Short Takes

Quite a bit on your humble blogger's plate this week, so we'll opt for the short and pithy today, with an emphasis on the former...

Tiger Reax - I'm shocked to find gambling in Casablanca, that Hillary would lie about her e-mail server and, most notably, that girl in college that told me that it happens to other guys as well... But that last bit isn't important now.

To accurately capture my state of disillusionment, shocked is woefully short of the mark and I'll have to dig deep for seldom-used adjectives such as flabbergasted, stupefied or, dare I say, nonplussed over this Mike Bamberger book review:

I went in with high hopes. I spent part of Monday morning reading chunks of it and skimming the rest. I’m sure I could put in for the $14.38 on my next expense account, but I won’t. I wouldn’t want to sully my expense account that way.

What could cause a sensible soul to be concerned about the sanctity of his expense account?

What a shame, because based on what Steve Williams has seen in golf, and his insight

into golf tournaments, courses and players, he was in position to make his first book one of the great golf books ever. As it is, I’m inclined to point you toward another book, Laura Baugh’s “Out of the Rough,” published about 15 years ago. Baugh went through a personal hell, survived it, and wrote up her story with intense honesty and considerable self-reflection. Being beautiful, it turns out, is not as easy as it might seem.

WTF!  He stole his title from Laura Baugh?  Sheesh, at least Dan Jenkins went to the trouble of stealing his book title from...well....me.  But for all involved this will no doubt be the cruelest cut:

In Hank Haney’s book about Woods, “The Big Miss,” Haney seeks to do the same thing that Williams wants to do. Haney tries, too desperately at times, to make the case that Woods owed him more credit than he was willing to give. But Haney’s book is loaded with insights into Woods that you could never read anywhere else. “The Big Miss” has, as any serious book must, a certain level of psychological detective work. Why do people do the things they do? Regarding Woods, we, the unwashed, are eager to get a better understanding of the man. That’s why there were 985 comments on those three sites at 6 a.m. But they were often in response to a single ridiculous word in the book, that Woods made Williams feel like a “slave” by tossing clubs in the direction of his bag, which required the proud Williams to bend over to pick them up.

Stevie, you're no Hank Haney!  Is that gonna leave a mark, or what?  Having already dispensed with what passes for the juicy bits, one can't help but be amused by this:

He thought his best chance to evade the long arm of Mark Steinberg and American jurisprudence might be to get the book published in New Zealand, where he lives, and that’s what he did.

Egads, which is the funnier, his desire to avoid Mob hitman Stein or "American Jurisprudence"?   Mike, did you really not have any follow-up questions on that?  Yanno, such as which bits did you think might be subject to court proceedings?

Oh, well, but as you might have guessed, the Hankster wants a piece of the corpse, noting this on SiriusXm radio:

"My diagnosis is the fact that he’s missed so much time. ... You add up the knee injury, you add up the scandal, you add up everything you want to add up and it equals 6 1/2 years of the last nine years.

"You take a superior athlete – I don’t care what sport they are in – and you take them out of their sport for six out of nine years, and then you couple that to the fact that it is a 40-year-old professional athlete, so you are competing against a lot of great young players that just seemingly get better all the time, that aren’t scared of you because they’ve, frankly, a lot of them have never seen his greatness, at least they’ve never competed against it, and you think, ‘How can you get your game back?’ And especially when your game is in the state that Tiger’s was in last year, which was not good.”

Can that match be remotely accurate?  Lastly, Golf.com runs a Tiger Enemies List gallery, truly an example of rounding up the usual suspects (for those keeping score at home, that's the second Casablanca reference of the day) from Dan Jenkins to ButchPhilSergioHankStevieBrandel.  But the funniest part was this first photoshop:

Nice to see Tiger in a suit... Let's see, that would have been circa 1974...wasn't that about when he won his last major?

Books, Worthwhile - .Clearly Stevie's tell-all isn't going to work as a holiday gift for the golfer in your life, but fortunately Shack is there for us:

While much of the golf world will be buzzing about caddie Stevie Williams breaking the imaginary player-looper confidentiality code with Monday’s release ofOut of the Rough, a tell-all book involving a golfer once embroiled in an international sex scandal is not the stuff of holiday gift giving. 

In recent years the golfer with a decent budget wanting to buy holiday gifts for colleagues, buddies or partners hasn’t had many options. That’s where the new Confidential Guide To Golf Courses fills a huge void. Even as sales of large hardcover books decline and we reconsider how many such books we put on our shelves, golf architect Tom Doak brings back and reimagines his once wildly controversial and still very useful “Guide.”

Gotta admit, I love the idea of looper privilege as a legal defense strategy....maybe that's the nature of Stevie's jurisprudential concern...

Lots of good background on how the guide has evolved into its third iteration, but I'm curious as to how Tom takes this:

When he first released the book in 1996, Doak was seen as the Steve Williams of architects, crossing an imaginary line by shining a light on the mediocrity of his peers and seeking to raise the bar on golf course design discussion.

Why, whose camera did he bust?  Anyway there's also a good Q&A with the Doakster, here's just a snippet:

Q: Course you have not seen that you most want to play?

For years, the answer to that was Banff and Jasper, but I played them both this summer in advance of Volume 3. Both exceeded my expectations. I also checked off places like Gamble Sands and Cabot Links this summer. I guess the current answer would be the new Cape Wickham course in Australia.

His list is a tad shorter than my own....

When Shanks are an Improvement - The golf world pretty much has this on an endless loop...careful, bet you can't watch just once.

This Week in Schadenfreude - For all you youngsters out there, THIS is what happens when you make fun of old guys:

Instant karma doesn't even begin to describe it." 

That's how Georgia senior Lee McCoy tried to put into words what happened to him on Friday after he imitated the golf swing of Bulldogs coach Chris Haack. It's one thing to make fun of someone else's golf swing, it's another to make fun of an injured golfer's swing. McCoy started mocking Haack, who was coming off a leg surgery and has a bad back, and he immediately hurt himself, dislocating a rib that put his status for the inaugural East Lake Cup in jeopardy. 

"I actually imitated his swing the best I could, and then the next ball, I couldn't swing," said McCoy, who had his rib put back in place on Friday night. "Everybody there thought I was still making fun of him, they thought I was kidding. I was like, 'no, I'm serious. I can't move.'"

Serves you right, kid.

Now? -  Talk about being late to the party, how about this?

The Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla., re-opens Monday after a Bobby Weed renovation of the original Pete Dye-Greg Norman design with a set of Tiger Tees, sod-wall bunkers and the second-highest slope and course rating in the country. 

According to Golf Digest’s ranking of America’s 75 Toughest Courses, only the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island is tougher than Medalist from the tips that include the Tiger Tees on six of the holes. Club member Woods had no design input but signed off on them and let the club put his name on the tee markers. 

The added length bumps Medalist up to 7,571 yards from the tips with a slope of 155 and course rating of 77.9, which puts it just ahead of Pine Valley and Oakmont. The Tiger Tees include par 4s of 499, 496, 494 on the front and 497 and 484 on the back, along with a 235-yard par 3.

Now, they're not just using that phrase as a euphemism: 

The irony, she burns... I picture Tiger showing up and being informed that the Tiger Tees are reserved for the long hitters, you know, Bubba and Rory.

As an aside, Medalist is where Greg Norman had a hissy fit over not being awarded the redesign, and sent them a letter demanding that they take his name off the design credits for the golf course.  Not sure of the current jurisprudence as relates to that demand.