Weekend Wrap

Hope you all had a good weekend once the rain cleared out....

More Jordan - This header kind of captures it:

'Just Jordan doing Jordan things': Spieth wins Travelers with stunning shot

Reminds me of a story from a few years back.... It was the semis of the President's Cup at Willow Ridge, and it was the other match in our foursome that was of interest.  It feature two guys that, in order to preserve anonymity, we'll call Bruce and Steve.

Bruce was the best player in the club, a one-handicap whose only weakness was his putter.  Steve was a 7 or 8, but felt over-matched, and when Bruce left himself a couple of short putts, he felt he needed to make Bruce hole them.  The putts were downhill sliders to be fair, but not long enough to really test him, and he holed them without any issue, though I could tell he was a bit peeved....

Then we got to the seventh hole, an 165-yard Par-3, where Bruce proceeded to jar his tee shot.  As we walked to the green I said to Steve, "You had him a little on edge there, though he seems to have come up with a work-around".

Well, Jordan Spieth couldn't hole a four-footer late yesterday, so he needed a work-around:

Make no mistake – Jordan Spieth holing out from the bunker to win the Travelers Championship was a historic moment. 

The type of moment that will be remembered not only for what it was, but for the greater narrative to which it contributed. The type of moment that, years later, will be recalled with a descriptive, “I remember where I was when …” 

Just as we remember Tiger Woods’ mythical feats in vivid detail, we’ll remember the shot, the club toss, and the soaring chest bump with caddie Michael Greller as Spieth became the only golfer in history to match Woods’ total of 10 victories before his 24th birthday. 

All Daniel Berger could do was stand and watch.

OK, it's "an" historic moment, where are the proofreaders when you need them...

 And Berger did more than watch, he gave his buddy a nice low five.... and Jordan then assisted in settling the crowd, so good stuff all around.

But the Tour Confidential panel goes off the deep end with this:

1. Jordan Spieth holed out from the bunker on the first playoff hole to beat Daniel Berger and win the Travelers Championship on Sunday, claiming his 10th career PGA Tour victory. In the modern era, only Tiger has won at least 10 times before turning 24. Spieth turns 24 next month. Has Woods's dominance unintentionally forced us to overlook, and perhaps underappreciate, some of the things Spieth has accomplished in his young career?

Pullleaze, who writes these questions?   I'm not sure I've ever seen Jordan's name in the same sentence with the "U-word".....

Josh Sens with the tip-in:

Josh Sens: Jordan Spieth is a remarkably accomplished golfer for his age. Check that. For any age. But underappreciated? He has earned enough money for many lifetimes; gets bucket-loads of media attention throughout the season; has sponsors fawning over him left and right; is greeted like a demi-god at almost every green he approaches. If only we were all fortunate enough to be so woefully underappreciated.

Thank you, Josh. Actually, part of me wonders if he isn't a tad over-rated.... Not his record. for sure, ten wins, including two majors, by twenty-four is just that good. But the expectations for the future may be a tad over-hyped, though his obvious ability to pull off these dramatic shots may make up for the lack of length in his game.

Jeff Ritter: Tiger absolutely shattered the scale by which all current Tour careers are

measured. Spieth may not be on a Tiger-like winning pace, but as I learned today on Twitter, his career arc so far is Mickelsonian. And Phil never had a 73rd-hole celebration like Jordan on Sunday. Not too shabby. 

Michael Bamberger: Tiger's personality added to his career to create an aura of Worldwide Golfing Dominance. Plus, Tiger won with a power game. It just looked more dominating. But 10 is 10—incredible, really.

 I think the Tiger comparisons are a red herring, as Brandel Chamblee reinforces:

What he's doing is amazing, but it's not Tigeresque.

You know that tradition in which the winner's caddie grabs the flag from the finishing hole?  Greller had different ideas:

Jordan Spieth's caddie hangs on to bunker rake from Travelers win

Wouldn't you?

And how about this called shot?

It's always the Indian, not the arrow, right?  On Saturday we had this:

Rory McIlroy tried out FIVE putters before his third round, still putted terribly

I think it's refreshing that the guys can still get excited about demo day....

And then the inevitable:

Rory McIlroy, using 3rd putter in 3 days, posts final-round 64 at Travelers

Hey, the man wrote the book on back-door Top Tens, so nothing in this is the least bit surprising....

And can we just agree that this is one of life's illy memes?

One has little to do with the other, and in many ways is a disservice to the folks in Hartford.  They seem to have created a good event in a difficult schedule slot, and put themselves in a position to benefit from the Tour's scheduling rules.  All good stuff, and Shack had kind words for them as well:

The Travelers is always fun at TPC River Highlands, but the combination of leaderboard, field and venue's ability to create excitement made today a long overdue reward for some of the hardest working folks in tournament golf. Couple in how great the latest renovation looked and the golden natives contrasting with the green turf, and it was off-teh-charts visual eye candy. 

And Spieth, like Tiger, brings out a certain adrenaline in observers. Still, I thought some of the comparisons to Erin Hills were unfair given different pars (70 vs. 72) making it easier to post lower red numbers. Nor would ever discourage anyone from bemoaning the scale of a 7,800 yard course versus the more intimate setting in Connecticut...

That difference in Par is telling, but Geoff also can't help himself:

There is little question that the scale of this week's venue versus Erin Hills created more realistic golf, better spectating and more energy at the end when fans were on top of the action. 

Imagine if the scale were even a little more condensced, just how much more democratic and energetic we could have things? Does this mean we all agree to a distance rollback?

Whew, that was easy!

Hey buddy, I see what you did there....

But it's all in the service of providing you with this, which we can agree is one of the worst appeals to authority ever:

Well, it's certainly not the answer for Luke.... And by the way, Luke, what are you doing these days?

More Sandy - A touching tribute from the great Jaime Diaz, including this nugget:

I was lucky to have a few special moments with Tatum. It wasn’t that I was around him very much. It’s that just about every time I was it, it was special. 

There was a round at Cypress Point, where on the 13th fairway Tatum’s description of what he’d observed in his several rounds with Ben Hogan gave me a more palpable sense of what Hogan was like than anything I have ever heard. 

“When it was Hogan’s turn to play, it was on the basis that he had been accorded the privilege of playing that particular golf shot,” he said. “And that privilege carried with it a responsibility. And that responsibility was to give that shot all the thought and effort that he could, and to make it as effective as he could. It was a very distinct characteristic.”

 Any of us should only be lucky enough to have Jaime pen these words about us:

“It adds up to this,” he said. “You no longer are able to do a lot of the things that made life so very satisfying through the years. So what you have to do is be able to accommodate those stages so that you don’t lose the essence of what you have left in your life.” 

Herbert Warren Wind once wrote of Tatum’s idol, Bobby Jones, “Of the people I have met in sports—or out—Jones came the closest to being what we call a great man. Like Winston Churchill, he had the quality of being at the same time much larger than life and exceedingly human.” 

So did Sandy Tatum.

Now that's what I call an appeal to authority!

And while everyone knows of his involvement with The Massacre at Winged Foot and with the revival of Harding Park, I didn't remember his involvement with The Hinkle Tree:

At the airless 1979 U.S. Open at Inverness, the journeyman Lon Hinkle found a first-round shortcut on the eighth hole by playing a tee shot with a 1-iron into the neighboring 17th fairway and then a 2-iron to the green. He turned a three-shot par-5 into a par-4. Tatum, then in the second year of his two-year term as USGA president, oversaw the overnight planting of a 15-foot spruce in an effort to block that route to the green. Telling me about it years later, Tatum said, "The players complained. 'You're changing the course, you're changing the course!' I said, 'We're rectifying a problem.'" He was a Stanford-educated lawyer and a dean of the San Francisco bar. He could make words dance. The Hinkle Tree is a footnote in the game's lore.

Lon Hinkle... Wow, what I always remember was what must have been his greatest indignity, assuming he knew about it.  In the first PGA Tour video game, one that had actual PGA members names on its faux leaderboard, they had a Lou Hinkle.  They probably paid him a buck-thre-eighty for that, but I'm guessing the guys gave it to him pretty good about what a fine playert his brother Lou turned out to be....

More Bones - The TC panel takes on the divorce of the century with this:

2. So long, Phil and Bones. After 25 years perhaps the most famous player-caddie duo ever mutually announced they're splitting up. Three questions: (1) Might Phil's game suffer without his loyal sidekick on the bag? (2) Will we see Bones on another bag by the 2018 Masters? (3) Which golfer would most benefit from Bones's services?

On the first query, this sounds about right:

Sens: 1) If anything, I expect we'll see a bump in the quality of Phil's play. Not because of anything Bones was doing wrong but because change can often have that effect, like when a baseball team swaps managers and suddenly goes on a winning streak.

Although that rule is void as relates to Rory and putters.....  But they were obviously not working well as a team, so it's likely just a relief to have the pain of the divorce behind him.

As for the middle query, there's too much that we don't know:

2) I sure hope so. I'm actually more interested to see how Bones fares away from Phil than how Phil fares away from Bones.

2) I would guess yes but have no special insight into that other than to know that Bones lives and breathes the game, so it's hard to imagine him staying away from it.

I have no insight as to what Bones might do next, but he's a proven commodity and I'd guess he'll have work next year at Augusta if he wants it. But at this stage of his life, would he want to join a young Tour grinder and hit the road 25 weeks a year? I see him pairing with someone laid back with a limited schedule that includes the occasional major. Fred Couples springs to mind.

I'm not sure we have a clue as to Bones' desire at this point, including how those knees are feeling.... But this reaction to that last question made me laugh:

3) As Michael Bamberger pointed out well in his obit for the Phil/Bones business relationship, Bones played more than a tend-the-flag-and-rake-the-bunkers role. I'd like to see him step in along a promising but not-quite-where-they-could-be player. Someone like Charles Howell III.

Unless Bones is going to putt for Chucky Three-Sticks, that ain't in the realm of possibility.... It all comes down to how much he still wants to be out there....  There's no shortage of young players looking for a strong presence on their bags....  Bryson DeChambeau, anyone?

The guys didn't break new ground when asked for their favorite Phil-Bones story, though this was new to me:

Bamberger: You wouldn't call this a story, but I love that Bones often flew Southwest home even when Phil was offering him a lift. Caddie and player should only spend so much time together. Maybe that's why they were able to go 25 years.

More Seth -  Don't worry, you're not supposed to know who he is, especially as he's all of ten year's old.  The hook is this week's Web.com Tour event, won in a playoff by Adam Schenk, who was using a yardage book partially created by the aforementioned Seth Damsgard (link is to Shack, because he failed to link to the original and I'm too lazy):

The drawings for all 18 holes of the course are a combined effort. Seth, of Brooklyn

Park, Minnesota, takes satellite images of courses from Google Earth and graphically designs its layout. 

Scott Brady of Precise Yardage Books visits each course in person to walk the entirety of it, measuring things like slopes of greens, depth of bunkers, manhole covers and changes in elevation. 

Those measurements are then sent to Seth, who completes the drawings. Then the yardage books are printed. 

Before Seth teamed up with Brady, he was making the books for courses he would play in junior golf tournaments. 

“I wanted to get tips from another yardage book maker,” Seth said. “We called Scott Brady with Precise Yardage Books. We wanted to get some tips from him. We told him how we did our graphic designing. He was just drawing them by hand, so he hired us.”

Enjoy your moment in the sun, young man, because those guys in Far Hills are coming after you.... 

More Drug Testing - From you-know-where:

4. The PGA Tour announced that beginning next season blood testing will now be administered along with urine testing to detect HGH. On top of that, the Tour will also make public player fines and suspensions, even for recreational drugs. What do you suspect triggered these policy shifts? And is there reason not to like these changes?

Zak: I can't think of a more obvious trigger than international golf star Rory McIlroy saying "I could use HGH and get away with it," last year at the British Open. Rory's one of the two most important golfers on the planet right now, and because of this, it seems his voice has carries plenty of weight. I also can't think of a reason to dislike the changes. If it leads to a cleaner game or—if nothing else—the perception of a cleaner game, it can only be a positive.

But Mikey Bams with the layup:

Bamberger: The Olympics had to have forced the Tour's hand, but also Jay Monahan may simply have a different approach and philosophy than Finchem. It doesn't work, not to announce suspensions, because it just muddles things for fans and sponsors and reporters and encourages an environment of gross misrepresentations, as when Dustin Johnson failed a third drug test in 2014 (not that the Tour ever said anything about that) and claimed that he was taking his own leave of absence from the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup that year. I don't know anybody who believed that. So this is welcome. It should go beyond drugs. If somebody is banned for other types of conduct that is unbecoming of the gents, that should be announced, too. Gambling in sports, including golf, will likely become far more common in the coming years. We will need to know that the players are giving it their best effort. Suspensions for consorting with gamblers, or other issues related to gambling, should be announced as well. It's also an excellent deterrent.

And he doesn't even mentioned the faux jet-ski accident.....  To reiterate, I have no problem if the Tour decides to stop testing for recreational drugs, since they don't assist performance.  But there should be complete transparency as to disciplinary actions, as anything else is unacceptable.

More Tiger -  Mom will be so proud:

Sadly, one of Tiger Woods' lasting images has become that ubiquitous mugshot following his Memorial Day DUI arrest. But in Australia, the unfortunate portrait is really on full display. 

Melbourne-based artist Lush has created a mural of the moment. Yes, a mural. A big mural.

OK, I know he blew a 0.000, but how perfect is that artist's name?