Weekend Woes

It remains late spring in Park City, so the bride and I have been focused on the condo....  As well as the possibility of a trip down to the valley to tee it up.

Appointment TV, Not - So, an NBC executive walks into a bar and the bartender asks, "Why the long face"?   The joke is that it's likely due to his NCAA bracket, as he gave up on golf by the close of business Thursday.

No Rory, no Jordan, no Jason, No Hidecki, no Justin....  Christ, did you ever think you'd miss Sergio?  Here are your round of sixteen matches, along with Jeff Babineau's handicapping:

Dustin Johnson (Group 1) vs Zach Johnson (Group 16)

Dustin Johnson. Know this much, a Johnson will win. The long-hitting, World No. 1

version is on quite a roll, fearless, making lots of birdies, and is going to be hard to stop. But his opponent is a clutch putter who will put up a fight.

Brooks Koepka (Group 9) vs. Alex Noren (Group 8)

Koepka. Koepka held off a late run by Ryder Cup hero Patrick Reed on Friday to get to 3-0. He’s on a nice run. 

Hideto Tanihara (Group 5) vs. Paul Casey (Group 12)

Casey. A great tournament by Tanihara already, getting out of a group that included Jordan Spieth and Ryan Moore. But Casey is a killer in this format, his record improving to 23-8-1. 

Bubba Watson (Group 13) vs. Ross Fisher (Group 4)

Fisher. Watson improved to 3-0 by beating Thomas Pieters, 1 up, on Friday. Fisher got through against Louis Oosthuizen in a playoff. Nod goes to Fisher, who has more match-play experience. 

Soren Kjeldsen (Group 2) vs. William McGirt (Group 15)

McGirt. If you picked this Saturday morning matchup in the office pool, take a bow. Kjeldsen had never won a match in this event before this week. McGirt hit a great approach at 18 Friday to set up birdie and get to 3-0. 

Charles Howell III (Group 10) vs. Jon Rahm (Group 7)

Rahm. He doesn’t play like he’s 22, he kills the ball, and he putts it better than Howell. 

Kevin Na (Group 6) vs. Bill Haas (Group 11) 

Na. He played boldly in his playoff, and Haas was fortunate to survive extra holes on Friday, holing an improbable 90-foot chip. Granted, it’s a new day, but Na looks good this week.

Phil Mickelson (Group 14) vs. Marc Leishman (Group 3)

Leishman. It’s been a nice run by Mickelson (3-0), who hasn’t played on a Match Play weekend since 2004, but he hasn’t been pushed at all this week. Leishman has been in the thick of the heat last week (winning at Bay Hill) and this week (surviving a playoff). That’ll pay off.

I was able to watch all of yesterday's coverage, which had its moments....  As per this, DJ's dominance makes it clear who has the biggest Johnson on Tour:

Johnson, the No. 1 seed going for his third straight PGA Tour victory, again won the opening hole and showed why he might be the most feared player in golf at the moment. He shot 30 on the front nine, and all PGA champion Jimmy Walker could do was make the match last as long as he could. 

Johnson won, 5 and 3, and goes into the weekend having led after all 46 holes he has played this week.

Things being what they are, it therefore seems close to a mortal lock that he goes down this morning in the Battle of Johnsons....

There were no shortage of epic fails:

Justin Thomas (6) also was knocked out. Thomas had a 2-up lead with five holes to play until Matt Fitzpatrick won the next four holes with birdies to win the match. That got Fitzpatrick into a playoff with Kevin Na, who had a 4-up lead until Chris Wood won the next six holes and seven out of the next eight.

And speaking of epic fails, did you catch Sergio's drive at the 13th?  Carried it all of 30 feet..... 

The great escape of the day goes to Bill Haas:

ll Haas had just hit about the least clutch shot possible, yanking his approach shot on the second hole of a sudden-death playoff into a hazard. So what did he do after taking a drop? Hit about the most clutch shot imaginable, of course, a long chip that somehow found the bottom of the hole.

And that led to our "Funny, he doesn't look Jewish" moment of the day seconds later:

Haas' unlikely hole-out for par kept him alive at the WGC-Dell Match Play Championship. It also led to an unusual situation moments later after opponent K.T. Kim ran his birdie putt four feet by. Haas conceded the comebacker -- almost as if he felt bad about knocking his fourth shot in.

It's called guilt.  No doubt he heard his mother's voice telling him to be kind to others....

And our candidate for Rocket Scientist, well that would be Tyrell Hatton:

Fitzpatrick didn't even endure the greatest frustration. That belonged to Tyrrell Hatton, his fellow Englishman, who lost to Rafa Cabrera Bello to set up a three-man playoff of stroke play involving Charles Howell III. 

Hatton had a 10-foot putt to win on the first extra hole, but just missed on the left. When he went to tap in, he set his putter down and nudged the ball. Under a new local rule, he could have replaced it with no penalty. But he tapped in and incurred a two-stroke penalty, and he was walking back to the clubhouse as Cabrera Bello and Howell played on. Howell wound up winning on the fifth extra hole. 

Asked if he knew the rule, Hatton replied, "I really wasn't thinking at that stage."

Or any stage, really.... What is it with these guys and the rules?  But, you know who else obviously was unaware of the rule change?  That would be Sir Nick Faldo, who cogently explained the former rule in his signature insufferable manner....

Well Earned - What's better than winning awards for sportswriting?  This:

Two worthy sports writers will be selected this year as the inaugural winners of the Dan

Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. The fact that the award named after the legendary Fort Worth sports writer known for bleeding TCU purple is based at the University of Texas doesn’t make it Dead Solid Perfect, but maybe that’s Life Its Ownself. 

Jenkins is known from here to Baja Oklahoma as one of the best sports journalists to ever grace the pages of a newspaper or a magazine and both fiction and non-fiction books. 

“I get a tie with Red Smith and Ring Lardner, who have awards for sportswriters,” Jenkins said. “In fact, I've received the Red Smith from the AP sports editors and I am receiving the Ring Lardner from the Union League of Chicago the week after the Masters. Usually, you don't get these things when you're still vertical.”

This is well-deserved, though it's something like referring to Da Vinci as a painter....  Jenkins has covered the gamut from basic sportswriting to golf fiction and astute tweeting, he's a five-tool athlete.

The Waybac Machine -  My favorite item today is a provocative Guy Yocum item under this intriguing header:

If Ben Hogan met TrackMan ...

I thought you'd agree.... And how well does that go with the Jenkins item above?  Perhaps we should nominate Guy for consideration?  The premise is understanding the launch conditions of the famed Hogan fade, but it's the description of its ball flight that interests me most:

Of all the shots in Ben Hogan’s mighty arsenal—and he had them all—there’s one that’s still regarded as the single greatest shotmaking weapon in golf history. The Hogan fade,

played as only he could play it, was by all accounts a different type of ball flight entirely, something unique and never duplicated since. 

What was that fade like? How did the ball behave exactly? Common recollections have it coming off the clubface with tremendous speed, starting on a trajectory shading on the low side. The ball maintained a flattish flight, never taking on the rainbow-like arc of ordinary driver shots. At a point in its flight where the eyes tell you the ball is about to stall a bit and come down, it did something magical. 

“It kind of turbo-boosted,” says Chuck Cook, the Texas teacher, who as a young man in the 1970s spent two days alone watching Hogan practice at Shady Oaks in Fort Worth , well after Hogan had stopped competing. “I don’t know how else to describe it. It seemed to re-energize itself and keep going.” 

The ball continued forward on a dead-straight line, reaching the peak of its flight. Only when it began to fall did it take on the fading characteristic, moving left-to-right very gently, perhaps a few yards. Even then the strangeness of it wasn’t complete. Rather than settle abruptly as all fades played with persimmon and balata tended to do, it rolled after landing.

As most know, Hogan battled an uncontrollable hook early in his career, and it was only when he was able to control the hook that he became Hogan..... This is also quite interesting:

Says Jim McLean, one of the world’s greatest instructors and a Hoganphile who authored 

the fine The Complete Hogan, “You can imagine what that fade looked like when Hogan was at his peak. He was a very long hitter, you know. He visited Spalding one time, and they had a radar device that measured clubhead speed. Hogan with the driver clocked at 132 miles per hour, the fastest among all the pros.” 

“He was a human launch monitor, a living, breathing TrackMan,” says McLean. “He was a machine.”

We think of him as a machine, not as a power player.  But 132 mph in that era is quite amazing....

Now Guy loses me as he goes into the weeds with this, but you may enjoy this part of the discussion more than I:

The near-universal belief that Hogan swung the club slightly to the left through impact requires that his clubface not be open relative to the target. An open clubface combined with a leftward path, is a lethal combination—slice city. Thus, the teachers who voted for a -1 path, all combined it with a clubface that was at 0—perfectly square to the target line. This indicates that Hogan was, above all, a “path fader.” The very slight left-to-right fade he imposed—again, we’re talking a few yards here—was the result of his path, not an open clubface. One teacher (Leadbetter) suggested that Hogan’s clubface could have been -1, or closed to the target line. But he combines it with a path that was possibly -2, making it a safe and reasonable opinion.

I shouldn't need to tell you to read the whole thing, as it's great stuff and what else do you have to do with your day?  But I'm left with two questions....

First, was the Hogan fade an accommodation to the persimmon heads and balata balls of his era, or could it work as well with today's equipment.

Second ( and Shack did ask this first), how would Hogan have used Trackman?  Would he have it every day on the range, or was he such a machine that he could tell from his ball flight how he needed to adapt?

There's match-play golf to watch, so why are you reading a damn blog?