Thursday Thoughts

I just read the long-range snow forecast for Utah and it's not pretty....in fact, the forecaster has broken out his mountain bike, not a good leading indicator methinks.

Bay Hill Boogaloo - Can you feel the buzz?  I know, but whatya expect?  Not that folks aren't trying, including this Orlando Sentinel write that leads his profile of Robert Gamez thusly:

There is a marble marker embedded in the right side of Bay Hill's 18th fairway that commemorates one of the most iconic shots in golf history.

You'll note the absence of a link as the remainder of the article is behind their paywall, something of a relief given the hyperbolic open.  As the song goes, don't know much about history...

Here's what little you need to know....Bubba is a WD due to the untimely death of a childhood friend.

 The event retains the four of the top five in the world, quite a testament to the King...  I would expect we'd see Bubba at least once more before Augusta.

No doubt you remember Tiger saying that he spoke to Arnold after deciding not to play Bay Hill.  Somehow that morphed into an hour conversation (Tiger never said such), but Arnie put that to bed cryptically with this:

Arnie brings down house with zinger when asked about long phone convo w/ Tiger. "Who ever told you it was an hour is full of sh--." #classic

Good to see him still full of spit and vinegar....I'll also recommend this warm profile of Arnie's relationship with this grandson Sam Saunders.  Being the King's grandson has to be quite the mixed bag, but Sam seems to have dealt with it with grace and his career seems to be building.  here's a tatste:

That grip? “The basic fundamentals,” is what Palmer likes to call it. Aye, though, here’s

the rub: The grandfather wants to be tough on his grandson, but he has a difficult time doing it. He’s got a real soft spot for the kid, who has grown to be, beyond a pretty good golfer, a very nice and polite young man. 

“Arnold is a tough guy, because he wants to be like his father,” said Alastair Johnston, the vice chairman of IMG and a man who has overseen Palmer’s business interests for decades. He knows Palmer as few others do.

Also new at Arnie's gala is the presence of World No. 1:

McIlroy makes his debut in the Arnold Palmer Invitational on Thursday, his final

tournament before he tries to complete the career Grand Slam and win a third straight major at Augusta National in three weeks. 

He began playing the Masters in 2009, and this is the fourth pre-Augusta schedule he has tried. 

''I thought I'd just mix it up a little bit this year,'' McIlroy said Wednesday. ''Play here and then I'll have a couple weeks off to get ready for Augusta. Back in '11, I took three weeks off before the Masters. It worked pretty well - for 63 holes, not quite 72. So just trying to adopt a similar approach.''

 It's also something of an homage to the King, and good on the youngster for understanding that time is of the essence.  And do spend some time with this collection of recollections of Tour player sof first meeting Arnie, the common thread being great generosity with his time.  Picking one alsmost at random from Brandt Snedeker:

The King with a young Jason Gore.

In 2009 when Snedeker was struggling with his game a little bit, he called Palmer out of the blue and asked if he could come to Orlando and talk to him. 

"I thought I’d get 30 minutes of his time, but we ended up sitting in his office upstairs at Bay Hill for two hours talking about golf, life, just everything," Snedeker said. "I told him I was having a hard time handling Sundays and pressure and asked him about how to get over that hump. 

"He said he never hit a shot he wasn’t 100 percent committed to -- it didn’t matter if it was a 3-iron from 200 yards out he thought he was going to make it. Whether he was going to pull the shot off or not he thought he could. He said, ‘People always thought I was aggressive, but I thought I was conservative.’" 

Snedeker and Palmer played 18 holes that day, and the King birdied 17 to win money off the Tennessean. "We had a blast," Snedeker said.

How perfect is that?  Incredibly generous with his time and willing to help a young player, but on the course, as the old joke goes, business is business.

Rory's Roots -  Rory seems to remember where he comes from, as per this item in the Belfast Telegraph:

Rory McIlroy's pulling power knows no bounds.

He's persuaded top names, including Ricky Fowler, Sergio Garcia and Ernie Els to play alongside local heroes Graeme McDowell and Darren Clarke in this year's Irish Open and yesterday at the Royal County Down Golf club it was revealed his influence has helped bag the tournament its first title sponsor since 2010. 

Having a successful company such as Dubai Duty Free on board won't just add weight to the event, it'll mean more prize money added to last year's €2m pot.

That's great, though I expect that the venue was part of the attraction for the players...certainly Rickie is quite familiar with County Down, as this iconic photo of the two was from the Walker Cup held there in 2007

County Down is a spectacularly beautiful site, it simply looks like no other golf course in the world.  The only minor quibble with it is that the front nine is far superior to the back nine, both visually and strategically, though the TV coverage will necessarily be weighted towards the latter.  But the event is in May when the gorse should be flowering, so it's never too early to set your DVR.

Where Are The Now Files: Sir Scam-A-Lot - In case that moniker isn't familiar. Jay Adkisson writing in Forbes provides the background:

I have previously written about the misadventures of the notorious Ponzi schemer Allen

Stanford, a blustering Texas real estate developer who bought his way into the Knight Commander of the Order of the Nation (KCN) for the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, ceremoniously conferred in 2006 by no less of a figure than Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, and then revoked in 2010 after Stanford had revealed Antigua and Barbuda to be the bad joke of the offshore financial world when his $7 billion pyramid came crashing down. 

Stanford was for a few years legitimately known as Sir Allen Stanford, but these days he is referred to as Sir Scam-A-Lot while serving his 110-year prison sentence, trading in his intended retirement on the tropical Antiguan and Barbudian beaches for the prison yard of the U.S. SuperMax facility in Sumterville, Florida. Stanford left behind a trail of financial disaster that has taken — and will continue to take — many years to clean up by the court-appointed receiver of Stanford’s Evil Empire , Ralph S. Janvey.

Stanford cut a wide circle in the golf world, and many players were victims, most notably our old friend Vijay.  Now what brings this scum to the fore is a curious court decision in the endless litigation that inevitably follows the collapse of such a scheme:

There's a lot here, so you'll need to click through if you want to follow the logic, but as part of their sponsorship of a PGA Tour event they paid Golf Channel some $5.9 million over a period of years.  While the initial court verdict was in favor of GC, here's the latest:

The Fifth Circuit took all of this into consideration, and then looked to see whether The Golf Channel’s advertising was of any benefit to the Sanford’s Ponzi scheme victims, and concluded that it was not. Thus:

While Golf Channel’s services may have been quite valuable to the creditors of a legitimate business, they have no value to the creditors of a Ponzi scheme.* * * Services rendered to encourage investment in such a scheme do not provide value to the creditors.

Wow, I hope you can appreciate the staggering breadth of such reasoning.  here's Adkisson's own reaction:

This case illustrates the dangers to a business that deals with a debtor, even unwittingly. If this decision is followed, it creates tremendous risk for any service business that deals with a debtor, since between the business and creditors, the creditors may win. This decision imposes what amounts to a significant duty on businesses to “Know Your Customer” and to thoroughly investigate a large customer’s affairs before taking their money. 

How realistic is such a requirement? Not very. Just think about this case: Was The Golf Channel supposed to divine that our world renown Knight Commander was just another Bernie Madoff before the SEC did? As silly as that sounds, it is what the Black Robes sitting on high at the Fifth Circuit just told us.

I can only hope that this is reversed on appeal, as it seems quite the dangerous precedent.  As the writer note, the applicability appears to be primarily to victims of Ponzi schemes, where by definition there is never enough money to go around.  But it imposes a level of due diligence on vendors that seems excessive, especially when the underlying business transaction is consummated on commercially-reasonable terms.

An Overnight Success - it seems our word of the day is iconic, an adjective often appropriately applied to Ben Hogan. Cliff Schrock devotes his Throwback Thursday column to reminding us that success was far from immediate for Bantam benL

Hogan had experienced a journeyman-type career to that point, relying on income from

Who better to present your first medal?

club jobs to get by. Some reports noted he was down to his last $30 to $36 upon arriving in Pinehurst, and others said he was on the verge of giving up tour life. At the same time, things were looking up, and Hogan had had seven runner-up finishes in the year leading up to Pinehurst, which only made him more determined and ramped up in his practice. Hogan was additionally feeling confident using a new 14-ounce MacGregor driver that Byron Nelson had loaned him; the heavier club, with a black head, seemed to calm down his nefarious hook. After Hogan’s Round 1 success Nelson gave it to him for good.

He's such a titan of the game that we forget his early struggles.  he only succeeded after he figured out how to take the left side of the golf course out of play.  And how about this finish:

Snead finished with a final-round 67 to put pressure on Hogan, but the impending champion made pars on the last two holes for a 70, and his 277 total won by three. For the first time, the results had the great contemporary trio of Hogan, Snead and Nelson, all born in 1912, finish 1-2-3.

Here's how Cliff closes his piece: 

Once Hogan got going, he won at a hectic pace. He won the next two tour stops at Greensboro and Asheville, N.C., and would win 64 times in the next 21 years, despite not playing for almost a year after his 1949 bus accident. 

The importance of a victory 75 years ago at Pinehurst is being honored at the course. The starters on No. 2 from now until the end of April will be wearing Hogan caps in a mix of blue and white as a tribute.

Nice tribute, that.  But 64 wins is just staggering in light of his slow start and the near-fatal bus accident.