We have some interesting bits for you this morning.... Though just barely related to the action on the course.
East Lake Boogaloo - Dan Hicks did his best, but it's hard drumming up interest in which of today's pampered princes will get one last big payoff before the three-hour off-season begins:
Given another opportunity to win, Marc Leishman didn't give anyone much of a chance in the BMW Championship.
Staked to a five-shot lead, Leishman made back-to-back birdies late in the final round Sunday to put away the final challenge, then closed with a birdie for a 4-under 67 to set the tournament record and win by five over Justin Rose and Rickie Fowler.
It was Leishman's second victory this year, and it sends him to East Lake as the No. 4 seed in the FedEx Cup, giving him a clear shot at the $10 million prize.
Stifle those yawns! I have it on good authority that this is really important.... Justin Rose got it within two on the back nine, but the hole was too deep.
The most interesting moments of the day were a contrast in pace... This guy pushed the envelope beyond reason:
With all due respect to Jordan Spieth on the 13th hole at the British Open, Sergio Garciawins the award for most excruciatingly time-consuming ruling of the season.
Playing the par-5 18th hole on Sunday at the BMW Championship, Garcia hit his second shot into a lateral hazard short and right of the green. His ball wedged against the rocks, Garcia called for a ref.
Garcia told the official he wanted to play backwards out of the hazard and carom his ball off a hospitality tent. Garcia showed that if he were to attempt the shot, the butt of his club would strike the tent -- a man-made object -- which would entitle him to free relief. After a lengthy discussion, the official deemed that a reasonable shot, and awarded him a drop without penalty from within the hazard.
"I think he should've been a lawyer," said Johnny Miller on the TV broadcast. "This one is comic relief."
The rules official should have laughed in his face, because he was pretending he would play a shot that he'd never attempt... You know, like on the Road Hole... Where's everyone that was outraged by Jordan at Birkdale.... Yanno, when it actually mattered? Oh, watching football....
Will Gray I guess gets credit for going into the long grass and explaining the nature of the relief:
While Rule 24-2 does not allow a player to take relief from a movable obstruction when in a hazard, Cox explained that the temporary nature of the obstruction made Garcia eligible to receive a free drop, provided he remained inside the hazard.
“(If) the player’s ball lies in a water hazard, he would not get relief from an immovable obstruction for like a sprinkler head,” Cox said. “We have very large structures which are situated very close to the water hazard which ordinarily wouldn’t be there, so the rules allow a player to get relief when his ball lies in a water hazard.”
This is laughable, though it does highlight the aggressive uses of TIO's on Tour. But this seems especially egregious, because it depends on the players good-faith assertion that he would have played that actual shot. I'd have loved them to call his bluff and move the banner.
But our hero of the day is Wesley Bryan:
Wesley Bryan’s PGA Tour season is now over, but he definitely went out in style.
Bryan shot 2-under 69 Sunday at the BMW Championship. But most impressive was that he completed his trip around Conway Farms in an hour, 29 minutes.
With Danny Lee withdrawing earlier in the week, that meant the player in 69th in Rounds 3 and 4 would go out as a single. Bryan ended 54 holes at 6 over, meaning he would play solo on Sunday.
Take an extra fiver out of petty cash, Wes....
Evian Amour - The girls did ultimately get around to playing a little golf this weekend, not that anyone was watching:
Defying driving rain and hail in a playoff, Anna Nordqvist beat unheralded American Brittany Altomare at the first extra hole to win the Evian Championship on Sunday.
Nordqvist took the fifth and final major of the season by sinking a 4-foot putt for a bogey 5 on the soaked 18th hole while the 102nd-ranked Altomare had a six.
Course workers removed pools of standing water from the 18th green as the players approached the putting surface after their third shots. The par-4 hole played long all afternoon and was near-treacherous for the playoff.
"I am from Sweden and I'm freezing," said Nordqvist, who was confined to bed for two weeks in July by a bout of mononucleosis. "I feel like I'm pretty used to bad conditions and that was probably some of the worst I've seen."
I'm happy for her simply because she absorbed the horrible penalty in last year's U.S. Open playoff with grace. Shack goes on a mini-rant and shares a data point of which I wasn't aware:
I suppose the best takeaway from last week's well-documented Evian Championshipfiasco is that sponsors should be careful what they wish for.Elevated to "major" status by the LPGA Tour to sustain the sponsorship, everything has backfired. Stacy Lewis passed this year. The weather was once again awful. The play was its traditionally horrible pace (six hours Sunday!). The event was a 54-hole playing after a false start Thursday.
It all looks especially bad when coupled with the Evian's forced major status implemented after years of being a player favorite, the LPGA Tour's equivalent of The Players or BMW PGA Championship.
It's easy to see how this happens, given the LPGA's negotiating weakness with sponsors. But Stacey skipping the event tells me all I need to know about the event's alleged major status.
The Tour Confidential panel had some tough love to dispense:
Michael Bamberger: I am fine with it but then I don't consider the Evian Championship a major. Just a nice event, played at a painfully slow pace on Sunday. The women have four real majors and I will use the historic names: U.S. and British Opens, the LPGAChampionship, the Dinah Shore/Mission Hills.
Alan Shipnuck: Agree that the Evian is not even on par with the Players, and the latter tournament is miles from being a major. It was a bad call and the wrong one to wipe out so many scores but at least that was on Thursday. The ensuing three days featured lotsa good golf and the final round was tightly contested by a bunch of top players. So, in the end it was an okay result, if we're grading on a curve.Joe Passov: I'm with you, Jeff, almost all the way, in terms of the British Open/luck-of-the-draw argument. In this case, however, it was deemed that spectators, as well as players, were in danger from the weather, and things needed to cease, period. But plant me in that camp that can't stand contrived, forced majors, of which the Evian leads the pack. The LPGA didn't need a fifth major, it didn't need to be the Evian, and it shouldn't be played in mid-September, when the weather is predictably dicey in the region. If there should be a fifth major at all, it should be in Korea, where a disproportionate number of world-class players reside or were born.
When Travelin' Joe is the voice of reason.... I went a little long on the excerpts to show the full extent of the bad decision-making, starting with the forced nature of calling this a major. But we've been so focused on the 54-hole tourney, that we lost sight of the equally-controversial restart.... But Joe does make a good point about the silliness of adding that fifth major in France.
So, now what do the powers that be do? A date change is one option for sure, as was argued earlier in the week. Anyone for a Wednesday start and Saturday finish? That would allow them to go to Sunday to get 72 holes in...
Now let's get to the more interesting stuff.....
Bridges Burned - I'm thinking that PXG v. Taylor Made is going to be the Hundred Year War.... So, as predicted here, PXG lost Round One:
PXG founder Bob Parsons’ efforts to stop the sales of TaylorMade’s new P790 ironsbefore they even started were put on hold Friday in U.S. District Court in Arizona.
Judge John J. Tuchi denied the request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) by lawyers representing Parsons Xtreme Golf (PXG) after a hearing late Friday afternoon. The hearing was part of PXG’s lawsuit accusing TaylorMade’s P790 irons of infringing on eight PXG-held patents, a claim TaylorMade has disputed in subsequent court filings.
In Friday’s hearing, Tuchi set a November date for a hearing on PXG’s appeal for a preliminary injunction against TaylorMade.
Tuchi did not cite any specifics in denying PXG’s request for the TRO, and TaylorMade’s formal argument opposing the TRO, which includes 10 separate attachments, remains sealed to protect confidential proprietary information. Still, TaylorMade’s reaction late Friday, the first day the P790 irons were available at retail, was one of vindication.
“While TaylorMade respects the intellectual property rights of others, we will always defend ourselves vigorously when someone falsely accuses us of infringement,” read a statement from a company spokesperson. “Our victory in court today re-affirms our confidence in our products and technologies, and reinforces the excitement and momentum we are experiencing with our P790 irons to date.”
That last bit is for your amusement given their history with Adams.... But Bob Parsons has a long history of not playing well with others, so this should shock nobody:
Lawyers for PXG filed additional complaints on Thursday and Friday against the four largest golf retailers in the U.S. for patent infringement violations tied to their sales of P790 irons. Worldwide Golf, the parent company of golf retail brands Edwin Watts and Roger Dunn among others, was named in a suit filed by PXG in U.S. District Court in California on Thursday. On Friday, PXG filed suits against PGA Tour Superstore, Golf Galaxy and Dick’s Sporting Goods in U.S. District Court in Illinois.
According to Allan Sternstein, professor of intellectual property and director of the IP and Entrepreneurship Clinic at the University of Arizona, “Those that infringe a patent are anyone who makes (manufacturers), uses (consumers), sells or offers to sell (retail outlets, golf shops, etc.) a product that falls within the scope of one or more claims of the patent. Accordingly, suing a retailer for patent infringement is totally appropriate under the law.”
Still, Al Morris, president of Worldwide Golf, said he was “blown away” when he learned Friday morning that he’d been sued by PXG. Morris was part of a team that successfully invalidated patents in a case filed by Max Out golf over clubfitting patents, a more than two-year struggle that cost Morris "hundreds of thousands of dollars" but ultimately culminated with victory in a review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last month.
Yowser! Chris Nickel at MyGolfSpy.com has some salient comments, first this:
By suing retailers, PXG is taking the road less traveled, but it is a road other have taken with some success. Strategically, the move might make sense, although it’s certain to draw the ire of the retail chains targeted, and likely the mainstream wing of the industry as a whole. The reality is these chains won’t ever be part of PXG’s business plan, so there’s no risk of PXG losing sales directly, and we suspect that PXG Founder, Bob Parsons, doesn’t much care what his competitors think.
Exactly, though it is a burn-it-to-the-ground type strategy.... I'll add this which will come a sno surprise:
It should be mentioned that custom fitters who carry both TaylorMade and PXG have, as of yet, not been served with a complaint.
Of course not, PXG does well through that channel and most fitters are small beer.
Now we had comments earlier from knowledgeable sources to the effect that this is PXG's core technology that they've little choice but defend aggressively, but there's also dissenting thoughts on that subject:
Industry insiders who have seen cases like this play out before, to a man, have told us that they don’t believe PXG has much of a chance of winning. A patent lawyer with extensive experience in the golf industry echoed similar sentiment suggesting that while anything is possible, it is unlikely PXG will prevail.It’s estimated that only 30% of patents would stand up to the scrutiny of a challenge. As one of our sources told us, “it’s [the patent system] designed by the lawyers, for the lawyers, so that’s who wins in the end.”
You can take that to the bank.
Hard for us civilians to know who to believe, but it's also hard to see Parsons' end game....Even the TC panel got into the fray on this one:
Bamberger: I don't think it's really logic at work here, I think it's a statement, consistent with the one the company has been making all along: we are disrupters.
Shipnuck: The retailers aren't the target, TaylorMarde is -- this is just a way to keep any product from being sold while this moves through the courts. Classic Parsons move: no f---s given.
Amusingly, when I went to the club on Friday to hit some balls, it was PXG demo Day.... The rep didn't want to talk about the lawsuit, although amusingly he had been with Adams when that went down.
Their irons are pretty sweet though, as you might have heard, they don't exactly give them away...
Penalties on Steroids - Ben Crane is struggling to maintain his playing status, and therefore teeing it up in the Web.com faux-playoffs.....See what you think of this bizarre series of events:
The 41-year-old Oregon native received two separate four-shot penalties Thursday for carrying, but not using, non-conforming clubs (a driver and a 6-iron), the non-conformitydue to ‘dot sticker’ decals that he uses to aid in data collection during practice.
Crane, who began his round on Hillcrest CC’s 10th hole, noticed a decal on his driver on No. 11 tee box. He brought it to the attention of a Web.com Tour rules official, and was assessed the first four-shot penalty (if he had noticed before putting out on his first hole, the penalty would have only been two shots, but since he was between holes, he was penalized two shots for each hole of the infraction.)
Wow, kinda stupid, no? Let me just say it this juncture that no one seems to have a picture of these stickers and I wonder whether they actually change the playing characteristics of the club.... But wait. it gets even crazier...
On the 14th hole, Crane informed the rules staff of a similar decal on his 6-iron. Since it was a separate rules breach, he received another four-stroke penalty (the maximum amount punishable under the rule).
If Crane had used either club before reporting the subsequent infraction, he would have been disqualified from the tournament.The Web.com Tour rules team conferred with the USGA as to whether the second infraction was necessary, since both infractions fall under the same rule. It was ultimately decided that each was a separate rules breach because they were reported at separate times.
“The rules staff did a great job and tried just to make it a four-shot penalty, but the rule stands,” said Crane, who finished tied for sixth at the Finals-opening Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship. “Eight-shot penalty. It’s a bummer, but it’s the rules.”
Yes, the rules staff did a great job. Your caddie and you? Not so much... But wait, we're not done with this mental midget just yet:
UPDATE: This unusual rules situation got even stranger on Friday morning when Crane was disqualified after telling an official he knew about the second non-conforming club at the time of him reporting that his driver had the training decal on it. Because he knew and didn't declare the club out of play at the time, Crane was disqualified.
"In his defense, I think that when you get assessed an eight-shot penalty, your head is going to be spinning," Web.com Tour Vice President of Rules, Competition and Administration Jim Duncan said on Friday.
It's just a shame that he took the spot in the field of someone who might have actually wanted to play....
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