Midweek Musings

There's shockingly little in the golf news department, so a perfect opportunity to begin our U.S. Open flood-the-zone coverage....  But first, a message from our sponsor Cialis.

Fifty Shades of Old - Sports Business Daily with this provocative header:

Going gray: Sports TV viewers skew older

Who you calling old, bud?  Care to settle this outside? 

The study, conducted exclusively for SportsBusiness Journal by Magna Global, looked at live, regular-season game coverage of major sports across both broadcast and cable

television in 2000, 2006 and 2016. It showed that while the median age of viewers of most sports, except the WTA, NBA and MLS, is aging faster than the overall U.S. population, it is doing so at a slower pace than prime-time TV. 

The trends show the challenges facing leagues as they try to attract a younger audience and ensure long-term viability, and they reflect the changes in consumption patterns as young people shift their attention to digital platforms. 

“There is an increased interest in short-term things, like stats and quick highlights,” said Brian Hughes, senior vice president of audience intelligence and strategy at Magna Global USA. “That availability ofinformation has naturally funneled some younger viewers away from TV.”

In the last ten years I've gotten more than five years older, so the rest of you are looking good....  But you'll also note that virtually every other sport has seen a similar trend.  In fact, the entire country is ageing, though at a lesser rate....

Designated Fixer Ty Votaw offers the mandatory rebuttal:

Ty Votaw, executive vice president of global business affairs of the PGA Tour, summed up the tour’s demographics: “While we may be older, our demographics have been of considerable higher quality than other sports and we have aged considerably slower.” 

Votaw also noted that audience trends today can’t be solely focused on the linear TV viewer and pointed to a younger audience on tour-run digital properties. 

“When you go to PGATour.com, the median age is 55 and for our PGATour Live (over-the-top network), the median age is 20 years younger than on broadcast,” he said.

Though perhaps Sir Nick is driving them away from the flagship linear broadcast. 

Interesting stuff, though pity the poor professional wrestling fans.... Maybe we could draw in some of them when their sport dies?

Golf is always going to skew older, but there's one fairly significant aspect that you'd think would be notable when comparing television viewership.  Let's take last Sunday for instance...  The final round of the Memorial came on the air at 2:30 p.m.and finished before Sixty Minutes at 7:00 p.m.  The second game of the NBA Finals started at 8:00 p.m. (all others had tip-off at 9:00 p.m.), and finished at zero dark thirty.  As the only sport requiring daylight, isn't that a rather major difference in the audience to be had?

Don't Try This At Home, Folks - Clearly he should have screened the participants for Sergio fans:

(AP) — Two weeks after Padraig Harrington returned from neck surgery, he was struck

in the left elbow by the club of an amateur he was teaching at a clinic. 

Harrington required six deep stitches because he said the club hit him so flush that it cut into the bursa sac around the joint. He had to withdraw from the FedEx St. Jude Classic in Memphis, Tenn., and hopes to be out only two weeks.

"Barring me fainting from the shock of pain, once I numbed it up, I couldn't feel anything," Harrington said. 

Harrington, who tied for 31st at the Memorial last week, said he was trying to teach the amateur how to fix his hook. He was standing to the side, shoulder to shoulder to show the amateur what the swing should look like. Harrington stepped away and the man kept swinging. 

"Caught me on the left elbow -- middle of the clubface, middle of the elbow," Harrington said. "I was pretty sure it was broken."

Unfortunate, for sure, but glad to see that he hasn't lost his cheeky sense of humor:

"There's no truth to the rumor it was the amateur's best strike of the day," Harrington said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

But did he replace his divot?

Glide Path to the Open - Repeat after me:  Erin Hills is not Chambers Bay.  Yes, there are some superficial similarities, but the course itself and the conditions we'll see will bear little resemblance to the 2015 disaster.

Will the players like it?  Who cares, it's the national championship and we'll get to see how adaptable they are....  which is, in most cases, a "No".

Jeff Ritter played the course on Media Day and files this useful primer.  Not only does he helpfully guide our expectations, but he amusingly describes his own hackfest in 35 mph winds.....  

"If there's no wind for four days, that would be highly unusual, but they'll definitely shoot lower scores. These greens are so good. They're going to make putts, and then you've got

a par 72. But listen, at the end of it, contrary to what so many think, we're not after a certain winning score. What we really are after is to see if we can set the golf course up in such a way that tests every aspect of the game." – USGA executive director Mike Davis, speaking on Wednesday to the assembled media at Erin Hills 

As a first-time major-championship venue, Erin Hills, in rural Erin, Wis., (population 4,525) presents a rumpled landscape of unknowns. No one is certain what scores the world's best players will shoot when the U.S. Open arrives next month. It will be the first par-72 U.S. Open site since 1992 (Pebble Beach), and with four par-5s, Erin Hills could serve up birdies galore (assuming Mother Nature behaves). That Davis downplayed the importance of an even-par winner is telling – the 117th U.S. Open could turn out to be a rare shootout.

So, after hearing from the guy that chose the venue and will direct its set-up, how about the guys the designed it:

Erin Hills was designed by a triumvirate of architects: Mike Hurdzan, Dana Fry and Whitten. It opened in 2004, played host to the 2008 U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links and 2011 U.S. Amateur. The day before I played the course, I took a spin around the track with Hurdzan and Whitten. Hurdzan delivered a line that captures the type of players who will (or won't) thrive here. 

"Guys who won't like this golf course are guys who don't like to think," he said. 

"We tried to make golfers think of every shot," Whitten added. "It's one of the most fun aspects of being an architect."

That eliminates about three-quarters of the field..... 

Read the whole thing, as I'll only excerpt a couple of notes:

2. Goodbye, flat lies 

Maybe wind isn't Erin's only defense. Because the architects tried to maintain the natural terrain, there aren't many level stances out there. It's another way the course keeps players on edge. And when they finally pull the trigger, the terrain will kick the ball in unpredictable ways. 

"The fairways themselves are bouncy," Davis said. "They're predominantly fescue. There's some ryegrass and some other grasses in there, but the soil or the subsoil here is a gritty, well-draining soil, so the combination of the grasses and the subsoil really do make this a bouncy course, so you're going to see balls hit and move."

But this may be what cause heads to explode:

5. Bunkers are true hazards

In addition to the wind and the blind shots, the bunkers at Erin Hills are uniquely diabolical. The architects created more than 130 irregularly shaped hazards they dubbed "erosion bunkers," which have wide spots and areas that are as narrow as a mere foot across. When players find the sand, they could have a clean look, or just as easily have no other option but a sideways pitch-out. Said Davis: "When you look at these things, there's a lot of nooks and crannies where a ball could get where you're uncomfortable, and I'm not sure I've seen a golf course where the bunkers have so many lies where you have a downhill high, an uphill high, a side-hill lie, and that in and of itself, when you're in a bunker, even for a good player, makes it challenging."

Here's an example from the 15th hole:

The last point Jeff makes is one I've heard from several folks that have been there, that it's a very hard walk....  Is that a factor for today's touring pros?  It shouldn't be, but you might want to avoid the geezers for your fantasy roster....

For those still spewing venom and saliva from Chambers Bay, rest assured that by all accounts the greens are perfect.  In fact, with rain in the forecast before the event begins there's a chance, should the winds be modest, of a shootout....  

Shack has been embedding the club's hole flyovers, but there's no commentary included.  The USGA videos at least come with written thoughts, and they can be found here.

Wither The Loop - I know that golf is dying and that leaves Golf Digest in an awkward predicament.  But shouldn't a Golf Digest blog be about, you know, golf?

They recently rolled out a redesign of The Loop, and the linkage to the game of golf seems increasingly tenuous....  Shall we look at a sample of stories?

Submitted for your approval, this history lesson:

Jon Lester picks off a runner, and other famous cases of athletes battling the yips

Yowser, Lester even throwing to first base is a stop-the-presses moment.  Lots of fun memories, such as this one:

Chuck Knoblauch: Like Lester, the Yankees’ second baseman and four-time All-Star sprouted an inability to get a baseball to first base; management adjusted by moving him to left field, where he had to throw farther. 

Yippiest Moment: One errant throw hit Keith Olbermann’s mom in the stands.

If you know Keith, she had it coming just for the act of breeding.... 

Relevance Grade:  A.  This is exactly the kind of whimsical item you'd expect and welcome at The Loop.  It covers golf, but demonstrates a wider knowledge of the human drama of athletic competition....

Next Up:

Jason Day will sit front row for Game 3 of the NBA Finals; his wife will NOT (Thanks, LeBron)

OK, we don't usually keep tabs on the wife's schedule, is she not a Cavs fan? Oh yeah, now that she's OK, it's pretty funny:

Golf Relevance: B+.  Captures the zeitgeist of the Dubs-Cavs threepeat, with a very relevant golf connection.  The grade might seem a tad low, but that's merely a reflection of the low degree of difficulty.

But you'll see my issue as we move on:

Watch this vertigo-inducing video of Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan without ropes

 OK, I saw this last night on the national news, where it belongs.....

Golf Relevance: F.

And this.....

Man determined to mow lawn as huge tornado swirls behind him

A great picture for sure:

Golf relevance:  Incomplete.   Let's see, they play golf in Canada and Bubba Watson once played Twister as a 6-year old, but otherwise I'm coming up empty....  You get my drift, it's a golf blog at a golf magazine's website....  Just sayin'!