This And That

We're at that familiar stage when your humble blogger has far too many browser windows open...so do me a solid, will you, and help me close a few.

The Tiger Beat - Jim McCabe's entry in the  "How the mighty have fallen" genre includes this:

Tiger Woods’ fall in the Official World Golf Ranking is a weekly curiosity factor. He’s

presently 87th and if he doesn't play in either of the Texas tournaments – the Valero Texas Open and Shell Houston Open – he would likely be ranked around 104th headed into the Masters. 

Compare that to 1997 when Woods, having left amateur golf just seven months earlier, headed to his first Masters as a pro ranked 13th.

This isn't exactly news, as the man isn't earning any new world ranking points and those from his five-win 2013 season inexorably roll off.  But this is his real point:

Want further proof that Woods put together a mind-blogging resume? The current top 10 – Rory McIlroy, Bubba Watson, Henrik Stenson, Adam Scott, Jason Day, Spieth, Jim Furyk, Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, and Justin Rose combine for 75 PGA Tour wins – four fewer than Woods owns.

I have a different favorite measurement of the phenomenon known as Peak Tiger.  There was a period when he had more than double the world ranking points of Phil, who was then ranked No. 2.  That meant that any golfer who had earned ANY world ranking points was closer to the second-ranked player in the world, than the aforementioned no. 2 was to Tiger.  That my friends is dominance...

 And Sean O'Hair, who has also spent time in the golf wilderness, had words of sympathy

for the Man:

"Obviously Tiger is going through some issues right now," O'Hair said Tuesday from Bay Hill. "I don't think that it's anything abnormal. When you look at all the greatest players in the game, you know, Jack, Arnold Palmer, all the greats, they've all had their ups and downs and I think the thing that with Tiger is that he's got to figure out what he wants to do and where he wants to be mentally, and I think that once he figures that out, he's going to be able to do whatever he wants to do again. 

"I just think that he's lost and the only reason why I say that is because I see it in his eyes and I see it in how he's walking and I see it in how he's playing because that's where I've been. I've been living it."

I'm not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on television, but I'll venture a guess that pity doesn't make him feel any better.

And the hits keep on coming....we had previously heard that EA had dropped Tiger as the sponsor of its PGA Tour video game.  But I'm guessing this rankles as well:

Now that Rory McIlroy has dethroned Tiger Woods as the world’s top-ranked golfer, heis claiming his rightful place as No. 1 in the world of virtual tournaments. 

Electronic Arts Inc., the second-largest U.S. video game publisher, is making the 25-year-old champion the face of its new video game, the Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, the Redwood City, California-based company announced Monday, replacing Woods after 16 years. The $60 game comes out in June, EA said.

And apparently Rory is a bit of a gamer himself:

"My first system was the original PlayStation, which I got back when I was a kid," he said. "I’ll still jump into a FIFA match with a buddy every so often, and if a bunch of us want to play we’ll start up a round of EA SPORTS PGA TOUR. I think games are a great way to spend a couple hours if you’ve got downtime and just want to relax for a bit."

 Well, since I'm now retired I've got plenty of downtime...except for keeping my damn readers happy.  I think my man cave is crying out for this, though like the blog itself I need to find a teenager to help me set it up.

Lastly, Gary Van Cynical provides nine thoughts on Tiger missing Bay Hill, though I suspect he's in grassy knoll territory with this one:

Suspension bridge: We know where the unfounded story about Tiger being suspended for a failed drug test originated, a club pro on a radio show. But where did he get that information? Based on what? The PGA Tour even stepped out of character to categorically deny it. We all saw him hurting at Torrey Pines. Was that part of a master cover-up plan? I really don’t buy into this rumor for a second…

Dr. Galea could not be reached for comment.  But as long as we're on the subject of Bay Hill....

There's Only Room for One Combover in Golf - Alex Miceli informs us that the greens at Bay Hill aren't ready for their close-up:

Last week at the Valspar Championship in Palm Harbor, officials posted a letter in the Innisbrook Resort locker room that advised players of the conditions at Bay Hill. The notice included a copy of the news release announcing the change from Emerald Dwarf to TifEagle. 

“It looks like a combover,” one player who spoke on the condition of anonymity said after a practice round Monday, describing the shaggy conditions.

You have to expect the grain to be a factor in central Florida.  But lest there be any confusion, this is the Official Combover of Unplayable Lies:

It never gets old, does it?

Masters Countdown - David Owen wears many hats, and his amusing My usual Game features sometimes obscure the fact that he literally wrote the book about the founding of Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters, all of which were far more happenstance than it seems in hindsight.  In his current post at The Loop he covers a number of topics, including providing this 1934 picture of what would now be the tenth green:

The green was subsequently moved further back and that's the famous Mackenzie Bunker which is now well short of the green and not really in play.

He also provides this wonderful old photo of the media center, with beer cans and what he calls "strange laptops" in evidence:

But David's real purpose is to tell the story of of ANGC's worst golfer, a Mr. Schoo:

During the club’s early years, a small creek ran across the first fairway, at the bottom of the hill, less than a hundred yards from the tee. The carry over the ditch was so short that few players noticed, but a member named Clarence J. Schoo drove into it so often that it came to be known as Schooie’s Gulch. Schoo was the founder and president of a boxboard manufacturing company in Springfield, Massachusetts. The company doesn’t exist anymore, but Schoo's name is preserved in the Schoo Science Center at Springfield College, of which he and his wife were benefactors.

At Augusta National one day, Schoo topped yet another drive into Schooie's Gulch, and told Clifford Roberts, the club's co-founder and chairman, “I wish you’d fill in that damn ditch.” Roberts did, during the summer of 1951 -- and sent the bill to Schoo. Or so the story goes. In truth, the ditch had always been a maintenance problem

That reminds of the C.B. Macdonald story from the building of The National Golf Links of America. One of the original members suggested to C.B. that a windmill would be a nice addition, yanno, just like in the auld sod.  So C.B. found one, had it sipped in and erected, and sent the bill to that member. 

For those who like David's more whimsical writings, you can find him acting as unpaid shill for Kentwool socks here and for Mixbook (his foolproof method of preserving golf photographs) here.  

Oh and I missed blogging David's celebration of Pi Day here in which he tackles the existential issue of the proverbial third world putt:

When a ball stops on the rim of the cup, golfers and TV announcers often say that it

needed "one more roll" or "one more rotation." But they're wrong, and Pi Day -- which celebrates the discovery of the mathematical ratio between a circle's diameter and its circumference, and is celebrated for obvious reasons today, on 3/14 -- is the ideal time to explain why. A golf ball, to be legal, has to be at least 1.68 inches in diameter. That means that its circumference -- the length of "one more roll" -- is at least 3.14 times 1.68, or 5.28 inches. And that length is eerily similar to one that was in the news earlier this month. Coincidence?

Click through to David's link at your own peril... but of course it was nice to see how above average I am.

Pictures - This is why you should look carefully before removing your ball from the cup:

And if there's one thing more interesting to your humble blogger than Lydia Ko, It's Lydia behind bars:

 I thought it was orange that was the new black...

And Golf.com has a kinda cool slideshow, some of the best golf courses on our planet as seen from space. This one of Old Head Golf Links isn't actually that great a golf course, but you can readily see how spectacular the peninsula on which it was built is: