Thursday Themes - Departure Day Edition

The heat may finally have broken here in NY, but we'll still have the usual compliment of hot takes for y'all....

Waugh, Nelly - Might just be the worst pun in this blog's ten years, but here's the news:

Seth Waugh is stepping down from the PGA of America after electing not to renew his contract, which expires on June 30.

A national search for a new CEO, which will include internal and external candidates, is underway. During the transition, Chief Championships Officer Kerry Haigh will serve as interim CEO. Haigh will not be part of the candidate pool for the new CEO position.

“The goal from the start was to leave the room better than we found it and I believe that together we have done just that,” Waugh said. “Golf has never been younger or a better reflection of the greater population. It’s never been more forward leaning, more popular or considered cooler than it is today. I have often said that golf is one of the great engines of good on earth. I am perhaps the biggest all-time beneficiary of that good.”

Waugh, 66, joined the PGA as CEO in September 2018. He was on the verge of completing a three-year term as an independent director on the PGA’s board when his predecessor Pete Bevacqua left to become NBC Sports Group President – he’s currently serving as athletic director at Notre Dame – and Waugh was hired to take over.

Sorry, Blogger is still effed up as far as hot links are concerned.  More importantly, have we lost the best head of hair in the game?  At least among non-players?

His take on his tenure:

“I may have gotten the job because of what I’ve done, my business stuff, but I took the job so that I could make a difference,” Waugh said shortly after starting as the head of an association that exceeded 30,000 club professionals for the first time during his tenure. “The opportunity to do that is what is fulfilling to me. That will be my legacy, not whether we win a Ryder Cup or have the biggest TV deal ever. It will be whether the members are better off.”

During his tenure, the PGA relocated its headquarters from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, to a fancy, new campus complete with championship golf courses in Frisco, Texas, and committed to bringing 26 future PGA America championships – the PGA Professional Championship in April being the first of them – to the two courses built in its backyard. In his role, he also signed a lucrative 11-year TV deal with CBS and ESPN beginning in 2020.

I seem to sense a couple of off-key notes in this news, as does our old friend Geoff, beginning with the timing:

The timing of Waugh’s departure is curious given how he appeared to be more engaged with issues at May’s PGA than at any point in his tenure. Reeling off numbers about the sport’s growth in his trademark laid-back style, Waugh trumpeted gains golf has made in attracting more women and children while highlighting the many creative ways newcomers are finding the game as a result of various initiatives. Waugh has also set a high bar for any CEO replacement thanks to a tone and gravitas built on years of dealing with far more difficult matters and people during his time as as a bank CEO.

Insiders say the PGA of America would like to name a member of its organization as its CEO.

The announcement came just days before Waugh’s contract’s expiration and the odd timing likely can be explained by not wanting to interfere with the KPMG Women’s PGA. In the increasingly corporatized game of optically-sculpted departures and seemingly seamless transitions, any willful departure for the 65-year-old should have started months ago with a swan song farewell at the PGA Championship. Instead, the odd announcement suggests Waugh and the PGA Board no longer were on the same page.

Apparently, he remains on call for the PGA of America, but announcing Kerry Haigh as interim majordomo seems to be the tell here.  

Waugh will forever be the Frisco Kid, and this is Geoff's take on that initiative:

To be determined: the success of a Frisco venture that will bring an excessive number of championships to an unproven and immature venue sharing similarities to past unsuccessful PGA of America forays into real estate, resorts, and championship golf.

Those 31,000 members seem like little more than props.

But Shack indulges in some crazy speculation, so remember where you heard this first:

The timing looks especially precarious given rumored possibilities surrounding the Ryder Cup and PGA Championship. Both events have long been envied by the PGA Tour, a cultish black hole of imagination that has failed while trying to create events of comparable stature. But the PGA Tour’s two boards are now armed with spending money while driven by player-first thinking and resentment at only getting 20% of Ryder Cup profits.

I haven't been privy to those rumors, but that's a Wow!  Still I can't imagine future PGA of America management willingly ceding their involvement in elite professional golf.  The one common thread has always been their indifference to actual PGA teaching professionals.

Geoff also correctly notes the link to this pending story:

Tiger Woods, the legend and PGA Tour Policy Board member emeritus who has delayed a decision on captaining the 2025 squad at Bethpage Black, has long been close with Waugh. He has been holding off on taking the keys to the Captain’s four-seater due to his Tour board commitment and, according to insiders, the uncertainty surrounding Waugh’s status. The two men played as partners in the Seminole Pro-Member earlier this year and Waugh was more amenable than the traditional me-first PGA of America board types to prospects of Woods making select captaincy appearances on his preferred schedule.

No worries, I hear that Hal Sutton is able to clear his schedule....

Happy Trails, Seth!

Motown Musings - I don't have anything much to say about a desultory Tour stop, even one that's played on a first-rate Donald Ross layout.  But this header has me nodding my head:

Rickie Fowler’s return to form already feels like distant memory

Even in the moment it seemed more smoke than fire, and who could see that coming with Rickie?

This week the Tour returns to Detroit Golf Club for the 2024 edition of the Rocket Mortgage. As

defending champion, Fowler should be among the favorites, but the sportsbooks know what Fowler knows: At least some of his struggles have returned, and even his +5,000 odds are probably generous. In 17 starts this calendar year, Fowler is without a top-10 finish, and virtually every part of his game has contributed to the slide. In each of the six primary Strokes Gained categories — from driving to iron play to putting — he ranks outside the top 100. “You’re seeing it throughout the bag where things haven’t been as good,” Fowler said Wednesday. His world rank, which had climbed back to 21 in the middle of last year, has dropped to 50, but Data Golf, which puts greater weight on recent performance, has him at 98.

Form, as any golfer at any level knows well, comes and goes, and it can be difficult to pinpoint the moment it leaves you. But in Fowler’s case, his play has been unremarkable since his win a year ago. From mid-July of last year through the FedEx Cup Playoffs, he had just one top-20 finish — at the 30-player Tour Championship. As a captain’s pick at the Ryder Cup, Fowler played only two matches and won no points. He opened the 2024 season by missing two cuts in his first four tournaments.

He's handled it graciously, but it's getting harder and harder to maintain the illusion.  And as he loses access to majors and Signature Events, the fall accelerates.

You Can't Make Me Care - Olympic golf is simply lame.  Sorry, kids, that's just a fact of life, if they wanted us to care, they'd have ensured there was something about which we could care.

You'll not be shocked that this is my favorite story of the day:

After qualifying for Olympics, golfers are snubbed. The explanation is baffling

It's my experience that certain folks are easily baffled.

But golf is different. The Olympics knows that, too.

Golf is different on every course in every country on any day all over the globe. Over four days, one of the 30 best golfers in the world tends to win. But sometimes — quite often, really — they scrape and claw to be just one stroke better than a player you weren’t expecting would contend.

Which makes it such a shame that the Netherlands Olympic Committee misunderstands that. Thanks to an initial report from Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press, it has become clear that only one Dutch golfer will represent the country in the Paris Olympics — Anne van Dam — eve though four qualified. Joost Luiten (ranked 148th), Darius van Driel (242nd) and Dewi Weber (302nd) were all informed that, despite meeting the marks set by the International Olympic Committee, their own national committee is declining to send them to France as representatives of the Dutch Olympic team.

Since golf rejoined the Olympics in 2016, the National Olympic Committee of the Netherlands Sports Federation has — unlike other NOCs — blanketed its approach with an extra set of qualifying rules. Being the best golfer from the Netherlands is not enough — you have to either be ranked in the top 100 in the world, or prove it by earning a high finish in a sanctioned tournament in the run up to the Games. Without that, the Netherlands Olympic Committee believes a player doesn’t display a realistic chance of finishing in the top 8 and contending for a medal. Van Dam was the only one of the four Dutch qualifiers to make that happen, when she finished second late last season on the Ladies European Tour.

Joost Luiten hardest hit.

This is so unintentionally hilarious, a classic of the genre.  It makes the cogent argument that golf is different, arguing that even such low-ranked players can occasionally "shoot the score", which is quite the cogent insight.  The players are correct that they could possibly be competitive, for the simple reason that 100 higher-ranked Americans have been excluded from the field.  If you wanted to create the weakest field possible, what would you do differently?

I think we can agree that in any ranking of Olympic Golf deficiencies, the absence of these Dutch golfers is way down the list.  Cantlay, Harmon and Homa aren't there, so I'll not worry about Joost having the week off.

Wishful Thinking - I'm blogging this for a second-tier purpose:

Tiger Mania II? In 2 years, the U.S. Senior Open could be must-see TV as Tiger goes for history

Maybe, but color me skeptical that the guy gives an actual damn....

But the lede reveals my priorities:

The U.S. Senior Open is being held at a fantastic venue this week at Newport Country Club in Rhose

Island, but two years from now it will take on an entirely different profile at the Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio.

At the course that shaped Jack Nicklaus into an 18-time major winner, Tiger Woods will be eligible for the field for the first time, and he’s strongly hinted that he’d like to win the title and fancies the chance to break a tie of nine USGA national championships with Bobby Jones. Winning at Scioto would make Woods the first player to achieve a Grand Slam of sorts: the U.S. Senior Open, U.S. Junior (3), U.S. Amateur (3) and U.S. Open (3).

“He’d love to win that Grand Slam and get some of the other senior majors on his CV,” Padraig Harrington said. “I saw him at the course (during the PNC Championship) and we were just crossing paths and he laughed at me. I won’t say exactly what he said but the gist of it was he can’t wait to get out and beat me.”

Yeah, that Grand Slam could well be of interest, but I just wanted an opportunity to remind folks that the Senior Open is at Newport, which should be fascinating.  Here's the background on the delay.

There's also a Tiger link, as he won his second Amateur at Newport.  

I just hope the Tour isn't expecting Tiger to play on its round belly tour, because I can't imagine him being that helpful, unless there's an incentive to do so.  After all, he won't even commit to being a Ryder Cup captain.

That'll have to get you through the day.  have a great weekend and we'll wrap Detroit, Newport and anything else on Monday.