Weekend Wrap - Return Of The Prodigal Blogger Edition

Since my last post, how many times have you hit refresh?  Go ahead, you can admit it.... We don't judge here at Unplayable Lies.  Yeah, that's not quite right, we don't judge our readers, that is.

It was my intention to blog our trip, a grand, old-style road trip in which your humble blogger covered 2,442 miles, from Henefer, UT to Golden, British Columbia and back, covering three resorts, in addition to the heliskiing.  But I'm out of control with photos and haven't seen any of the video my nephew captured on his fancy new Go-Pro alternative I bought him in December in anticipation of this adventure.

We got stiffed on fresh snow and there was much else that didn't go according to plan, but it was still a grand adventure shared with my brother and nephew.  Bear with me as I still intend to share it with you when Zack gets through the video. 

But for now, let's gently dip our toe back into the golf worlds....

Mexico - I plucked myself down Sunday afternoon intending to watch a taped Yankee exhibition game in front of the fire, only to discover that Optimum overruled my taping instructions.  There was golf on, allegedly an actual PGA Tour event, just one unburdened by recognizable players.  Shack noticed:

Person-American Named Brian Campbell Books Masters Trip

Hmmmm, I'm guessing he wasn't enthralled....

The field was dreadfully weak:

The field featured just two top 30 players (Aaron Rai and Akshay Bahtia), four top 50 players, and just 26 in the top 100. And that’s with the OWGR heavily tilted toward the PGA Tour.

Which often can provide surprisingly dramatic viewing, because the guys are actually fighting for their professional careers.....  Though I'll have to agree with Geoff, this one laid an egg.  Campbell has a compelling story of survival and the young South African will be heard from, yet it was all as flat as three-day old seltzer....

Dylan Dethier, in his Monday Finish column, provides a good summary of relative firepower:

Imagine, for a moment, you’re in the shoes of a particular player this past Sunday afternoon in the Mexico Open at VidantaWorld.

Good news: You’re in a playoff to win on the PGA Tour!

Some bad news: Your opponent is 20-year-old rising star Aldrich Potgieter. He’s unscarred and unafraid. You? You’re about to turn 32. You’ve earned your PGA Tour card and you’ve lost it and, after 150-plus starts in the minor leagues, you’ve earned it back. You know the preciousness of this opportunity and you know the consequences of a misstep. It’ll be tough to play free.

Some more bad news: Your opponent’s swing speed is 17 mph faster than yours. His ball speed is nearly 30 mph higher. He carries his tee shots, on average, 51 yards longer than you do. He hits 59 percent of his tee shots longer than 320 yards while you clear that threshold less than four percent of the time. He is arguably the longest driver on the PGA Tour. You are arguably the shortest.

Some more bad news: You’re playing a par 5.

But then he was the beneficiary of an unbelievable bounce:

Some more bad news: Even though you are one of the straightest drivers in professional golf — your “good drive” percentage is over 90, ranking second on Tour — now your tee shot is slicing

so far right of the fairway that it’s almost certainly headed out of bounds. A tee shot out of bounds means you’ll re-tee hitting three which means, really, your goose is cooked.

Who are you? You’re Brian Campbell, southern California native and Illinois graduate. You’ve spent the better part of a decade bouncing between the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour and back to the Korn Ferry Tour. You’ve remained relatively anonymous because you’ve never quite played your way out of anonymity; you’ve never finished inside the top 10 in a PGA Tour event, never cracked the top 100 in the world and less than two years ago you’d fallen outside the top 1000. A strong 2024 season on the KFT got you back to the big show and now you’ve gotten yourself to the brink of a career-changing victory. Until this sliced drive, of course…

But then something wild happens: Your ball crashes into the woods and then it crashes out. You’re fine. You have a second chance. Pros often say that you need some luck to win, that you need a few bounces to go your way. They’re not usually this literal.

Crazy lucky, but Campbell and his caddie paid homage:

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A post shared by PGA TOUR (@pgatour)

Not a day the Tour wants us to remember, which could also be said about most events this year.  As they head to Florida, I'm reminded that the West Coast Swing is the best of the Tour, quite the depressing thought.

The Tour Confidential panel did deign to cover the event, for what that's worth:

Brian Campbell won the Mexico Open, beating rookie Aldrich Potgieter in the second hole of a playoff after Campbell’s drive ricocheted off a tree out of bounds and he still made birdie. What impressed you most about Campbell’s first Tour title?

Marksbury: Anytime a player wins a playoff, it’s usually indicative of some serious mettle. Campbell is no exception. But I’m inclined to look beyond his performance this week to the journey he’s been on for the past 10 years, grinding on the Korn Ferry Tour. He showed some serious grit to simply get his Tour card for this year, and now he has his first PGA Tour win. I love stories like that — and his looks like it’s just beginning.

Sens: For starters, it came after long years in the wilderness, trying to regain the Tour card he’d lost. But this week, he was also paired for the last two rounds with a kid who was knocking it some 40 yards past him off the tee. He could have easily gotten away from his own game trying to keep up. But he stayed patient. I don’t think anyone would call the round a pretty one, but grinding isn’t supposed to be pretty.

Bastable: Color me impressed by how Campbell managed his nerves. On Sunday evening, he admitted he felt like throwing up most of the day, and perhaps never was that jitteriness more evident than when, on the second playoff hole, he sliced his tee shot into the trees. But instead of letting that bit of messiness undo him, he took advantage of a break for the ages and still made birdie. Pretty cool stuff. How much did the win mean to him and his wife, Kelsi? Her tears said it all.

Curious.... You presume to know the spouse's name, but get an important detail wrong?  Not sure you're quite on board with this journalism thing:

Girlfriend of golfer Brian Campbell gets emotional after his chaotic first PGA Tour win

Perhaps you should have checked the AP's style book (a little topical humor for those who get it).  And even a query on the youngster:

Potgieter, at just 20 years old, nearly became one of the youngest winners in Tour history, and this comes after he became the youngest winner in Korn Ferry Tour history last season. What did you think of his week, and is he the best young prospect in the game?

Marksbury: Is it just me, or does it seem like there’s a new young gun to discuss every week? We had Blades Brown making his first PGA Tour cut on Friday at 17 years old, Ludvig Aberg is ranked fourth in the world at just 25, and Nick Dunlap and Akshay Bhatia already have two wins each at age 21 and 23, respectively. And let’s not forget about Luke Clanton, who’s 21! Given the ball-striking prowess we witnessed this week, I certainly expect Potgieter to make a name for himself in a similar fashion. But the “best young prospect” race boasts a pretty competitive field.

Sens: Combine this week with his final-group showing at the Farmers, and he’s made a strong first impression. But if today’s balky chipping was any indication, his short game still needs polish. I’m with Jess. He’s obviously a huge talent, but I don’t know how you single out the best in such a thick crowd.

Bastable: Is 25 still considered “young” on the PGA Tour? If so, you won’t find a better BYP (Best Young Prospect) than Luddy Aberg. Potgieter is the real deal, though. I liked what he said about learning how to play under Sunday pressure, first at Torrey and then again this week. The only way to experience it — and improve at it — is by getting yourself in the mix.

Hits it a mile and I'm guessing that he might fit Employee No. 2's parameters, especially now that Lumpy is retired.  We need more jowly players out there....

Deal Or No Deal -  Do we even care?  Rory keeps beating the drums on reunification, but I'm thinking that four times a year is about right:

The latest PGA Tour-PIF “reunification” meeting was initiated by President Donald Trump and held at the White House on Thursday, leading to more speculation that some sort of

long-awaited deal could come soon. Regardless of how soon a deal is made, based on what you’ve heard and learned over the past several months, what might the future of men’s pro golf look like? One tour? Two working alongside each other? And what about the team component? What’s your best prediction?

Jessica Marksbury: My best guess is that we’ll see the creation of a new series of tournaments that will be set apart from both the PGA Tour and LIV but will be open to players from both leagues — with significant investment from PIF. It’s clear that both sides want to see the best players in the world competing against each other more than four times a year, and adding events as opposed to fusing the two tours together seems like the most logical way forward. From what we’ve been hearing, LIV isn’t going anywhere, so this would allow both leagues to continue to exist independently while still “unifying” the world’s top players.

Josh Sens: Agreed, Jess. LIV doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. I see both circuits continuing on in their parallel universes, with some kind of limited-event world tour that gets the big guns together more often than the four times a year we now see in the majors. On a side note, whatever happens, I would expect LIV-ers like Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka to appear on opposite teams in this year’s Ryder Cup.

Alan Bastable: Just what pro golf needs: another tour. But, yes…some version of what my two wise colleagues have sketched out does seem like the most likely scenario, because what’s the alternative? Hard to fathom LIV contractees having carte blanche privileges on the PGA Tour, and it’s equally hard to fathom PGA Tour stars moonlighting at LIV events; the LIV model doesn’t support drop-ins, or at least the tour’s current construct doesn’t. Whatever happens, it seems likely President Trump’s courses will continue to be part of the equation. Why else would he be so involved?

Having ruined the Tour through limited-field moneygrabs, we'll now superimpose WGC-like moneygrabs on top, with presumably even larger purses? What could go wrong?

Leaving the Tour with a series of weeks like the one we just had?  Will Nielsen be able to discern an audience?   

That Other League - I actually looked to see if the TGL was on last night, and failed to find it buried on ESPN2.  That's a good sign, no?

While I was lost in British Columbia they had a triple-header, and the sycophants thought it rocked:

TGL’s triple-header was electric. Can it maintain the momentum?

The formula has always been about the best players in the world caring and coaxing the viewers

to invest in the outcome. If they care, the viewer cares.

TGL seems to know what it is and what it isn’t. McIlroy and Woods have been upfront about wanting the league to be additive to the professional landscape. They don’t want it to be a substitute for tournament golf, but hope it can drum interest from people who aren’t attached to traditional golf. Halfway through its first season, TGL seems to have a competitive identity. It has a backyard feel, playing around with college buddies, only with the best golfers on the planet, all of whom are competitive psychos.

The players also seem to be settling into their role as entertainers. The banter was never going to be the draw, but we are now getting insight into their thought processes and how they feel about the other players in the league. That was never more apparent than in their commentary around Aberg.

“Ludvig is just different,” McIlroy said after Aberg hit the longest drive in TGL history. “He’s feeling himself right now.”

But is anyone watching?

The ratings tell a similar story. Monday’s Presidents Day triple-header (featuring two matinee matches and an evening bout split between ESPN and ESPN2) delivered some of the league’s

smallest TV ratings to date, delivering 347,000 (ESPN), 377,000 (ESPN) and 357,000 (ESPN2) average viewers, respectively. Those holiday numbers, while only a fraction of the 1.05 million who tuned in for Tiger Woods’ debut in week 2, represent modest gains over the broadcasts in the same windows last year, and fall generally in line with expectations for the holiday, time slot and home network.

Of course, it’s probably not in the TGL’s long-term best interests to have its telecasts vacillating between a quarter-million and a million average viewers on any given week (if not growth, consistency is a sought-after trait in the TV world), even if this most recent batch of TV numbers weren’t totally out of character with the schedule. One of the league’s biggest advantages is its partnership with ESPN, which has broadcast the league’s matches on Monday and Tuesdays as part of an agreement that sees the TGL cover production costs. The so-called “Worldwide Leader” provides plenty of cover (and a high floor) for a sports property emerging into the marketplace, and the Monday and Tuesday primetime slots given to the league have mostly paid viewership dividends.

Two obvious points present.  First, it's hard to imagine that  these audience numbers can support the valuation underlying the SSG investment, much less the capital under discussion from PIF.  Of course it can't help that these paltry viewership numbers are similar to the audiences tuning in for the Tour's actual events.... Making Rory's case that TGL be additive ironic.

Secondly, the trend line points down, so at this juncture it's unclear if they're still shedding those tuning in out of curiosity.... In other words, we may not yet have scraped the bottom.  A cheery thought that...

The good news is that the product seems to be improving.....though the golfing press isn't exactly going to tell us otherwise, are they?  I will tune in again, assuming I can find it.

That will have to do for today kids.  I'm going to try to appear more consistently, but we'll see how that plays out in the real world.  Have a great week.