Wacky Weekend Wrap

You'd think a world renown golf blogger would be safe to schedule travel on a Monday morning, but you'd be wrong.  Terribly, horribly, disastrously wrong....But who is this world renown golf blogger you speak of?

Paddy Power - Sometimes we get it right and other times we miss the mark.  In discounting Padraig Harrington's chances at the Honda I would say  that I got it quite right about his game, I just didn't factor in that he'd be so contagious to the rest of the field.

Before we get too deep into the snark I should note that I saw Paddy sink a putt to tie at -7 with Poulter and Reed at the Salt Lake Delta Sky Club, then had to pack up the iPad and board.  So we'll rely on Doug Ferguson's game story:

Lost in all the collapses down the stretch was that the 43-year-old veteran was five shots

Still the best overbite in golf.

behind with eight holes to play when he hooked his tee shot and dropped his head walking off the 11th hole. It was enough left of the fairway to find a patch of muddied grass that had been trampled by the gallery, and he played a bold shot to a right flag over the water to 15 feet for birdie. That's where Poulter went into the water, and the three-shot swing meant Harrington was back in the game. 

He followed with a 35-foot birdie on the 12th, a 7-foot birdie on the 13th and a 15-foot putt on the 14th for his fourth straight birdie and a share of the lead when Reed holed from 18 feet right before him.

That doesn't capture the final sequence, when he horribly dunked his tee ball on No. 17 to make double but rolled a 16-footer in on No. 18 to salvage the day.  Doug has a good summary of the other various collapses if you're in a train wreck kind of mood.

Brian Wacker captures Paddy's struggles since 2008 here, including a bout of the "Y" word:

Whatever physical tinkering he had done with his swing, not seeing the results he’d hoped for had crept into the mental side of his game and in 2012 he suffered the yips.

“As a lot of people who win major tournaments, you look back at them and you try and live up to them, play up to them,” Harrington said. “I just got very intolerant of my mental game, my focus. 

“When you get (the yips), it's really frustrating, it's really hard. You don't know what to do. You grind your way through it and it is a tough thing to get through. 

“But yeah, there's no doubt low points in those years, because you know, in 2008, 2009, I'm very much in the penthouse. I wasn't quite down to the doghouse but not far away from it.”

Now Paddy's struggle with his concentration should take no one by surprise, because he's famously willing to try ANYTHING.  And he'll do it at any time, as Shack showed us in his warm-up before the conclusion of yesterday's final round:

I can see doing the Happy Gilmore thing as a footwork drill or to help with timing or any

number of swing issues.

But with a rubber-band around the knees? While you're contending in a tour event? With people watching?Were all the straitjackets taken?

Shack has the video of the Morning Drive gang chortling over this.  And speaking of straightjackets, and how's that for a segue, Luke Kerr-Dineen reminds us that Paddy left no stone unturned in his quest for perfection:

"I was so angry...I put my arms in my sweater and ripped one of the sleeves off,"Rapcavage said. "I jammed both by arms in one of the sleeves and almost immediately I started thinking: 'hey, this actually feels kind of good.'"

The product that came out of that semi-destructive process is called the Golf Swing Shirt, which is essentially just a spandex golf shirt with one sleeve. Rapcavage managed to get it into the hands of a few different tour pros, and one of them -- Padraig Harrington -- liked it so much that he agreed to become the face of the product.

Here's what that looked like:

Combine the Swing Shirt with the Happy Gilmore Theraband drill and you've really got something there.  And, while I don't usually have much interest in the ubiquitous WITB (What's In The Bag) features, but this WITB is very much a WTF:

Ball: Titlist Pro V1x
Driver: TaylorMade AeroBurner (Mitsubishi Kuro Kage Silver 60 TX, 9 degrees
Driver: TaylorMade SLDR Mini, 12 degrees
3-wood: TaylorMade SLDR, 15 degrees
Hybrid: Wilson D100, 19 degrees
Irons (4): Wilson FG Tour V4; (5-PW): Wilson FG Tour V2
Wedges: Wilson FG Tour (52 degrees); Ping Eye2 Gorge (60 degrees)
Putter: Wilson Infinite South Side

Where to start?  I'm not sure which is stranger, the two drivers or the Ping Eye2 wedge, both of which make it seem that he's channeling his inner Phil (and how about that 8 degree gap in his wedges?).   If I remember correctly, the Ping Eye2 has the non-conforming grooves but was grandfathered in as legal as part of the settlement with Karsten.  There aren't too many to be found, but I recall Phil using one just to, you know, make a point.

The Poultergeist - We all love a good train wreck, and this was a classic of the genre.  But let me start with a brief digression about Johnny Miller.  Miller is not everyone's cup of tea, though I've always thought the positives outweigh the negatives.  And he's not Nick Faldo, which is saying a lot...

He's always been a stream of consciousness broadcaster, seemingly saying whatever pops into his mind.  There's no flow to his commentary, as he just kind of blurts things out that may or may not provide knowledge to the viewer.  As he's gotten older the words and thoughts don't come as easily and the whole process seems increasingly disjointed, putting tremendous pressure on Dan Hicks to keep Johnny tethered to reality.

That said, credit must be paid to Johnny for his work on Sunday.  No sooner had he opined that Poulter might not be able to hold on, than he cold-shanked is tee shot on the 5th and followed that double by smother-hooking his tee shot on No. 6 into the water.  Here's video of the shank, not suitable for the faint-of-heart:

Now, one might have thought that the suspension of play would allow this veteran to regroup and he came to the 14th tee the next day tied for the lead, whereupon hilarity ensued:

It doesn't read any better than it looks:

After a birdie on the eighth hole to open Monday, Poulter splashed his approach on 11

and made double-bogey. He then put back-to-back shots in the water on 14 to record a triple bogey. (He even went in the bunker on 14 before making a 19-footer to save triple.) During the NBC telecast, Johnny Miller questioned whether Poulter would have enough balls to finish the round.

Usually when Johnny discusses balls, he's not speaking of, you know, golf balls...Our Poults is a weird one, a very borderline Tour rabbit that's difficult to reconcile with the guy with the big "S" on his chest from Medinah.  For those keeping score at home, he put five balls in the aqua in his final round, and one doesn't win doing that.  Then, just because, he birdies Nos. 17 and 18 to finish a mere one shot out of the playoff.  Just because...

Rory Rebounds - Fresh off his lackluster play and missed cut at the Honda, Rory quickly found his game and secured his third straight major:

Rory McIlroy didn't take long to rebound from missing the cut at theHonda Classic.

The world No. 1 scorched venerable Seminole Golf Club on Monday to claim gross-division honors at the Seminole Pro-Member paired with John Pinkham. 

McIlroy, who missed the cut in his 2015 debut on the PGA Tour with rounds of 73-74 last week at PGA National, began his day with three consecutive birdies and went out in 6-under 30. The Ulsterman shot 63 on his own ball.

The weird thing is that Phil made it to Seminole after finishing his fourth round at PGA National in the morning.  I don't know anything about the set-up for the pros, but even if they played from the ladies' tees a 63 at Seminole is golfing your ball.

A Retraction Land Speed Record - News broke yesterday that Tiger was suspended for use of PED's.  The disclosure admittedly came from an unlikely source, a guy that had a cup of coffee on Tour named Dan Olsen.  Here's the full interview conducted by David "Mad Dog" Demarco:

By now you know that Olsen has ignominiously retracted the entire interview, apologizing to Tiger, Nike, the Tour, Phil, and Commissioner Ratched.  But if you have twelve minutes free to walk into the long grass, it covers Lance Armstrong, untested golf balls, the commencement of drug testing one month after Tiger's last major....everything short of a second gunman on the grassy knoll.

Now this shouldn't have seen the light of day, given the source.  Here's Shack's take on it:

Besides the loopy description of his source (worth listening to just for the giggle), things

crumbled fast when Olsen mentioned a one-month term. The interviewer should have asked if there was such thing in the PGA Tour's drug policy guidelines (there is not).

Anyway, this kind of stuff certainly will always be out there when Dr. Anthony Galea made 14 in-house visits, but you'd like to think WVFN would have been more discerning.

True that, as the link to Galea has never been adequately explained.  But the beauty of stories like these is that they sometimes result in a crack in the moat at Fort Ponte Vedra Beach:

Reaction was swift after Olsen's comments were widely reported Monday. 

From Ty Votaw, executive vice president of the PGA Tour: "There is no truth whatsoever to these claims. We categorically deny these allegations."

I'm sorry, I understood that it was the policy of the Tour to NOT comment on disciplinary actions.  As with the DJ story, it now appears that anything not specifically denied by the Tour suits can be assumed to be accurate.  And I'll leave you with this tease from Geoff:

There are some fun stories floating around about Olsen and the Commish. If I can get a couple of more sources, I'll do my best to share! But for now, he should go back to his birther and truther DG's.

There's little that we here at Unplayable Lies enjoy more than fun stories involving the Commish.  So we'll stay tuned...