Sunday Stuff

I hear talk that there's some sort of football game later today....don't these folks know it's ski season?

The Agony of Defeat - My Lydia took me on a wicked roller coaster ride yesterday, which didn't end particularly well:

During a closing stretch that featured one of the more tumultuous final hours in recent

LPGA Tour history, teen wunderkind Lydia Ko faced a series of tough predicaments. But a query that came after the final round gave her the biggest pause of all. 

After reclaiming the lead late Saturday to set herself up for a double payoff of sorts, the 17-year-old double-bogeyed the 71st hole in the inaugural Coates Golf Championship to lose by a shot to Na Yeon Choi. 

However, Ko secured a piece of history that could be remembered long after the details of the tour's season opener are forgotten. The transplanted New Zealander became the youngest player of either gender to climb to world No. 1, breaking the record set by Tiger Woods by almost four years.

It was a drama-filled afternoon and one can only hope there were a few eyeballs watching.  They were lucky to have the three contenders all in the final group, though none of the three played all that well down the stretch.

But Lydia is not yet the best player on that tour, regardless of how the numbers tumble.  And her wedge play down the stretch was downright Tigeresque, late-period Tiger that is.  But she's got time...

No Surprise Here -  Lydia couldn't close, but fellow World No. 1 has that drill down:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- An unrelenting Rory McIlroy secured his second

Dubai Desert Classic title in six years with a 2-under 70 in the final round to win by three shots on Sunday. 

The Northern Irishman's 22-under 266 total matched the lowest in the history of the tournament, set by Stephen Gallacher in 2013 and Thomas Bjorn in 2001.

John Huggan thinks the kid might be for real:

Seen this image enough lately?  Blame Omega...

It was a contrast impossible to miss. As Tiger Woods played a game with which he is not familiar, Rory McIlroy was simultaneously asserting his increasingly clear superiority over what currently passes for his competition. Although only half a world apart -- one in Scottsdale, the other in Dubai -- the two biggest names in golf were metaphorically on different planets.

The same sort of intergalactic banishment was the collective fate of those in McIlroy's lengthy slipstream at the Omega Dubai Desert Classic. Four tours of the Emirates Course saw him reach 22 under par and finish three strokes clear of the runner-up, Swede Alex Noren. As a measure of the 25-year old Irishman's now prolonged level of high performance, 18 of his last 49 competitive rounds have added up to 66 or better. His last seven finishes on the European Tour: First. First. First. Second. Second. Second. First.

Think the Masters might be fun?  I was also struck by the contrast between the two Swoosh show ponies, especially as they both chose pink shirts early in the week.

Phoenix Rising - You mean they didn't cancel the event when Tiger and Phil tanked?  Go on....

Saturday is the day when we don't really care who is winning the WM Phoenix Open.

We only care who got cheered, who got booed, who handed out party gifts, who played to the crowd and hey, where are those hot chicks headed? 

For the record, Scotsman Martin Laird finished the third round with a three-shot lead over Brooks Koepka, Memorial Tournament champ Hideki Matsuyama and Mr. Iowa, Zach Johnson.

Forget Tiger-proofing golf courses (as funny as that quaint concept seems at this moment), but Phoenix has Tiger-proofed an entire tournament.  Quiet the feat, even if accomplished in a manner that makes intractable purists a little queasy, they seem to enjoy things there.

A couple of additional notes on the event.  Shack had linked to this local piece after the second round:

Near the top of the leaderboard Friday at the TPC Scottsdale was a pair of 21-year-old

John "Rahmbo" Rahm 

golfers who gained entry this week via exemptions – Daniel Berger, who shot a 2-under-par 69 and is 8-under for the tournament, and Justin Thomas, who was 3-under Friday and 7-under overall. In addition, ASU junior Jon Rahm, the lone amateur in the field who got in on a sponsor exemption, is 4-under. 

"It's very rewarding," said Calihan, the Open's tournament chairman. "We have a team of people who do (help determine sponsor exemptions) and we take it very seriously. A spot in a PGA golf tournament is a valued thing and we know it means a lot to the players, so we try very hard to make sure we make worthy selections. It's very fun when those young guys come through and play great. They're both great young players and nice young men and we're really psyched to see them playing so well."

Amen, Sister!  It is so refreshing to hear a tourney sponsor speak in those terms and take the allocation of exemptions seriously, though it's obviously a crapshoot.  Or you can just give one to John Daly and watch him inevitably sulk his way to a 79-82-MC.

Luke Kerr-Dineen posted this photo from Reddit of the stands at No. 16 completely empty:

Weiskopf spent some time with Gary McCord on Friday and indicated that they were considering building permanent stands out of concrete and steel, complete with a prerecorded soundtrack of a crowd.  I'd add inflatable spectators, but why not at this point?  TPC Scottsdale isn't a track one plays to study architectural nuance, so let the retail golfer walk trhough that tunnel and get booed when he misses the green....

Oh, and just in case you missed it, here is Francesco Molinari's ace from early yesterday:

I just have to say that over-serving the patrons in actual cans seems, how to put it, predictably unwise...

Wither Tiger -  What, you thought we were done with this subject?  Sorry but I don't think we'll be discussing much else between now and Thursday...this will be reasonably short, but I'll start with a point of personal privilege....this post, in my first month of blogging I think holds up pretty well, especially the middle section where I detailed what in an IPO prospectus would be called the Risk Factors.  And please bear in mind that I was evaluating the 2013 Tiger, off his five-win season that included The Player Championship.

John Strege has this from erstwhile Ryder Cup captain Paul Azinger:

“When Tiger says rust, to me it’s a signal that he doesn’t know what the problem is,” Azinger said on ESPN Saturday morning. “I feel he’s as confused as he’s ever been in his career. Byron Nelson used to say there’s two kinds of players, those that need to know a little and those that need to know it all. Which one do you think’s easier?

“Tiger’s in a mode where he has to know it all. Technically and physically I think he felt like he peaked and that he needed more information to get better. In his quest to get better, Tiger’s actually gotten worse and now he’s confused.”

The full clip is at the link, and Zinger is one of the mare opinionated guys out there.  But a lot of what he focuses on, Tiger's relationship with other players, is clearly secondary.  It's fun to speak of the intimidation factor from his Sunday blood-red golf shirts, but when he doesn't play well enough to have a Sunday tee-time no one will be intimidated.  Oh, and Zinger thinks his short-game woes can be fixed in minutes...

Is It Real Or Is It Memorex - This video of a highly-skilled golfer hitting a shot that lands on his noggin has triggered a debate as to authenticity:

Shack has apparently spent as much time with this video as the Warren Commission did with the Zapruder film, and concludes that the rental clubs and golf swing lead him to believe it to be authentic.  However, I heard an unexplained sound from the grassy knoll to the left of the frame....

Life Imitates Unplayable Lies - We stole an oblique Hawaii Five-O reference from Shack a few days ago, and who knew that Michelle Wie is a reader?

Michelle Wie will guest star on an episode of "Hawaii Five-O" on Feb. 20 on CBS. But

before you get too excited about seeing what kind of acting chops the LPGA star has, you should know she'll be playing herself and not some criminal mastermind.

OK, but I hope she's more convincing in the role than whoever was playing her this week in Ocala...

TBPNTCAAM - We've long heard about the dreaded title of Best Player Never To Have Won a Major, golf's premiere albatross.  Highly prone to category errors, let's see is it Lee Westwood or Jordan Spieth currently, it's long highlighted differing opinions as to how important those four events are.

Alex Myers nominates Bill Haas for a variant on this theme, and it strikes as both sillier and more interesting than the more popular version of the parlor game:

With his second Humana Challenge victory, Bill Haas picked up his sixth career PGA

Tour title. That number is nothing to sneeze at -- especially in this era where professional golf is more global and deep than ever -- but it prompts two questions: Why hasn't Bill Haas done more in majors? And is he the best player never to have contended in a major?

Haas has come to this win total and $21.5 million in earnings (NOT including a $10 million FedEx Cup bonus) before turning 33. That means he could just be entering the prime of his career, but still, his results in golf's four biggest events are puzzling.

Haas has played in 21 major championships and has never finished in the top 10. The closest he's ever come to contending was holding the 18-hole lead at the 2014 Masters. He shot 78 on Friday, though, and wound up T-20. Only twice in those 21 starts has Haas bettered that performance with a T-12 at the 2011 PGA Championship and a T-19 at the 2012 British Open.

We've always had trouble assessing the careers of guys that didn't get over the top in majors, the aforementioned Westwood and Monty, for example, the latter of whom lost two majors in playoffs.

But how do you assess one of the better players on Tour that simply, over a long enough period of years to be statistically relevant, never plays well on the biggest stage?  Is it confirmation of the rap on the modern pro, out there to make as bunch of money but not hungry and driven?  Or is it that the more difficult set-ups at majors exposes limitations in the player's game?  Or some combination of thee two, or perhaps 21 events is still a statistically meaningless sample size?  Discuss among yourselves....