Thursday Threads

Bit of a quiet day, I'm guessing due to the heat....

These Crazy Kids - It's that time of year again, the NCAA Golf Championships are upon us.  If you haven't made the time to watch them the last few years, please give them a look in the coming weeks.  Not only will you see kids that will soon be posing with oversized cardboard checks, but the team match-play format rocks.

But we're still at the regional stage, qualifying individuals and teams into the finals.  But the kids manage to entertain, as Ryan Lavner informs:

On the fourth hole at LSU’s University Club, his 13th of the day, senior David Wicks marked his 3-footer for par and waited for the other two players in his group to finish

out. He crouched on a steep bank to read his putt, but as he stood up and reached for the ball in his right front pocket, he dropped it. 

Of course, it didn’t just fall straight down. No, it kicked off the back of his shoe, rolled off the green, around a bulkhead, and after a brief chase he watched it tumble into the water on the left side of the green.

“I looked at my playing partners, they looked at me, and there was that awkward silence where we both knew it’d be a penalty,” Wicks said by phone Wednesday night.

Said his coach, Mike Blackburn: “Just a stroke of bad luck.”

Anyone remember when this happened to Ian Poulter on the fourth green at Sawgrass?  Of course, this highlights the refreshing difference between the professional and collegiate games, as Poults merely directed one of his Nubian wenches (actually it was his trainer) to find the pellet.

Here was Wicks’ predicament: He needed to find his original ball or he would be assessed a two-shot penalty for not finishing the hole with the same ball. In contention both in the team and individual race, Wicks said, “I was always going to go in. If I hadn’t gone in and we’d lost by a shot, the nine-hour drive back I would have been thinking about it the whole time. At least I know now.” 

And so the Englishman stripped down to his underwear and waded into the waist-high water.

Ah, another Brit....  But while the first ball Poults' minion pulled out was in fact his, this young man didn't have any such luck:

“It was warm,” he said. “Nice temperature. If I had a nice inflatable and a Diet Coke, it would have been a lovely afternoon.” 

Digging through the mud, searching for five minutes, he found about 30 balls – “Mostly Top Flites and Pinnacles” – but not his.

Not his TopFlite or Pinnacle?  Very imprecise wording...

But the story has a happy ending, as both Wicks and his team qualified for Nationals....  Of greater importance, you now have a team and player for whom to root.

Shack's got links to the other regionals, video of the young man's search (we provide equal-opportunity beefcake here at UL) and, of greater import, a reminder to set your DVR's:

The NCAA finals start Sunday for the women and a week later for the men.

If that "Go Waves" confuses you, it's because Shack is a proud Pepperdine alum.

Delivering The Goods -  There was never any doubt that this would be epic, but Bradley Klein and Martin Kaufmann got there first:

America’s next must-visit golf resort officially is open for business. 

Sand Valley Golf Resort opened May 2 on an extraordinary inland site smack dab in the middle of Wisconsin. Appropriately, golfers were greeted with “very Scottish weather” on opening day, said Michael Keiser Jr., who spearheaded the project. 

The Keiser family’s affinity for Scottish golf has manifested itself in great, off-the-grid golf destinations in the U.S. and abroad. Mike Keiser, Michael’s father, created Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Bandon, Ore., collaborated with Toronto businessman Ben Cowan-Dewar to build Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs on the northwest coast of Canada’s Cape Breton Island, and is exploring a new project in the Scottish Highlands.

Forgive the long excerpts, but this is going to be quite the place:

The property is enormous: 1,711 acres (2.67 square miles). As was done at Bandon Dunes, the first course will bear the name of the resort: Sand Valley. The Bill Coore-Ben Crenshaw design occupies 550 acres – three times the land normally needed for golf. A second course set to open in 2018, by David McLay Kidd, is appropriately called Mammoth Dunes and occupies even more ground – 620 acres.

More than 600 acres for a walking-only course?  Wow!

Sand Valley’s grass-covered dunes, some of them 50-60 feet high, are the product of massive outwash from glaciation and an abrupt flood 15,000 years ago. Coore and

Crenshaw’s routing meanders through broad valleys, climbs atop those dunes and at times circulates through flatter ground that had been planted for decades in the dead straight rows of a pine tree farm. 

The scale of the place can be disorienting, given the wide berth of playing options available. The par-72 layout tips out at 6,909 yards (72.6 rating/128 slope). But those black-tee numbers are virtually meaningless in the midst of the prevailing wind and the intensity of ground-game roll. The vast bulk of rounds will be played from more comfortable yardages of 6,514 yards (orange), 6,087 (sand), 5,574 (green) and 4,586 (blue). Get it – no gender-biased red colors here. Just play it from where you think you can have fun.

There's likely to be 4-5 courses before he's done, with Tom Doak seemingly teed up to design the third course.

For anyone interested in the creation of such a resort, I can't recommend this book highly enough.  It details the creation of Bandon Dunes virtually on a decision-by-decision basis, and it's just a fascinating peak into the process by which that resort improbably came into existence.

This does capture their philosophy:

The Keisers secret has been to create courses that are so much fun that customers can’t get enough. Early indications are they’ve accomplished that again at Sand Valley. 

“We had a lot of confidence in the project,” Keiser Jr. said, “but you never know until you see people walk off the last green and go right to the first tee.”

The only real question is whether that can be done in the absence of ocean views....  My guess is that it can, especially given the good proximity to major population centers.

London Calling -  This is an interesting insight into the business side of the Tour:

The PGA Tour has flexed its muscles towards its equivalent in Europe by opening a base in England. Although an announcement is not expected until mid-summer, the PGA’s London office is already operational with its prime focus on media rights and tournament sponsorship. 

The implication is that the PGA Tour will seek to court sponsors who might otherwise be attracted to European Tour events. Given the fiscal power the PGA Tour has already displayed – this month’s Players Championship had a purse of $10.5m (£8.15m) as the €500,000 (£428,839) Portugal Open was taking place – this is an intriguing business move. 

The sense golf is edging towards one global tour is impossible to ignore, as is the fact the PGA Tour clearly regards London as an important commercial hub. Fresh business partners for golf have been hard to come by in recent times.

OK, if you're going to compare the Player's Championship to a Euro event, it should obviously be the BMW-sponsored flagship event at Wentworth, but so be it.

More importantly, I draw exactly the opposite conclusion from this data, that the two tours are aggressive competitors and that the Yanks are flexing their muscles with a presence on the Euro's home turf.

But Mr. Pelley will not be very vocal with any concerns:

The European Tour offered no comment on news that the PGA Tour, whose headquarters are in Florida but which has offices in Beijing and Tokyo, has taken on premises in their backyard and is believed to be relaxed about the situation. The European Tour has full-time staff in the United States, for whom permanent premises may be forthcoming.

Did you now the Tour had offices in Beijing and Tokyo?  

Jay Monahan, the recently appointed commissioner of the PGA Tour, presided over a FedEx extension which is thought to include curious restrictions on players sponsored by a rival distribution brand. The PGA Tour has also tightened its own criteria for membership, partly in a bid to retain European players who might otherwise be tempted by a return to their home circuit. 

The PGA Tour declined the opportunity to comment on the London office. Coincidentally, one of Pelley’s operational priorities for the European Tour has been finding an alternative home to Wentworth.

Ewan Muarray is an experienced golf writer, but he seems to be throwing random mud at walls to see what sticks.  The exclusivity agreement is troubling as we've noted, but is it germane to the subject at hand?  I'll confess ignorance to the tightening of of the Tour's membership criteria, but are we aware of any Euros besides Paul Casey not maintaining their Euro Tour and, thereby,their Ryder Cup eligibility?  Jon Rahm had some early qualms about serving both masters, but his win at Torrey put that issue to bed?

And Wentworth?  The issues there relate to the new Chinese ownership and the ongoing row with the membership.... and perhaps, or so I'd like to think, the desecration of a Harry Colt classic.

A Rorschach Test - What do you see in this story?  

Get ready to see some history made at this year's U.S. Open. Golf's national

championship will be contested at Erin Hills for the first time -- and a first-of-a-kind series of stamp will be revealed by the United States Postal Service. That's right, we said stamps. 

The Postal Service's new "Have a Ball!" campaign will kick off at Erin Hills on June 14, the day before the tournament starts. It will feature forever stamps mimicking the look and feel of balls used in eight different sports, including golf. 

According to the Postal Service, the dimple-like texture on the golf ball stamp comes from a special coating is applied during the printing process. 

Wanna see the others?

Kickball?

Do you see a heartwarming homage to our great game?  Or do you see an out-of-control federal agency recklessly spending money to remain relevant?  There's an old saying that everyone's conservative about that which they know best...

Consider The Source - Steve Elkington has such a tortured history on Twitter, that you'd have though he'd weaned himself off it.  This piece from three years back has some, but not all, of the rich history:

Steve Elkington Is Your Dumb Uncle On Twitter

Of course he feels compelled to share his thoughts on Ian Poulter's course management on Sunday:

Yanno, I consider myself pretty opinionated, but the guy, per Teddy Roosevelt, in the arena has to live with the consequences, so a little deference is due.

Apparently the outrage is that Poults didn't go from the green from the right rough on No. 16....  He had a spongy Bermuda lie and was in the right rough, leaving him a horrible angle to a right pin tucked behind a bunker.  Is it so obvious that going for the green was his best chance to make a four?

I've never been a Poults fan, finding him far brasher than his game can support.  But let's take on the elephant in the corner, which Alex Myers manages to confuse:

It's possible the lie was worse than it looked. It's also possible that in second place by two shots at the time he was playing it safe to ensure a big paycheck. But with this week's runner-up getting $1.134 million (Poulter and Oosthuizen wound up making $924,000) could you really blame him?

It's the money, it's the card....  Poults has no status on Tour past this year, so he does need to be conscious of maintaining his high finishes to ensure tee times next season.  He didn't create this system, but he had a near-death experience before Brian Gay saved his bacon, so do we really blame him?

Given where he was on Sunday, I find his decisions defensible....  and since he had to hit the shots, I'm not exactly sure that my opinion should count for much.  He wasn't going to be able to control the ball out of that lie and he still had two holes to play.  Why not make sure he wouldn't make more than a five, and see if Si Woo might falter?

I get the argument that he should have played more aggressively, but it's just that, an argument.  

The King Would Like This - We had this story a while back, but I guess they upgraded the plaque.  It's an unusual homage, but I think he'd have liked it:

Remembering Arnold Palmer is a good thing, of course, but remembering him for making a septuple-bogey 12 seems an unusual way of doing so. 

Nonetheless, the city of Los Angeles had an Arnold Palmer Plaque Rededication Ceremony at Rancho Park Golf Course on Wednesday morning. 

It was on the par-5 ninth hole there (now the 18th hole) that Palmer made a 12 in the Los Angeles Open in 1961. Two years later, the city placed two plaques there commemorating the septuple-bogey. 

In a ceremony that included Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz and World Golf Hall of Fame member Amy Alcott (“this is where I started my golf career,” she said), a new plaque was unveiled (shown above) at the hole.

I love the play-by-play in that right panel....  They could have quoted Seve... I mees, I mees, I mees.... you can fill in the rest.