision. All six automatic qualifiers were still card-carrying tour members, and there was no American plying his trade on LIV whose form would make an obvious captain's pick for Davis Love III.

It was a different story for the International team and captain Trevor Immelman. Two of his top four players in automatic qualifying—Cameron Smith and Joaquin Niemann—took themselves out of the running when they jumped to LIV after the Tour Championship in late August. Same with six-time PGA Tour Marc Leishman, who would've been an obvious captain's pick. Suddenly, a team that had won just one time in 13 editions of the match looked like an even more under of underdogs.

To Immelman’s credit, the Internationals succeeded in making the contest more competitive than anticipated, the 17½-12½ final score betraying just how close things were during Sunday’s singles. Tom Kim rose as an unlikely hero, one of a trio of young South Korean players who emerged as potential anchors for Mike Weir when he captain’s the Internationals at Royal Montreal in 2024.

Even so, the weakness of an already flailing contest is plain for all to see. The International team hasn't lifted the Presidents Cup since 1998, and to have several of its best players likely ineligible moving forward is a gutting blow. With LIV appealing specifically to the best International players, it's hard to comprehend what the road back—if any—is.

The Ryder Cup, meanwhile, has the luxury of waiting to let things cool down and play out. The awkward removal of Europe’s original captain, Henrik Stenson, after he signed with LIV in July was a controversial call, one that even golf fans passively opposed to LIV considered harsh. But, ultimately, it's a tradeoff they'd take. There will be no uprising against Stenson’s replacement, nice guy Luke Donald.

The luxury it doesn't enjoy is golf fans not caring what they decide to do. The Ryder Cup has stakes. Real stakes. Ones people as passionate about. Ones that depend on the allure of an outcome nobody can predict. —Luke Kerr-Dineen

I'm not predicting a disruption of that certain event in Rome, but I can see scenarios that call its occurrence into question.

The Match - If a made-for-TV golf event falls flat in its face in the woods (heh, see what I did there?), does anyone hear it?  Apparently not, per Geoff:

I've been unable to capture the relative audience sizes for the seven installments, with only the second iteration drawing what I would characterize as a substantial audience, which I'm sure we can credit to Tom Brady splitting his pants.

But no one is watching, even with Tiger actually playing, so Lord knows where this might be going.  

But I did want to include this for two very important reasons.

First, because of its shear size, it appears to make this post more substantive.

But, more to the point, I'm pretty sure they're no longer calling it the Shark Shootout.... Why?  Well, I'm guessing you can suss that one out on your own.

LIV Bits - The actual story is behind a WSJ paywall, but Geoff had this on further legal maneuvering:

I'm unclear on why this would be deemed tortious, though I'm unable to find another source that references the WSJ account.  

But there's something in the water, because it was the WSJ that ran that weirdly-timed expose on Jay Monahan's private jet use back in September.  We've seen similar inconsistencies from the Biden Administration, which has careened from calling Saudi Arabia a "pariah state" to having its Justice Department conduct an antitrust investigation of the PGA Tour, which could seemingly only be at the behest of the bonecutters.

The fault lines are difficult to discern, but my Spidey sense indicates that this is no mere coincidence....

I'm going to post a couple of weird tweets, the authenticity of which your humble blogger cannot verify.  The first is from an account called LIV Insider, which smells to your humble blogger just like PReed's oft-discussed UseGolfFactsNow burner account.  See how you like this one:

First obvious question is whether that can possibly be true.  So what if it is, but I just look at Charlie's game, especially with cameras pointed at him, and can't see there being too many better at his age.  

But, more importantly, I thought we avoided attacking the women and children.... Your humble blogger thought Tiger calling for Norman's head was "punching down", so what would we call this?  Although, to be fair, I think Norman could make a compelling case that taking on Charlie is a battle of equals...

This one is even nastier, though I can't find any evidence that this was actually said:

Color me skeptical, given that his father always said that Tiger was good to him.  Just some strange times we're living through, which should effectively dispel any remaining sense that golf is a game for gentlemen.  Glad to have that out of the way...

Pay close attention, because if you blink you'll miss another of those effortless segues.... Golf Digest has this item topping its home page:

7 surprising social media stars of 2022

And, whatya know?

LIV Golf Bots

This isn’t a specific person, but rather a specific type of person. You know, accounts that seemingly popped out of nowhere with no profile photo. And ones that suddenly were very vocal when it came to defending LIV Golf and attacking the PGA Tour. These bots were everywhere! I won’t highlight any, but rather a joke at their expense:

Like me, the author is putting his faith in you-know-who:

It's OK to share differing opinions, but the mean streets of Golf Twitter are actually getting mean thanks to some of these people pests. Clean it up, Elon!

Elon's doing great, just quite a few years too late for most of us.

I'll leave you there and see you as news and my ski schedule permits. 

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