Midweek (Loosely Defined) Musings

I'd apologize for yesterday's unanticipated absence, but the dog ate my homework, I had a headache and had to wash my hair....  Also, I just didn't feel like it.  Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?

I'm Just Glad It has a Future - Gil Hanse gives a typically thoughtful interview, from which this is the takeaway:

"The future of golf is fun"

Fact of the matter is that it always has been.  No fun equals no customers.... The lede reminds of the history of this week's venue:

When Arnold Palmer's original routing for TPC Boston opened in 2002, it felt like a course transplanted from a Florida resort, with eighteen individual holes on a wandering

layout whose long cart rides from one hole to the next epitomized its lack of flow and local flavor. It never quite fit in Norton, Mass., a town of 20,000 some 40 miles south of Boston, but the TPC had already landed a PGA Tour event, the Deutsche Bank Championship. The tournament, which debuted in 2003, was well-attended, but fans yearned for golf carts, while pros and members alike noted how the course lacked continuity. When the PGA Tour announced just three years after TPC Boston's debut that the second leg of the newly minted FedEx Cup Playoffs would come to Norton, the TPC needed to up its game. The Tour tapped Hanse Golf Course Design, a boutique firm that had just opened Boston Golf Club to rave reviews. 

"I think at that point we had a good reputation within the industry, with people who knew golf and golf course architecture, but we weren't on the radar anywhere else," Gil Hanse said in a telephone interview Monday. "TPC Boston literally put our work out there on national television for millions of people to see, and things obviously multiplied from there."

What this reader takes away is the exacting qualification process of the Ratched Regime in awarding Tour events...  Sure, you can have our playoff event on your promise to turn your cow pasture into something playable.  Sheesh! 

That said, it kind of worked out, as Gil has leveraged the prominence of that restoration into a position as one of the new vanguard of minimalist architects.  Everyone will cite Castle Stuart and the Olympic Course in a precis of his C.V., but I first became aware of him from his existential restoration at Sleepy Hollow, which I wrote about here ( Part II here).

You should read all of it, of course, though I'll focus you on the scheduling implications.  The prevailing wisdom is that, with the PGA move to May in place, the next domino to fall in order to conclude before Labor Day will be a reduction in the FedEx faux-Playoffs from four to three events.

Eat Lake is, of course, sacrosanct, so which of New York, Boston or Chicago (very loosely defined) should go?  Boston to me is easily the best of the three because of the great venue.  New York's rota has its high points, notably Ridgewood and Plainfield, but I can live if I never see Conway Farms ever again....  But naturally, Boston is the event that's in the cross-hairs, because we can reward success.... though admittedly it's the one with sponsorship issues, despite strong local support for the event.

Amusingly, Alan Shipnuck was asked this very question in his weekly mailbag:

"Which of the four playoff events deserves the ax in 2019 when the Tour wraps up its season by Labor Day? #AskAlan" - Dan (@djdonof)

The Tour Championship! It’s so f’ing dull. Part of the problem is the dreary venue, East Lake, which has no pizzaz archtecturally and small, lifeless crowds. The other issue is the FedEx structure. At the Tour Championship only a handful of guys actually have a realistic chance to win the Cup – the rest are just going through the motions, burnt-out by the FedEx slog and content that they’re getting guaranteed money and World Ranking points and various exemptions for the following season. A major tweak to the format (match play!) and/or the points structure is needed to make the Tour Championship relevant. Otherwise, it could disappear entirely and no one would really notice.

That is going, going...See Ya!  Is there the remotest chance that anyone will forward this to Jay Monahan?  Nah, what am I thinking...

And just when I can't get any more depressed, Brian Wacker has this that I hadn't heard previously:

But ending the season earlier wouldn’t mean a longer offseason, according to those same sources. The next season would start a week after the previous one ended, which would still compete with football season. 

Or, as one player said, “It kind of defeats the whole purpose.”

 Only one?  Well, they can't force us to watch, can they?

Nothing To see Here - Occasionally one shot captures the public's imagination, and DJ's drive on the playoff hole at Glen Oaks is one such shot.  Kyle Porter captures the zeitgeist:

The reaction to Dustin Johnson's gargantuan drive in the playoff of The Northen Trust on Sunday was not exactly what I thought it would be. Sure, you had the "I think I just woke the children up" screams from folks like me and others, but there was a more ominous, Nick Saban-like vibe from some within the golf world. 

Is this what we want golf to be? 

At first glance, of course. Paul Bunyan-like heroes sending missiles into the New York sky for large sums of money. It passes the initial smell test for sports in the 21st century. But it is also an indictment of how the sport has evolved and a warning about where it is going.

That's quite the scatter diagram, though there are two other dots I'd like identified.... As Porter notes, hitting the ball long and straight is the very essence of our game, so it seems churlish to complain.  But complain they have....

Shack takes his own shot at this issue, though I think he comes up short:

The key to understanding the beauty of the play, in my view, is to separate the tee shot number of 341 yards from the line taken, the shocking tracer lines and the huge advantage gained over Spieth. If you just see this as a long hitter taking a risk under pressure and reaping a reward, it's a beautiful thing. Even better is that the hole was part of the playoff and in a mini-match play situation allowed for this risk-taking. 

I'm concerned how many players were suggesting a playoff hole should be chosen based on some sort of arbitrary design characteristics. No matter how you feel about the impact of distance gains, I would hope that when the day comes, we all agree that long drivers like Johnson get to continue to enjoy an advantage as long as their drives are accurately placed.

I think there's a few issues creating a bit of dissonance.  Initially the line that DJ took, as represented by the Pro-Tracer arc,  created shock in the viewers, simply because no one knew you could go that direction.  And indeed no one had taken that line all week...

But it's a uniquely bad golf hole that creates the uncertainty about its fairness....  Its incorrectly being called a Cape hole, which I think is wrong.  The essence of a Cape hole is for the player to choose how aggressive a line to take on a continuum of possible lines....  Here, the severe 90 degree dogleg makes it a binary choice.   If you could carry it the 300 yards, not only can you take the aggressive line, but you're rewarded with a 100-yard wide landing area.  This is really the ket comment from Dustin:

"It's only 300 carry. I can cover that. I told [my caddie] A.J., I was like, 'If we go into a playoff, there's no way I'm going to the right again. Unless the wind is in the face; the right, it's actually a hard drive for me to go down the right side."

Get that?  The easy shot is actually harder....

My only concern is that the discussion of DJ's drive obscures the true true crappiness of this golf hole for the club's members, that the normal landing area for most tee shot leaves the players with a downhill, hanging lie for a shot to a significantly-elevated green.

I played Tuesday with a friend from the Met. Golf Writers who happens to be a Glen Oaks member, and he agrees with this assessment.

 As long as we're rehashing the Barclays Northern Trust, Mike Bamberger has a wonderful account of the week, though he found the golf more energizing than most.  But his best bits were about the club, such as this:

This was U.S. Open rough at Glen Oaks, one of Long Island's so-called "Jewish clubs," founded by wealthy, accomplished Jewish businessmen years ago when they were not welcome at the elite WASP clubs on Long Island's Gold Coast. New York's Jewish clubs often tried to outdo everything the WASP clubs did, especially in the area of food. Glen Oaks is famous for its food. Its healthy rough has everything to do with the fact that the course superintendent is one of the best in the game, Craig Currier, formerly of Bethpage—and Bethpage Black in particular. There was U.S. Open rough, and U.S. Open greens, and U.S. Open trees. You remember U.S. Open trees, don't you?

You'd be surprised at how many people don't understand why there are Jewish clubs....

And this little nugget about Glen Oaks' hideous clubhouse:

A classic, post-modern series of cement cubes that George Jetson of Orbit City would have been proud to call home.

I think he makes it sound more appealing than it is.... But, perhaps time to move on.

Eh, not so fast...  If we're talking distance, the USGA has reliably informed me that I shouldn't believe my lyin' eyes.  I'll just show you this chart of the round bellies:

These guys are blowing it past where they hit it in their primes....  The scary part is we don't know what's buried in those numbers.  How often are they hitting less than driver and what measures, such as mowing the grass back towards the tees, have been taken to control distance.  

OK, that'll have to keep you for today...