Odds and Ends

Back in Park City furiously hosing down the facility in anticipation of Employee No. 2's arrival tomorrow....

Gentlemen, Start Your Brackets - It's a rarity for the pampered snowflakes of the Tour to submit to the primal indignities of match play, so we best enjoy it.... The event has been transformed in recent years including:

1. A new round-robin format;
   
2. A new date, and;
3. A new venue.

The last is the easiest to asses, it's a home run.... though when the comparison is to the dreadful Dove Mountain, it's grading on a substantial curve.

The date is problematic, far too close to the Masters for comfort.  No doubt the powers that be thought that wedging it in between Doral/Chapultepec and Augusta would ensure the participation of all players, not so much:

Sixty-four of the top 70 players in the world are in the field, with Henrik Stenson, Adam Scott, Rickie Fowler, Justin Rose and Adam Hadwin opting not to play.

Hadwin gets a pass.....  No issue with the deferral of the honeymoon, but "Hon, I can't make our wedding because of the match-play" wasn't gonna fly".  But losing four of the top 13 players in the world is discouraging....

As for the format, meh.... The first thing to note is that we still have a match-play, which was no small thing.  This is what it took to get Dell to the table, which beats the alternative handily...

I used to call this event the backwards week, because the best day was Wednesday.... Thirty-two win-or-go-home matches, an embarrassment of riches.  And because it's golf, in which eighteen holes is a virtual coin flip, you're guaranteed to see some top tier players fighting for their lives....  Great stuff.

The introduction of pool play waters that down a bit, as one can survive a single loss....  But losing a match means you've lost control of your own destiny, so there's still urgency....  and while Friday includes some inconsequential pairings of 0-2 players, there's always a Keegan Bradley-Miguel Angel Jimenez cage match to keep us amused.

No my real problem is with the weekend, where the 36 holes per day is simply more golf than a human being can consume....even this human being.  It just troubles me to have it structured that way, tree in the forest and all.

Oh well, it's great golfers going mano a mano, so savor it... Everyone and their cousin is taking shots at analyzing the groups, looking for that Group of Death.  Here's Ryan Lavner's pick:

The top player with the most difficult draw is Hideki Matsuyama, who will have to face Louis Oosthuizen, who is 13-3 in this event the past three years, Ross Fisher, who tied for third at the WGC-Mexico earlier this month, and Jim Furyk, who has plenty of match-play experience. 

Not far behind is the All-American Group 9, where top seed Patrick Reed will have to get past Brooks Koepka, Kevin Kisner and Jason Dufner. Interestingly, the lower seeds arrive in Texas playing the best in the group: Kisner, who tied for second at Bay Hill, and Dufner, who has four consecutive top 25s.

Really?  Furyk has lots of experience losing at match-play and Top-25's are now noteworthy?  I agree that Hidecki's group might be the strongest top-to-bottom, but that's mostly because of King Louie...

Brentley Romine throws out ten players to watch, and it starts well enough.  Tyrrell Hatton, John Rahm and Thomas Pieters are, indeed, worth watching....  But Spieth, DJ, JD and Rory?  I think we knew to watch them...

Wither Tiger - Steve DeMeglio scored a sitdown with the man, and here's the headline:

Tiger Woods will attend the Champions Dinner the Tuesday night of Masters week.

Teeing it up two days later is still on the table. 

The four-time winner of the first major of the season said Monday during a tour to promote his book, The 1997 Masters: My Story (Grand Central Publishing, available at tigerwoodsmasters.com), that his troublesome back is feeling better and he is working hard to get ready to play in the Masters. Woods did not play the Masters in 2014 and 2016, and tied for 17th in 2015. 

“I do have a chance,” to play, Woods told USA TODAY Sports in an exclusive interview. “I’m trying everything I possibly can to get to that point. I’m working, I’m working on my game. I just need to get to a point where I feel like I’m good enough, and I’m healthy enough to do it. ...

Later in the item he had this:

“I’ve been practicing, I haven’t been playing,” Woods said.

OK, practicing can mean just about anything....  I'd have followed up by asking about full swings, drivers, speed, etc., but I'm sure that was off-limits.  But if you have a sense of deja vu it's because we went through this same kind of tease two years ago, and it's really becoming tedious...

 Can anyone explain to me what the benefit of this secrecy is?  

He did take down Michael Strahan in a putting contest, so he's got that going for him.... though the fist pump looks like he needs reps.  Yanno, to get back his fist pump feels....

Mike Bamberger posted a very personal review of the book, and it seems especially Tigeresque...  You really need to read the piece, because Mike does a great job in framing his hopes for the book only to be splattered against the rocks of reality...  sometimes an excerpt just sin't up to the task.  I'll throw you one, but give Mike a click:

And with that, let's turn to page 7 in the first chapter, where Woods writes about Arnold Palmer and his Bay Hill tournament, which the golfer-turned-author has won eight times, Arnold there to greet him each time in victory just off the final green. Woods writes: 

"I was sad when he died on September 25, 2016, and I thought of all those times behind the eighteenth green. Arnold meant so much to the game, and I'll never forget our friendship and his counsel to me over the years. Looking back, I know he fired me up the week before the [1997] Masters." 

Those are not sentences that should be published in a book written for sentient adults. It is right there that the editor should note in the margins of the author's manuscript, How, how, how, how? Show, show, show, show! It is there, in the writing phase, that the author must ask, Can I go deeper here? Because the truth is so obvious. Arnold is dead. He half-invented the tournament that defines this book. You (Tiger) logged a lot of time with him, and you're giving him some of the credit for your most important win.

You can't say enough here. Instead, we are presented with one shaggy paragraph.

Tiger sad.... got it.  

There is of course much of inetrest in the book, as Mike acknowledges....  Among the notable inclusions are olive branches to Fluff and Butch, a long time coming for those.  I also enjoyed Mike's take on the title, which he characterizes as "willfully dull".  True that, but he offers alternatives as well...

Interestingly, the most candid section of the book might be his architectural opinions of the changes to the golf course in recent years.  This from Coleman McDowell's seven things we learned from the book:

7. Woods isn't wild about the course changes Augusta National has made as a result of modern equipment. "The course has changed in just about every way imaginable, except for the routing. That's why people say it looks the same year after year. Well, it does, but it doesn't play the same. The players can see the difference...It probably makes me sound like an old-timer saying things were better back in the day, but I don't see how anybody could say it's a good thing that the ball is going so far, and that it doesn't curve as much because it doesn't spin."

Well, they seem to have effectively Tiger-proofed it, given his play after his last win in 2005.

I've been critical of the man on a variety of subjects, but he may well be more thoughtful on golf course design than I expected....  

Costco v. Acushnet - Interesting news from the business side of our game, as Costco has preemptively sued Acushnet...  Briefly, remember that Costco created quite the fuss last year with their incredibly cheap Kirkland Signature golf ball.  It garnered great reviews from MyGolfSpy and sold out quickly, and also apparently garnered a cease-and-desist letter from Acushnet.  From Golf-Patents.com:

Well, it finally happened – Costco has sued Acushnet. Yes, you read that correctly;

Costco sued Acushnet. Costco is seeking a declaratory judgment that it is not infringing any valid patent rights owned by Acushnet by its sale of its Kirkland Signature golf balls and that it has not engaged in false advertising regarding the golf balls. Why did they take such a provocative step? The complaint states “[t]he need for such relief exists because Acushnet has wrongfully accused Costco of patent infringement and false advertising.

MyGolfSpy is all over the story as well, with this victory lap:

The legal wrangling comes at a time when sources are telling us that Costco is ready to begin shipping K-Sig balls to its retail stores. Coupled with the lawsuit, the clear suggestion is that, letters be damned, Costco is going to sell its golf balls and make Acushnet fight publicly to stop it.

To this point the pleadings look delightfully personal and angry, which could provide good fun for us all...  And while Costco seems ready to see this through, I haven't seen any speculation as to whether Acushnet will as well.  I get that they have a valuable market position to protect, but I also wonder whether their letter was pre-IPO positioning.  

Also amusing is that, while we know Costco has product in the pipeline, we don't know whether it's the same ball that they were selling last year....  So, we're arguing whether a golf ball violates patents, and no one knows what ball is under discussion....  Should be interesting.

Distaff Doings - To the surprise of exactly no one:

TOKYO — The course that will host the 2020 Olympic golf tournament has avoided

being stripped of the event by deciding to change its membership policy to include women. 

The Kasumigaseki Country Club said Monday its executive board decided on the change after discussions among its members. The membership policy came under scrutiny when Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike urged it to admit women as full members.

Other critics said the club’s policy was contrary to the spirit of the Olympics.

OK, we get it.... The enduring mystery will be how the venue got selected in the first place...  Wasn't this pretty obvious from 30,000 feet?

But submitted for your consideration is Randall Mell's "rant" in a different high-profile women's event, and the likely eventuality that the circus will be in town:

Women’s golf can’t win as the epicenter in this clash between President Trump and women’s activists. 

If LPGA pros play at Bedminster, they’ll be depicted as “good girls afraid to cross the guys,” as Burk has already said of them. They’ll be cast as sellouts, placing their self-interest above larger women’s rights issues. 

There appears to be an unavoidable clash coming, with no middle ground or compromise to be hashed out. So the question that looms isn’t whether the most important competition in women’s golf will in some way be diminished as a sideshow by the debate that is going to mushroom around it this summer. The question is how much of a sideshow will the competition become. 

And how many clowns are going to show up this time.

If you care about the women's game, this is really troubling....  The obvious comparisons are to Martha Burke's protests, but at least those were directed at a specific policy.

This is likely just to be another lefty hissy fit, because their preferred candidate lost.  But while they'll pretend to be doing this for womynkind, they'll in fact be ruining what should be women's most important week in golf....  well played, gals.