Travel Day Tidbits

It's getaway day for your humble blogger, some last turns this morning then off to Salt Lake to jet home to the Little Irish Girl™.   Before we get to our golf stuff, a couple of quick ski notes:

• FNBF* Bob, making a strong claim to retake the title form Boyd, took an epic spill yesterday.  Skiing a tree run appropriately named The Abyss, Bob ejected from one ski and slipped some 20 yards down the steeps, stopping just short of a gnarly pine tree.  After searching several minutes, Mitch found Bob's second ski some 15 yards below his corpse point of forward progress.  The estimated 35-yard spread (and no, I didn't pace it off) between the two skis is a record for the season.

FNBF* Bob with his beard a whiter shade of pale.

• I've had a great season here (and no, it's not yet over), but have had to deal with some logistical issues on the mountain, the most significant of which is the absence of a seasonal locker.  Thanks to NBF** Boyd, I've been able to make the day lockers work, but barely.  One of the annoyances there is that folks seem puzzled by the purpose of the large racks conveniently located outside the locker room, and insist on bringing skis, poles or snowboards into the crowded facility, often placing them where they block lockers or the scarce benches.  

But the funniest was this guy that I caught a few days ago:

Is that a snowboard, or are you just glad to see me?

 We now return to our regularly scheduled golf programming.

• There Will Be Was Blood - I had completely missed this item, but Tiger's opening drive on Sunday did some structural damage, as per this Coleman McDowell post.  

The victim, an Austrian tourist, post-impact.  I'm not sure if the nose was a preexisting condition.

I can't make out much from this GIF.  The victim was quoted as saying, "Not his best shot, eh?"  Apparently he hasn't watched much golf this season.

Glad to see Tiger do the right thing by stabbing a Sharpie into the open wound.  But I do hope he gave the fan the requested fist bump.

• Ladies Day - A couple of notes from the ladies' game.  First up is this Josh Sens piece about the late struggling Yani Tseng:

But those celebratory moments now seem so long ago. Back then, Tseng was just beginning her meteoric rise, a rocket shot that would eventually propel her to five major wins before the age of 23 — the youngest golfer, male or female, to ever pull off the feat. Tseng was named LPGA Player of the Year in 2010 and 2011 and went on to spend 109 straight weeks atop the Rolex Women’s World Golf Rankings, until… 

The wheels didn’t exactly come off, but they wobbled. Once a heavy favorite every time she teed it up, Tseng ran into a prolonged slump. Her last LPGA win came in March of 2012. She has since dropped to 44th in the Rolex rankings.

Beg to differ, Josh.  The wheels came off in a stunningly spectacular fashion, which can be traced to the moment she fondled the Kraft Nabisco trophy on the first tee for the final round of that event in 2012.  

The Scene of the Crime:  Yani's pact with the devil lapsed immediately after grabbing the trophy before teeing off in the final round of the 2012 Kraft Nabisco Championship.

In fact, for a comparable fall-from-grace one needs to look to David Duval or Ian Baker Finch.  Or perhaps the better analogy is baseball's Steve Blass or Rick Ankiel, successful pitchers who woke up one day and had suddenly lost the ability to find home plate (or perhaps the fictional Joe Hardy is the best analogy of all).  Really quite staggering given her complete dominance.

And speaking of the Kraft Nabisco, Beth Ann Nichols gives us the bad news that Kraft will not renew their sponsorship of the event after the 2014 edition.   Commissioner Mike Whan puts the best spin possible on it:

LPGA commissioner Mike Whan insists that it will not mark the end of jumps into Poppie’s Pond. The first major championship of the LPGA season, no matter what it’s called, will remain at the Dinah Shore Tournament Course, he said.

The Kraft is of course the old Dinah Shore, and its ties to Lesbians Gone Wild notwithstanding, it's the extent of the traditions left in LPGA world.  It also has eerie resemblances to The Masters, being the one major played at the same venue each year, silly traditions (Poppie's Pond vs. awkward green jacket ceremonies), etc.  The Tour needs a quality sponsor (perhaps Loudmouth Cafe would be interested) that will stay in place for the long-term.  Bad news for the tour that can't get a break.

• Links Trust Hijinks -  Returning to a field he's plowed previously, Shackelford posts about the St. Andrews Links Trust, the charitable organization that runs seven golf courses in St. Andrews, including The Old Course.  The gist of it via The Scotsman:

The claim is that the private companies, operating on the outskirts of St Andrews, are passing off and taking benefit from the internationally-renowned activities and reputation of the St Andrews Links Trust (SALT), the charitable trust which runs seven courses, of which the Old Course is one.

The citation centres round the issue that the private companies have been incorporated to deceive or confuse the public, or to induce the belief that their golf-related goods and services are connected with those belonging to Salt.

Ewan McKay, a director with SAIGC and Feddinch Developments Ltd, said that this was not the first time that local businesses had been pursued by the trust over use of the St Andrews name.

“The fact is that they [Salt] are in dispute with several local companies over the same issue and I find the whole thing abhorrent,” he said.

“What right has a body established in 1974 got to deny people who have businesses in St Andrews to use that name?”

Good question that last one, no?  I shan't pretend to know much about U.K. intellectual property laws, but this seems to be throwing around their weight in an unseemly manner.  I'd think they'd be on firmer ground in zealously guarding the Old Course name, but not so much the name of the town, university, bat, et. al.

• Hanks for the Memories -  We can't miss Hank Haney because he just won't go away.  Three, yes three, Hankster items to share this morning.  First up, Hank informs us, per this Matt Newman Scorecard item, that Tiger never intimidated his opponents:

Asked if Tiger still carries the same aura about him, Haney responded that there may have never been an aura to begin with.

“I didn’t buy into that when people talked about it as much as people talked about it,” Haney said. “Tiger won because he shot the lowest score, not because he intimidated his opponents.”

The pressure of playing in one of the final groups on Sunday is always there, whether or not Tiger is, Haney said. That — not Tiger’s presence — is the reason players fade.

Per John Strege, Nick Faldo jumped in on Twitter with this riposte:

Sir Nick Faldo ✔
@NickFaldo006

@GolfChannel Another amazing quote Hank! When Tiger walked on Masters range ALL heads turned. His aura was like a freight train! #Iwasthere
7:45 PM - 11 Mar 2014

I'm not going to belabor this, but it all depends on what your definition of is intimidation is.   More importantly, I feel about a Haney-Faldo Twitter cage-match the way Henry Kissinger reacted to the Iran-Iraq war, it's a shame both can't lose.

Next up on our Hank three-peat is this Farrell Evans ESPN piece (via Shackelford) in which Hank helpfully corrects Sean Foley's misguided notions of the golf swing:

Foley has made Tiger's grip much stronger. Haney had Tiger in a more neutral grip to eradicate the shot to the left. So, most of Tiger's misses were to the right. He eliminated half the golf course. Now, Haney argues, Tiger is about 50-50 with his misses to the right and left.

Second, Haney had Tiger's position at the top of the swing more left of the target or slightly laid off. Now, Haney says that Tiger is more neutral or across the line, which brings a hook more into play.

Third, Haney says that Tiger no longer plays the low stinger shot with the fairway wood and driver that was a key go-to shot for him in his best years. It was like hitting a knockdown shot with a wood: more controlled without losing much of the distance.

"That was an important shot for him," Haney said. "He played it with Butch [Harmon]. He used it a little differently with Butch than he did with me. But he hasn't used it one time this year."

Obviously Hank is still in axe-grind mode, but it does seem that Tiger is losing his driver to the left more than he used to.  As for the stinger, it seemed that last year he revived it, but maybe my memory is playing tricks on me.

Lastly, and this is barely a Hank item, but earlier this week TaylorMade built a driving range in Times Square to promote their new Speed Blade irons.  Haney was there as part of the promotion.  You'd think I'd be able to find a cool photo of it, but this is the best I've come up with.

• SIG Alert -  We'll wrap up with a couple of items from this week's SIG+D, an acronym whose charms continue to elude me.  First, a couple of their typically great photos:

Ryuji Imada escapes left-handed from the vegetation at the Puerto Rico Open.   

Any guesses as to whose range balls these are?  Way too easy, as it's of course The Most Interesting Man in Golf.

Lastly, Cameron Morfitt delivers a mild rant on the PGA Tour's incoherent schedule, though his major gripe seems to be that you can no longer drive the Tour as was done in the barnstorming days of Walter Hagen and Ben Hogan.  He states that the Tour is no longer drivable for those that have to drive it, but I'm not sure who that is.

He's on the same page with your humble blogger when he talks about the Tour willingly turning its back on its own history, comparing it to watching a ballgame at Fenway or Wrigley, where they've been playing since time immemorial. 

It's a digital magazine, so no copy-and-paste, but his best image is his comparison of the Tour's geographic permutations to the flight path of a concussed sparrow.   Morfitt also takes on the issue of Tour accessibility after the demise of Q-School.  Good stuff here as Q-School has effectively been replaced by the Web.com Tour Finals, a series of tournaments with 25 PGA Tour cards available.  As Morfitt takes us through, a guy with one T7 in the four events, including an MC at their Tour Championship, easily won a PGA Tour card.  

I agree that the Tour has become an increasingly closed shop, but I wish Morfitt had used his available bandwidth to stay on the scheduling incoherence.  I know I've become a broken record on these issues, but the combination of the heavy late schedule (think PGA, WGC-Bridgestone and four FedEx Cup events) and wraparound schedule is a sucker punch to the West Coast swing, the most historically relevant portion of the schedule and the best series of venues.  What I further don't understand is diminishing the events during that time period when you have the least clutter in the sports calendar, with all golfers in the northern half of the U.S. living as shut-ins and no major sports in their playoffs.  

That's all for now, folks.  See you on the other side.

*FNBF - Former New Best Friend
**NBF - New Best Friend