Midweek Musings

Boy, that midweek really came up quick this week.... wonder what causes that.

Walker Week - Very nice of the folks in Ponte Vedra Beach to allow the young uns' to have the schedule to themselves...  Just that pesky football thing to go up against....  For me, it's about the venue:

Seclusion would seem unattainable with 300 acres bisected by the busy four-lane Wilshire Boulevard. How can it hope to remain inconspicuous in a conspicuous-

The 4th hole at LACC North.

consumption zip code, Beverly Hills, 90024, $10 million condos overlooking it, a $200 million house and Hef’s Playboy Mansion adjacent to it, Rodeo Drive down the street from it? 

Attention historically has been anathema to the membership of the Los Angeles Country Club, one of the country’s most exclusive clubs featuring one of its greatest courses. It has not even wanted anyone to know it’s there, two nondescript signs, one on either side of its entrance, revealing its address, but not its identity. 

Yet is has largely succeeded in keeping the public at bay and scrutiny to a minimum. For more than half a century, Los Angeles C.C., for reasons understandable and maybe less than honorable, has resolutely protected its privacy, resisting any overtures that might expose it to the outside world. 

Until now.

Who is this Hef you speak of?   

Before we move on, how about a round of applause for the USGA?  Their Open venues have had issues, but after this they're taking us to Seminole and Cypress Point.  

And how about this priceless anecdote about its membership policies:

LACC, renowned for excluding entertainers from joining, had no Jewish members until 1977 or so, and no African-Americans for some time after that. Its exclusion of Jews was alluded to in a legendary anecdote about Los Angeles’ private club scene at one time. 

It involved a Texas oil man, Frank Rosenberg, who was rejected for membership at LACC. “They probably thought you were Jewish,” a friend said. Rosenberg was advised then to try Hillcrest, a club founded by Jews who were unable to join LACC. So he applied there, but made the mistake of telling the club he wasn’t Jewish. 

“Oh, dear. I’m sorry. We don’t admit gentiles,” a Hillcrest member said. 

“Well I’m an SOB,” a frustrated Rosenberg replied. 

“If you can prove that,” he was told, "you can get in Riviera!”

The spectacular 11th green with what passes for a skyline in the background.

 Shack is predictably all-in on this event, but for good reason as he explains:

Full and only disclosure here for the week: I worked on the restoration of LACC's North Course since 2007 with Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner and many fine shapers, contractors, club officials and fine committees. The Walker Cup will be a celebration of all that went into restoring George Thomas and Billy Bell's 1927-28 redesign. More details on that later in the week, but if you must jump ahead, Ran Morrissett's 2014 review should tell you plenty about the architecture.

While that may seem to be an odd marriage, Geoff has worked with Gil previously and literally wrote the book about The Captain.  Here he devotes an Eye on Design video to the glorious history of The Walker Cup, well worth a few minutes of your time:

This event was a major factor in promoting the travel of U.S. golfers to Great Britain and the opposite direction as well.  Back in the day players could ill-afford the high cost of trans-Atlantic travel, and it was only with their travel expenses paid by the USGA that American amateurs could test themselves at the home of golf.  If you look at Bobby Jones' record, you'll see that his Open Championships correspond to Walker Cup away games, and in the Grand Slam year of 1930 he was the playing captain of the U.S. Walker Cup team at Royal St. Georges.

Shack plays aggregator-in-chief with this link-filled post, and also teases us with this Golf World piece that's safely behind the paywall:

And yes, I dared to claim for this week's Golfweek digital edition that the North may be the second best match play venue on the planet after the Old Course.

Geoff also has this EoD video on their nineteenth hole:

They just left it in the trees?

Fox is also all-in, with six hours a day of coverage.  Set those DVR's now, so you won't forget....

Three-for-Two - My guess is that right now they're stenciling Brian Harman's name on a golf cart at Liberty National:

Interestingly, Brian Wacker considers Charley to be the lock, not Lefty:

As for the other captain’s pick? This is where things get more interesting. 

Of the next nine names down the list none carries as much star power as Phil Mickelson,

who has played on every Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup team since 1994, boasts a 17-4-7 record in the last seven Presidents Cups and who last fall went 2-1-1 in helping the U.S. reclaim the Ryder Cup at Hazeltine National. He also appears suddenly re-energized and re-focused, posting a a T-6 finish at TPC Boston that moved him up three spots to No. 15 in the standings.

Asked if he felt like he has done enough to get the nod from Stricker, Mickelson said, “We'll see. I hope so.”

The only other player in the top 20 on the points list who could seemingly knock Mickelson off would be Brian Harman, who finished 12th with seven top-10s, including an impressive win at the Wells Fargo Championship and a runner-up at the U.S. Open. He’s also a deadly putter and his personality would fit well in the laid back team room (so, of course, would the elder statesman Mickelson).

We'll end up at the same place, but I do think Brian has the process bass-ackwards.... Strick will look for any rationale to have Phil, the man who single-handedly saved the Ryder Cup, on his roster.  Then he'll decide between the "H's", either pick of which is defensible.

My hope is that it gives Strick the cujones to sit Phil in foursomes....As for Captain Price, he gets to choose among players most recently seen on milk cartons:

More complicated is whom Price picks for the International team, which has lost the last six Presidents Cups and hasn’t won it since 1998 with the two teams tying in 2003. Adam Hadwin secured the final spot in the top 10 with his tie for 13th at TPC Boston. Where Price goes from there is less certain. 

Emiliano Grillo finished 12th in the standings and had a 22nd-place showing at the Dell, but he also has five missed cuts in his last nine starts. 

But like Stricker, who else is Price going to pick? No one around Grillo has exactly stood out. Hideto Tanihara is No. 11 and Yuta Ikeda 13 and both have missed a handful of cuts of late.

I'm not sure that "complicated" is exactly the right word there....

But I have it on reliable authority that Robert Allenby is available that week....

Stat So? -  Martin Kaufmann covers golf broadcasting for Golfweek, and files this thought provoking idea based upon an MLB experiment:

I was thinking about that recently while watching MLB Network’s fascinating “SABRcast” experiment. The term is a play on Sabermetrics, the advanced metrics that

have taken over the game. It is to MLB what ShotLink is to the PGA Tour.

The announcers didn’t dwell on balls and strikes, or even talk much about balls in play. The running discussion was more topical. They delved into the reasons behind Giants catcher Buster Posey’s declining pitch-framing skills and his offensive performance when catching vs. playing first base; factors in the Cubs’ lackluster play compared to last season; the difference of pinch-hitting against starters vs. relievers; and the Giants lack of power and the types of free-agent sluggers who might excel in their spacious park.

Martin is an astute critic of golf broadcasts, but it's a little off-putting how much he gets wrong here.

First, ShotLink is not equivalent to Sabremetrics, but this guy's work is... ShotLink is just the raw data that he's used for analysis.  Broadie is the Bill James of golf, the first to use the burgeoning availability of data to create new metrics of performance.  As an aside, I was seated next to Mark at the Met. Golf Writers awards dinner 3-4 years ago, and had an interesting conversation with him about my early adoption of James' work back in samizdat days....  My advice to him was to focus on the writing....  keep it lively, or the audience won't stay with you.

More importantly, most of their insights are less data driven than the kind of thing you'd expect from a grizzled baseball scout with a wad of chew in his cheek.  

Now, there's little doubt that our golf broadcasts need a shake-up, though with Johnny and Sir Nick entrenched it's hard to see where that will come from.  This reflects, I believe, the thankfully-departed Commissioner See-No-Evil, who wanted us to take it on faith that only angels play our game....

This is really about all that Martin came up with:

How do we address that conundrum? How do we get back to that time, pre-DVRs, when we used to race home to watch early-round coverage of a tournament from Hilton Head Island or Fort Worth? 

I’ve been giving that some thought recently. I don’t have a perfect answer, but I might have the outlines of a partial solution. 

I’ve consistently advocated shaking up the traditional configuration of announcers at golf tournaments. Specifically, I’ve suggested two ideas: Taking more announcers out of the towers and putting them on the course, closer to the action; or dispatching with the traditional anchor-analyst setup and simply allowing a group of analysts to “talk golf,” if you will, rather than doing traditional play-by-play.

Rose-colored glasses much?  I don't remember running home to see Thursday coverage from Colonial, nor did you I'm guessing...

And, not to burst his balloon, but the most-watched golf broadcast on the planet has no on-course reporters.  Shall we move on?

Conflict Ahead - Jaime Diaz captures the zeitgeist with this timely analysis:

The Great Divide 

The clash between modern tour pros and modern architects over course design can, as was the case at TPC Boston, become heated

Here's his framing of the issue:

Through advances in clubs and balls, fitness, technique and agronomy, tour players keep

hitting the ball farther and proportionately straighter, with less fear of a disastrous miss. They are leaving themselves shorter irons into greens (very often some kind of wedge), clubs designed to produce the combination of accuracy, height and spin that allows stopping power around the hole. It adds up to a lot of birdie chances inside 15 feet, the distance from which the vast majority of putts are converted. 

Amid all this progress, the modern architect’s task is to find a way to fairly increase the challenge to the best players. In the process, he aims to reward skill through the bag, encourage more strategic options, introduce more variety in shot-making and club selection (as in longer clubs for approaches to par 4s) and make the game more interesting to play and to watch. Otherwise, golf at the highest level would likely devolve into a pattern of driver (or 3-wood) off the tee and wedge to 12 feet.

Now the irony was reinforced by the outrage just the prior week when DJ was rewarded for bombing his drive on an aggressive line in the playoff against mere mortal Jordan Spieth.  Here's Jaime on ther controversial changes to TPC Boston's 12th hole:

At TPC Boston, Hanse was trying to inject some variety into what has become known as a “bomber’s paradise.” Reasoning that a good course has ebb and flow, he decided that making the 12th a hard hole made sense early in the back nine, before a closing stretch that has traditionally produced a lot of birdies. 

Hanse stretched the formerly 461-yard par 4 all the way to 511 yards and built a new, more contoured green. To keep tee shots from running down a hill toward the green, he ended the fairway at 330 yards, and at 305 yards, placed two deep “lobster pot” bunkers evoking the Principal’s Nose on the 16th at the Old Course at St. Andrews. Justin Thomas’ called the pair “so death.”

I'm guessing that Ian Poulter loved it....  But this tells you all you need to know about the current state of our game:

On a hole that in the past had left wedges and 9-iron approaches, Hanse wanted players who chose not to try to thread a longer tee shot past the fairway bunkers to hit a mid- to long iron approach into the green, something that has become rare for the tour’s longer hitters. In Friday’s first round, Dustin Johnson hit a 6-iron into the 12th, the longest iron he said he had hit into a par 4 all year.

Emphasis is all mine, but think about the implications on course design.  

Jaime also drops this little bombshell on us about an iconic venue:

Next year the U.S. Open is going to a Golden Age classic, Shinnecock Hills, artful in the extreme, but also shortish. It’s the kind of venue that is most at risk of being overrun by the modern game. 

In the last few years, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw restored the course. The fairways were widened (up to 60 yards), the greens expanded, and trees were removed. Visually, the result was spectacular, and the club’s members have loved the changes.

The USGA, too, initially sang the restoration’s praises, but recently officials have reconsidered their original setup plans at Shinnecock. The fairway width—done to create more strategic angles and options—was deemed too wide (perhaps in the wake of Erin Hills). Native fescue rough is now being planted on the edges of the fairway to narrow them back down. The course won’t be as narrow as it was when it held the championship in 1986, 1995 and 2004, but it will be narrower than what was originally planned on for 2018.

So that the art of Shinnecock can be brought out rather than overrun, the decision was made that long and crooked has to be punished.

It's rapidly approaching the day when major championships can't be held at any clubs with members.... a day of reckoning is coming.

The Spieth Lower Forty - Is there anything this kid can't do?

Texas coaches had long talked about building a short-game mecca at their facilities in Austin, and wonder boy Jordan Spieth stepped up to help make it a reality. 

The Spieth Lower 40 is six-hole par-3 course built on 4 1/2 acres between the member’s range and the first hole at the University of Texas Golf Club. Roy Bechtol, who designed the par-71 championship course at UT, also put pen to paper for the short course with input from a variety of folks, including Spieth. The three-time major champion spent three semesters competing as a Longhorn and was part of the 2012 NCAA Championship-winning team. His design contributions to the project included everything from the placement of the green complexes to elevations and contours.

It's way cool and will be quite the recruiting tool....  There's a hole-by-hole description at the link.  Don't miss the sixth hole homage....