While I have never met Pete Dye, I know him well. He is 500 years old and has absorbed the wisdom of the ages. He has a pointed hat and a flowing robe embroidered with occult symbols. When he speaks, he becomes extremely animated, and gesticulates a lot with flashes of blue static crackling from his long fingernails. PETER DOBEREINER
Balls are in the air at Ponte Vedra Beach, so let's dive in...
Players Gonna Play - Sean Martin has a fun read on the widely variable fortunes of players on this track:
The year was 2006, and Love was tied for the first-round lead after a bogey-free 65. He
It's a golf course that makes one assume the position... shot 18 strokes higher the next day, punctuating the round with a quadruple-bogey 9 at No. 9 to miss the cut by four shots.
“It doesn’t take much here,” Love said. “A couple double (bogeys) and it adds up real quick. … A couple bad shots and a couple bad breaks and you didn’t really play that bad and shot a big score.”
Love, for all his success at TPC Sawgrass, has more missed cuts (8) than top-10s (7) in his 28 PLAYERS appearances. He’s hardly the only one with such a resume.
It's built for thrills and spills, with water in play on twenty of the eighteen holes, so there's gonna be some tears. But when you add a stroke a hole to your first day score, you're likely to have the weekend off.
And here's some aggregate data...admittedly it's difficult to know what the frame of reference should be, but you'd think that many balls would raise the water table:
The island green at No. 17 gets a lot of the attention, but there are plenty of treacherous shots at TPC Sawgrass. The 249 shots into the water last season were fourth-most on TOUR, while the 225 scores of double-bogey or worse were fifth-most.
There have been 3,104 shots hit into the water here since 2003, the second-most on TOUR in that span (TPC Southwind leads the way with 4,671).
My only questions is where is TPC Southwind? I watch more golf than the average bear, and I have no clue what event that is....
But while they say it all the time, this really does seem to be a golf course that favors no specific type of player.... Heck, Tim Clark and K.J. Choi have won here, and they're shorter than I am. Also, they don't hit the ball very far...
Don't miss this Skratch Golf post on ProTracer greatest hits at Sawgrass.... My personal favorite is Graeme McDowell almost nailing the tree on No. 6, though the marshall in the last one gives a very compelling performance. And this is pretty cool:
No word on which unfortunate soul hit that outlier on the viewer's right.
Cam Morfitt takes off his rose-colored glasses to speculate on issues that Commissioner Monahan will have to address, this being the elephant in the corner:
That's the good news. But Monahan, 46, is also inheriting a large and sometimes unwieldy house that will require constant upkeep. Where will the Tour take Miami's WGC, what with Cadillac declining to re-up and the host course, Trump Doral, owned by the radioactive Donald? What happens when the FedEx sponsorship expires at the end of 2017?
The last bit, that is... But while others spoke of Commissioner Ratched having widened the moat, I'd suggest that he's built a house that might exceed the load-bearing capacity of its foundation...
Ernie Els has some interesting things to say as well... Now please don't let Ernie turn over the dirt on any more Harry S. Colt masterpieces, but the man is one of the nicest guys on the planet and observant to boot:
"As long as guys on the Tour keep their noses clean and give them a nice, clean product," Els says, "it's going to be hard to screw this up no matter who the commissioner is."
Be that as it may, Els feels changes are needed. Golf on TV, he says, still doesn't look right, and the pacing feels off. Viewers should be able to click a button to see their favorite players. "Slow play is a concern," Els says. "The product needs to stay fresh and fast, like other sports. It's got to work on television. The technology is there."
Cam, why wouldn't you do a follow-up with Ernie and let him describe in detail how that broadcast should look.... But speaking of TV, this is getting the headlines:
Ogilvie, who was on the policy board when the Tour's 15-year deal with Golf Channel was announced in 2006, says Monahan will have to shore up the main TV deal, which he says is costing players money. Ogilvie's assessment is based on recent sports-television deals, specifically the 12-year Fox-USGA pact, which was said to be worth around $100 million a year when it was announced in '13.
"The Tour left $700 million to $1 billion on the table when it did the deal with Golf Channel," Ogilvie says. "There's been astronomical growth since then, and with 20/20 hindsight Comcast got a sweetheart deal. Tim went for what was safe, and you can't fault him for that."
Wow, it's turning into the Night of Long Knives, accusing Commissioner Ratched of leaving a billion large on the table.... You know we've ventured into the Bizarro World when I'm forced to defend the man, but that's just nonsense on stilts.
The objective back then was to lock in coverage of every round and put a long-term deal in place, and that was accomplished at a good price for the times. Comparing it to Fox, which overpaid greatly for a second-rate package of properties (excepting, of course, the big one) is just silly...
Today in Zika News - In an earlier Cam Morfitt piece, he dealt with the Commish's presser and discussion of the "z" word.... To his credit, the Commish didn't completely bury the issue, but he might have downplayed it just a tad.... Cam felt compellled to include this:
"Brazil's Zika problem is inconveniently not ending," wrote Amir Attaran, a professor at the School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine at the University of Ottawa, in TIME. "The outbreak that began in the country's northeast has reached Rio de Janeiro, where it is flourishing. Clinical studies are also mounting that Zika infection is associated not just with pediatric microcephaly and brain damage, but also adult conditions such as Guillain-Barre syndrome and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, which are debilitating and sometimes fatal. Simply put, Zika infection is more dangerous, and Brazil's outbreak more extensive, than scientists reckoned a short time ago."
The article questions the wisdom of enabling a mass migration of some 500,000 foreign tourists into the heart of an epidemic in Rio. And some would-be travelers are taking pains to avoid even outlying areas. Citing Zika concerns, the Pittsburgh Pirates and Miami Marlins voted last week not to play two games on May 30, 31 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, relocating them to Miami.
The real issue, of course, is that those 500,000 souls then return home.... But this is what happens when you take the Olympics to dysfunctional third-world countries. They don't have institutions capable of providing the basics to their people, and now we add a massive infrastructure project and strain those limited resources further.
On a similar subject, Golf.com has gone into the video business, and this is their first production, which is quite beautiful and touching, as well as a bit troubling.... It's 17 minutes long and well worth your time, if you have that kind of time, or you can read this Jeff Ritter companion piece.
As moving as as it is at the micro level (it follows a local player named Breno Domingos), I'm just profoundly uncomfortable with all that is involved at the macro level. I don't think that the Olympic Golf Course destroyed the loyal environment, that was accomplished long before Gil Hanse set foot in Rio.
But when you lie with dogs you get up with fleas...and in this case you can't build such a golf course and hold such an event without abetting corruption and malfeasance.
Things That Make Us Laugh - Just click here and enjoy. You can thank me later...
Alan Shipnuck is Now My Hero - Alan has been everywhere lately, mostly to good effect. Oh, I quibbled with his Olympic item the other day, but cheerleader is part of their job description.
So, why has he been granted access to the pantheon? For the outrageously unwise act of publishing this:
The Shipnuck 100: The Best Golf Courses I Have Played Worldwide
This is obviously a "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished" undertaking, as his inbox will be filled with endless "How Could You Leave Del Boca Vista No. 3" off the list" e-mails. Not to mention the "How could you put that cow pasture" on the list?' variants on the theme...
Alan knows how to write a lede, so we'll give him the space in which to set his hook:
A couple of weeks ago my laptop computer was stolen. I've never been very good aboutbacking up stuff, so gone with my Mac was a good chunk of my iTunes library, many treasured photos of my kids and, saddest of all, a Word file on my desktop entitled Top 100. Don't let the simple name fool you—this was a monumental document, a distillation of my life's work. Yes, it was the ever-changing, always-evolving, highly idiosyncratic list of my 100 favorite golf courses on the planet. After a deep period of mourning it's now time to recreate the list, not least because last week I played two courses that demand a rethinking: the recently redone Dunes at Monterey Peninsula Country Club and Chambers Bay. (This was actually my second time pegging it at Chambers but on the first go-around last year, for a GOLF.com video, I was forced to play from the U.S. Open tees, in the rain, while being followed by a camera crew, and thus unable to fully appreciate the course before me.)
Since this is as personal as letting someone read my diary—or, at the very least, my Netflix queue—I feel compelled to explain my crude methodology. There are no fancy statistical categories or complicated metrics. No, I simply ask myself, would I rather play this course or that one? Each track moves up or down the list accordingly. Note that these are only courses I've played, not merely strolled in my guise as a reporter. (Ergo, missing is Oakmont—the only course in the first 17 of Golf Magazine's Top 100 in the World I haven't played.) Ranking anything is highly personal. When it comes to golf courses, I value above all else fun, memorability, beauty, quirkiness and heroic shot values. Courses at which the primary virtue is difficulty don't do much for me. Since I grew up in Monterey County and have returned to live there, I'm deeply biased toward playing by the sea, and all the better if it's ancient linksland. History is a bonus but not mandatory. I love public courses and loathe American golf's obsession with exclusivity, but I try not to let this unduly affect my rankings. Still, when you go to a place and everyone is uptight and you feel like you're supposed to whisper and every dude in the grill room is a cigar-smoking Master of the Universe, that does have some effect on the experience. So, here's my top 100…
Ancient linksland, eh? I think I like the cut of his jib... And with names like Cruden Bay (pictured above), Machrihanish and Lahinch in the Top Ten, he doesn't disappoint. He's more charitable to newer links such as Castle Stuart and Kingsbarns than some, but it is, after all, his list.
I was surprised to see Old Head make the list, which calls into doubt his qualifications as an insufferable purist, but we all have moments of weakness, so I'll not dwell. But tucked away at No. 92, and I wouldn't have ti higher, is one that's near and dear to my heart, The Old Course at Ballyliffin.
That he appreciated those marvelously rumpled fairways, which I always compare to an unmade bed, is just so great. As is the fact the he prefers it to the sterner Glashedy, which is perfectly fine for what it's meant to be. But the Old is just a wonderful walk with spectacular vistas and uncomplicated yet beguiling shot values.
It's our home away from home in Ireland, but it's so great that a guy that's played everywhere sees the appeal in it. Well done, Alan.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, what the &*%$#@ is Valhalla doing on this list?
No comments:
Post a Comment