Mid-Week Musings

The rains have cleared out at last and the thermometer threatens to blow past 55 degrees, so let's have at it, shall we?

Tigers and Trojans, Oh My! - Team Match Play is da bomb, and there was ten hours of it to watch yesterday:

BRADENTON, Fla. – Parity and an unpredictable match-play format can make for a

tumultuous championship. 

We saw it seven days ago, when Stanford and Baylor knocked off the favorites and reached the NCAA women’s finals. 

And that’s what we have again here at Concession, where over the course of 12 hours Tuesday, Southern Cal defeated Texas and Illinois – the popular choices to win it all with a combined 15 wins this season – to advance to the NCAA Championship final.

The 13th-ranked Trojans will face No. 9 LSU in the 18-hole championship match Wednesday.

Now for some reason I didn't find the men's event to be quite as captivating as the ladies'... that may be due to the lack of appeal to my inner lech (or inner Maggot), or it may be that the guys are just too good.  Except for their bizarre inability to lag putts, that is.... Honestly, you've never seen as many guys needing only a two-putt to win a hole blow the first seven feet by...

USC, surprisingly, has never won a Men's NCAA title:

“It doesn’t make sense to me that we haven’t won,” Zambri confided. 

He then rattled off mind-boggling stats that his alma mater has collected over the last half century that included the number of touring professionals, major-championship winners, All-Americans and Pac-12 Conference Championships.

Shack gives all due credit with this outburst:

Even though the program has produced many major winners and NCAA individual champions like Al Geiberger, Dave Stockton, Craig Stadler, Scott Simpson and many more, the University of Southern California still trails Pepperdine in the NCAA team title department but they are tied with Georgia Tech at least!

C'mon guy, not even a short drumroll for that last guy?  Where's the respect?  Shaack, you might have intuited, went to Pepperdine and I'm guessing the Georgia Tech slam is for Charlie Rymer.

On a related note, do check out this Shane Ryan item on the best NCAA matches since the introduction of match play in 2009.  Here's just a snippet:

7. Patrick Reed def. Peter Uihlein, Oklahoma State, 2010 & 2011 

Reed frustrated Uihlein, one of the best amateurs in the country, in the 2010 championship when he refused to concede an early short putt, and Uihlein missed. Reed won 4 and 2, and the following year, Oklahoma State was eager for revenge. Uihlein had just won the Ben Hogan Award as the best golfer in the country, along with the U.S. Amateur title the previous August, and he was playing on Oklahoma State’s home course, Karsten Creek. But it all didn't matter. Reed destroyed Uihlein in front of a huge partisan crowd, 8 and 7, still the most lopsided result in any college golf match.

Reed makes another appearance on the list and, SPOILER ALERT, is Shane's pick as the best match-play player of this short era.  Bonus points to the headline writer as well, to whom I paid the supreme compliment of plagiarizing...

Today's Quota of Silliness - Loyal readers will recall that I've been highly critical of certain grow the game initiatives that involve skills not related to golf....i.e., FootGolf.  But this has me rethinking my position, perhaps it's just the ball that's at issue:

And then there's this from the What Could Go Wrong Files:

Two points to be made here...Number one, your video camera has a landscape mode, so USE IT.  Number two, how many Tour pros would pay money to see Caleb Watson try this shot?  But honestly, I don't think his head dipped any more than Tiger's does...

Lastly, our old friend David Owen introduces us to Lord Griffiths:

...William Hugh Griffiths, a.k.a. the Lord Griffiths, a past captain of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, who died on Sunday at the age of 91.

Jerry Tarde, the editor-in-chief of Golf Digest, describes Griffiths as "my favorite R & A captain." David Fay, a former executive director of the U.S.G.A., agrees, and writes, "I will never forget his speech at the U.K. Golf Writers dinner, where he summarized his judicial philosophy: 'Always rule against the shits.'" (Griffiths was also a judge.)

I miss him already, though favorite R & A Captain is a notoriously noncompetitive category....But David is not in the obituary business, and he's going somewhere with this....here's his lede:

The bunkers at Royal County Down, in Northern Ireland, are famous for their ball-devouring overhangs, which are savagely rimmed with marram grass and may serve as portals to a different dimension. I once wrote that their densely tangled upper margins resembled the eyebrows of old men. I thought I was kidding, but maybe not.

Here's a photo of Lord Griffiths:

 And David helpfully provides the side-by-side:

I know, it's eerie....perhaps I should have saved the item for a fourth Separated at Birth feature.

Occam's Razor - Olympic Edition - Loyal readers are well aware of my opinion regarding Olympic golf, that it will leave no ripples in the water, except for the rather serious disruption and complication to the golf calendar.

I've had something of an evolution in my thinking, having previously mostly focused on the mendacity and corruption inherent in the International Olympic Committee (not to mention Brazil and the city of Rio as well).  And while I stand by my profound contempt tor that organization, I've also realized that other, simpler explanations also apply.

This revelation came through the caddie story we blogged a few months ago.... the IOC has a lodging constraint in Rio during the games, and simply couldn't understand why the players needed to bring caddies with them (or maybe they're just big fans of college golf).  So file this Derek Lawrenson item shouldn't surprise:

How’s this for a lamentable state of affairs? Picture Tiger Woods, from the depths of his current world ranking of 172nd, beginning the long march back with a good finish at the Memorial tournament in Ohio this week. 

So it continues, step by agonising step as he inches back inside the top 20, until he captivates the entire sporting world with a victory at The Open at Royal Troon next year for his 15th major championship. 

A fortnight later, another blistering finish at the USPGA leaves Woods looking up at only Rory McIlroy at the top of the rankings as the sport re-enters the Olympics.

The astute reader, and I've no other kind, will sense where this is going:

It cannot happen because the qualifying period for golfers to represent their country in Rio in August next year just happens to conclude on the Sunday before the 2016 Open begins. 

No, it’s not you. I had to read this several times as well to make sure I had got it right. You mean to tell me that Tiger could win The Open next year and the US PGA but if he was ranked outside the world’s top 15 before both events were staged he would not be in Rio? Yep, that’s the strength of it. How stupid would golf look in those circumstances?

And forgive me going long, but this is ironic gold:

No one I approached at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club was keen to comment and to be fair, having lobbied so hard for golf’s inclusion in the Olympics, what could they say? 

But they must be deeply disappointed that the qualifying period cannot end a week later. As if golf’s inclusion was not controversial enough, we now have this real danger to the credibility of its gold medal award, and for what? An extra week to measure up uniforms and carry out paperwork?

Occam's Razor again rears its ugly head... Our governing bodies wanted this so badly, that that's exactly how they got it.  So many sacrifices had to be made in terms of size of field, format and the like, that the product on display will be substandard... the saving grace being that no one will be watching.

Dogs, fleas.