How Cruel It Is - Imagine for a moment that you're a member of an anonymous golf club and at the same time you've started an equally anonymous golf blog. Now supposing that aforementioned known-only-to-its-members golf club becomes part of a multi-day national story, and you're in a position to find out all sorts of behind the scenes details and can have the blogging world beating a door to your little bloglette....
Tasty isn't it? Well, it would be if I'd been in the country....proof again of the absence of a benign deity, the Obama story broke just after we set sail for Ireland. In any event, how's this treatment?
Representatives on behalf of the president reportedly contacted a number of elite golf courses in the Westchester County area -- among them Trump National Golf Club, Winged Foot and Willow Ridge -- hoping to get Obama a tee time over Labor Day weekend. The president had been planning to stay in the area overnight to attend fundraisers and two weddings, but opted only for a day trip after his requests were rebuffed by the clubs, according to a report from NBC 4 New York.
Heh, Willow Ridge an elite club? Obviously Luke Kerr-Dineen has never set foot on the grounds and just kinda assumed that if Obama called we must be something special.
The there's this from that NBC report:
Club managers apparently did not want to inconvenience their high-powered and high-paying members over Labor Day weekend by shutting down their courses to accommodate the president.The sources said the White House advance team was giving the clubs just a day or two notice to fill the president’s open Saturday morning in New York. Of several courses contacted in New York and Connecticut, a spokesman for Fairview Country Club in Greenwich said it would have accommodated the president if he had asked. That was the only club that said it would.
High-paying? For sure.... High-powered? Only in our imagination.... Sheesh, and club manager worth his salt knows that if he told the members to pound sand on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend he'll be updating his resume post haste.
FedEx Follies - In 2009 Tiger Woods won his second FedEx Cup and you may remember the delightfully-awkward award ceremony with both Tiger and Phil, who actually won the Tour
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| Mine's bigger than yours... |
Championship, on the podium. Since then your FedEx Cup champions have been Jim Furyk, Bill Haas, Brandt Snedeker, Henrik Stenson and Billy Horschel. Of those illustrious names, only Poor Furyk has a major to his name and he hasn't won a single tournament since that Tour Championship. Of the others, I don't believe any of them won even a single tournament before the start of the "playoffs" (I'm going from memory, so forgive me if I've missed one).
So, how's that season-long race for the FedEx Cup going? It's obviously a bad joke, yet Commissioner Ratched keeps telling us it's a home run. Shackelford had a good Fisking (that's an old Internet term for a point-by-point rebuttal) of Timmy's East Lake presser, but for me this was the take away:
Our leaderboards are consistent virtually every week. Our field quality is consistent. And we have a lot of happy sponsors on that tour.
So they don't care about the ratings? Hmmmm...mind if I get a second opinion on that.
I love when a plan comes together, but how about a note or two of dissent? Per Doug Ferguson, don't expect much in the way of big names on the West Coast swing in '15.
Some 20 years ago, there was a feeling that the PGA Tour didn't really get going until Florida.
It might feel like that next year, too.
Among the contributing factors - the busy end to the FedEx Cup season that forces players to pace themselves during the year, the start of a new season and moving the Match Play Championship to the first weekend in May.
Not a problem, yanno, unless you're the sponsor of those events. And those events are played on some of the only interesting venues on Tour (Riviera and Pebble) and typically get the highest ratings of the year. Hard to imagine, but you saturate the end of the schedule with big-money events and start the season three months earlier, and the players will create a break in their workload where it suits their needs.
If you make the end of the schedule more important, then you make these sponsors' events less important and therefore less valuable. But Tim tells us they're happy, so what do I know?
Videos of the Fortnight - Would you be a bear and tend the pin for me:
And while this is no longer topical, John Oliver's take on the Scottish independence referendum is on a par with best of his work from the Daily Show:
No golf references, but funny is funny...
It's Not You, It's Me - The bormance of the century is officially over, as Ryan Lavner informs:
Adam Scott and caddie Steve Williams announced Wednesday that they have ended theirpartnership.
Scott and Williams had worked together since summer 2011, but Williams, 50, said at the start of this season that he hoped to scale back his tournament schedule and spend more time with family in New Zealand.
But I thought they were soul mates? Have they told the kids?
And in more important news, Karen Crouse informs us that there's yet one more thing that pisses off Stevie Steve:
Settling in at the lectern for his speech, Williams gave Sands the same look he would give a golfer who questioned his yardages. “It’s Steve,” Williams said to the assembled crowd at the Cherry Hills Country Club outside Denver. “Stevie’s what Tiger used to call me, so that’s what everybody calls me. I hate that name.”
I think it's touching that Stevie wants to spend more timing ripping cameras out of the hands of his family.
Ryder Cup Stuff - Just a few days before the epic confrontation of our WAG's against theirs, but shall we check in to see how everyone is prepping:
On the subject of bromances, this one of the May-December ilk. Here's how Shack summed it up:
Perhaps wanting to keep peace for Team Europe, the Judge in the Rory McIlroy vs. Horizon management case analyzed an application for discovery of "sensitive" documents related to Graeme McDowell's days at Horizon and asked the lawyers, “Is this not a case that is made for mediation?”
Rory is also accused of destroying data held on his smartphone, so seems as if there might need to be stenographers in the team room. Notwithstanding the increased tension between the former BFF's, Paul McGinley had this to say:
"Rory's had arguably his best year ever (winning two major championships) and Graeme won the French Open. It has not affected their performance and both of them have assured me it's not going to affect anything in the team room.
"I would be very surprised if they don't play together although I'm not going to write it in stone."
Please do, Paul... we might very well need something to talk about. And it will also simplify the serving of papers...
As for our side, Shck had no sooner made the case that picking Chris Kirk was the hotter hand than Webb Simpson, and pretty much your average cadaver can clear that low a bar, than Billy Horschel morphs into Michael Jordan and runs the table to the tune of $13,4 million.
But Cap'n. Tom tells us that the picks cannot, wouldn't be prudent, be made any later:
“In ’93, I made my two captain’s picks the day after the PGA, six weeks before the Ryder Cup,” Watson said.
“Logistically, there are so many different things that go into it, just in getting the players over there and getting ready ... get their families involved, get their families and friends over there. It would be awfully tough to make the decision the week before the Ryder Cup.”
Don't you realize how hard it is to find a tailor to hem the trousers this time of year. Or perhaps it's the WAG swag (that's one I should trademark).
And I'm sure the "Here's how we did it in '93" logic will be a big winner with this generation of history buffs..
Saving Anthony Kim - The article of the week is this Alan Shipnuck update on former bad-boy Anthony Kim, who is facing quite the dilemma:
The sightings have the ring of myth. One night he is at his favorite bar in Dallas, So & So's, sitting in the usual corner booth ordering bottles of Patron for a small entourage.Then he is in a penthouse at the Dallas Ritz-Carlton, playing a private, big-money card game. Next thing you know, he is on the range at the Madison Club in La Quinta, Calif., or hitting balls at TPC Craig Ranch outside Dallas. Then he is vacationing in Belize with a comely companion. Or beachcombing in Santa Barbara. Or at Costco in La Quinta with hair grown down to the middle of his back.
Anthony Kim has become golf's yeti, an elusive figure who is the source of endless conjecture. What we know for sure is that Kim, 29, has not teed it up at a PGA Tour event in more than 28 months. Once considered the future of U.S. golf, he is now estranged from the game that brought him fame and fortune. His handlers at IMG rarely speak to him. In April, golfchannel.com asked Kim's agent, Clarke Jones, about his client's whereabouts. The best Jones could come up with? "He's not living under a bridge, he's not living in a box." The players on Tour wonder if they will ever cross paths with Kim again.
If the key to Watergate was to "follow the money," here I'd suggest following the Bolivian marching powder... But do read it to see why AK has to decide whether to take the money and run.
First Looks - It's not often that one is provided the cure for what will ail me next week, that being the dreadful Centenary Course at Gleneagles. Josh Sens catches up with The Kooch, who has been to Nova Scotia and has seen the new Coore-Crenshaw Cabot Cliffs:
Count Matt Kuchar as a rarity among Tour pros: he packs his sticks on family trips and -- here’s a novel concept -- plays golf for fun. On a recent getaway with his wife, Sybi, and their two kids, Kuchar found himself in Nova Scotia, where he teed it up at Cabot Links, a seaside layout that ranks 82nd on Golf Magazine’s list of Top 100 Courses in the World.
Moving at a breezy pace, Kuchar shot 64 (ok, he took a breakfast ball) and got around so quickly he had time left for sight-seeing. One of the sights he saw was Cabot Cliffs, Cabot Links’ sibling-in-the-making, a Bill Coore-Ben Crenshaw design that sits just up the road from its sister course.
Here's a couple of images to wet your my whistle:
Other Stuff - The Shark almost decapitated one of his fins, the Chinese have purchase Wentworth, Rory landed a ball in a spectator's pocket and Tiger is still searching for his explosiveness, but I'm only one man....More later, perhaps.
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