Weekend Wrap

I'm pleased to report that all obligations related to my niece's wedding have been faithfully discharged with the return of my Dad to the happy couple.  That's perhaps not the weekend wrap you expected, but let's get to it:

Rickie Don't Lose That Number - We can discuss endlessly whether that March poll that labelled him the most over-rated player in golf had any effect, but there's little doubt that our Rickie can finish:

NORTON, Mass. (AP) -- One big putt for Rickie Fowler. One big mistake for Henrik Stenson. 

The turned out to be the difference Monday when Fowler rallied from a two-shot deficit with five holes to play, making a 40-foot birdie putt on the 14th hole and playing flawless the rest of the way for a 3-under 68 and a one-shot victory in the Deutsche Bank Championship.

That's three significant wins for the young man this year, and it's quite inconceivable that there won't be many more.  That said, the strange thing about his 2015 season was his desultory play in the majors after top-fives in all four the previous year.  Because....golf.

Before we chat a bit about Rickie, it's surprising to me that Henrik Stenson finds himself as the current hard-luck golfer that can't get it to the clubhouse.  He hasn't won on Tour since his magical 2013 run, and he has struggled with leads most notably at Bay Hill and this week.  This loss was can be pinned on one bad shot on the 16th hole, which may or may not have been due to the club selection.  But, and since I'm a professional blogger you can trust me on this, short is no good on that hole, there are some mistakes one can't survive, so one struggles to understand how a player and caddie allow it to happen.

Unsurprisingly, no sooner had the cognoscenti declared golf in the hands of a new Great Triumvirate (and anyone unfamiliar with the use of that term in golf can go here) of Spieth, Day and McIlroy, than those know-it-alls consider a mulligan to add Rickie:

Fowler won the Deutsche Bank Championship on Monday by overcoming a three-shot deficit with eight holes to play at the TPC Boston and defeating Henrik Stenson by a shot. It was his third victory of the season — he won the Players Championship in May and the Scottish Open in July — and one that declared his intention to disrupt the reigning triumvirate of Spieth, McIlroy and Jason Day. Clearly. 

A resume that included top-five finishes in each of the four major championships in 2014 was void only of victories, and though the major win has eluded him, he has erased that blemish against formidable fields and no doubt already is looking ahead to April and the Masters.

He's now ranked fifth in the world, and doesn't that seem to have it about right.  But the accomplishments of the other three are a level above his, with a major being the most obvious missing link.  And I'm pretty sure that my judgment is on the mark, because this guy agrees with me:

“With the three guys that they talk about, Jason, Rory and Jordan, they've clearly played the best out of anyone over the past few months to couple of years,” Fowler said. “So I'm trying to be a small fourth thrown in there. But there are a lot of other really good young players playing well right now, as well.”

The Tour Confidential gabfest kicked it around, and I haven't seen such consensus since the Politburo was disbanded:

Michael Bamberger, senior writer, Sports Illustrated: Fowler has had two terrific wins this year against good fields on golf courses where a lot can go wrong. He's contended in majors. He's fun to watch. I love his energy. But McIlroy, Spieth and Day are, for now, a full tier ahead of him, and McIlroy and Spieth have more shots at their disposal.

Gary Van Sickle, senior writer, Sports Illustrated.: Rickie had what would've been a Player-of-the-Year type performance in many years but not this year. The New Big Three are on top of the golf world. Rickie is in a class that's one step down. He has to win a major to step up to that top tier.

Could we be singing from a different hymnal by mid-April, of course...but more importantly, how much fun are the next few years going to be?  Not least because the three or four guys are so likable, each in their own unique way.  But do appreciate this grace note from the winner:

He had accepted accolades at the trophy presentation and provided all the answers to all

the questions asked of him. It was time to go — or so everyone figured, since well, that’s the routine of most tournament winners. 

Ah, but Rickie Fowler isn’t like most tournament players and he showed that again Monday evening when after conducting his post-game press conference he circled back into the media center. 

He had a few more things to say. 

Mostly thanks. For the week-long coverage of the tournament. For the stories that had been produced. Fowler spoke from a railing overlooking rows of workstations occupied for reporters and he raised a bottle of champagne (one of the many that he had sent over) to offer a toast.

I'm sure Tiger's done that a million times....

Wither Jordan -  Boy it's a tough crowd....you win two majorts and miss two others by the narrowest of margins, and they turn on you like....well, no one has really turned on him, they're just making a bit much of a man being tired.  Let's get the world ranking silliness out of the way with this from John Strege's item linked above:

NBC’s Johnny Miller went to BYU and majored in physical education, which rules him out. “If any of you out there can figure out how a guy [Jordan Spieth] can miss two cuts in a row and now become number one [in the World Ranking] over Rory [McIlroy], let me know,” he said.

OK class, we've been over this too many times.  Any mathematical algorithm will have anomalies and look foolish at times.  As a rule of thumb, if you don't know who the best player in the world is from following the game, then don't complain when the formula can't compute results within the margin of error.

Jason Sobel had this telling quote from Spieth:

If there's a major takeaway from these two weeks, it's that he understands the need to remain sharp -- not just with his clubs but with the mental aspect of his game. 

"Normally my mental game is a strength of mine," he explained. "And it's something I feel like I have an advantage over other players on. These past two weeks, it was a weakness for me. And I've just got to go back and reassess how to remain positive."

As penance, Jordan should be forced to read all of my posts from the week leading up to the Open Championship, in which I played Nostradamus and predicted such a result.  Yes I was a tad early, but my point still stands...

And see what you think of this Brian Wacker item at the Tour's site:

It's a curious thing to say, but for a guy who headed to St. Andrews this summer with a chance to win three consecutive majors, it might actually be Jordan Spieth's next tournament that counts as the most important of his year. 

Spieth has now missed two consecutive cuts. He hasn't broken 73 in four rounds. Plenty of players on tour endure these sorts of dry spells, but rarely is it a guy who won two majors that year and is just days removed from being the No. 1 player in the world. How would we assess his year if it ends with such a thud?

Meh!  Brian, you're usually a more level-headed kind of guy but, contra your overwrought header, I'm gonna stick with St. Andrews being more important than the BMW.  But he's on to something with this 'graph:

Beyond that, though, there is the larger question of how Spieth handles adversity. We thought we saw evidence of his resilience when he lost the Masters in 2014 and then came back to win it the next year. But you could argue that was still a period when the expectations were quite low. Now Spieth is the face of golf, with the new burden of needing to perform every time he plays. Maybe he doesn't frame it that way, but even he acknowledges he's contending with negative thoughts of late. 

“I had really bad self-talk this week, something I haven't experienced in quite a while,” Spieth told reporters after missing the cut with a 75-73 at the Deutsche Bank Championship. “Maybe heightened by just everything that's happened this year, and just being so used to being in contention, that not only was I out of it, but I was also outside the cut line. And maybe it just heightened my self-talk. I need to walk with some cockiness in my step these next two tournaments."

Not to pull a muscle in patting myself on the back, but that was one of my concerns leading up to the Open Championship, and it's to be expected.  But to test the premise of Brian's piece, will your assessment of Spieth's prospects at the 2016 Masters change in the slightest based upon his finish st the BMW?  We're done here...

Our Cup Fever Runneth Over -  Your FedEx Cup Fever has no doubt precluded acceptance of delivery of your President's Cup Fever.... But qualification for the President's Cup has ended and here are the teams as they now stand:

U.S. Team

1. Jordan Spieth

2. Bubba Watson

3. Jimmy Walker

4. Zach Johnson

5. Jim Furyk

6. Rickie Fowler

7. Dustin Johnson

8. Patrick Reed

9. Matt Kuchar

10. Chris Kirk

International Team

1. Jason Day

2. Louis Oosthuizen

3. Adam Scott

4. Hideki Matsuyama

5. Branden Grace

6. Marc Leishman

7. Anirban Lahiri

8. Charl Schwartzel

9. Thongchai Jaidee

10. Danny Lee

Where it gets just a teensy-weensy bit interesting is that N0. 11 in the final points total and preemptively under serious consideration for a Captain's pick is Bill Haas.  Yes, I acknowledge that there is nothing remotely interesting about Bill Haas, but there is the issue of the captain being named Jay Haas.  Given that his spawn was the next guy on the list and has tons of team competition experience, it's hard to believe that he won't be selected.  The names after Bill's are Holmes, Hoffman (Charley, not Morgan), Horschel and Snedeker, and it's hard to see him going lower than that.

My guess is that he takes Bill and J.B., inoculating himself from criticism by taking the next two from the points list.  But Webb Simpson is in 16th place, so let's hope he doesn't have Jay's cellphone number...

For the non-Euro's (Internationals takes too many pixels) Steven Bowditch is in 11th place, and deserves selection.  Next up is Byeong-Hun An who, as a South Korean, might be the path of least resistance though I think Sangmoon Bae is the better player, though I'm not sure when he reports for military service.

This Week's Trumpalooza - Fresh off the WaPo's item on Trump as cheater at golf comes a more substantive sitdown with Jaime Diaz, 

What have you learned from the presidential experience? 

Well, I had no idea it would be this big, number one. Because when you look at what’s happened in terms of the level of popularity and the polls, I didn’t think it would be that fast. And once I announced it was like a rocket ship. Nobody thought I was going to run, and once I announced, it’s gone very fast. 

Number two, it’s a nasty business. It’s nasty. I find great dishonesty. Sort of the opposite of golf, I find great dishonesty in the world of politics.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that there's gambling in Casablanca... but this was my favorite exchange because Jaime follows up as you'd want:

If you ran golf, what would you change?

I’ve felt strongly that golf should be an aspirational game. It shouldn’t be a game for all strata of society. It should be something that you aspire to. And I think golf got away from that. And by getting away from it, it actually hurt golf. 

In Scotland, where golf began and spread among the populace, it’s long been a game for all strata. Why in your opinion does that formula not work now?

I think that formula does work in terms of the daily fee and public courses. I have a course in Los Angeles that is tremendously successful. It’s a great course, but it’s also on the Pacific Ocean. Trump Ferry Point, from 6:30 to late afternoon, foursomes are just going out. Never have an empty slot. Public golf does work if you have a really good course in a really good location. 

But those are expensive courses. What about municipal’s like Cobb’s Creek in Philadelphia, where you yourself first began to play game seriously paying $10-$15 a round?

I used to play for even less than that at other public courses. I think those entry points are OK. But I see so much emphasis on getting young people to play the game, and once they get a little bit older they’ll never play. But once they become successful, they will be able to play. And they’ll aspire to play. So it’s good to give them a touch at the beginning, but I just think that you know, golf is not an inexpensive game, whether we like it or not. I just think for golf to be truly successful, it’s got to be more of an aspirational game then they are talking about right now.

This is how you interview someone like Trump, there's no need to be confrontational but one can readily allow his words to collapse of their own weight.  It's nonsense on stilts and quite surprising that he's still peddling it... If I were one of his challengers on the campaign trail I'd make sure that those words got more widely circulated.

Now rumors that he's a Clinton plant in the Republican primaries will only be fueled by this:

What’s your experience with Bill Clinton as a golfer?

We’ve played a number of times. We have very different games. By the way, he doesn’t cheat. He will drop a ball, but he doesn’t make any bones about it. If he misses a shot -- he doesn’t get to play very much -- so he’ll drop a ball and hit a second shot. But he’s not saying he got a par if he didn’t get a par. It’s not like he’s trying to hide anything. I think he’s been treated unfairly.

You mean by the media that wanted everyone to know that he broke 80? I have no problem with Bill Clinton or anyone else playing golf in a manner that they enjoy, including the dropping of second balls and mulligans... the problem is when you want to have it both ways, as Bill so often does.

And lastly we have this slideshow of Trump's five favorite golf courses, presumably excluding any that he owns.  The list is a shocker to be sure, including:

Cypress Point

Augusta National

Winged Foot

The Old Course

Pebble Beach

Are we sure he's not a career politician?  I find that list laugh-out-loud hysterical because of its epic lack of originality.  I'd be embarrassed to have my name on it, but it's old news that The Donald isn't easily abashed.