Mid-Week Meanderings

It's our weekly lull in the news cycle, but there's over-paid people to hold up to ridicule, so let's skip the preamble and dive in.

For A Dying Game, It Pays Awfully Well - We'll let Shack do the heavy lifting here, as he actually gets paid for this.  The impetus is the publishing of Ron Sirak's annual listing of the top earners in our game, and though Sirak's list includes money actually earned on the golf course, this list is what brings out the snark in us all:

That's an awful lot of commas, especially for guys we've never heard of... good thing the game is growing, eh?  Here's the aforementioned Shack snark:

Congrats to Joe Steranka for a 6&5 win over Dick Rugge in the Going Away Package Classic, while Zink and Moorhouse continue to collect generous pay for telling Commissioner Farquaad what a great job he's doing. And that David Pillsbury makes more money than Mike Whan or Mike Davis or Mike the cartboy at TPC Sawgrass is just plain wrong.

 Gotta nominate Mike Davis for most underpaid, given that he actually makes a contribution to the game.  The amount of coin available at Fortress Ponte Vedra is both staggering and expected, but I'm sure the struggling PGA professionals would be excited to know that has-been PGA of America officials maintain an existence-level sinecure long after their actual service ceases.

And for those that enjoy such things, Shack's Farquaad reference comes from the Shrek movies, though strangely enough Louis Oosthuizen is denied a spot in the top fifty.  I've mostly stuck with my Ratched bit, though I do enjoy when Geoff goes for a new reference, though his apogee was no doubt Commissioner Le Pétomane.

And as we're on the subject of fartists (another world-class segue, if I do say so myself), I found this chart of interest as well:

Not horrible for a guy with the yips.  But can someone explain how he made $610,000 on course in 2014, when I can't remember him making a cut?

I Don't Need To Know - Matthew Ruddy pens a recurring feature at The Loop titled How He Hit That, typically relating to some especially good ball striking.  Not so much this week:

Like "yips," "shank" is a word PGA Tour players don't even like to say, never mind actually do.

Ian Poulter can avoid saying "shank" if he chooses, but video from the final round at the Honda tells the story. On the tee at the par-3, 174-yard fifth hole, Poulter shanked his 8-iron dead right. The ball bounced on the cart path and into the water, leading to a double bogey that dropped him from the lead permanently. He ended up shooting 74 and missing the Padraig Harrington-Daniel Berger playoff by a shot.

"Tour players usually hit a shank--when the ball hits the hosel and comes off sideways--when they apply force a little differently in the downswing, like trying to hit it harder or softer," says 50 Best Teacher Brian Manzella. "Poulter said after his round that the shank--and some of the other bad shots he hit--came when he was trying to take something off it."

I can see your lips moving, but all I hear is blah, blah blah....

RIP, Jay Morish -  We lost one of the interesting men in the business of designing golf courses:

Morish on the right, with Rees Jones and Bill Campbell.

After graduating from Colorado State University in 1964 with a degree in landscape and nursery management, Morrish taught horticulture at the university before landing a job on the construction team at Robert Trent Jones-designed Spyglass Hill. It was the start of a career that would span five decades and bring Morrish into partnerships with several of the best-known figures in the field. 

In 1967, following a tenure as construction superintendent on Jones’ courses, Morrish worked with George Fazio and Desmond Muirhead. He then signed on as a designer with Jack Nicklaus in 1972. After 10 years with Nicklaus, Morrish teamed up with Tom Weiskopf. Their partnership lasted 12 years and produced more than two dozen courses, including Loch Lomond in Scotland and TPC Las Colinas in Irving, Texas.

Weiskopf's best work was in conjunction with Morish, and I was upset that he didn't get his due with all the fanfare over the redesign (misguided in several respects) of TPC Scottsdale.  But I didn't know of his involvement with Spyglass...

Doral Doings -  Not much news out of Miami, though the Great Scott (redundancy alert) is in the building....errr, in a manner of speech.

Since we last saw Adam Scott in a PGA Tour arena, some changes have graced his life.

Namely, daughter Bo Vera, delivered by Scott’s wife, Marie Kojzar, on Feb. 15 in Australia. 

Oh, and the conventional putter that he used for Tuesday’s practice round on the Blue Monster at Trump National Doral. 

Now it’s true that the conventional putter is a far less life-altering and heartwarming addition, but Scott understands the complexion of his livelihood. His favored method of putting – the anchored stroke, with a long putter – will be banned at the end of this year, so Scott knows a change is necessary.

Interesting, as I had Scott pegged as a dead-ender.  He was about as dreadful a putter as imaginable without anchoring, but admittedly that was before the day of Super Stroke grips and counter-balanced putters...

This Week in Nepotism -  I like this sort of thing, Mike Van Sickle's diary of a Monday qualifier:

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—It’s like deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once said. So much so that I’m half expecting to turn the next corner and see Denzel Washington standing there. (If you missed that movie, never mind.) 

Once again I tied for fifth in a PGA Tour Monday qualifier (or The Race to Four, as I like to call it), this time for the Puerto Rico Open. You might recall that I also finished fifth in the Monday qualifier for the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines; I shot seven under par on the back nine that day but came up a shot short.

That's the thing about Monday qualifying, par is bupkis.   he shoots a tidy 29 and comes up short...

If the name rings a bell, h's the spawn of Gary Van Cynical, though we'd need to see him with the hat removed to know whether he was adopted.

A Class Action Sans Class - I was anxiously awaiting this news, because if the issue is caddie bibs who ya gonna call?

Steve Williams has become the first big-name caddie to acknowledge joining a lawsuit by the Association of Professional Tour Caddies against the PGA Tour, according to a Golfchannel.com report Tuesday morning. 

“I don’t think the Tour has treated the caddies in a correct manner for a long time,” Williams told GolfChannel.com from his home in New Zealand. “I think this is a good starting point to get the Tour and the caddies in a better stead.”

Please, he prefers to be called Stevie.

Texas lawyer Gene Egdorf, attorney for the caddies, tells Golf.com Williams is one of “more than 60” additional caddies who have come forward to join the suit, which Egdorf says will be amended in U.S. District Court in San Francisco in the next two weeks. All told, Egdorf said, there will be “somewhere around 150 plaintiffs” lining up against the Tour.

You're gonna need a bigger boat steel enclosure for lightning storms.  So, why is this amusing me?

According to one longtime caddie who is part of the suit, the legal wrangling began over the caddies’ attempt to self-fund a retirement and health-care benefits program by selling advertising on a small patch affixed to their bibs. When the Tour balked at the idea, this caddie says, “We didn’t really have a choice” but to take the Tour to court.

Williams has chosen to step away from the Tour this year but he is perhaps the most famous caddie in golf. He was part of 13 of Tiger Woods’ 14 major victories and most recently worked for Adam Scott. Williams told Golfchannel.com he has been fined $500 several times for taking off his bib prior to the conclusion of a round. He said it was part of a pattern of behavior by the Tour that made him feel like a “second-class citizen.”

Stevie's signature move was to take off his bib before his client putted out on the final green in his victories....well, that and breaking cameras.

Dominoes, Down -  I thought that for scheduling reasons that Royal Troon would be first, but this will surprise absolutely no one:

One of the three clubs on the British Open rota with a male-only membership policy has voted to allow female members for the first time. 

Royal St. George's, which last hosted golf's oldest major in 2011, said on Wednesday more than 81 percent of the club's full members took part in a ballot, and 90 percent voted in favor of women being eligible for membership.

Muirfield will be the last holdout, as tweed-clad geriatrics will man the ramparts with a glass of Kümmel in each clenched fist.

History, Repeating? - No, I'm not predicting that Steve Webster will win on the PGA Tour this week, because as far as I know Mr. Webster will not be in Puerto Rico. For those confused, the last two winners on the PGA tour, James Hahn and Padraig Harrington, both were ranked No. 297 at the time of their wins, a statistical oddity to say the least.

But it's this that is the subject of my musing:

In February, Australian Richard Green made the craziest hole-in-one you'll ever see on apar 4 at the Oates Victorian Championship on the PGA Tour of Australasia. But unfortunately for the three-time European Tour winner, the rarest form of albatross came a day before the tournament started.

And now, less than a month later, it's happened again. 

This time it was Henrik Norlander pulling off the trick in a pro-am ahead of the Cartagena de Indias at Karibana Championship on the Web.com Tour. 

OK, not so awfully sad for Green, as he went on to win the event (as did his fiancee in the women's event held concurrently).  So, in your Euro Tour fantasy league, do you take Webster or Norlander?  Why take chances, I'd suggest going with both.

This Week in Commercials - ESPN has been doing great things with their Masters promos.  The prior one with Bubba reading his invitation was notable, as is this peak at the Champions' Locker Room:

But this Nike ad makes me strangely sad for Tiger, who seems diminished by it:

I'd like to see the ad agency pitch for this.....let's see, we've got our current meal tickets such as Rory and Michelle, and we've mixed them in with the old news of Barkley and Bo.  And I'm sorry, which is Tiger?

One last advertising note, Shack regretfully informs us that our long national nighmare is ongoing:

You know what that means? We’ll have another six months of the Guantanamo-ready piece even though it had grown insufferable within days of its debut. 

But as Golf News Net notes, if history is any gauge, we'll have another six months to detect some sort of hidden genius behind the campaign since Omega only does one golf ad a year. 

Either way, please, please make sure you have fresh batteries all so you never experience the hitting the mute button only to find your remote has lost all juice from repeated MUTE use.

 But I'm standing in the hall of fame and the world's gonna know my name....really, I can quite any time.

And, as long as we're throwing up videos, how about this high-production-value trick shot video from Shack?  Now one caveat, even though it's labelled Dude Perfect, I am not in it:

Lots of great stuff featuring long-drive hero Jamie Sadlowski... when they hit driver off the deck, they really mean deck.  Though oddly enough, I've got a bag of Skittles sitting on my desk as I type...