How I Spent My Winter Vacation

The body cried out for a day off, and the mind conspired to grant that request on a day with great golf to watch...  so your humble correspondent watched an aggregate forty-one holes of golf yesterday:

1. The final two holes of Saturday's play from Riviera with my first cup of coffee;
2. All eighteen holes of coverage of the ladies' event from storied Royal Melbourne;
3. The 18 holes of Round Four from Riviera, followed by the three-hole playoff.

That may be too much golf for even your humble correspondent, but because of the venues it was quite glorious.

Lydia Rocks - With her preternatural calm on full display, my Lydia won the Women's Australian Open:

New Zealand's Lydia Ko made her second start as world No. 1 a winning one, shooting a

final-round 2-under 71 for a two-stroke victory over South Korea's Amy Yang in the Women's Australian Open.

The South Korean-born Ko finished with a 72-hole total of 9-under 283 on the composite course at Royal Melbourne. Yang shot a final-round 72.

More importantly, I may be coming to grips with the absence of the beloved glasses...Maybe I'm not too old to deal with change.

I don't actually buy the concept of Lydia as the best player in the world, because I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that you should show something in the biggest events before earning that title, and The Race to the CME Globe isn't one of those.  But then again, she should be a junior in high school...

She didn't appear to play especially well, struggling with her speed on the greens early and benefiting from a couple of misses from short range by Amy Yang.   But sometimes appearances can be misleading, as a course like RM demands exacting precision on where to set down your ball that seems boring from a distance.

But see what you think about this Aussie writer's assessment:

In a tournament where only 11 players finished under par, Ko showcased a brilliant

combination of deadly accurate ball striking and mental strength to be the only person to record four rounds in red figures, the last a near-flawless two-under 71 that outclassed her main Sunday challenger, South Korea's Amy Yang, who finished two shots behind as runner-up at seven-under. 

With the world at her feet, Ko's goal for 2015 will be to win a major – or several – something that would take her status as the world's best to another level, and on Sunday's evidence, she is well placed to do so after conquering Royal Melbourne in conditions and on super-fast greens that many players have said this week you only see at a major. 

Comparisons to Tiger Woods, in terms of her accomplishments at such a young age, will only grow after Ko closed out this event in a controlled yet aggressive manner, something she admits she had not been able to do in past Australian Opens.

I was tempted to call BS, but what I really think is that he's way early with such a call.  Not only is Lydia younger, but she's winning in a completely different fashion.  She gives up quite a bit of yardage to her peer group, so it's exciting to think about how good she might become as that length differential mitigates.

But to speak of multiple majors before she's actually contended in one is just nonsense....this game has humbled too many, and it's not necessarily helpful for her to have the No. 1 ranking prematurely.

The Riv Shines -  I loved it, how about you?  There are some dissenting voices to be found, voices that we respect, but what a great week of strategic golf.  For the second time in four years we saw a playoff go to the great stage that is the tenth hole, and were rewarded with great shotmaking.  I think John Srege has it right:

The Riviera Country Club, 12 miles west on Sunset Blvd. from the Dolby Theater at

which the Oscars would be held later in the day, sparkled in the gloom of a wet Sunday afternoon, its difficulty worthy of its pedigree.

“A shrine of the sport. A citadel of the game,” the late great Los Angeles Times columnist and Riviera member Jim Murray called it. Until the USGA went to Torrey Pines in 2008, Riviera was the only Southern California course ever to host a U.S. Open, back in 1948, when Ben Hogan won for the third time in 18 months on what came to be known as Hogan’s Alley.

It was more of a demolition derby down the stretch, as Casey, Spieth, DJ, Sergio and too many to mention made critical errors down the stretch.  And that doesn't include the alter kockers, as when Retief, Veej and Angel lost it, they looked like twenty handicappers.

But firm and fast is the ultimate test in our game, and that's what the Riv provided this week.  And how about those pitches that James Hahn and DJ hit on No. 10 in the playoff, the beauty being that those were shots they wouldn't dare even try in a stroke play event.  And of course the delicious irony that the guy that put is ball in the correct spot, Paul Casey, was the guy eliminated on that hole.

That dissenting voice noted above is of course the Shackmeister, who had these comments:

Riviera was tough. Major tough. The firm greens almost reached 13 feet on the

Stimpmeterafter morning mowings. The poa was turning grey. The old girl required intense precision like never before. 

Granted, some of the 2015 Northern Trust Open difficulty came from contrived elements. The fairway widths were down to nothing, with a few laugh-out-loud-to the naked eye landing areas (1, 3, 5, 8, 12, 15, 17, 18), no doubt the club's desperate last attempt to compensate for not getting the U.S. Open it so wanted and won't get by presenting bacon strip fairways. 

That said, the rough surrounding those fairways was entirely manageable and rarely the hack-out stuff we saw at Torrey Pines a few weeks ago. But with all sorts of elite and rising players fighting for the lead and a chance at history, the same story of late emerged: elite players unable to hold leads. Or even elite players unable to make 5 on par-5s from the fairway...with a wedge for their third shots.

Forget the stimp, it was the firmness of the greens that made it such a severe test, as anticipating and controlling that first bounce was the challenge.  And while I'd agree about some of the landing areas, the key was limited rough that gave the guys options.

But I don't think Sergio and DJ failed the test because of the contrived set-up, they failed it because at crunch time they hit poor shots.

As is often the case when I watch golf, I found myself rooting down the stretch for the player for whom a win would make the biggest difference, in this case obviously James Hahn, a man that has paid some dues:

Hahn’s story is one of perseverance whether it is being nearly broke, falling so close to

winning his Tour card, or selling shoes to make ends meet at two Nordstom’s department stores in Northern California in 2006. 

“I was pretty good at it,” Hahn said. 

Hahn, best known for his "Gangnam Style" dance on the 16th green at the 2013 Waste Management Phoenix Open, was one of the seven players to lead during a wild final round that had more traffic on the leaderboard than the I-405 freeway.

Paul Casey was a close second, both because I pegged him as the best of his class of English players (Westy, Donald and Poults) many years ago, his constant struggles with injuries as well as this:

Watching somebody shank the ball is usually something of a somber, awkward affair. But it's always slightly more encouraging when a tour player hosel-rockets one into nowhere. We start thinking: Maybe the rest of us aren't so bad, after all.

Webb Simpson is one of the few tour players with a reputation for hitting the odd shank, and now we can add Paul Casey to that list. Casey hit a stone-cold shank on Rivera's 13th hole on Sunday from 155 yards. 

Of course he pitched it over a tree to eight feet and made a rather routine par.

As for Sergio, he has a long-demonstrated ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in some very strange ways, as Shack informs:

It won't mean much to non-Angelenos, but back nine leader Sergio Garcia hit quite possibly one of the worst drives I've seen a professional strike in some time, leaving himself 10 paces behind Dave Stockton's infamous drop-kick hit in 1974 with a tiny persimmon driver. Stockton roped a three-wood in to the green and made birdie to beat Sam Snead. (Sergio did see the plaque but as you might surmise, did not stop to read what it said.)

Sergio hit comically bad drives on both 17 and 18, but it was his chipping that I felt really cost him the tourney.  He continued to use his sand wedge to disastrous effect all week, as if a guy who won a British Amateur at Muirfield couldn't handle a bump and run.   Go figure.

On to Florida.