Thursday Themes - Eye Of The Tiger Edition

I know, it's been a while, but I was thinking of you the whole time....

It's been quite the weird ski season, and the sense is that it won't get better anytime soon.  The ten-day forecast for the home mountain includes a massive 2" of the white stuff, and the comparable forecast for British Columbia isn't any more robust.  

As for golf, Employee No. 2 and I did watch a bit of Tuesday night's festivities after arriving home that day from Utah.

Can You Feel The Game Growing? - Fortunately, this Golf Digest summary is far more even-handed than its header would seem:

TGL Week 2 Superlatives: Tiger's debut, Kisner's hosel rocket and an itchin' for friction

Excuse me, which superlatives are those?   Wait, I stand corrected, "worst" is, in fact, a superlative, so do carry on....

All your humble blogger can say is, thank God for Kiz....

Thanks to the magic of Kevin Kisner, this week we’re rolling our best and worst performance categories into one. NBC’s new lead golf analyst showed what happens when you spend too much time in the booth and not enough time on the range, splashing two in the drink, hitting three in the sand and failing to make a single putt, which is ordinarily the strength of his game.

On the penultimate hole of the evening, however, Kisner’s performance went from bad to so bad it’s good when he nearly recorded TGL’s first fatality, striking the flagstick with a skulled bunker shot that was headed straight for his teammates’ foreheads. As Tiger Woods wiped away tears of laughter (and probably fear), Kiz almost jarred his 15-yard chip for what would have been one of the most ridiculous pars in golf history, putting a big rubber stamp on his star/heel of the evening honors.

Almost jarred?  I was asleep by then, but if the hardest shot in golf is the one right after a shank.... 

Highlight of the night 😅 pic.twitter.com/o4tkLenf7w

— Jupiter Links Golf Club (@JupiterLinksGC) January 15, 2025

It's hard to convey how bad Kiz was, bad even by the standards of an NBC analyst....

For sure this wasn't the plan:

Most Troubling Trend: Blowouts

The first two matches of TGL have been done and dusted before the singles portion of the evening even began, leaving both squads with nothing to play for but season-long tiebreaker points. To this point, that seems more like a fluke than anything, but if Week 3 is equally uncompetitive, we’ll have to start wondering if there’s more to this trend than coincidence.

My Spidey Sense tells me that Week 3 is problematic for other reasons, which we'll get to below.

When your highlight reel is limited to, checking notes, your walk-on:

Best Big Cat Moment: Eye of the Tiger

Tiger's TGL entrance is electric ⚡️🐅

📺: ESPN pic.twitter.com/orQ9xwAzt9

As for the show, Tiger had some thoughts:

Giggly and red-eyed from laughter, Woods took a self-deprecating tone to his team's 12-1 lashing at the hands of Collin Morikawa and Los Angeles Golf Club.

“We were entertaining. We hit a lot of shots," Woods laughed. "I think the people here got to see how bad pros can be. It was a boat race. ... I can only imagine what our teammate, Tom Kim, is thinking."

Ummm, Tiger, would you mind if I get a second opinion on the entertainment value?  I'm thinking a tampon might have helped....

And this spot-on coda:

“As evident from today, I don’t have any golf skills,” Woods laughed. “The walking is not really an issue. It’s that my game is not very good.”

 But at least Tiger's game was one Kiz could kill for....

But there was this bit as well:

Woods and his Jupiter Links playing teammates, Kevin Kisner and Max Homa, took refuge in the learning curve of hitting into a 60-foot screen and the playing surface's uncertainty at SoFi Center.

“We hit every single wedge shot long,” Woods said.

“Significantly long,” Kisner said.

This provides one of those effortless segues to this Golf.com piece:

2 things TGL must fix for Tiger Woods’ new golf league to flourish

If the line is set at two, I'm certainly taking the over.... But this is the second of his two, one that I think is a way bigger issue than perhaps the authors understands:

The second issue was with the Full Swing simulator technology. This didn’t appear to be an issue on the first night, but it was clear the tech wasn’t working properly Tuesday night.

There’s a zero percent chance that Woods, the greatest ball-striker in history, would hit a flush 100-yard wedge shot and wind up blowing it 30 yards over the green. There were too many moments on Tuesday night where the simulator left players perplexed at how poorly they hit a shot, especially from short range.

“I didn’t even hook that,” is not something that needs to be a common saying on TGL broadcasts.

The technology can’t make the best in the world look silly or inept. Full stop.

Holy Shotlink, Batman!  That's just what this venture needs, an assertion that the tech of a tech-infused golf league doesn't actually work.  This item is written by the previously unknown-to-me Josh Schrock, but we've had launch monitor technology for decades now.  You'll notice that none of the players are hinting at this, because how ya gonna bring them back for Week 3 if it's all effed up?

Amusingly, even if I were to accept his premise that Tiger airmailing the green had a zero percent probability, now do Rory!  Yeah, 30 yards long on a 100-yard wedge shot is his signature move!  The only thing missing when Rory makes his January 27th debut would be JP and Rory asking each other what just happened..... IYKYK.

This Schrock promised two fixes, yet offers up a third:

That brings me to the green. It’s a technological innovation, but the league must fine-tune it. Players of this caliber rarely run 25-foot putts 7 feet past the hole. Tiger Woods and Justin Rose having an impossible time stopping downhill puts and/or missing putts in the 5-to-7-foot range by half a cup or more is…not great.

As my colleague Dylan Dethier pointed out, the players stopped short of openly criticizing the technology on Tuesday, but the league needs to polish it by next week’s match.

Obviously the players have to keep their yaps shut, but are we sure about excluding the possibility that Tiger simply has no golf skills...

As I understand things, this tech-infused venture is supposed to be somehow dependent upon a dirty rag:

Easiest Fix: The Hammer

After two weeks of play, TGL appears to have some very tricky problems to fix, but one that shouldn’t be difficult is the Hammer. Last week, we said the Hammer had a lot of potential, but Golf Diget’s resident Hammer skeptic Drew Powell raised some valid concerns. On Tuesday, after an early flurry of Hammer blows, those issues quickly bubbled to the surface when LAGC took control of not only the scoreboard but the Hammer, allowing them to simply play keep-away with the supposedly match-changing gauntlet. This issue has rendered the Hammer largely impotent in the back half of both matches so far, with the losing team unable to access their only means of mounting a comeback. Thankfully, the solution shouldn’t be too radical:

Give teams a high-risk mechanism for “stealing” back the Hammer. Perhaps they can challenge the Hammer-holders to a closest-to-the-pin contest on par 3s or an eagle challenge on the par 5s, wagering their own points on the board in exchange for the yellow towel. This doesn’t need to wait until Season 2. The TGL concrete is still wet. Much like the NHL, the league should be willing to make rule changes and improvements on the fly, and this feels like a logical place to start.

It's pretty lame, no?  There's this inevitable tension between competitiveness and entertainment value, but I don't think they can make this work simply as a hit-and-giggle undertaking.  Unless, of course, Kiz plays every week.

Employee No. 2 had quite the range of reactions, not having watched the first week.  She initially found it pathetic, though we kept watching and she did admit to that contradiction.  Her final take was that the evening needed to end with the six guys in a fistfight....  Hmmm, GMTA:

Most Needed: Villains

So far, TGL has placed a huge emphasis on Good Vibes™. The players yuck it up with each other, the celebs flash their pearly white veneers course-side and Matt Barrie, well, let’s just say

he’s no Johnny Miller on the mic. While this is all by design—the league is clearly geared towards being a fun golf gateway for casuals—it has started to feel a lot like an exhibition. On Tuesday, as Woods, one of the fiercest competitors in sports history, smiled his way through a truly abysmal performance, it became painfully clear:

TGL needs villains.

Sports fans love nothing more than something to hate. Usually that’s an opponent. Sometimes it’s a coach, GM or owner. Heck, we even pick scapegoats on our own teams. TGL is crying out for a few Bad Guys—a T.O., a Nick Kyrgios, a Roger Clemens, a Patrick Reed, perhaps. There has to be some friction, because friction is inherent in competition. Without it, TGL will always feel like empty calories. Maybe a fiery guy like Atlanta Drive G.C.’s Billy Horschel can provide that spark. Or maybe recent match-play controversy alumni like Patrick Cantlay and Tom Kim will martyr themselves for the cause. As we all learned at a young age, there can be no Batman without the Joker.

I think there's a cause-and-effect failure here, notwithstanding my approval of the accompanying photo....

I agree that bad blood would be helpful, but there's a missing predicate.  One has to be invested in the teams and the outcome before one can assign white and black hats..... next week is NY Golf Club vs. the Atlanta Drive..... Quick, name any players on those teams.  

I think this Yahoo piece captures some of the issues:

Despite the in-house audience, TGL is primarily a TV-based enterprise, and from that perspective, the product still needs work. ESPN doesn’t yet appear to have decided whether the tone of this should be serious or jovial, and so the coverage pinballs between the reverential and the silly. TGL ought to be the equivalent of a televised beer-pong match, not a PGA Tour event, and ESPN ought to lean into that strangeness rather than, say, seriously trying to compare LAGC to the Lakers dynasty.

TGL also brings one of the most cringeworthy elements of PGA Tour broadcasts indoors: interviews with sponsor executives. It doesn’t really matter in this case that the executives are famous athletes; a segment with Serena Williams — who clearly has little interest in golf — was a tough listen.

I think the whole venture suffers from that competitiveness vs. entertainment dichotomy, and they're really not delivering much on either front.  Watching these guys struggle has some appeal, but I'm not sure this thought actually helps:

Most Important Distinction: These are great golfers, not great simulator golfers

Tiger Woods, Xander Schauffele, Rory McIlroy, Collin Morikawa, Hideki Matsuyama, Ludvig Aberg. To say TGL boasts some of the best golfers on the planet is not a stretch. The problem, which became clear as Tuesday’s night chop-fest unfolded, is that simulator golf is a very different discipline. Though TGL’s roster boasts 13 major winners, South Korea’s top simulator pros would wipe the floor with them in a head-to-head screen match, so why aren’t they the ones we’re watching?

Simply put, the level of play hasn’t been sharp enough through two weeks, and the carnage, apart from Kisner’s hosel rocket, hasn’t been that fun to watch. It’s one thing to watch Jean van de Velde take off his socks and wade into the burn with the Claret Jug on the line. It’s another to watch a guy splash one in a virtual water hazard, take a drop two feet away and hit it back into the same screen. There’s plenty of reason to believe these guys will get the hang of it—they have the raw ability, work ethic and the professional nous to do anything with a golf club in their hands—but the question is whether they’ll improve fast enough to make the rest of this season worth watching.

How about we find some actually good simulator players?  Maybe folks will tune back in to see what Kiz does next, but other than that......

By delaying this post a day we have actual ratings:

Tiger Woods, the headline player and co-founder of TGL, did not play in the simulator golf league’s first night—instead he waited a week in what was widely believed to be a strategic move to keep interest and buzz high for the new venture.

That turned out to be a smart move.

ESPN reported Wednesday that the second TGL match, in which Tiger Woods’s Jupiter Links was soundly defeated 12-1 by Los Angeles Golf Club, drew an average audience of 1 million viewers. That’s a 9% increase from the inaugural match on Jan. 7.

According to the network, viewership peaked at 1.1 million from 8:30-8:45 p.m. and was steady in the 1 million range from 7:30 until past 9 p.m. The match ran 18 minutes past the allotted 7-9 p.m. window, forcing the start of a Duke-Miami basketball game to be moved to ESPNews.

 God is worth less than 100,000 pairs of eyeballs?  Good to know....

Where does it go from here?  This is your Week 3 match-up:

I know, they made us wait three weeks for Lucas Glover..... Should we do a reader poll as to projected audience size?   They're pumping the bejeesus out of the following week's Tiger v. Rory match-up, but I'm thinking Week 3 will be quite the downer....

I had some other stuff to blog, but we've gone long here and I've got a day to kick off.  Nothing that won't keep, so we'll catch up down the road.

 

Midweek Musings - Changed Golf Edition

What if they change golf and we don't like the new edition?  More amusingly, what if we all like it better than the prior version.... Nah, TV ratings for the trad product can't get much worse, can they?

Golf Digest has some squirreliness with their headers, promising this on their homepage:

The high-energy debut of TGL indoor golf was described in a Golf Digest article as filled with hype, energy, and a constant stream of pop music

But when one clicks through the actual header seems more tethered to reality:

TGL indoor golf debuts with smoke, music and a buzz-killing rout

The magnitude of said buzz is quite arguable, as is the cause of death....  as always, my dafault assumption is Professor Plum in the library...

Of course they lede with quite the fine dis, so enjoy:

Opening night of TGL was a blowout. On the scoreboard. To the eardrums. It was golf but louder than that other tour that claimed to be louder.

Yeah, well tat other league says a lot of things....

“This is golf. But it’s not traditional golf,” said Tiger Woods, one of the co-founders of TMRW Sports that created the new simulator-based stadium golf concept that premiered Tuesday night

on ESPN and other media outlets around the world. “It’s hard to believe this dream came to reality, and we’re going to take golf into the next stratosphere.”

That sounded like more than a slight exaggeration, but it seemed appropriate on a night when a lot of hype and energy and a constant stream of driving pop music beats filled SoFi Center. If you actually wanted to hear the sound of a club contacting a golf ball, you were in the wrong place.

The first match in TGL history—which began 15 minutes late after a delay and rather drawn-out player introductions—saw a dominating effort by the trio of Shane Lowry, Wyndham Clark and Ludvig Aberg representing The Bay Golf Club. Aberg won the first hole with a 10-foot birdie putt and his team never looked back with a stunningly easy 9-2 victory over New York Golf Club’s Rickie Fowler, Matt Fitzpatrick and Xander Schauffele.

As you may have heard, the concept of fact-checking is under further review, so take this with a grain of salt:

One observer called it “carnival golf,” but it wasn’t that. With the music unceasing, it felt like a rock concert with the stage act swinging golf clubs in what Fowler later called "a glorified man cave." The golf looked real enough, and the players were genuinely engaged in the outcome. They cheered each shot hit into the giant screen. Whether in attendance at the arena or watching on television, fans were fed a full slate of statistics like ball speed and launch angle, plenty of things to sate the techie appetite.

Perhaps "carnival golf" feels a bit harsh, but isn't "rock concert" a distinction without a difference?

So, the question I keep asking is, "What about all this is going to compel me to tune in next week?"  I know that a certain guy will be playing, but apparently we're supposed to be fascinated by the, checking notes, hammer?

What is ‘the Hammer’ in TGL? An explanation of the innovative rule

Innovative?  Yeah, we'll be the judge of that....

What is TGL’s Hammer and how does it work?

Physically, the Hammer is a yellow-orange piece of cloth shaped like a Thor-like hammer. But

here we’re most concerned with what it represents and how it’s used.

The team in possession of the Hammer is permitted to throw it down on any hole. When it’s thrown and accepted, the point total of the hole increases by one. While holes normally count for 1 point, the Hammer increases the points to 2.

If the Hammer is thrown before the start of the hole, the opposing team must accept it. However, if it’s thrown on any other shot, the opposing team has the option to reject it, but if they do they also forfeit the hole.

You can imagine a situation in which a team knew they would lose the hole, so by rejecting the Hammer they limit their opponents to 1 point instead of 2.

Either way, once it is thrown, possession of the Hammer automatically switches to the other team.

So, if I have this right, all of our hopes and dreams for the future of golf are dependent upon an orange cloth?

To my ear it sounds like a press, but whatever.

How did it work on the ground?

How the Hammer was used in TGL debut

The official first use of the Hammer occurred on the 3rd hole of the debut match between the Bay Golf Club and the New York Golf Club.

The Bay Golf Club began the match with the Hammer after winning on a coin toss, and when TBGC player Wyndham Clark had a seven-footer for birdie on Hole No. 3, he threw down the Hammer hoping to earn his team an extra point. And he did. Clark drained the birdie improving his team’s lead from 1-0 to 3-0.

When the teams reached the 7th hole, NYGC, now losing 6-0, still had possession of the Hammer. TBGC’s Shane Lowry set up to hit his tee shot, but before he could, NYGC’s Xander Schauffele threw the Hammer at his feet. You can see the moment below.

Lowry accepted the Hammer challenge, but both teams finished with a par, so no points were awarded, and the score remained 6-0.

That was the last time the Hammer was used on the first night of TGL’s existence. In the end, TBGC was able to maintain their large lead and finish of NYGC by a final score of 9-2.

My God, this changes everything!  Or not.

James Colgan is hyperbolic as well:

The TGL’s first broadcast gave us a genius innovation … AND a sugar high

Or at least his header writer is, as this sounds more judicious:

THE BIG NEWS

In the end, I thought the much-ballyhooed launch of the TGL on ESPN was … fine. The telecast ran for a shade more than two technically sound hours, featured an utter blowout, and did not leave a bitter taste in the mouth of most who tuned in. For a sports league in Season 1, Episode 1 — a league that was perfectly transparent about the fact that its broadcasts will only improve from here — fine feels like a … fine place to be.

Sounds like an awfully low bar to me, especially considering the obvious hook of the technology and the equally inevitable fatigue to be anticipated.  The question needs to be asked repeatedly, what compels you to watch again?

Colgan at least tries to be more than a mere cheerleader:

But then the action began with Shane Lowry’s opening tee shot, and the broadcast shot out of a cannon. The biggest lesson of the TGL’s opening broadcast — and perhaps the entire opening day

— is that the league’s shot clock is a revelation. Gone is the boredom of incessant pre-shot tinkering and the inherent sleepiness of golf on television. If nothing else, the TGL moves, and that alone gives the format a real chance to survive.

The telecast was structured into three stanzas. The opening five holes, then a commercial break; the middle five holes, then a commercial break; then a brief “intermission” hosted by Van Pelt, another commercial break, and the final five holes. Sure, the speed ebbed a bit as the competition progressed, and the intrigue of the activities in the field of play dissipated as The Bay opened up a blowout lead over NYGC. But there was enough there to keep your attention until the match had been decided, which was around hole 8.

The biggest question after week 1 is the TGL’s ongoing balance between flash and substance. Tuesday’s broadcast felt a bit like a hefty bowl of powdered sugar for dinner. I briefly felt the dopamine hit, I certainly rode an energy high, but by the end I felt a little empty. Is the competition supposed to be serious, funny, or some combination of the two? I’m not upset that I watched, but I still can’t answer that question. I suspect the TGL is still feeling out that comfort zone itself.

I didn't mostly even notice the shot clock, which isn't to say that the quicker pacing isn't their biggest asset.  As critical as I've been of the made-for-TV money grabs, this indoor version thereof solves many of the pacing issues...

But that last 'graph hits at what I think is the crux of their issue, which is that the "dopamine hit" of the technology will inevitably fade, so what keeps us interested?  Yeah, the broadcasters will benefit from a learning curve, but is this competition, entertainment or some awkward combination of the two?

Here's his long-winded take on what worked:

GOLD STARS

The Shot Clock: The clock had been deployed for roughly 15 seconds before most golf fans started rethinking the PGA Tour’s approach to enforcing pace-of-play rules. It’s an awesome innovation, and it is the innovation that gives the TGL hope of surviving even as the concept grows less novel with time.

The Camera Setup: There are some 70 cameras bugged throughout SoFi Center like Secret Service Agents — lead producer Jeff Neubarth specifically designed the league’s camera outfit to be invisible from other TV cameras, and therefore invisible to folks at home. It felt like each camera angle was used in some way throughout the action, and spare for a few wildly oversaturated bunker-cam shots, it all whipped around pretty seamlessly. In a nod to the production team’s efforts, shots did not feel overly choreographed or boring to watch after the ball struck the simulator screen.

Virtual golf holes: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I really enjoyed the freakiness of some of the TGL’s virtual designs. The visual extremes play extra-well on TV. If I had a critique of the competition, it was that we needed more tricked-out holes. What a world.

The Microphones: No reasonable viewer expected ESPN host Matt Barrie to have communication with a group of golfers 85 yards away down to an exact science tonight, but the back-and-forthing will be important to the long-term entertainment value of the TGL’s telecasts. The functionality worked, providing a few personality slivers from golf’s stars without being overwrought. Xander Schauffele performed particularly well.

SVP: Van Pelt, ESPN’s voice for the PGA Championship and Masters, offered some considerable credibility to the TGL right off the bat. His pre-and-postgame interviews (the latter part of his midnight SportsCenter with SVP) were incisive and effortless. The players clearly have a rapport with him, and his decades of golf experience make him uniquely apt to thread the needle between golf’s traditional dialect and its new simulator slang. Even his touch of self-deprecation about the (slightly horrifying) caricature crafted by the TGL’s marketing team was deft. I was a fan of his inclusion all the way around.

Well, I agree with some of that....  I thought the audio was more of a hot mess than James seems to, and can't actually remember anything Xander might have said.  I will note that Ludvig Aberg's facial reactions might just save the endeavor, as they were far more evocative and enjoyable than anything that came through the audio.

I thought they didn't use the virtual golf holes to any great effect, and I was really hoping for something more there, perhaps even having them take on some of the great holes in our game.

The flip side:

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

The live discussion: It was hard to parse through the noise on Tuesday night. What was player conversation? What was broadcaster banter? What was part of an interview with guests Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy? What was music blaring over the SoFi Center? To me, it felt like there was so much to say that it was hard to hear anything at all. Some personality shined through here, but the forthcoming weeks figure to feature a lot more.

The “Intermission”: The TGL’s decision to include a lengthy “intermission” segment with SVP — sort of like a halftime report — was a real rally-killer. The sequence of commercial-intermission-commercial lasted exactly 10 minutes just after the match had been decided, and when the competition returned again, the energy felt like it’d been sucked out. Maybe this will be better when the matches are closer, but I think it might be better to reimagine this format altogether.

DJ Khaled: Please, no more.

Live Interviews: Tiger and Rory are both big gets for any live golf telecast because their depth of experience and golf intellect are unparalleled. The problem with Tuesday’s interviews was that neither golfer had much more experience with the TGL than anyone watching at home and the broadcast got caught asking them questions even as the action sped on. Their presence was hardly a bad idea, but with all the other noise happening at the same time, I don’t think viewers came away with much.

Not only did Tiger and Rory have nothing to add about the technology, but they're not exactly riveting presences on their own account.   Where's Charles Barkley when a lonely nation turns its eyes to him?

This is an interesting take, though:

THE NUMBERS

There is no “normal” for a product like the TGL, but I’d guess anything in the neighborhood of 700,000 average viewers would be acceptable for week 1 on ESPN.

The network’s weekly average has hovered in the neighborhood for months, and the TGL was buffeted by a Duke basketball lead-in on Tuesday night. The TGL’s hopes of ascribing to ESPN primetime averages (closer to 2 million, but aided by the NFL and NBA) remain a longshot, but beating LIV while staying safely clear of the PGA Tour seems reasonable.

On the one hand, it strikes me as perhaps a surprisingly reasonable target for viewership given the numbers that watch actual golf.  That said, can a puny 700,000 pairs of eyeballs pay off their investment?   It seems the kind of numbers you get for repeats of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or, yanno, LIV.

How do I feel on the morning after?  I think it was an interesting diversion, showing off unbelievable technology.  But, now that I've seen the technology, do I need to tune in further?

We know that the big cat will play next week, and of course we'll see a surge in viewership for that.  We should note that, in prior appearances in such exhibitions, Tiger has not had much of value coming though his microphone.

The bigger problem is that this doesn't have much to hook us in other respects.  Obviously their trying to one-up LIV with a team concept, but except for Keegan and Boston, the teams are such an artificial construct as to be laughable.  And, Ludvig's mugging aside, the guys are a mixed bag in front of a camera, and that may be overly generous.

So, where does this go?  Can anyone see us caring about the competitive aspects of this league?  Is anyone depressed this morning because New York got routed last night?  Ironically, I react to these "teams" in much the same way that I react to the LIV teams, with scorn and ridicule.  Which can't be a good answer for anyone that put $1.5 billion in PGA Tour Enterprises?

There are some other aspects to note.  First, while you see their logical strategy of avoiding the NFL and other major sports competition (hence the Monday and Tuesday prime-time broadcasts), the sports calendar gets increasingly cluttered as basketball and hockey move towards their playoffs and spring training is just around the corner.  The question to me is whether there is appetite and capacity to watch more sports, and I think that's a far tougher environment than they want to acknowledge.

The second pointy to make is that the TGL requires the players (six per week) to be in South Florida, and obviously those there last night aren't headed to Oahu this week.  The marker I'd like to leave you with is that this venture competes for players with the Tour's traditional sponsors, which is entirely on-brand for the Tour.  Once the ink on those sponsorship contracts dries, the sponsor is on its own.

That's it on this subject, I'll just exit on this ominous header:

Riviera CC included in mandatory evacuation from fast-moving Los Angeles fire

Fingers crossed.  That will likely be it for this week.  Employee No. 2 is headed out here later in the week, so the blogging schedule is completely TBD.

Weekend Wrap - Maui Wowie Edition

Greetings from the Wasatch Front, where bizarro-world labor relations continue without resolution.  One funny bit is that, with thousands of holiday visitors affected, you'd expect at least a few would have megaphones:

Vail Resorts stock ($MTN) dropped nearly 7% yesterday, which garnered the reactions of Wall Street analysts, but CNBC contributor Jim Lebenthal had personal grievances to express towards Vail Resorts.

Lebenthal explained on the January 2nd episode of CNBC's 'Halftime Report' that he was at Park City Mountain Resort with his family for the holidays. He expressed how "angry" he was towards Vail Resorts for not informing skiers about the ski patrol strike, and that, "less than 20% of the mountain was open during the peak Holiday time," despite over two feet of new snowfall.

CNBC has yet to publish the clip to their channels, but a recording has been shared to the r/skiing subreddit. Press play on the embedded video below to watch Lebenthal's rant against Vail Resorts.

"If you want to run a travel and leisure company, you darn well better give the experience you're advertising," says Lebenthal in the clip. "If you don't, you will get negative PR, and non-repeating customers. Exactly what you don't want."

As for that last bit about providing the appropriate experience to its customers, why start now?

Words is that "progress" has been made in the talks, which I'm sure will be great comfort to those that chose to bring their families here for the holiday break.  There doesn't seem to be a short-term financial hit to Vail, but word on the street is that Anheuser Busch and Jaguar have offered to hold their beer...

Can't Anyone Here Play Defense? - Kapalua has changed dramatically from those halcyon Tiger-Ernie days, morphing (for reasons Mark Rolfing never quite manages to explain) into a soft, target golf track:

After birdieing half the holes at Kapalua Resort’s Plantation Course on Saturday along with an eagle for an 11-under 62, Hideki Matsuyama never cracked a smile. The 32-year-old Japanese

star also declined to speak separately to the Japanese media, a dedicated crew that follows his every shot and hangs on his every word, for the second straight day. And this was – we repeat – after a bogey-free 62 that set a tournament 54-hole scoring mark and equaled the Tour record too.

Matsuyama, however, is his own toughest critic and he high-tailed it to the range to iron out the flaws he perceived in his game. What could he possibly need to do at the range is a head scratcher, but Matsuyama said he needed to fix his driver and we'll take his word because it worked. The grind never ends, and very few can match Matsuyama’s grit and determination to scrape every ounce of brilliance out of his game.

All the hard work paid off on Sunday when Matsuyama took dead aim at the par-4 fourth hole and two-hopped a wedge from 107 yards into the hole for an eagle.

The mercurial Matsuyama, who has a well-earned reputation for hanging his head or dropping a hand off his club in disgust, only for the shot in question to be a thing of beauty, stared down his approach at the fourth and knocked knuckles with his caddie when it dropped. He closed in 8-under 65 to win The Sentry, the season-opening tournament on the PGA Tour by three shots over Morikawa, and notch his third victory in a signature event in the last 10 months.

I saw maybe an hour of coverage between NFL games, and it looked as boring as anticipated.  

Geoff had some characteristically caustic reactions to it all:

For the few fans watching the PGA Tour opener positioned oh-so-strategically against the NFL regular season’s concluding day full of playoff ramifications to ensure the fewest eyeballs possible, viewers were treated to an abnormally high number of Matsuyama’s trademark one-armed finish. Or maybe it was the juxtaposition with fake-looking red numbers. The failed follow-throughs became so relentless during Saturday’s third round, that Golf Channel analyst Smylie Kaufmann suggested Matsuyama would likely hit the range post-round to figure out how to get back to more center-face strikes. After a 62.

And this brings us to the nutty state of modern pro golf when a rain-softened course becomes defenseless, lacks a fighting spirit, and where record birdie totals elicit more yawns than yippy-doo-das.

C'mon Geoff, you know that's merely a result of all the ab crunches they do....

As for the TV schedule, I have a query.  If you were trying to shed all your viewers, what exactly would you do differently?

Not to be outdone, NBC’s return to college basketball coverage means they are emulating the CBS tradition of scheduling games that bleed me into coverage. Lucky us. This set up a less-than-idyllic start on Golf Channel, a move for a few hours to NBC before the final 120 minutes concluded on Golf Channel.

That’s not a big deal to those with a cable box remote control where numbers are entered and channels change effortlessly. But for streamers, Peacock only carries the NBC portion of the proceedings. This means the poor souls who cut the cord and signed up for Comcast’s Peacock had to navigate between multiple apps twice during the final round.

Reminder: it’s 2025 and this Peacock Shuffle stuff is still going on.

Seriously, will Nielsen even detect an audience?  The Tour tells us this is one of their eight precious, special events, yet the presentation, with it's network hopping, feels like a clown show.

While the event felt lifeless, at least these guys tried to liven things up:

That's something you don't see every day.

Will Zalatoris and Cam Davis were each penalized two shots for playing the wrong golf ball on the par-5 15th hole Sunday during the final round of The Sentry at Kapalua's Plantation Course.

Rules expert Mark Dusbabek explained that Zalatoris played Davis' ball, then Davis played Zalatoris. Neither player realized the error until they reached the green.

The penalty for playing the wrong ball is two shots, so the players had to return to their previous shots and replay from there.

Zalatoris and Detry both made double on the par 5.

The mishap occurred on third shots into a Par-5, lay-ups seemingly being the last place you'd expect the guys to go to the wrong balls.  No word on whether they play the same ball and/or mark it in similar fashion, but one hopes the respective caddies are secure in their employment status...

The Tour Confidential panel fulfills your expectations of Tiger sycophancy, but they do get around to this event at the bottom of the page:

Hideki Matsuyama won the season-opening Sentry, beating Collin Morikawa by three with a PGA Tour record score of 35 under. Anyone impress you? Surprise you? What was your takeaway from Week 1 of the marathon 2025 PGA Tour season?

Sens: Collin Morikawa looks hungry to get that third major, after a couple of close calls last year. He didn’t win but I dig his new Sam Snead-esque pre-shot routine and the ball striking it gave way to. He had a few short game glitches. But it still took a record-number of birdies to beat him.

Marksbury: Takeaway No. 1: Maui is always a welcome sight in January. Those vistas are truly unmatched. And as far as player performances go, this week was a great reminder about how incredibly talented Hideki is. Thirty-five under, a new scoring record (!!!). That’s unbelievable! I think he tends to fly under the radar sometimes, even as a major champion (though not for our betting expert Brady Kannon, who’s 1/1 on winning picks so far this year!). I will say I’m a little surprised by Xander. He has an excellent record at the Plantation course, with a win in 2019 and three other top 10s since then. He was T30 this week — his worst finish ever — and was never really in the conversation.

Hirsh: Hard to not be impressed when Hideki averages just one birdie shy of one every other hole. I don’t care how “easy” that golf course played, this tournament was never really intended to kick the crap out of these guys and that course would kick the crap out everyone reading this story from those tees. Could the 5th hole be switched to a par-4? Yea probably (it averaged 4.1 this week), but par is just an arbitrary number anyway. It’s the first tournament of the year at a beautiful and extoic resort course with only the 60 best players from last year invited. Let them make some birdies!

Yeah, you can hear the yawns as they scramble to say anything of note.... 

Let me just interject a story here to make a repetitive point about the ongoing scam that is the PGA Tour:

Here's what three PGA Tour player directors think about revamping the Tour Championship

Including this one:

Added Malnati: “I'm hopeful that we can do away with the starting strokes thing because I hate that that's part of the conversation every year. I think it's important that we maintain a season-long element to it. If you played a Scottie Scheffler season, you shouldn't get to the Tour Championship and start even with everyone else. I think there's different ways that it could go but I don't know what direction it’s going to go (yet).” The Tour’s television partners – CBS and NBC – are driving the discussion to make a change.

Yes, it's that Peter Malnati, who along with Adam Scott has cornered the market in sponsors' exemptions.   Malnati is there as a representative of the Rabbit-Americans on tour (and Adam Scott as well at this point in his career), yet they receive exemptions into all the massive money-grabs.  Do we think this might affect their view of the world and resulting votes?   Nothing to see here....

Simulate This - The other big news in the golf world is tomorrow's debut of the TGL, which the TC panel did a deep dive upon:

Finally, after a year-long delay and months of hype promoting the tech-infused golf league backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, the first match of the inaugural TGL golf season kicks off at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday on ESPN. What’s your biggest question mark you want answered as you tune-in for opening night?

Josh Sens: It’s a pretty basic question that applies to a lot of entertainment in our fractured,

distracted age. Will it be fun and fast-moving and feel genuinely new and exciting, with enough golf to win over a traditional audience and enough novelty to capture a fresh one while earning the approval of the ‘internet?’ Or will it comes off like a contrived and cynical cash-grab, which has been the case with a lot of other televised golf concepts?

Jessica Marksbury: Josh, spot on. The biggest selling point with a format like this is the showcase it offers for the various associated personalities. I’m wondering just how loose these guys are willing to be. Because simply watching them launch shots into a simulator for a couple of hours isn’t going to be enough of a draw for me.

Jack Hirsh: Agree Jess, will there be enough banter to make it interesting? We all remember how hyped up the first Match between Tiger and Phil was, but it really wasn’t that great of TV because Tiger and Phil were being competitors, not entertaining and the banter between the two wasn’t that good. It wasn’t until The Match II when Peyton Manning and Tom Brady were added to liven things up that the series became a success. Will the whole concept of a simulator league be enough to lighten things up between some normally steely competitors? We’ll see.

Gee, I feel like I left some vitriol in the bag, as that "contrived and cynical cash-grab" perfectly describes the Sentry and all the Signature Events, no?

As for Jess' comment, I'm not sure "loose" is the issue, as to me the bigger issue is that these guys just aren't all that interesting, and that starts first and foremost with Tiger.

For tomorrow's premier I'm sure they've teed up their strongest rosters to make a dramatic first impression.  What?  Really?

The first match will feature the New York Golf Club (Xander Schauffele, Matt Fitzpatrick and Rickie Fowler) against The Bay Golf Club (Ludvig Aberg, Wyndham Clark and Shane Lowry). (Three of each team’s four players compete in a match.) Does the first match have enough star power to get the public interested?

Sens: If this were a traditional tournament, I wouldn’t call this a field that is destined to move the needle significantly. But of course it’s not a traditional tournament. At this early stage, old-fashioned curiosity should be enough to get people to tune in. Would more people tune in if Tiger Woods were playing? Sure. But this schedule wasn’t made by coin flip. It was thought out. By not featuring Woods in the debut, my guess is that TGL is saving its powder for when the inaugural novelty wears off. The organizers understand that the field itself is probably not the most important factor this week.

Marksbury: Agree. We’ll be tuning in regardless! But the novelty factor will only last so long. With the exception of Lowry, I don’t see this opening cast as much of a hot-take-spewing, yuk-it-up type. But maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised!

Hirsh: Yea I’m really interested in TGL and like the idea, but I’m not sure I like the strategy of not putting Tiger in the first match. I get that the idea, as our James Colgan reported back in October, is to use strategically place Woods’ debut one day after the broadcasting network, ESPN, hosts an NFL playoff game to cross-promote it. But, we all know Tiger is the needle. Rickie Fowler is probably the only player a casual golf fan will recognize. Even after Schauffele won two majors last year, I still don’t think his brand has reached past avid golf fans. Shouldn’t TGL use Tiger as much as possible to capture the attention of non-avid golf fans with a new concept?

I think the half-life of that novelty factor is about fifteen minutes, so this seems designed more to solve America's sleep disorders, than to entertain.  Where's Charles Barkley when we need him?

Finish this thought: the TGL will flourish if…

Sens: If it has drawing power beyond its novelty and Tiger’s name. And if it gets talked up — as opposed widely mocked — on social media. It will definitely help if the matches are close and the shots seem appropriately challenging. Beyond that, it comes down to intangibles. In one respect, TGL seems to check the right boxes for our time. It’s high-tech and meant to be fast-moving. It’s got celebrities attached to it, and well-liked broadcasters calling the action. Oh, and you can gamble on it. But elements that seem great in isolation don’t always work when they’re brought together. The magic formula is hard to forecast. At least for me. When Survivor first aired, I thought, Who would watch this garbage? Shows how much I know.

Marksbury: I’ve watched a fair bit of alternative golf in recent months, from Golfzon Tour’s simulator matches on YouTube to a lighted, high-stakes par-3 tournament here in Phoenix. And one thing is for sure: The golf is only part of the package. To stay interested, we need a reason to buy in to rivalries, personalities and storylines. It all has to matter. So I hope there’s plenty of that to chew on with TGL.

Hirsh: Call me a broken record because I said this above, but I really think it’s going to come down to the banter. Players are mic’d up, is that going to be actually useful? If the guys are lose and taking swipes at each other during the match, while there is still an obviously high level of competition, that could be fun. Everyone is entertained at their golf course by the guy who can walk out with no practice and casually shoot 67 while trashing talking the crap out of everyone. That’s the kind of golf I wanna see.

OK, Jack, but if you're expecting that from Ludvig and Xander, I think you're betting against type.  There's a reason all these made-for-Tv matches suck, so I'm taking the under...

And struggle if…

Sens: Here, I’ll rehash some of my answers from above. If the banter is lame, as the kids say, if the matches are blowouts, and if leading names and whiz-bang tech aren’t enough to sustain interest. Also: if the tech glitches often enough that it doesn’t seem credible. There’s an obvious risk in live TV. My litmus test after the first airing will be to ask my kids and their friends, who are in their teens and twenties. If they deem it ‘cringy,’ I’ll take that as a sign of trouble.

Marksbury: My hope is that listening to the team interactions will feel like being a fly on the wall in the matches these guys routinely play against each other without camera rolling. If they can’t tap into being themselves — or if they do succeed at being themselves, but it’s just not that interesting — I can’t see this endeavor becoming a screaming success.

Hirsh: I agree Jess, if each match ends up like the first Tiger-Phil match, then TGL could die quickly. We have to see a side of these guys we’ve never seen before and we’ll get a golf product unlike anything we’ve seen before. If the players treat this as business as usual, it will not work.

There's probably a larger point to be made here about the nature of professional golf and it's fit with entertainment products such as this.   The nature of the game demands an equanimity, as they win so seldomly and need to stay on an even keel.  Here what they need is confrontation, and good luck getting that from Wyndham or the other guys.

Eamon has some thoughts as well:

Golf’s new TGL league has bravado and billionaire backers, but does it have a future?

The list of investors in TGL, the simulator-based league launching on January 7, is a veritable Burke’s Peerage of American oligarchy: John Henry’s Fenway Sports Group, Steve Cohen,

Arthur Blank, Marc Lasry—all members of the Strategic Sports Group that dropped $1.5 billion into the PGA Tour a year ago. Joining them are Pied Piper figures like Steph Curry, Serena Williams, Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout and Josh Allen. If a group with that combined record of accomplishment and affluence all buy the same stock, average punters might conclude they’re on to something and follow suit. Yet on TGL, skeptics remain. Golfers know what they like versus what they need to be sold on, and for now TGL occupies a murky zone in between.

There are numerous appealing aspects of this enterprise. The SoFi Center facility itself, for starters. I visited last month and saw an impressive feat of engineering. The technology too will stand out in a sport that’s doggedly analog and aged. There’s the opportunity, increasingly rare these days, to see Tiger Woods compete in an environment where he isn’t being upstaged by his kid. And to eavesdrop as teams debate strategy on unconventional hole designs. Or listen to the banter between opposing teams, though admittedly that’s the least promising selling point since an enormous book of evidence suggests cardinals playing canasta could produce more edgy trash talking than golfers in an exhibition setting. But will all of the interesting parts equal a whole that is sufficient to keep viewers coming back? The technology will eventually cease to awe and Tiger won’t play that often (though Charlie only lives a couple miles away and could be called up in a pinch).

Given the ubiquity of shot-tracing on golf broadcasts, I think it's open issue how different this will seem, but perhaps a reminder that no one watches real golf is in order as well.

Of course, Eamon has the receipts:

It’s one thing to consume a product when it’s temporarily convenient, quite another to develop an eagerness for more of it.

The awkward reality is that a decade’s worth of flaccid efforts to make exhibition golf entertaining—most recently the Showdown in Las Vegas—has callused the tolerance of golf fans, and that’s before factoring in a palpable weariness about the current state of the broader game. The comical flop of LIV has also rendered team golf a subject of parody. The RangeGoats aren’t even talked about around water coolers in Riyadh, much less in America.

“Rory under the lights at Shadow Creek pulls 625K viewers. Cam Young in a tennis bubble hitting into some simulator with NBA music and lights? Yeah, should be explosive,” texted one friend who, while a Colossus of cynicism on the daily, does offer a hint of the uphill climb TGL could face among even devoted golf fans.

The roster of folks behind TGL features some of the smartest and most accomplished people in golf, including many far below the investor and executive level, but they all face an intriguing challenge: Can they manufacture demand that doesn’t seem to yet exist for a product they’re already committed to supplying? That question is unlikely to be answered quickly, and even if the first season of matches gains audience traction there’s the small matter of monetizing the entire enterprise over the longer term.

Yes, and this cynical observer assumes that the $12 billion valuation of PGA Tour Enterprises to support that SSG investment would include an excessive valuation of the TGL, which presumably will require a large audience to validate.

But color me skeptical about Eamon's rousing coda:

Headwinds notwithstanding, let’s hope TGL does succeed. It would be additive for golf to have a genuine attempt at expanding its product offering and drawing a fresh audience, one that isn’t a dilutive public relations exercise for an autocratic government. We see and hear enough about what’s wrong with this sport these days. If nothing else, TGL is a reminder that a grand old game can still accommodate something new, unconventional and ambitious. Who knows, maybe those rich folks are on to something.

I find myself instinctively rooting against it, just because the entirety of the prior three years has been about professional golf refusing to live within its means.  To me this is just another adjunct money grab, the and inevitable mewling about growing the game have long since become tedious.   The game of golf exists separately from the professional version thereof, and I find myself increasingly bored by the latter.

I expect to tune in and blog the opening night, but we'll see if they can get any kind of traction.  Have a great week and I'll see you at some point this week, Wednesday morning perhaps being the most likely due to Tuesday night's broadcast of the TGL.  

Thursday Threads - Kapalua Kickoff Edition

So, how was your offseason?  I can only hope you used the hour-and-a-half profitably....

I have arrived at Unplayable Lies Western HQ without incident, as New Years Day is a good one on which to travel, including a land speed record getting to JFK.  That said, I'm walking into a bit of a mess (that "bit" being an understatement) at the mountain, as the geniuses at Vail have taken a strike of the....wait for it, Ski Patrol.  Yup, the only Vail employees for whom we have any use....  Limited terrain and the last of the holiday crowds with nowhere to go.

The other minor issue is that there remains little to blog.... Obviously we have the 2025 season blasting off later today, though your humble blogger did chuckle at the sequence of events that resulted in the getting big-footed by the college football playoffs.  Wonder which people will choose to watch?

Max's Moment - Suddenly, amidst that content void, all anyone wants to talk about is....checking notes, Max Homa.  Yeah, he didn't exactly light it up last year:

'It's been a weird year': Why Max Homa made a surprise move to Cobra

One of the Tour's biggest names is hoping an equipment change will lead to more fun (and success) on the course as the season kicks off in Hawaii.

Fun?  Fair enough, but does he know our fun now comes from not watching their exhibition matches?

PALM CITY, Fla. — Max Homa has time to kill as another pop-up shower makes its presence known at Floridian National Golf Club. A whirlwind content shoot has been put on hold, allowing

him the opportunity to ponder a question he’ll certainly get from peers and fans alike at PGA Tour’s season-opening The Sentry: Why Cobra Golf?

For more than a decade, Homa’s staff bag was filled with Titleist clubs that helped him go from relative unknown on the Korn Ferry Tour to one of the most marketable names on the PGA Tour. Five tour titles in a two-year stretch reinforced the belief that Homa was more than a social media darling.

Expectations were at an all-time high entering the 2024 season, but results didn’t match the forecast.

Homa failed to win for the first time in three years and missed out on the Tour Championship. In the aftermath, he started to take inventory of the game and noticed a worrying strokes gained/off-the-tee trend. After finishing no worse than 41st in the statistical category the previous two seasons, he struggled to keep it in play and plummeted to 164th.

Has he considered that it might be the Indian, and not the arrows?  And he looks weird in a Cobra hat...

Is it me, or is he perhaps sounding a wee bit needy?

“I drove it poorly for the first time, so I just thought it wasn’t necessarily the golf club that makes the ball go straight,” Homa told Golf Digest. “My caddie [Joe Greiner] said it proves the golf club doesn’t make the ball go straighter every time. You make it go straight. Go find something that can do that. Go through the business process and see what’s what. I think that gave me the confidence to go shop around. So when the time came for the opportunity to look around, I did. It’s been a weird year. Making golf fun can be tricky, and sometimes change is fun.”

With myriad suitors rolling out the red carpet to land one of the biggest draws on tour, Homa opted to take it slow, go through the courting process for the first time in his career and embrace being the cynosure.

“I like to consider myself low maintenance,” he said. “I don’t enjoy being the center of attention. Being truthful, I wanted to experience what that feels like [to be the center of attention]. Feeling wanted is a nice thing. Even in my own family, I’m fourth in line behind the dog. So it feels good to feel that.”

 So, a Sally Field moment?  Or perhaps run a similar process for a new family?

Obviously all the companies make great products, but this has me chuckling:

Their gear more than held its own during head-to-head testing. A smaller, more intimate tour staff that already featured good friends Rickie Fowler and Gary Woodland was also a plus. So, too, was the opportunity to work with Ben Schomin, Cobra’s Tour Operations Manager, in an official capacity.

It didn’t take Schomin long to prove his bona fides after Homa and Cobra came together on a multi-year club agreement. As the duo kicked around ideas for new equipment that would best suit his skill set, the conversation eventually led to the irons, long considered the best part of Homa’s game. Initial testing with Cobra’s King MBs made Homa believe a change could be in the cards, but a few issues persisted. The toe profile, topline width and offset were a noticeable detraction from the Titleist blade profile he’d grown accustomed to seeing for nearly two decades.

Could Schomin and team replicate the old look in a Cobra iron?

Until a few years ago, such a request would have required a herculean effort. According to Schomin, a one-off forged product requires five tools to be made, pushing the turnaround time to anywhere from six to 18 months for an initial prototype. Homa’s timeframe was somewhat shorter at four weeks. It could be debated that no one has embraced 3D printing more than Cobra. When Bryson DeChambeau was on staff, Cobra’s R&D team created countless prototypes using 3D printing technology. Fowler and Woodland have benefitted from the rapid design process as well, along with recreational golfers following the release of Cobra’s Limit3d iron. In other words, the idea-to-creation timeframe wasn’t an impossible ask.

I thinks that's a fun look behind the scenes of equipment fitting an elite player, but it's also plenty curious, methinks.  First, the doctor's diagnosis related to driving, but the irons seem to have garnered more attention (at least from this article).

But amusingly, let's see if I have this right.  An elite player's game deteriorates, and he decides change is the critical ingredient to regaining his moxie.  So he goes through a presumably systematic process with the equipment manufacturers, settling with Cobra but forcing them to change their equipment to mirror his old stuff.  So, in what sense is he changing anything?  Yanno, except for the TLC he's getting as a new recruit....

Though this seems aggressive, or at least early:

The Sentry DFS picks 2025: Why I’m betting on a Max Homa bounceback

With Scottie on the shelf, it's a pretty weak field, but a guy with all new sticks?  By the way, does anybody know what ball he's going to play?  If he's still bitterly clinging to his ProV-1X's, this really may be much ado about nothing....

Doing The Job Bloggers Won't Do - Since I'm unable to provide much content today, this might fill a void:

We asked Golf Digest writers the story they were proudest of in 2024, and why

Not the worst premise for a year-end recycling piece... Some good stuff here, including this nice Nicklaus-Jacklin homage:

The classiest move I’ve ever seen on a golf course

But this one stoked my architectural nerd gene:

Masters 2024: In search of the greatest Augusta National

I haven't read this as closely as I should, but spoiler alerts aside, here's your best ANGC evah:

The ‘Greatest’ Augusta National

Where does that leave the discussion of which Augusta National belongs in the Hall of Fame? The club’s maintenance prowess and ability to control the playing surfaces would bolster an argument that the course has never been better. Conversely, the pure length has put the green jacket out of reach for perhaps half the field, making it improbable that crafty feel players like past champions Ben Crenshaw, Seve Ballesteros, Jose Maria Olazabal or Gary Player could contend. The narrowing of numerous fairways has eliminated an important degree of decision-making that was always critical to scoring well. Crenshaw summed it best in 1986, comparing Augusta’s cerebral calculations to more penal courses like TPC Sawgrass. “At Augusta, it is strategy, strategy, strategy,” he said. “Augusta’s strength is around the greens and the ability to place tee shots according to the pin locations.” Now, on too many holes, the prevailing criteria is to just get the ball in the fairway, exactly Crenshaw’s critique of the TPC.

That places the debate in the mid-to-late 1990s, after the club had begun installing the SubAir systems (1994) and approaching maintenance nirvana, but before the addition of the “second cut” of rough that looked awkward and deviated from Augusta’s heritage. Our choice for Augusta National’s most ideal version is the course of 1995 to 1998. Before the severe lengthening, any type of player might still contend. Surrounding Tiger Woods’ record-setting 18-under-par victory in 1997 were wins by 43-year-old Crenshaw (1995), a 38-year-old Faldo (1996) and 41-year-old O’Meara (1998). Though driving distances were increasing, the architecture remained an apt foil for the spinny, wound golf balls and smaller metalhead drivers of the time, and players still needed to play long irons and woods into the par 5s (and even some par 4s), illustrated by Faldo’s minutes-long deliberation between his 5-wood and 2-iron for the second shot at 13 after he had tracked down Greg Norman in 1996.

Some say that MacKenzie, who died in 1934, wouldn’t recognize Augusta National if he saw it today. He probably wouldn’t with the altered holes, razored bunker edges, imported groves of pine, Perry Maxwell’s greens and the immaculate turf. But if he were transported to 1998, it’s likely he would appreciate the course for rewarding a spectrum of physical and tactical skills, a course that required bravery, guile and experience as much as power. That, at least, was the Augusta National he believed he and Jones had designed.

Can't say I saw that coming, but anything that allows us to relive that 1996 collapse is to be cherished.

2025, Briefly -  I'll blitz through this, but it likely demands an hyperbola warning:

25 burning questions for the 2025 golf

Burning, you say?  The only thing burning right now is my apathy..... 

See if you follow me here, first with this:

3. Did Jordan Spieth just fix … everything?

Sometimes a wrist surgery is more than a wrist surgery. Spieth Nation hopes that’s the case. We haven’t seen Spieth since he bowed out in the second round of the FedEx Cup Playoffs in August — but perhaps this is intermission before a massive Spiethian second act.

Yanno, it's not like he was killing it before the injury....

But juxtapose that with this (even acknowledging he's pimping his podcast):

12. Can Xander Schauffele finish off the career grand slam?

Okay, maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps winning the Masters and the U.S. Open this year isn’t gonna happen. But what if it did?! We unpacked that on this week’s Bold Predictions episode of the Drop Zone, which you can find here:

So, you like Xander's chances to get the two better than Rory or Jordan's chances of getting the one they're missing?  I do as well, although not in 2025.

 He's got all sorts of governance bits as well, including this odd bit:

LEADERSHIP DIVISION

6. Who will the PGA Tour’s new CEO be?

Not just in name but in philosophy — who will Monahan and Co. hire to push the PGA Tour forward? And what does [gestures at entire landscape] all of this mean for Monahan?

It's that "Monahan and Co." that's so odd, because my operative assumption is that Jay will have nothing to do with filling this slot, as he's the irrelevant man, still there only because Tiger and Patrick have found it useful to divert stray voltage.

This one's not exactly keeping me up at night:

22. What’s the story with with LIV’s Fox Sports deal?

That is, where, when and how will we watch LIV? Getting a big-time TV deal is huge for the league’s potential exposure and could be an antidote to its underwhelming ratings. But I’m curious how the media rights were valued and how the product will be televised — how much FS1 we’re getting vs. Fox, whether international events will be live vs. tape-delayed, etc. LIV’s ratings remain an important subplot as various power brokers decide golf’s future.

In what sense is it a burning issue where events are aired that no one will watch?

This I agree might be a burning issue:

23. Will the TGL work?

Color me intrigued. I think this could be sneaky fun and legitimately different; it’ll be fast, the tech seems pretty cool and there’s plenty of star power involved — but there’s also a world where it’s something of a disaster. A directly related question: Will the players buy all the way in?

Is it me or is there precious little hype for this, given that we're five days from its launch?

I shall leave you here and get on with my day.  I would expect to be back Monday to wrap Kapalua, but check back early and often just to be safe.  And a belated Happy New Year to all my precious readers.  

Weekend Wrap - Christmukah Doldrums Edition

Shall I begin by introducing myself?  It's been a while, though I've needed the break and there hasn't been any real news....

I have just a few bits for you today, then head back to Western HQ on Wednesday.  Blogging will likely resume later in the week, as the boys will hit Kapalua.  The good news is that it's been snowing out West, hopefully catching up after an extremely slow start to the season.  Your humble blogger feels on the clock as I try to get this old body in ski shape for as February adventure that I'll speak of as we approach.

Have a safe New Years Eve and a happy and healthy 2025.  Speaking of those whose health has taken a detour....

Man Men Down - This is as close to actual news as we'll get:

Scottie Scheffler out of The Sentry with hand injury suffered on Christmas

Can you say, "Opportunity Cost"?  I thought you could...

Scottie Scheffler’s PGA Tour brethren could hardly stop him in 2024, but the start of his 2025 campaign is going to be delayed by an off-the-course accident that involved preparing Christmas dinner.

The PGA Tour announced on Friday that Scheffler, the 2024 PGA Tour Player of the Year who won seven events in the season, has had to withdraw from next week’s season-opening The Sentry in Maui. According to a statement by Scheffler’s manager, Blake Smith, the World No. 1 suffered a puncture wound to his right hand, and small pieces of glass in his palm needed to be removed with surgery.

Smith relayed that Scheffler, 28, has been told it will take three to four weeks for the hand to heal, with Scheffler’s next start scheduled for The American Express in the California desert that will be played Jan. 16-19.

This is about the only way the Amex gets a name-brand player, so maybe it all works out in the end.  Not that Kapalua gets all that great a field, despite all the zeros in the purse:

The full field of The Sentry was finalized on Friday evening. With Scheffler out, the top-ranked player is World No. 2 Xander Schauffele, winner of the PGA Championship and Open Championship last year. No. 3 Rory McIlroy will again skip The Sentry, with his only start in the event having come in 2019.

No details on how the accident happened, although if his footwork with a paring knife mirrors that with a driver, one would it expect more such incidents....

And it's not just Scottie they'll do without:

Viktor Hovland suffers freak holiday injury

The Ryder Cup star is supposed to play in the PGA Tour’s season-opening Sentry event in Maui this week, and as of writing is still listed in the field. According to Eurosport, Hovland is hoping that painkillers and tape will be enough to get him through the competition, although Kapalua’s Plantation course is one of the harder walks on the tour thanks to its mountainous topography.

Hovland, 27, captured the FedEx Cup in 2023, but is coming off a somewhat rocky campaign with just two top-10 finishes in 16 starts following a series of swing changes. The Norwegian is still ranked inside the top 10 in the Official World Golf Ranking and earned an invite to Maui thanks to finishing 12th in the FedEx Cup, a standing helped by a third-place finish at the PGA Championship and T-2 at the playoff-opening event in Memphis.

Hmmm...two young stars suffer weird unexplained injuries simultaneously?  Coincidence?   We here at Unplayable Lies don't believe in coincidences.....

The Year That Was - The Tour Confidential panel took a half-hearted swipe at the end of 2024, and you'll wonder why they bothered:

In 2024 we saw unpredictable comebacks, insane winning streaks and some stars finally cash in after some lengthy major droughts. But who, or what, won 2024?

Sean Zak: I tried really hard to come up with another answer, but there is no other answer. Who won 2024? The man who won everything. Scott Scheffler. For my money, it was the greatest season since Tiger Woods’ 2000. We’re bound to remember Scheffler’s 2024 as an all-timer … so long as he doesn’t follow it up with something even greater.

Josh Sens: If we are sticking with who, no doubt it was Scheffler. On the what front, I’d say recreational golf. Participation is up. More women and kids are playing. As the Tour/LIV divide dragged on and TV ratings dropped, this year underscored what feels more true than ever: the best part of golf is not the pro game. It’s the game most of us play.

Josh Berhow: Good calls on both. Can’t disagree with Scheffler, who somehow had a better season than Nelly Korda did on the LPGA Tour. And any golfer in a well-populated area can vouch for the continued rise of recreational golf, as the struggle for last-minute tee times is as real as ever.

Wow, way out on a limb there, guys.  Though I do wonder whether history will reassess Scotties year as compared to Xander's, the latter who at least won two full-field events to Scottie's one.

Alas, it doesn't get better:

So if Scheffler won the year, then who would you hand out silver and bronze medals to for what they accomplished in 2024?

Zak: Silver medal for Nelly Korda, whose brilliance was just as great as Scheffler for much of the year. Bronze medal goes to Bryson DeChambeau, who helped create the greatest finish of the year. (All due respect to Lydia Ko and Xander Schauffele, of course.)

Sens: I’ll put Korda and Ko (the latter ending her major drought and punching a ticket to the Hall of Fame) on the bronze podium together and give the silver to Schauffele, who finally got off the snide by winning a major and then won a second for good measure. That’s rarefied stuff. Let’s not forget that a small swing change preceded his big breakthrough. Should be fun to watch what he does next.

Berhow: I was sold on handing out the silver to Nelly and bronze to Xander, but Sean has a point — it’s hard to argue against what Bryson did in the past year. Not only winning the U.S. Open but completely changing the narrative around him, winning back fans and becoming one of the most popular golfers on the planet. That said, here’s why I lean Xander for bronze: would Scottie or Bryson rather have his season? It’s all about major titles, and Xander won two of ’em.

Yeah, Bryson had a very good year, though they're better at citing the names than constructing actual arguments, as I'm sure you've noticed.

 Before we move on from 2024, I had last week's TC still open, and hadn't grabbed this bit:

We’ll spend next week’s Tour Confidential looking ahead to 2025, but first let’s take one last look back at 2024. What was your favorite golf moment of the past year?

Melton: I always get a kick out of covering the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, and this year was no different. Lottie Woad’s back-nine charge was epic — and it was a lot of fun to witness in person. We’re still only half a decade into ANWA’s history, but the event is a total hit in my opinion. Here’s to many more iconic moments from the ladies at Augusta.

Bastable: I will always associate 2024 with the Scheffler arrest. Was it my favorite moment? I don’t know. But for those of us in the golf-news business, it was the kind of moment that makes this job a blast. Still gobsmacked that it even happened.

Hirsh: Yeah, it’s Scheffler’s arrest for me too. That was just one of those moments that transcended sports and will make people remember “where were you when.” For me, it was the seven phone calls from my dad telling me to turn on SportsCenter at 7 a.m. Let’s also not forget, the dude shot 66 that day. Like come on man, don’t let us know how easy it is for you!

It's not every day that the best player in the world is gets to put his stamp on the mugshot genre, but Scottie?  The nicest guy on the planet in leg irons?  Not something we see every day....

Before any looks forward (and we'll not go too deep with those), Eamon Lynch has his own wistful take on the kidney stone year of 2024.  Buckle up:

At last, 374 years after Dutch settlers played the New World's first recorded “kolf” in upstate New York, the sport can no longer be airily dismissed as unrepresentative of America. Forget those old familiar sideswipes about being too monochromatic, too elitist, too cloistered. In 2024, golf is the game that most reflects the state of the nation — with immense power concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few and wielded for largely selfish ends.

It's been a year in which players have been busy exercising the control they snatched back in the bitter aftermath of the June 2023 Framework Agreement with the Saudis, on which they were not consulted. They secured ownership equity grants, increased purses and Ryder Cup pay, with no commensurate increase in obligations. In the boardroom, they constructed a super majority, ousted independent directors, took on private investors to further slake their financial thirst, limited the number of snouts with whom they must share the trough, and announced a new CEO role that will clearly diminish the authority of their commissioner.

In an era when every year seems to bring seismic change, ’24 ought to be remembered as the most transformative in the Tour’s history. *

* 2025 pending, of course.

But a rising tide lifts all boats, right Eamon?

Obviously, those flexes have been by and for elite stars. The rest of the membership has learned how little leverage it possesses. No wonder that even corners of the locker room prone to fretting about Newsmax being too liberal are starting to sound more like a Bernie Sanders rally.

As power plays go, it has been brutally effective. Compare it to Jon Rahm’s move a year ago, when he jumped to LIV Golf in the pompous belief that he’d be a catalyst, that his shocked peers would hasten to the negotiating table to secure his return to a unified game. Instead, it delayed any resolution by hardening sentiment against providing a path back for those who left to line their pockets. Regardless of the guff Phil Mickelson peddles, the PGA Tour was reshaped by those who remained, not those who left to launch a comically worthless enterprise that will need to be salvaged under duress by their former colleagues.

For all the public and private politicking by players, the most significant day of 2024 came early. On Jan. 31, the Tour announced Strategic Sports Group had invested $1.5 billion into a new for-profit vehicle, PGA Tour Enterprises, with the promise of another billion-five to follow. Whether intended as a hedge against the Saudi threat or to dilute an eventual cash infusion from the Kingdom, it marked a fundamental shift in how the Tour operates, and for whom. Only now are we beginning to see how the impact of that investment will manifest — in budget efficiencies at headquarters, in executive exits, in the elimination of tournaments, in the narrowing of player eligibility, in ambitious acquisitions, in a more global presence. All for something the Tour had never previously concerned itself with: a return on investment.

I'm reasonably OK with the ROI, it's the money-grabs to keep Patrick sated that have me so repulsed.

It seems ordained that we’ll eventually reach a moment when we’ll see who flexes a more powerful bicep, the players or their investors.

Against this backdrop, ’24 made clear that consumers of professional golf have been drifting away, weary of being so obviously treated as an afterthought. Broadcast ratings were consistently down, even on Masters Sunday, the once unbreachable fortress of golf television. The recent Showdown in Las Vegas drew viewership that was enormous for the LIV guys who participated but Lilliputian compared to what their opponents are accustomed to. It was evidence that meaningless, manufactured competition won’t cut it. Too many players and executives are relying on the notion that fans alienated by the entitled money-grubbing will flock back when the entitled money-grubbers are gathered under one roof again. That is looking dangerously close to a convenient delusion. The damage might be long-term, if not permanent. Golf’s most powerful constituency remains its consumer fanbase, and 2025 will go some way toward showing if they’ll keep voting ‘No’ with their remote controls.

As this year staggers to a welcome close, we can at least draw comfort from the example of Scottie Scheffler, who showed what’s possible when a golfer focuses on his job rather than on politics, posturing or pay. And from the tragic lesson of Grayson Murray, who proved that golf isn’t life, that money doesn’t matter, that wins are ephemeral, and that what we think we see isn’t always so. As we enter ’25, normalcy seems as distant as it did a year ago and the power plays are far from exhausted. Fans had best get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

It's not that I'm uncomfortable, it's that I'm bored.  It's actually very simple, seventy player fields are glorified exhibition matches, so the Brave New World envisioned by Tiger and Rory is one in which the PGA Tour is in the business of conducting exhibition matches.  ZIs Gene Sarazan available to provide commentary?

I promised a pivot to 2025:

Xander, Amy Yang and Ayaka Furue won their first majors in 2024. Which major-less pro finally gets theirs in 2025?

Zak: Jeeno Thitikul gets it done on the women’s side (and perhaps twice!). For the men, I’ll hang my hat on Viktor Hovland returning to the peak of his powers.

Sens: Charley Hull wins at Royal Porthcawl and lights a cigar(ette) in celebration. On the men’s side, it’s got to be Ludvig Aberg, although in his case it’s not fair to say finally. His career is far too young.

Berhow: Sam Burns has won five times on Tour but was winless last year, although he did finish in the top 10 eight times. He does just about everything well and is consistent enough to always give himself a chance. I think he takes the next step and wins a big one in 2025. How about the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow? For the women, it’s Rose Zhang. Three top 10s in majors in 2023 but none in 2024. That’s going to change in 2025, and she’s bound to win a handful before her career is over.

I'm wondering about Ludvig, though probably the issue there is that folks were out over their skis too early.  Also Rose, just because she's a pretty short hitter, and that's a hard way to compete.

And one more bit:

And the player to break out in 2025 is…

Zak: Thomas Detry. Played fantastic golf throughout most of the summer in 2024. Put himself in the running for the 2023 Ryder Cup. Seems right on the cusp of becoming a top 30 player in the world.

Sens: Michael Thorbjornsen. Fresh out of Stanford. Stellar amateur career. Top graduate of the PGA Tour University. All the makings of a star.

Berhow: Max Greyserman. Three runner-up finishes as a rookie last year. One of the best putters on Tour. More good things to come.

Thomas Detry?   That's at least one I didn't see coming....

But I lied, there were actually two bits more:

What’s your boldest prediction for next year?

Zak: LIV golfers win more majors than non-LIV players. And if you want me to get extra bold, the LIV slam takes place. All four, starting with Jon Rahm at the Masters. My colleague James Colgan has dubbed it the Llam.

Sens: Rory McIlroy exorcizes the demons and wins the Masters – and the career grand slam with it.

Berhow: Nelly Korda’s 2025 will be better than her 2024.

Sorry, Josh, I think Thomas Detry has a better chance to win the Masters than Rory....  Come to think of it, so does Rose Zhang.

And on that droll observation, we will declare 2024 to be wrapped.  I'll see you on the other side early in 2025.  Have a great New Years.