Lots to cover, so freshen that cup of coffee and let's have at it:
Ryder Roundabouts - What a long, strange trip it's been...
By the time you read this, Captain Darren Clarke will have committed to rounding his squad out with Thomas Pieters, Lee Westwood and Martin Kaymer. But yesterday word broke of a Luke Donald boomlet..... I know, who's Luke Donald? Turns out that he's an English professional golfer and the former top-ranked player in the world. Yanno, for about an hour-and-a-half.
Luke Donald, a potential Ryder Cup captain’s pick?
That theory gained serious momentum on Monday, just a day before European Captain Darren Clarke is set to make his three wildcard selections at Wentworth Golf Club, the headquarters of the European Tour.
With many believing that veterans Lee Westwood, an Englishman like Donald, and Martin Kaymer of Germany were locks for Clarke’s team, the third selection is the only one that seems to have much suspense. But even with just that spot open, the drama is building, as several options are on the table.
Scotland’s Russell Knox and Belgium’s Thomas Pieters have both won in recent weeks and appeared to be the pair vying for the last spot, but then almost out of the blue, Donald’s name was mentioned.
Joking aside, Donald was once a stalwart Euro Ryder Cupper, and I still remember the scene on the first tee at Medinah on Sunday. Bubba was batting leadoff against Luke, and doing his now-tired routine of riling up the crowd. Luke was just watching calmly, secure in the knowledge (as was your humble correspondent) of the inevitable outcome.....
The 2012 Luke Donald was the guy they picked to go out first and silence the crowds.... the 2016 Luke Donald never entered the conversation, as he's simply too short and too crooked off the tee to be competitive.
But here's the interesting part:
Much of what fueled the Donald fire was an online report by the Scottish golf magazineBunkered. In the end, William Hill, one of the largest sportsbooks in the United Kingdom, suspended the betting on Donald in the afternoon.
According to Joe Crilly of the Press Office Team at William Hill, Donald was at 7-1 mid-morning in the U.K. and over the next three or so hours went to 6-4, which is when William Hill suspended betting at about 2:30 p.m. BST.
The betting came not from its web or mobile sites, but from differing Hill retail locations throughout England, mostly in the northeast of England.
“They were only small bets, the biggest of which was I think 200 pounds,” Crilly said of the Donald bets. “They were only small bets but they were of the frequency on a special market like that that you wouldn’t necessarily see on a special market and thus somebody had an inkling that something was going to happen.”
Really? A guy that can't hit it 250 yards can move the betting market? I find it both amusing and depressing.... But I also feel bad for Russell Knox, who deserved a selection.
But, alas, it's not just the Euros that have lost the plot.... Davis Love gave a presser on Monday and, SPOILER ALERT, he really likes his team. I know, I'm shocked.... But with far too much time on his hands, he might have a tendency to overthink things:
Specifically, Love has been consulting with a group of statisticians hired by the PGA of America. During his last captaincy at the 2012 Ryder Cup, categories like strokes gained putting and other ShotLink-driven stats were still rather esoteric. But they’ve since gained wider understanding and their keeping more sophisticated, and Love plans to give them increased weight in his decision-making this time around.
“Patrick Reed suggested we pay closer attention to strokes gained tee-to-green,” Love said. In alternate-shot, for example, it could be possible to pair a player whose proximity to the hole with irons syncs with another’s putting percentages from those distances, and then overlay that data across the holes at Hazeltine National.
“Now instead of saying ‘OK, you two go play together,’ we can give players a reason they’re paired,” Love said. “We can say, ‘Hey, we ran the numbers and dissected the course and together you guys are unbeatable.’
Unbeatable? I'd rather you tell them that they have no chance.....
I'm a big fan of statistical analysis, as it provides many useful insights into players' abilities from tee to green. But, and it's a big one, you can see how this readily jumps the shark, as evidenced by the nonsense-on-stilts above.
Again, how about we just tell the guys to play better? Now, remember that task force? Yanno, the one that was going to lead us out of the wilderness and into the promised land. Also, it bears noting, the one that gave Davis his mulligan.....get a load of this heresy as relates to Justin Thomas:
He averages more than 300 yards off the tee and has chemistry with Fowler and Spieth. His 2015-’16 track record shows a win at the CIMB Classic (from last November) and four third-place finishes, including the Players.
In this case, Love is willing to overlook the Mickelson edict of not fully counting fall tournaments in the wraparound schedule, instead giving consideration “to the big tournament he won in Malaysia.” Love also questions the analytics of how Thomas could enter the Barclays ranked just 25th in Ryder Cup points but 10th in the FedEx Cup standings.
I've no clear sense of Justin Thomas' ceiling, but there's little doubt that he's not yet earned a captain's pick.
Now the siren song of experience beckons like a modern day Scylla and Charybdis, so this little trial balloon is to be expected:
Love has affectionately told 46-year-old Jim Furyk “flat out” that he’s playing his way out of his place on the sidelines as a vice-captain. In an exchange of text messages with another vice-captain—Tiger Woods—Love expressed that Furyk’s late-summer hot streak “is screwing up the top 12 right now.”
According to Love, Woods responded, “That’s great. Let him mess it up. We want guys to play good to make the decisions hard.”
Furyk missed the first four months of the 2016 season with a wrist injury that required surgery, but started to make a case for himself with a T-2 finish in the U.S. Open at Oakmont in June and back-to-back top-10s before the Barclays that included his PGA Tour-record 58 at the Travelers.
To which I ask, experience at what?
The other criticism of Furyk is a 10-20-4 record in 34 matches going back to 1997.
May I please have more, Sir?
Lastly, Mark Hermmann throws a bit of cold water on the inevitable Fowler selection:
In any case, the ending was somber for Fowler. “If I focus on winning the golf tournament, things would be fine,” he said. The troubling part is that it is a trend. He is 0-for-4 with a 54-hole led in PGA Tour events. Almost every time he faced a crucial shot down the stretch, he made a poor one. “Just made some not-so-good swings at a bad time,” he said after another rough Sunday in an unfulfilling season.
All of that notwithstanding, he probably is a lock for the team. The other United States players like him. So does captain Davis Love III, who gets to pick four players to fill out the squad.
Rickie has never won a Ryder Cup match and famously laid down when pitted against Rory in singles last go. I agree with everything above, but I'd gamble on Rickie way before Alas, Poor Furyk.
Burying the Lede, USGA Edition - Today's comic relief relates to word that the USGA sees the need to simplify the rules of golf in order to.... wait for it, Grow the Game. I know, hiding behind Mom's skirt again....
From Brian Costa in the WSJ:
For the USGA, it isn’t just a matter of creating more rules buffs. It’s a matter of creating more golfers. The number of Americans who play at least once a year has declined steadily from a peak of 30 million in 2005 to just over 24 million last year, according to the National Golf Foundation. Surveys of people who quit the game have shown a direct correlation between participation and their overall comfort level on the golf course. To that end, a Byzantine rulebook doesn’t help.
This summer, in particular, has been like a billboard for everything people find absurd about the rules of golf. Before the sight of Spieth pondering the intricacies of his relief options, there was the U.S. Women’s Open. Anna Nordqvist of Sweden lost in a playoff after incurring a two-stroke penalty because her club grazed a few grains of sand in a bunker.
I find the rules of golf to be a challenging jigsaw puzzle, though we've long established that I'm not like other people. Are the rules needlessly complex? There's a few that I quibble with though I think Costa gets this somewhat wrong:
To some degree, the nature of golf requires a more complex set of rules than in other sports. There are 34,000 courses in the world, each one of them different, which creates endless hypothetical scenarios. But in their quest to cover all of them, rule makers have left players with a document that makes the federal tax code read like “Goodnight Moon.”
It's not that the course are different, it's that ours is the only game played over hundreds of acres of land, creating the myriad, oddball situations that can occur. Here's his coda:
The proposed changes are being drafted by a group of around a dozen people representing the USGA, the R&A and the pro tours. The goal is to create a simpler set of rules that apply to all levels of golf without fundamentally changing the way the game is played.
“We realize that when golfers go out to play golf, they’re not always going to play 100% by the rules of golf, and you know what? That’s OK,” Davis said. “What we want to do is make the game more welcoming and easier to understand for everyone that plays it.”
Thanks for your permission, Mike, though I didn't actually notice anyone asking for it....
You'll know where I'm headed with this.... The USGA has embarked on a multi-year, task force-driven process to simplify the rules of our game. I have no particular ax to grind with that, and the guys on Golf Channel have come out with their own simplified rules of golf towards that end.
But Coasta's piece leads with the USGA's annus horribilis, DJ and Anna Nordqvist and such.... So Mike, we've got a problem in the here and now, namely that the best players in the world are playing on greens the texture of marble where balls won't stay put, and you're throwing us a head fake for the good of the game.
Wake me up in 2019 when this committee is ready to save our game....
Tiger Droppings - A couple of items about our favorite cart driver, first John Strege with some fun facts about Tiger's professional debut twenty years ago:
2. In Milwaukee, Woods paid for dinner one night with a gift certificate he had receivedupon his arrival. A day later, when Woods and his instructor Butch Harmon were driving to Brown Deer Park Golf Course in the Milwaukee suburb of Glendale, Butch asked him whether he had his checkbook, so he could pay the $100 entry fee. “Butch, I don’t have one-hundred dollars,” he said, despite having already signed a $40 million contract with Nike. Harmon floated him a loan. Later, Woods said, “I haven’t seen a penny yet. I haven’t seen any check in the mail yet. I’m still broke.”
Has he compared notes with Hillary? And I think I like his Mom:
5. The Woods family — Tiger, father Earl and mother Kultida — was sporting 27 Nike swooshes on its clothing and shoes on Wednesday, though Kultida vowed not to give up the Reeboks that she had been wearing the week before. “They pay Tiger, they don’t pay me,” she said.
Yeah, but they pay him a LOT!
Also this on the state of Tiger's dining room:
Despite his absence from the game, Woods remains one of the sport's most recognizable entities, making the 40 year old a prized free agent among club manufacturers. According to Golf Channel analyst and Woods' friend Notah Begay, equipment companies aren't letting this opportunity go to waste.
"I walked into his dining room and it was like going into a PGA [Tour] Superstore now that Nike's equipment line no longer exists," Begay said on "Golf Central" Sunday morning. "Every single manufacturer had sent equipment in there, and he's trying a variety of different things, trying to get a sense of where he's going to go from this point on."
I can see why they'd all want their equipment in his hands assuming he comes back, since there will no doubt be millions of eyeballs on him. It's risk free, in the sense that at this point it's all upside.... If he still stinks up the joint, no one will blame the sticks.
But, how much guaranteed money would you throw at that endorsement deal? So, yeah, if I were Tiger I'd be trying them all, because who can predict who'll throw a bunch of money at him?
PXG has been bandied about, and makes some sense since Bob Parsons thinks he's the smartest guy on the planet.... I'd also throw Cobra out there, just spitballin' who might feel the need to do something irrational....
I'm going to wrap it up here and catch you further down the line.
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