Monday Mishegoss

Sorry about leaving you high and dry this morning, but when the off-season lasts only forty-eight hours you have to grab it while you can.  But there was some spectacular golf played this weekend, just not in the U.S.

Road Hole Blues - It was a weekend of mostly perfect links weather in the Auld Grey Toon, or as perfect a sit can get in early October.  From the unbylined AP game account:

Oliver Wilson held off Rory McIlroy to capture his first European Tour title with a one-

Oliver Wilson in the seemingly mandatory ski cap.

shot victory in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. 

Wilson shot a 2-under 70 in the final round on the Old Course at St. Andrews as McIlroy came up just short after a bogey on the 17th hole. Wilson finished at 17-under 271, with McIlroy (68) in a three-way tie for second with Richie Ramsay of Scotland and Tommy Fleetwood of England.

It was just a great shootout, with each of the four seemingly in control at one point or another.  Wilson is a former Ryder Cupper who has fallen on extremely hard times, so bad that he was the 792nd ranked player as the week began.  He survived some short-putting woes early in the day, and it's even harder over there to reel that back in as you're buffeted by the wind.

Most of the buzz is about Rory putting his ball into the Road Bunker.  Go here to see the video, as it's in a format that Blogger doesn't recognize.  That's really the play, and he was no doubt playing the aggressive line to try to win the event.  But I'll take you on a trip down memory lane back to the 2010 Open Championship.  Everyone remembers this amazing recovery shot by The Most Interesting Man in Golf:

But only your humble blogger remembers how he got into that predicament against the wall.  He left his second shot short of the Road Bunker just as Rory did, and tried to play the soft pitch onto the green.  Like many an amateur before him, the bounce on his wedge skipped the club into the ball resulting in the dreaded skull.  That's why you putt that ball and almost anything around the green.

Alas, that wraps up our links golf for the year, though it's never too early to start planing our 2015 trip to Askernish.

Now, I found the event delightful, but then again you know how I feel about links.  But see how you react to this James Corrigan rant:

Golf does not do itself many favours, does it? The first time the Royal & Ancient

clubhouse is seen on our screens since the historic vote last month to accept women members and the game will seem about as inclusive as the directors’ box at Old Trafford.

It is not gender or race which will appear as the great divide at the Alfred Dunhill Links but elitism. Not elitism in the sense of sport, and golf’s ultimate elite of Rory McIlroy , but elitism in the sense of who will be perceived as actually playing the game.

In this glorified pro-am, the likes of Hugh Grant, Bill Murray and Kyle MacLachlan will de depicted as normal golfers, as being just like you and me. Yes, to varying degrees, they hit the ball like you and me and inevitably feel as inadequate about their hand-eye co-ordination as you and me. But the differences are obvious.

As long as they don't invite Ray Romano and George Lopez, I'm OK with it.  But it's a bitter, class-warfare way to look at the world, since it's the Pro-Am structure that allows the tournament to exist in the first place.

Golf of course has an unfortunate history of exclusion that is a serious subject for discussion, but the rich are going to have their playtime whether it's here ot elsewhere.  If you don't like the event by all means don't watch it, but commercial sponsorship isn't going away anytime soon.

And if it's an everyman you want, James, how about Gerry McIlroy celebrating his 55th birthday with his son on the Old Course?  

Mea Culpa - I'm sure by now that everyone has seen the statement from Tom Watson taking "full responsibility" for pretty much everything.  It doesn't necessarily seem to be stopping the drip, drip, drip of new revelations or the parsing of prior revelations, but I'm not the only one out there that needs content.

Jim McCabe has a lengthy piece at Golfweek that serves mostly to frame some of the more damaging stories to Tom's rep.  For instance, he has this as relates to the replica Ryder Cup gift from the team:

According to the ESPN story, Watson “scoffed” at the team’s gift to him, a replica of the

Ryder Cup signed by all 12 team members. Two sources who were present said it didn’t happen quite that way. 

Said one: “He accepted the gift and said, ‘Thank you.’ It was sincere. But as he walked away, he stopped and said something like, ‘But I don’t want this one; I want the real Ryder Cup.’ I guess it was his way of pumping us up, at least in his mind, but it was 100 percent Tom being Tom. It came off as being a little disrespectful, but I don’t think he meant it to be. But I guess some people saw it that way.” 

The other source added, “He meant to put the emphasis on how important it was to win the Ryder Cup. It was bad, but it wasn’t harsh. He de-emphasized the gift but emphasized the real Ryder Cup.”

That sounds far more believable to me.  Even his alleged comment that "You guys stink at foursomes" could have worked as a means to relax the guys, 'cause they know how badly they played in those two sessions.

But here's where it gets a little dicey for Cap'n. Tom:

Matt Kuchar thought he was going to play team games with Jordan Spieth, yet he sat out the first session and then played with three different partners: Jim Furyk, Bubba Watson (with whom he hadn’t practiced) and Zach Johnson. Hunter Mahan practiced with Johnson, then got tossed in alongside Furyk, which prompted a furious set of phone calls to manufacturers to help each player know the attributes of the other man’s golf ball (Mahan plays a Titleist Pro V1x, Furyk a Callaway SR3). Spieth and Patrick Reed thought they would play Friday foursomes after winning in four-balls, only to be benched.

I can certainly see the issue in foursomes, but it's all really just to let the guys know what to expect.  If you're surprising your own guys, that can't be good.

And of course this:

The second half of the Watson shock? It came Saturday morning, and Mickelson didn’t understand this one at all. Watson met Mickelson, Bradley and Simpson in the lunchroom and told them that they would be on the bench for the afternoon foursomes, too. (It meant that Simpson, who had played in Friday morning’s four-balls, would sit out three straight sessions and play just twice in this Ryder Cup.) 

Several sources said the news was enough of a blow to Mickelson, Bradley and Simpson; what made it worse was how blunt Watson was, disparaging the way the three of them had played Friday. To Mickelson, the captain had crossed the line. 

“Phil’s a leader,” said a source who was in the locker room all week. “His fatherhood came out. He’s a protector. He was angry with the way Watson had talked to Keegan and Webb.”

The story last week was that Phil at least had been informed of that by text message.  The mistake wa sin playing them in foursomes FRiday afternoon, and that created a bizarre chain reaction that left everyone miffed.  

Alex Miceli writes about another instance of indecision for the Captain:

Less than 24 hours after having decided on his captain’s picks for the Ryder Cup, Tom

I'd go with none of the above.

Watson changed his mind regarding Bill Haas and opted instead for Webb Simpson, sources familiar with the decision told Golfweek. 

An impassioned plea from Simpson proved to be enough to get Watson, who had decided on Keegan Bradley, Hunter Mahan and Haas, immediately after the final round of the Deutsche Bank Championship on Sept. 1 to flip for Simpson.

Again we had heard about a 3:00 a.m. text message from Simpson, but it seems that only Webb got to electioneer at the polls.  And that great anonymous quote about Watson, "Seldom right, but never in doubt" seems off the mark, as his indecision is a big part of what bit him in the butt.

And if you think I've been hard on Tom and Phil, grab a gander at this Scotsman rant about our guys:

Ah yes, money – the root of all mediocrity. Think on this little gem. Since the PGA Tour changed from 60 all-exempt players to 125, the US has won but four of 15 Ryder Cups. The biggest and wealthiest tour in golf is breeding a generation of “fat and happy” players who, generally speaking, feel no pressing financial need to win tournaments.

And this one's gonna leave a mark: 

Perhaps the only surprise was that, having proved over and over they don’t know how to win, the visiting Americans, “led” by former Open champion Phil Mickelson, showed they don’t know how to lose either.

At least the U.S. team's charter had left Scottish airspace before this ran.

It's Not Nice to Tease Me - Shackelford had my hopes raised with this header:

Hazeltine In 2016 Won't Be Hazeltine As We Know It

If only.  But for those of you that remember Hazeltine's 16th hole, the only charitable thing I could ever say about it is that it would make a more interesting match play hole.  Turns out that you can't have that kind of drama that late in the round, wouldn't be prudent, per the Star Tribune:

On the course, the most interesting aspect is that Hazeltine will reroute how the course plays. Players will start on what have traditionally been holes 1-4, then jump to 14-18, then back to 10-13, before finishing on 5-9.

With fewer players in the field than in a traditional tournament, that layout allows for better flow, Hunt said. 

“It allows more people to be on the closing holes and to get off the golf course,” he said.

The 16th actually started life as a "Dogleg Par-3" as someone put it at the dreadful 1970 U.S. Open won by Tony Jacklin.  The players reviled the course, with Dave Hill famously quipping that "The only thing Hazeltine was missing was "80 acres of corn and a few cows."

Hazeltine was given a mulligan when the Open returned in 1991, with the 16th transformed into the Par-4 we know today.  I've understandably always hated the hole, as my namesake coughed up that Open to Payne Stewart on that very hole not once, but twice.  He was in control on both Sunday and in the Monday playoff, and made a mess of it both times.  Thus I have only the one Sports Illustrated cover (1987) on my office wall, with my face Photoshopped over his.

As long as we're having this discussion, here's what it looks like:

How topical given who he beat.  

Is it 2015 Already?  How can we miss Commissioner Ratched if he won't go away?  Can you believe that the 2015 season commences this Thursday?  It's really quite mad, and it's created all sorts of unintended consequences as players adjust their schedules but this isn't the time for this rant.  We'll focus on that as we see the depleted fields on the West Coast Swing.

What is for today is a change of venue, the Frys.com is moving to the Silverado Resort in California's Napa Valley, as per this preview in the Napa Valley Register:

It marks the PGA Tour’s return to Silverado – a property rich in golf history – for the

first time since 1980. 

“When you look at the past champions here at Silverado, you see that it’s the best of the best,” said Tim Geesey, Silverado’s director of golf operations. 

From 1968 to 1980, Silverado hosted PGA Tour events. The winner’s circle here features some of the game’s greatest players. 

Johnny Miller, a World Golf Hall of Fame member who is now one of Silverado’s owners, won twice during the Kaiser International Open Invitational. Jack Nicklaus was also victorious here.

It happens to be a fine venue, though there was nothing seemingly wrong with Corde Valle where the event was previously held.  It's just two full months early...