May in Rochester; what could go wrong? We'll tackle that and other PGA stuff, but first your humble blogger's spit-take of the day. It turns out, that if a tree falls in a Tulsa forest..... well, who doesn't love their Tuesday schadenfreude.
Chief, Activate The Cone of Silence - We take our Weekend Wrap obligations seriously here at Unplayable Lies, covering all of the weekend's action that I find interesting or notable. Also, those that don't piss me off, which is most of everything these days.
Sunday night/Monday morning presented with artisanally crafted journalism such as this offering:
It took an extra hole, but Dustin Johnson did just enough to earn his second LIV Golf victory.Johnson, the two-time major champion, birdied his final hole in regulation to get into a playoff withCameron Smith and Branden Grace, and then he birdied the par-4 18th again to win LIV Golf Tulsa at Cedar Ridge Country Club.Johnson knocked in his putt from just off the fringe, and he was the second player to go. Grace putted first, also from the fringe, and his narrowly missed to the left. Smith was the closest of the three, and his putt was off from the start, missing right.It’s Johnson’s first victory since winning LIV Golf Boston last year. He led after 36 holes in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, at 14 under, and his 3-under 67 on Sunday was enough to get him in a playoff at 17 under.
There was a triple bogey by DJ on the tenth hole that brought the whole field into play, so pretty dramatic stuff, no? As these things go, I'm sure every golfer in America was texting their foursome to tune in, so expect to hear about boffo ratings in the next few days.
What? But I had been reliably informed that LIV had a TV deal.... Oh, I see, not that kind of deal.
James Colgan regrets to inform that he's unable to lunch (and anyone getting that Cole Porter reference is too old for my target demo) apparently Greg Norman missed some of the fine print in that contract, an inattention to reality being so out of character for our Great White Pilot Fish:
Talk about a buried lede! What fans?
But don't all sudden death playoffs end abruptly? These guys are pros pros, so what could go wrong?
But even Colgan's framing is curious:
It all started as Dustin Johnson turned for the 18th hole early Sunday evening. Branden Grace and Cameron Smith, the tournament co-leaders, were in the clubhouse at one stroke better than Johnson’s 16 under and readying for a playoff. If Johnson, a member of the last group left on the course, made birdie on the 18th, he’d join Grace and Smith in the playoff.
Boy, am I confused. Ever since those gentlemen in Leith laid down the original thirteen rules of golf in 1744, I had thought that the purpose of a shotgun start was so that everyone finished at the same time. With Cam Smith on the range (as per another account), it seems the LIV organizers are every bit as good at their shotgun starts as they've proven to be at due diligence.
My readers will know what's coming, as DJ is lining up his putt on the 18th hole:
But as Johnson’s birdie putt dropped, sending the tournament into a three-way playoff, LIV’s lead broadcaster Arlo White offered a quick note to the fans watching from home: the broadcast was also available to viewers on the CW app.At the time, it seemed like a strange pronouncement. Why bother with a moment of self-promotion when everyone who planned to watch the tournament was already tuned in? But a few seconds later, as the clocks turned to 6:30 p.m. ET, a host of fans quickly learned why. As the playoff began, affiliates in major markets across the United States began switching off from LIV Tulsa, resuming normal programming while the tournament hadn’t been decided.
Normal? If you wanna go with that, fine, but the LIV apologists were scrambling to wipe that egg off their face
You just know the podcasters and "journalists" are excited to talk about how the broadcast ended early on The CW as if it has something to do with LIV and isn't just an downside of TV contracts that have plagued all major golf tours over the years.
— LIV Golf Updates (@LIVGolfUpdates) May 15, 2023
Those coverage gaps are fair game, but you've been around long enough to know that, annoying as they are, the come at the start of the network coverage, with the last group typically still on the front nine.
Though the biggest howler is that it apparently has nothing to do with LIV, just an externality that doesn't reflect at all upon the appeal of that broadcast. Think of it as a new installment of When Bad Things Happen to Good Bonecutters...
Colgan's close:
Quickly, LIV’s dream viewership situation had devolved into a nightmare. Fans on social media were angry with the network’s seemingly abrupt decision, and with LIV for allowing it to happen. LIV, for its part, was likely just as angry at the lost viewership from those key markets — a significant metric for the league in generating advertiser and sponsor interest.As a few LIV-tied accounts pointed out, the CW’s decision to drop LIV was similar in many ways to the “coverage gaps” administered many weeks by PGA Tour broadcast partners. Except, of course, that unlike the Tour’s coverage gaps — which usually come before the beginning of weekend coverage — LIV’s happened to land during the tournament’s most pivotal stretch. That sort of coverage gap would be an extreme outlier for golf’s establishment broadcasters. In fact, just weeks ago NBC extended its coverage by more than 90 minutes to show the completion of the Chevron Championship, collecting record ratings along the way.It will be difficult to know how many viewers LIV lost by virtue of the coverage decision, particularly considering the league’s own inconsistencies in reporting TV audience sizes. The good news, at least, is that LIV won’t have very long to stew on the audience gap lost in Dustin Johnson’s victory. The league’s next televised event will come May 26-28 in Washington, D.C.
LIV was angry? Set aside your quibble with the concept of an inanimate entity experiencing an emotion such as anger, but one assumes that heads will roll. Literally!
Ummm, folks, why is this a surprise. Remember all the cognitive dissonance when the CW deal was announced? Having heard this, why would Sunday's epic fail be the least bit surprising:
- The CW does not pay to broadcast LIV, but rather will share ad revenues when, if and as collected;
- The CW would not interrupt their Friday afternoon reruns of Buffy and Gilmore Girls, so LIV is streaming only that day.
- The CW does not participate in the Nielsen ratings on weekends, which one assumes isn't because those ratings would be strong.
The CW switched off LIV Golf's big Sunday finish, and the list of TV programs it aired instead is something else
I’m going to start an organization called the Classic Golf Course Preservation Society. Members get to carry loaded guns in case they see somebody touching a Donald Ross course. Tom Weiskopf, after seeing changes made to Oak Hill
Wasn't that a time?
The ongoing effort to dust off, replenish and embellish classic courses cannot be traced to oneexact point of origin. But Oak Hill sure seems like a great place to start.Just a year before the 1980 PGA Championship in Rochester, the world’s finest golfers turned up at the Donald Ross-designed Inverness to find four new holes that share little resemblance to the rest. They were dance remixes on Abbey Road. A Dominoes deliveryman crashing The Godfather wedding. And a giant stain on an otherwise classy old course.The rationale for such a drastic rearrangement? Easing spectator congestion. Seriously. So George and Tom Fazio created the stink bombs and made sure the holes looked nothing like the rest of the brilliant Toledo design. Whether it was ego or general haplessness or both, who knows.“I’ve never found a course where I couldn’t build a new par-three,” George is quoted as saying after adding the totally-out-of-place 15th at Oak Hill with its mini pond and stone wall.Let’s go with ego.
Hey, at least for once it wasn't the Jones boys....
Less than a year after Inverness, pros discovered the same level of butchery at Ross’ Oak Hill for the PGA, prompting Lee Trevino, the 1968 U.S. Open winner there to wonder why anything needed to be done at all. And Weiskopf uttered his famous line about a “preservation society.” That would come to fruition nine years later when the Donald Ross Society was formed. (Tony Dear recently filed a terrific First Call story on the state of the group.)Prior to the major championship-driven defacing of Inverness and Oak Hill, there had been som recognition of the role people like Ross, A.W. Tillinghast, C.B. Macdonald, George Thomas and Alister MacKenzie played in elevating the art form to craft America’s best courses.Credit in many ways should go to Pete Dye for driving interest in architecture via his over-the-top designs based on old school ideas. He was inspired by ancient links golf and architects like Ross or more obscure names like Seth Raynor or Van Cleek and Styles. There was also former USGA Executive Director Frank Hannigan’s 1974 Golf Journal essay on the life and times of A.W. Tillinghast that was written when the organization realized they were bringing three championships to his designs in one year. Hannigan highlighted what fascinating characters the old architects were and inspired new interest in the rich figures mysteriously forgotten.
Not to worry, Geoff gets his licks in on you-know-who:
There was also the accumulated apathy ferom Open-doctoring of classics by Robert Trent Jones. While his Oakland Hills redo was the first to be jokes about in 1951 for its excessive tricking up in the name par preservation, his work at Oak Hill was the first to be openly lambasted. That didn’t stop the club from thinking it had to do more to get future majors. This led to the Fazio hire. We know how that turned out.
Forgive the lengthy excerpts, but we live in the golden age of golf course restorations, wherein folks like Gil Hanse and Bill Coore faithfully work to restore golden age classics. Obviously fascinating issues of accommodating 100-year old designs to the modern game abound, but I experience such a thing first hand last week, and had neglected to blog it.
A week ag today, the Met. Golf Writers visited Montclair Golf Club, an iconic 36-hole club that features 27 holes of Donald Ross' creation, combined with a fourth nine-hole loop by Charles Banks (the one nine I've not played). unusually, the four nine-hole tracks are referred to as The First Nine, The Second Nine, etc., leading to unnecessarily awkward terminology, such as this from a Golf Club Atlas message board:
Pat is right about the 36 holes and I concur playing the #2 and #4 nines -- that combo is among my personal top 10-12 courses in NJ. Simply some of the most unique and fun holes you can play. The green complexes -- particularly the 1st on the 4th nine -- are truly well done and fit the landscape quite well.
Any discussion of hole requires a citation of it's number as well as the nine's number, unwieldy to this visitor.
That landscape is notable, as all four nines are built on severely sloping land, too severe in reality for golf (not to mention walking). But it's the greens I wanted to show, just a random selection of those I got photos of:
Other holes such as the 2nd, 3rd and 4th on the second nine and the 6th on the 3rd have been redone, mostly at the green end. Some of those greens became too severe for modern speeds, which is unfortunate as they had tons of character.
If I weren't so lazy, I'd link back to my post on Ashkernish, where we were playing greens as they existed in the 1890's. Not only did I estimate that they would stimp at about 1 1/2 foot, but I had the first blind putt of my golfing life. Lots of character....
Other interesting aspects of Montclair is that it was the home of our beloved Yogi:
I was lucky enough to have a business contact who belonged to Montclair, and on one long-ago visit saw a frail Yogi being helped into the clubhouse.
The other interesting aspect to the day is that I played with Gary Player's grandson, a very nice young man who, and this will shock you, hits it a bloody mile. A nice young man except for the weird fact that he and I showed up in the exact same golf shirt. All I could do was compliment him on his fashion sense, mostly not wearing all-black.
After golf the subject of Yogi came up, and it amused your humble blogger no end to try to describe Yogi to a South African. I went through the expected stuff, that he'd be the last guy in lineup you'd pick to be a world-class athlete, and the full gamut of Yogiisms, those profound malapropisms that all make perfect sense. But, lifetime Yankee fan that I am, I couldn't just leave it at that. I tried to explain that Yogi produced a Hall of Fame career swinging at pitches no other human being could hit, and it so happens there's a word for a cricketeer (of course, a week later I can't remember the word) that swings at bad pitches. Who knew.
Udder Stuff - Just a couple of loose ends, beginning with one of the weirdest takes on the ball rollback I expect to ever find:
The golf ball rollback could have this unintended consequence. A top golf physics expert explains why
And what might that unintended consequence be?
What if the proposed ball rollback doesn’t actually roll back performance among elite golfers? Sasho MacKenzie, among golf’s very short list of leading biomechanists, posed the question Monday to a panel that featured representatives from the USGA and R&A.“If we roll the ball back on the tour level, there's going to be an explosion in clubhead speed that they're not predicting.”
Doesn't that pretty much describe the last period in our game? But, much as I love that there's somebody on this planet incongruously names Sasho MaKenzie, I'm struggling to understand his sense of cause and effect:
Announced this spring, if adopted, the new rule would change the speed at which balls are tested for conformance, increasing it from 120 mph to 127 mph. That effect would require balls to fly 15-20 yards shorter than they do currently to be conforming to the test. Mackenzie believes that kind of rollback actually might have the unintended consequence of further emphasizing a pursuit for distance, or, more precisely, clubhead speed. And in Mackenzie’s view of the future of a rolled back ball, that potential for swing speed is monumentally higher than it is now."We're talking about the best of the best, a very, very small percentage of athletes," Mackenzie said, "but if you start playing with a ball that gets slower and slower in terms of the distance it's going off the tee, players will start swinging faster and faster, and all of a sudden players that cannot swing the club at 130 and 140 miles an hour will not be in the game. I think 160 is the limit that we're kind of working around with [in terms of] human potential. There is no reason to think that the top .005 percent of the golfers in the world won't figure out how to swing a golf club at 140 miles an hour in the next 10 years. I don't see it going any other way.”
Has anyone told Dr. MaKenzie (yeah, that name might ring a bell, though note the alternative spelling) that professional athletes are, yanno, competitive? I think what the man is saying is that the proposed rollback of the ball will unleash a sustained assault on club speed, ignoring that they are more likely reaching physical limits whereby future gains will be inclemently harder to come by.
I have no idea what the heck this guy is talking aout, but has anyone checked whether he's cashed checks from Wally Uihlein?
On other fronts, why even hold the event?
In the PGA Tour v. LIV matter, perhaps the former's worst moment was allowing Mr. Daly to beclown himself at the Zurich. Because nothing says high-level athletic competition like a fat man who can't walk shooting in the 80's...
Not sure I agree with this take:
Sungjae Im flying to Korea in between Quail Hollow and the PGA to win a golf tournament is as baller as it gets
I get that the next week Sunjae takes off will be the first, and I further get that there was nothing of interest happening in Fort Worth, but I still think one should wait to see how he plays at Oak Hill before trotting out the baller nonsense.... It reminds me of Jordan going to Quad Cities in lieu of a serious preparation for the calendar year grand slam. because, yanno, those opportunities come around once a generation....
I don't even want to read this item, because the full story can't possibly improve on the header:
Tour pro loses hat to kid after cutthroat game of rock, paper, scissors
Hmmm, it's Mackenzie Hughes, so you know how cutthroat those Canucks get....
A nice look for a change:
What it’s all about! Fun week @attbyronnelson and looking forward to Rochester 💯 https://t.co/hJ1P2e1RC1
— Mackenzie Hughes (@MacHughesGolf) May 14, 2023
Please Jay: More Hughes and less Daly...make that No. Daly!
We'll go out on this walk down misery lane:
PGA Championship 2023: When Oak Hill hosted history's most underrated Ryder Cup
It's underrated for what I think is the best of reasons, because it sucked so royally. But it did feature the first of a U.S. archetype, the cocky yet incompetent captain, whereby Lanny Wadkins begat Hal Sutton and Jim Furyk. So, we've got that going for us...
The golden age of the Ryder Cup, at least as defined by the closeness of the matches, fell between 1983 and 1999, with classics at Muirfield Village, Kiawah, and Brookline punctuating the drama. Often lost in that mix of tremendous golf is the 1995 match at Oak Hill. For three days in late September, the U.S. team captained by Lanny Wadkins (in Tony Jacklin's words, "the cockiest son of a bitch you ever met in 10 lifetimes … but in the nicest way") took on Bernard Gallacher's Europeans in an effort to maintain the American mo-jo from their’ dramatic comeback win in the Belfry in '93. What transpired was not only another nailbiter, but one that perhaps introduced the possibility of a wild Sunday swing—the kind that would reach its wildest form at Brookline and Medinah.
As a captain, Wadkins was a harbinger of the future—incredibly organized, efficient and seeing out every aspect of his job to the last detail, including, as Peter Jacobsen later noted, clothing and shoes and dinners and accommodations and scheduling. But there was a bit of the maverick in Wadkins as well, and he came under scrutiny when he selected Curtis Strange, then 40, and Fred Couples, 35, with his two captain's picks. They were 23rd and 34th in the points standings, respectively, but Strange was the more controversial pick since he hadn't won a PGA Tour event in six years. What he had won was the '89 U.S. Open at Oak Hill, and that horses-for-courses philosophy, plus the fact that Strange shared Wadkins' combative energy, seemed to drive the decision to leave out a red-hot Lee Janzen and that year’s Open winner, John Daly. This choice played a massive role in what was about to unfold in Rochester.
I think it's important that the captain be organized and efficient, the more so when the captain is the village idiot. It's a long time ago, but Janzen was a big game hunter, and Curtis Strange was a shell of his former self, so Lanny was apparently the only guy that didn't see this coming.
I remember this moment as if it was yesterday:
Montgomerie beat Crenshaw, and in the eighth match came the most pivotal battle of all: Faldo vs. Strange, both captain's picks. Strange was 1 up on 16, but Faldo, knowing Europe had a legitimate chance to win, squared it up heading into 18. He pulled his drive, Strange hit down the middle, and the situation looked desperate. Faldo pitched out to 90 yards, but Strange came up well short of the green, and with the tension mounting, Faldo stepped up for his third."We had 93 yards to go," said his caddie Fanny Sunesson, "it was the middle-wedge, and he just got the most perfect stroke on it, pitched nicely and ran to about four feet just left of the hole with an uphill putt."Strange's chip settled about five feet away from the hole, and to the astonishment of the crowd, he missed. Faldo lined up. "The pressure was immense," he said, "everything was shaking … everything except my putter." He sent it home, and Europe had another point. As he walked off the green, Ballesteros was waiting for him, tears in his eyes. He hugged Faldo and said, "you are a great champion."
I remember those drives, and with Faldo in deep trouble, my Spidey-sense was still telling me to short Curtis. When the author says Curtis came up well short, he means that completely missed the ball. Leaving us with this enduring image:
It's entirely fitting that Curtis couldn't watch that closing ceremony, because I was in a similar pose watching him play those final holes.
I'll be back with more tomorrow, as Wednesday golf will be in the afternoon.
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