More of Those Random Musings

No doubt you've all taken a personal day from work to celebrate the start of the 2015 PGA Tour Season, a/k/a the Season-Long Race or the FedEx blah, blah, blah.... Yeah, I can hardly contain my excitement.

Rules Stuff - Considering it's on the Tour's website, Brian Wacker has an interesting two-parter that goes behind the scenes with rules officials Slugger White and Mark Russell.  This excerpt got Shack's attention, mostly out of concern for Ben Crane:

Also, if a player is hit with a second bad time in the course of a season, he is fined

$5,000 and a third bad time and each subsequent one after that an additional $10,000. If a player receives 10 bad times in a year, he is docked $20,000. 

“We’ve had several of those,” White said. “We’re actually trying to bump that up a little, too. These guys are making so much money now. It’s antiquated.”

Slugger's a good  guy, but he's barking up he wrong tree here.  There's no  amount of money that will affect our hedge-fund-invested Tour players, and we'll know that the Tour is taking a pass on this issue unless and until they assess penalty strokes.  Let's remember that no PGA Tour player has received a penalty stroke for slow play (I'm not if that's true forever, but it's certainly true in modern times), and the only penalties impose were on a 17-year old at The Masters and on the LPGA Tour.

But both Part I and Part II are fun reads, covering a range of famous rules violations, as well as the call-ins and weather delays.  On the latter, it also included this rather dramatic photo:

Silverado Dreams - Ron Kroichik writes at SFGate on how the Frys.com event landed at Silverado, and you'll not be surprised at Johnny Miller's involvement:

Johnny Miller planted the idea in the parking lot at CordeValle. 

That’s where he met Frys.com Open president Duke Butler on June 14, 2010, the Monday of U.S. Open week at Pebble Beach. Miller went to the club in San Martin for a corporate outing, but he arrived early to talk to Butler, a longtime friend, about one day bringing a PGA Tour event back to Silverado Resort in Napa. 

Miller had a vested interest: He was part of the ownership group buying Silverado at the time. Butler asked when the new owners were taking over, expecting a distant date.

“Friday,” Miller replied.

That's ironic, since they ended up moving the event form CordeValle.  But what on earth was Miller doing there on the Monday of U.S. Open week?  Shouldn't he have been down at Pebble prepping?

It's a fine golf course on a beautiful piece of property, but I didn't know until reading this that's it's a stopgap:

Miller created more doglegs on the North Course and moved bunkers to give the layout some defense against today’s long-hitting tour pros. The North Course will measure 7,203 yards and play at par-72; Miller predicted the winning score will fall between 12-under and 18-under. 

Silverado still counts as a stopgap solution, with the Frys eventually headed for the Institute, John Fry’s ultra-exclusive course in Morgan Hill. That probably won’t happen until 2016 or ’17, until the Institute’s clubhouse is finished and other infrastructure issues are resolved.

 Another ultra-exclusive venue will have tongues wagging, but it's John Fry's party and he can do as he wishes with it.

And to sate your FedEx Jones until coverage begins at 5:00, here's a Golf Digest slideshow on everything you need to know about the 2015 season.  I was going to joke about not needing to know it until January, but they make a point that I've been making:

The tour schedule is a zero sum game, which is another way of saying if players are adding events on one part of the calendar, they're very likely to subtract from others. With the fall schedule becoming increasingly busy, and with the Florida Swing stronger than ever, it's the West Coast events that many players will deem skippable. With the exception of Torrey Pines, where Tiger and Phil are almost always locks to play when healthy, we're expecting attendance to be sporadic from the upper crust -- especially now that the Match Play has moved to spring. Odds are Woods will only show up once, and we likely won't see Rory McIlroy play in the U.S. until the tour gets to Florida.

I couldn't have said that better myself, especially the zero-sum aspect of it.  Florida benefits from improved venues, but mostly it draws the far stronger fireld because it's in the glide path to Augusta.  

I'm likely in the minority, but I liked the Fall Finish far better when it was a stand-alone part of the schedule for Tour rabbits fighting to earn or retain their cards.  What is lost in marque names it more than made up for in urgency for the guys playing. 

Everything Old is New Again - Thanks to Shack for linking to this CNN piece on those crazies that play hickories:

While most professional golfers pride themselves on using the latest whiz-bang

This is like a cel from The Greatest Game Ever Played

equipment, deep within the Scottish countryside a very different tournament is taking place -- one where the players are happily swinging antiques. 

In fact, anyone watching the World Hickory Open Championship could be forgiven for thinking they'd stumbled 100 years back in time. 

It's not just the old-fashioned equipment -- wooden-shafted clubs that date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- but also the clothes: the players trek across this dramatic landscape dressed in plus fours and flat caps for the men and long skirts for the women.

There's more of these crazies than you realize, as evidenced by my acquaintance with Kevin Mendik over the summer.  And it's something that your humble blogger would like to try at some point.

Caddyshack 2? - Apparently Carl Spackler was on Howard Stern, and you can listen to it here.  I've never gotten the Howard Stern thing, so I'm giving it a pass, but you-know-who had this comment:

 

Early on he talks about the importance of caddying and how it taught him about human interaction (seriously, not jokingly).

I could not agree more.  I've always thought caddying was the best possible job for a kid, as it teaches all sorts of useful skills about how to make a customer happy and interact with adults (and successful ones at that).  And that doesn't even touch on the fact that it pays way better than flipping burgers and you tend to have a nice office.  Plus, how about caddie programs as a grow-the-game mechanism?  Way better than Foot Golf, no?

There was also a mystery golf project mentioned, so those of you that worship Caddyshack (and I'm not in that group) can get your hopes up.