Unplayable Lies: Frenetic Friday

Argh! That wasn't the Thursday anyone wanted at Oakmont.... Last I heard, they received 1.1 inches

of rain on Wednesday and another 1.1 inches during the three stoppages yesterday and, because the gods have a nasty sens eof humor, an additional .7 inches overnight. For those keeping score at home, that's just under 3 inches of rain in total....

The Yangtze Division has been mobilized and the more than 200 bunkers have each been rebuilt and play will resume shortly. But this tickles my funny bone.... remember how weird it was last year when there were no spectators on the eighth hole at Chambers Bay? Well, there will be no spectators anywhere on Oakmont this morning, because the parking lots are quagmires....

The course, that had been perfect Wednesday morning, is now softer and slower than is ideal, but will look fine to the viewer. The good news is that there's only s mall chance of rain today and none for the weekend, so there shouldn't be any issues getting back on schedule and finishing Sunday afternoon (or not, but take that up with the USGA as it would mean a Monday playoff). But as Gil Hanse noted yesterday on the Fox broadcast, the greens will recapture their speed but not their firmness.... 'tis a pity.

So, a question for you all.... why is the U.S. Open held in June? You couldn't pick a worse month on the weather calendar, at least in the Northeast. We've seen this movie time and time again, at Congressional, Bethpage (2x) and Merion spring immediately to mind....

A tough day for those players that got onto the course, because of a curious USGA decision after the first delay:

Others were frustrated. After lengthy weather delays, players are customarily afforded time to loosen up. But after the first stoppage, which lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes, USGA decided against giving the players range time, because of the ominous forecast for the rest of the day.

“That was a bad one,” said Danny Willett, who echoed the complaints of several other players. “We sat in a cabin for an hour and 10 minutes behind the seventh tee without being given a chance to hit any balls or do anything. You're in a U.S. Open, they don't give you a chance to even hit a few balls.

“Even the second time out, 1:47, and we were told to go back out again at 2:10, never hitting any balls. You can appreciate they're trying to get as many holes in as possible, but sometimes you just have to call it a day and come back.”

I completely get it, though perhaps it's a bit short-sighted.... You're never going to get better scoring conditions than yesterday, so perhaps one should just suck it up and have at it?

And how about the position in which overnight leader and previously-unknown Andrew Landry finds himself? He has a 10-footer for birdie on the ninth hole, his last of his first round, after which he'll have some time on his hands, as his second-round tee time will be in the dinner hour at the earliest....

Kudos to Fox, which has adjusted their schedule and will put in a 13-hour day for us, with coverage from 8:00 a.m. through 9:00 p.m.

Mid-delay, Shack posted some thoughts on where we go from here:

— Oakmont won’t be able to put up much of fight. Barring 5-percent humidity, wind and news that Sub Air is under the entire property, look for the course to be vulnerable to more red numbers. Is Johnny Miller’s 63 in danger? Probably not, though Andrew Landry briefly flirted with the record before coming back to earth.

-- The wave that was scheduled to go off Thursday afternoon seems to have the better side of the draw. Those players never had to deal with the stop-and-start fiasco on the first day, and will likely get a soft golf course under clear skies on Friday.

— The winning score should be under par. Gamblers who took “Under” a +2.5 winning score are going to sleep well the next few nights.

— The USGA will not play Lift, Clean and Place when play resumes.Never have, never will.

I think all of that is mostly correct....I had thought the storms were expected during the afternoon wave yesterday when I opined that I liked the morning wave.... I do think the late-early groups might end up with the better of it, though I am seeing some breeze on the Morning Drive coverage.... that could help dry things out more quickly....

But this is just unnecessarily mean-spirited:

— Any more delays and Fox may have to resort to showing us last year’s action from Chambers Bay. Is anyone prepared to re-live moon golf all over again?

Don't make me hurt you, Geoff! I understand they've been blasting that broadcast at Guantanamo inmates to get them to talk...

So, what do we think of the re-tooled Fox? Martin Kaufmann sees the glass as half-full:

It’s impossible to assess Fox’s performance on a day when there were three extensive weather delays, but the early signs were promising.

One of the things the first day’s weather delays seemed to illustrate was the wisdom of putting Brad Faxon in the 18th tower with Azinger. I initially questioned this plan; I thought Fox should put Azinger out front and give him a big platform. I was wrong about that. Azinger is the unquestioned alpha dog in the 18th tower, but he and Faxon seem to have a good rapport during the live hits, and when Fox returns to live action, Faxon simply slides over to his duties as a hole announcer. I don’t know if Loomis had considered this, but one of the benefits of his decision to have Faxon in the 18th tower is that it helps Fox kill time with reasonably intelligent conversation during weather delays.

Apparently math is hard.... What he failed to account for is that with Fax in the tower, at least some of his airtime serves to limit Joe Buck's. Win-win, baby!

Alas, though, I agree with him here:

The same, oddly, can’t be said for Holly Sonders, who hosts the segments with Ford and Hanse. In situations where she is asked to have a normal conversation with colleagues, she seems excitable, jumpy, ill at ease. The contrast is particularly striking here: Whereas Ford and Hanse are a couple of smooth bourbons that go down easy with viewers, Sonders is a hopped-up triple espresso. She’s still struggling to find her place on the Fox crew. My advice to Sonders is that she take a cue from her colleagues, chill out and simply try to enjoy the conversation. The segments will come off much better.

I didn't get her appeal when she was on Golf Channel, and I don't get it here....John Strege similarly agrees that Fox is improved, also citing the studio work of Ford and Hanse. But he also touches on this amusing vignette:

The delay also allowed it time to show a promising new feature, “Brownie Points,” hosted by Ken Brown, a former European Tour player turned broadcaster. The segment had Brown showing the cerebral Bryson DeChambeau, a former physics major at SMU, the original Stimpmeter.

“They say you’re hypertechnical,” Brown said to DeChambeau, the reigning U.S. Amateur champion, now a professional, whose irons are all the same length.

DeChambeau was mesmerized and began throwing out terms like “mgh” (mass, acceleration from gravity, and height), “linear distance,” “cosign factor,” “deviation and the extraction right or left, essentially, for each five, 10, 15 feet, 20 feet, 25 feet.”