Holiday Happenings

Everyone have a good 4th of July.  Not sure when we'll meet again...

He's Baaack - Turns out he wasn't so far away, after all....at least according to his own self, per Karen Crouse in Pravda:

Woods returned this week with a head of steam too weak to move a ball off the tee, and opened with a 66 on Thursday. Go figure. It was his best first-round score in 22 months, and, at four-under, it equaled his lowest score relative to par this year. 

“I know people think I’m crazy for saying that, but I just felt like I wasn’t that far away,” said Woods, who dismissed the notion that he had proved anything to anybody with the good start.

Can anybody translate the opening metaphor into English for me?   Head of steam?  If that's how you move a ball off the tee, then I've been doing it wrong all these years...But before we move on, Karen lets us know that he's still got the game that wowed the crowd in Phoenix, La Jolla and Dublin:

Woods, whose most recent victory on the PGA Tour was in August 2013, hit six of seven fairways on his first nine, and strung together three birdies to end his round. The birdie binge followed a double bogey on the par-4 sixth, the particulars of which have become par for Woods’s season. After he drove into the left rough, Woods caromed his second shot off a tree branch and into a bunker. He bladed his next shot, missed the green with a flop shot, chipped to 5 feet and made the putt to fall to one under.

He rebounded from that to birdie his final three holes, so this does represent progress, and

this from Steve DiMeglio sounds like the right medicine:

“I made a little bit of progress since last time I played. Obviously (that’s) not really saying much, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow,” Woods, 39, told reporters Wednesday about his game since the U.S. Open. “Really looking forward to competing again and getting out here and playing. 

“ … I didn’t touch a club for a while (after the U.S. Open). Took my kids down to Albany, and we were down diving in the water every day all day pretty much. It was nice to have a summer break with them like that, especially after the way I played.”

No doubt it's real progress, if only because of the recurring train wrecks that preceded it.  But it was one good round accomplished on a soft golf course with not a hint of a breeze, and he'll need to show that he can do it consistently....or even occasionally.

The Hits Keep On Coming - Relax, I haven't subscribed to the N.Y. Times, though this may well be the first time I've blogged two of their articles in the same post year.  The Times provides few surprises, and the lede in this Ginia Bellafante thumbsucker makes it clear where we're going:

If the thought of Donald Trump has been lodged in your head of late, exclusively as a Republican presidential candidate, defamer of immigrants and thrice-wed champion of traditional marriage, then it may have escaped your attention that a lush and extravagant municipal golf course bearing his name — Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point — opened this spring on the southeastern shoreline of the Bronx. Paid for by New York City, to the sum of $127 million, and maintained by the Trump organization, the course offers the kind of visual lessons in inequality that make statistics and editorials and Thomas Piketty seem ponderously inefficient.

Even money that she's never read Piketty's ponderous, mostly-discredited tome, but we're checking all the right boxes.  Golf bad while there's still poverty in a horribly-mismanaged city....and just to ruin your day, Ginia, that $127 million is no doubt low by an order of magnitude.

But, like the proverbial blind squirrel, she stumbles upon an acorn:

But how likely is it now that the United States Open, so dependent on corporate sponsorships, will be scheduled on a public course named for someone who said he is committed to building a wall at the Mexican border to keep out drug dealers and “rapists”? Although you could argue that none of his comments could have been anticipated, getting blindsided by craziness from Mr. Trump is like landing at a monastery only to be surprised that it’s quiet.

Call me crazy, but I anticipated that our Donald would step in it, didn't you?  Rich Lowry had this to say in a recent Politico column:

The shunning of Trump is in response to his uh, memorable presidential announcement that included comments about the alleged criminality of Mexican immigrants that were typically crude. Trump could make a statement about arcane tax policy details related to accelerated depreciation for business investment — and still make you want to take a shower afterward . . . 

But her point is no less valid for being so obvious.... the governing organizations are not inclined to enjoy Mr. Trump's blustery personality, so why fight him for the microphone.  Nothing startling there, but this was my favorite part of the item...in writing for the Grey Lady she has access to all the right left people, so give this a read:

That followed the move on the part of NBC Universal to sever ties with Mr. Trump on his television projects and an announcement from the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that it would no longer consider Trump hotels as sites for two conventions next year that make up the largest meetings of Hispanic business leaders in the country. 

“He has no idea what’s coming,” the organization’s president, Javier Palomarez, told me. “The Hispanic community is really galvanized around this.”

Nice little business you have there...sure be a shame if something happened to it.

But do read the balance of the piece, which is wonderfully, if unintentionally hysterical.  She uses Trump's apostasy on immigration policy to excoriate public-private partnerships, but then provides a litany of the manifold failures of the public portion thereof (omitting, of course, the biggest, that they couldn't finish the golf course).  It's enough to make the head of a lefty journalist (but I repeat myself) explode...

Legal Stuff - What seemed at the time a bad decision (and horrible precedent) has been over-turned:

Golf Channel averted a multimillion-dollar legal setback when the Fifth Circuit vacated

an opinion that would have required the network to pay $5.9 million to the receiver for Allen Stanford clients who were bilked in the imprisoned financier’s Ponzi scheme.

The fact that Golf Channel provided the services in good faith to Stanford seems to be the real question, but according to Janvey it has little bearing on the case. In his complaint filed in federal court in 2011, Janvey claimed that Golf Channel could be sued under the Texas Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act to recover the advertising money paid to the network by Stanford. 

In its decision Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit decided to ask the Texas high court to define whether “market value is sufficient proof of reasonably equivalent value,” which the Golf Channel has argued as a defense. It would save not only Golf Channel but also IMG and the PGA Tour millions of dollars paid by Stanford, a former sponsor of PGA Tour and LPGA events.

I'm not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV, but it seemed to be quite the over-reach.  Stanford was a bad guy, and his victims included players such as Vijay Singh and Henrik Stenson.  But unless fraud can be proven in his other dealings, I don't see how you can unwind standard-issue contracts years after the fact.

Stanford himself is in the early years of serving his 110-year sentence.

Open Stuff - Would you believe we have another N.Y. Times piece, this one about the modern Grand Slam by someone named Victor Mather:

At 21, Jordan Spieth has won his second major and become the most celebrated player in golf. He is also halfway to one of the most difficult feats in sports, the Grand Slam. Indeed, “difficult” may be selling the challenge short. In its modern incarnation, no one has ever completed a Grand Slam in golf, and no one has come especially close.

Mather deals with Bobby Jones, and then throws out some mangled history:

In 1951, Ben Hogan took the first two majors. But he would have faced a significant hurdle for a Grand Slam: The British Open started a day after the P.G.A. ended. After sustaining terrible injuries in a car crash in 1949, Hogan played a light schedule, and in the end he elected not to compete in the last two majors.

Yeah....it's all true, but completely misses the point.  Not only did Hogan play a limited schedule, but he didn't play the PGA in that era because he couldn't make it through 36-hole matches.  But more relevant, why would he attempt to win the Grand Slam, when there was no such concept in that era... in fact, I'm not even sure they used the term "major."

And while I need to get moving here, Shack provides this video of Bobby Jones' win in the 1930 Amateur in the first leg of what became his Slam:

Quite the nice play from the Road bunker... and continuing to fight the good fight on Jordan's schedule (amusing he lost his own reader poll), Shack posts this quote from Tony Lema about caddie Tip Anderson:

He was far more useful to me than a club. Without his help I doubt if I could have won it. It amazed me the way he just put the club in my hand.

When Arnie decided not to make the trip for the 1964 Open Championship at the Old Course, he suggested to Tony Lema that he hire Anderson.  

Geoff, you're entirely correct on this matter, but we seem to have lost this fight.  It won't be the last...