Tuesday Tastings

It's been a while since I've blogged for two consecutive days... Just think of me as the Chad Green of the blogosphere.  Too soon, Yankee fans?

Take Your Time - Evin Priest tells us that October is the month of introspection for Aussie golfers....  Shoot, I had guessed never....  And they have some mostly sensible things to say about our game's Number One Problem.  First, Geoff Ogilvy:

“There are probably eight parts to the answer of that question. But it’s clearly got to be focused on kids and I think it has to become more accessible to kids. Make it really,

really, really cheap for juniors. You should always give golf to kids for free. Range buckets should be cheap, too.

“The thing they do very well in the US is, if the dad is a member of a golf club, quite often the kids can go play – they’re members, too. That’s a pretty good deal. And going to watch pro golf tournaments? Anyone under the age of 18 should get a free ticket. That will encourage parents to let their kids play golf because that’d be a pretty cost-effective thing to do.

“I was so addicted when I was a kid because I had access. And is there a better place to drop your kids off in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon, considering the alternatives? Rather than the local shopping mall, terrorising the place. If they’re at the course, they’re hanging around generally respectable people learning how to behave around adults.”

I've always believed that caddying is a great job for the young 'uns, having to provide a service to a successful adult, and it doesn't hurt that it pays fairly well.

 This from Adam Scott is also a no-brainer:

“I think growing up on a par-3 course was really beneficial. When you’re 5 or 6 years old and the holes are 80 or 100 yards, you can actually play them. It’s very hard to get a young kid, even 10 or 11, to play a 420-yard par 4 – it just seems like an unattainable goal to get it into a tiny hole at the end of that.

Scott also talks about getting girls involved in the game, though one of the photos chosen seems more an inducement to young boys:

When signing isn't a mind-numbing chore....

 This is also good, if you can get past the source:

“Golf’s biggest challenge in the modern day is it just takes too long; young families with little kids don’t want to spend four, five or six hours on the golf course. They’d rather play a few holes and an hour is all they can possibly give up. Maybe if there were three-hole and four-hole loops on courses where they can go out for an hour and come back, they’d get on board. That’s how you can get introduced and fall in love with the game. And those who like it will transition into the 18-hole side."

That's of course none other than Jason Day, the man whose progress around the golf course can only be discerned through the use of time lapse photography.   But they mean well for sure....

All kidding aside, Aussie golf is a different animal, and I highly recommend this Shack piece from a few years back for those trapped at home by the biblical storms today.  Some of the course maintenance practices are truly interesting, especially the bunkers and greens.  Good stuff for a bad day....

A Solution at Hand - The Euro Tour will seemingly try anything, and God Bless them for that....  We had previously noted their intention to use a shot clock at their Austrian event, but Alistair Tait has more details for us:

Every player will be timed on every shot in Austria. The other big difference from

GolfSixes is that the event will use the Tour’s official timing policy. Each player in the 120-man field will have 50 seconds for the first player in a group, with 40 seconds for subsequent players. A one-shot penalty will be handed out to players going over the time limit, and a red card will appear beside their name on the leaderboard. 

The Tour is hoping to cut three-ball timings down to four hours, and two balls down to three hours and 15 minutes. 

“The 2018 Shot Clock Masters will be a fascinating addition to our schedule next year,” European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley said. “Not only will it help us combat slow play and reduce round times, it is also further evidence of our desire to embrace innovation.”

They've actually named it the Shot Clock Masters....  Who's the sponsor, Casio?  And who do we write to get Ben Crane a sponsor's exemption?

Read of the Day - Guy Yocum with a fascinating deep dive into the green reading technology that has piqued the USGA's interest.  Spoiler alert:  If you think this is helpful to pace of play, think again....

First a primer on the technology:

To start, green maps are modern technology at its most advanced, on a par with launch monitors, swing-analysis tools and club and ball technology. The process begins by

placing an optical scanning laser directly on or close to the green. Some scanners cost about $120,000 and are used to take impressions of oil rigs, industrial spaces and even car-accident scenes. The unit shoots a laser beam at a mirror that is spinning rapidly within the housing of the device. Millions of beams, reflected by the mirror, are projected onto the landscape of the green, scanning as the device rotates to encompass the entire surface. As each beam is redirected at the green, it is measured precisely. Very precisely. Minute differences in height are measured and fed into storage. Typically, three million to four million bits of data are collected, all in the 10 minutes it takes to scan a green. 

"The lasers can easily pick up a small coin from 100 feet away," says Michael Mayerle, president of JMS Geomatics, the company that measures courses for the PGA Tour's ShotLink program. "Discerning green height is well within its capacity. But when we shoot at an area that is on a plane similar to the scanner perched atop a tripod—a sharp falloff at the front of a green, say—we'll move the device and shoot the green from an additional angle." 

Once the data is collected, it is placed on an electronic template, or outline of the green. Mark Long, for many years the caddie for Fred Funk, is a green-mapping pioneer who has provided maps for the majority of PGA Tour players through his company, Tour Sherpa Inc. (examples are at longyardage.com). Long carefully measures the dimensions of the green using a GPS device, creates the outline, then uses special software to express the laser-scan data as the arrows, contours and sometimes numbers you see on a green map.

Shockingly, when the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith codified the original rules of golf in 1744, they failed to anticipate this eventuality.... No foresight!

The use of these books may also surprise:

That leads to the next aspect, which is how players and their caddies actually use the 

Name the green if you can...It's a Sunday pin.

books. There is great variation here. The presumption, born out by what we see on TV, is that players and/or their caddies use them strictly on the greens. But Dustin Johnson points out that he uses them primarily from the fairway. "When you see us checking our yardage book, we're usually looking at the green [map] just as hard," he says. "I want to know where the straight putts are. And I really want to know how the ball is going to kick after it lands." 

Jordan Spieth is largely in the fairway-use camp, too. "He's looking not only at the slope where the ball will land and bounce, but sometimes even the grain so he knows how the ball will run out," says his teacher, Cameron McCormick, as Spieth hit balls on the range at TPC Boston. But Spieth and his caddie, Michael Greller, clearly use them on the greens. There was an instance earlier this year where Spieth, who frequently thinks out loud, was overheard saying as he approached a putt, "Trust the book . . . trust the book!" Zach Johnson also is a green-map reader from the fairway. "Putting is one of my strengths, and I want to leave myself as straight a putt as I can," he says.

 Stewart Cink, one of the more thoughtful guys out there, covers the PoP issue:

Ah, the pace-of-play issue. We referenced earlier how Dustin Johnson spent an additional 20 seconds consulting his green-map book on the 18th green at the Northern Trust. That decisive putt notwithstanding, tour players have not routinely surpassed the 40 seconds allowed on a putt per tour guidelines. "As I've gotten used to the books and what to look for, I'm referencing them much more quickly," Cink says. "I rarely look at a map for more than a few seconds, but it's a legitimate concern. Those small time blocks can add up." He adds, with a laugh, "If you see us going to the book on our third putt, it's time to call us out." 

Long and Charleston say that everyday amateurs having green information immediately makes the maps a timesaver. "You're going to see less walking up to the hole and back on 60-footers, less plumb-bobbing and pacing around in general," Charleston says. Adds Long: "There are presentations coming in map designs in the very near future that unequivocally will speed up play."

Color me skeptical on that last bit, but it's an existential issue for the 21st century.  We've always drawn a distinction between factual information and advice, and this seems more the former....  Yet, there's this:

Among players on the PGA Tour, Adam Scott, Ian Poulter, Lucas Glover and Luke Donald have gone on record as disliking them. Scott and Poulter have said they should be banned. The art of putting has been lost, Poulter tweeted in March. If you can't read a green, that's your fault. He also said they slow down play. But Duplantis says that each of those players—or at least their caddies—use or have used them. And it can be noted that Poulter, after winning the WGC-Match Play in 2010, later tweeted about how "useful" the green books had been.

I must confess that I feel strongly both ways.... I do think green-reading is a skill that should yield a benefit to the player, yet this is just factual information, no?

Golf in the Middle Kingdom - We're back with another installment of this evergreen feature, first with this story that broke a week or so ago:

Gabriel Wildau reports for the Financial Times on the Chinese government has declared "illegal" two golf courses owned by the powerful Dalian Wanda Group. 

The FT storys says this is part of "a campaign against luxury and waste ahead of a Communist party gathering that begins in Beijing this week" and continues the trend of high profile attacks on golf in China. Given the Wanda Group's international standing, even if the move is targeting the group for non-golf reasons, it appears to be yet another blow for the game in China.

It's certainly a disincentive to invest in course construction.... But today's news cycle has this:

Jingwulu Primary School, in Jinan, in the eastern Shandong province, introduced the sport to “foster children's strong determination, self-discipline and manners,”

headmistress Ji Yankun said. 

“I don’t think I am being over dramatic in calling it a gentleman’s sport, as there is so much good etiquette involved,” she told The Telegraph.

The school has installed practice nets in its grounds and drafted in coaches from Shandong Gold Golf Club to provide compulsory training to nine-year-old pupils.

The golf club is also consulting with four other schools to roll out the training across the province.

“Many children have fallen in love with the sport, which has been called 'the green opium',” said Shandong Gold's Jiang Chunqiu, using a phrase which is often used in China to portray golf as highly enjoyable, but a dangerous foreign import.

Green Opium?  That's so good I may have to work it into the masthead of the blog....

As I always note when running these items, China cannot be the savior of our game until this schizophrenia is resolved.  Even then the country seems far too poor, but the game remains technically illegal, never a helpful sign.

More Technology -  From Marty Kaufmann's TV blog:

While most of this column’s attention is focused on the networks and Golf Channel, some of the most interesting production ideas are originating with the PGA Tour. Some see that as evidence that the Tour is preparing to bring production of its tournaments in-house. We’ll leave that for another day. 

One of the recent innovations brought to our attention was livestreaming using HatCam, an ActionStreamer camera that, as the name suggests, attaches to the brim of a hat. The Tour tested it during practice rounds at the Web.com Tour Championship. It also was worn by fans following Sam Saunders when he shot a first-round 59. 

HatCam weighs just 65 grams, and Greg Roberts of ActionStreamer said a smaller version “about the size of a money clip” is in the final stages of development. HatCam has a self-contained battery, is controlled remotely and has MEMS gyroscopes that minimize the bouncing effect in point-of-view transmissions.

Shack had this video as well:

First thought, it's likely more interesting if they're used on the caddie's hats.

Though the bigger issue might be in that first 'graph.... This would be a big mistake on the part of the Tour.  There's nothing wrong with cashing checks, guys.

Return of the Stinger - Everyone is getting a woody over this...I just want to know why he stopped hitting it...  Was he bored hitting so many fairways?

Header Confusion - This header seems inconsistent with the underlying story:

LPGA's rigid Q-school rules cause No. 1 ranked women's amateur to forgo final stage in order to finish college career

Here's the underlying story:

Leona Maguire wants to play on the LPGA Tour some day. But first things first. The No.

1 ranked amateur in the world is a senior at Duke who is on track to graduate this spring, a priority that supersedes her professional aspirations. So much so that the 22-year-old native of Ireland is turning down a spot in next month’s final stage of LPGA Qualifying School 

Indeed, Maguire competed in last week’s second stage of LPGA Q school, knowing full well that even if she finished high enough to advance to the final stage, she wouldn’t play. Sure enough, she finished T-9 at Plantation Golf & Country Club in Venace, Fla., and then, for the second straight year, told LPGA officials she won’t be around next month. 

So why bother competing at all at second stage? Despite turning down the invite to the final stage, Maguire’s performances earned her a playing privilege on the Symetra Tour for 2018, something she’ll take advantage of after graduation. Unlike with the LPGA Tour cards that will be earned at the final stage, Symetra Tour membership can be deferred until later in the year, allowing current college players to remain in school through the spring semester and then play in the summer.

As I understand things, Leona wanted to finish college with her teammates, but is using Q-School for experience that will help her down the road.  I fail to see where the LPGA's rules are overly rigid....

In fact, it seems a simple path to the Tour that allows players to finish their amateur careers if they want, as distinct from a  certain men's tour that requires a period of indentured servitude.

Or perhaps I'm just advertising my well-known weakness for Irish girls?