I'm thinking that if I dive right into the wrappage you won't even remember my Friday absence.... It was all in a good cause, as I received a last-minute invite to go play Mountain Ridge, an exceptional Donald Ross track. Bygones?
Safeway Shenanigans - Early yesterday evening Employee No. 2 heard a groan escape from the man-cave... She asked if it was my Yankees, to which I responded that Shack's bllod pressure had just spiked 10 points.
First, the game story:
Brendan Steele is the Safeway Open champion! (No, this is not a copy and paste.)
The 34-year-old fired a 3-under 69 Sunday in Napa to go from two behind to two ahead. Steele won this tournament last year with an 18-under total, this time needing 15 under to get the job done. Maybe he couldn’t match the score, but Steele earns back-to-back wins at this event. This is his third career PGA Tour title and he of course has now captured the Tour’s season-opening tournament each of the last two seasons.
Leading the 2017-28 FedEx Cup points standing.... Too soon?
Here's the background on Geoff's frustrations:
Finau was trying to chase down Brendan Steele when he pulled his approach to the 12thhole at Silverado Resort and Spa, plugging into a greenside trap. The subsequent blast appeared to be racing past the hole but it collided with the ball of Jason Kokrak, who had just chipped to within a few feet of the hole from 30 yards off the green.
Instead of facing a lengthy par putt, Finau's ball instead stopped just 2 feet away and he easily converted the save.
The word you're searching for is "backstopping", the increasingly prevalent practice of leaving balls unmarked on the green when their position can only help one's playing partner.
Over to Geoff:
During Sunday's Safeway Open final round we had yet another example of the backstopping practice prevalent only in men's professional golf (here, here and here for 2017 samples). In case you haven't been watching, this is the now-regular practice where golf balls are left down on a green unless it's in the path to the hole, with various motives and theories as to why this has become practice instead of players simply marking their ball to protect the field. Speed of play is cited as the reasoning.
Watch the video at either of those two links and you'll quickly grasp the concept. As is often the case, every time a player opens his mouth on this subject the hole deepens. First, today's beneficiary of the "luck", Tony Finau:
"Funny thing is, I forgot he hit. I was so focused on what I needed to do and how hard my shot was," Finau said. "I hit a perfect shot, but it was still going to go about 25-30 feet past. It was a bonus to hit his ball. I used the rules to my advantage, I guess, not knowing."
You forgot? But if I may, isn't there a little tell in there, as though he senses that he might have ceded the moral high ground?
But filing an amicus brief on behalf of Mr. Finau is none other than Player of the Year Justin Thomas, who also seems to be dealing with moral ambiguities:
You got that? It's a God-given right to take advantage of another player's ball on the ball, and anyway it only happens FIVE times a year. To paraphrase Groucho, these are my principals. If you do't like them, I have others....
It's the tone deafness that's amusing me so.... Were the players to openly conspire to assist each other in this manner, the remedy would be disqualification of both. So it's done with a wink and a nod and justified as being for God and country and pace-of-play.....Shall we let Geoff rant on?
While many don't see this practice as a major issue, I do not agree for the very simple reason that professional golf's success is built on the integrity of its players. Corporations pay handsomely to be part of professional golf because they view the athletes as the most honest and upstanding in all of sports. Many fans follow the sport and love it because the athletes have such integrity.
Having a top player openly confessing to taking advantage of a ball on the green to possibly better his chances of finishing near the hole, is not great. If we found that his peers knows he does this and leave the occasional ball down to help him, we'd have the makings of disqualification for violating the rules. That this is even a "thing" speaks to a cultural shift and behavior that, if it becomes commonplace, could cause some to question the integrity of the players. Or, at the very least, make fans question if the players are legitimiately competing or colluding for peculiar reasons.
You might find this analogy a stretch, but I was flipping back and forth to the Cowboys-Packers game and I find the players inability to understand how this looks to the rest of us similar to the NFL's reaction to player's taking the knee during the anthem.
Everyone has grievances and everyone thinks the way they do about things, but at a certain point one needs to be able to walk to the other side of the table for that perspective. For the NFL, pissing off half your fan base is just simply bad for business, whatever the underlying merits of the protest might be (and they're at heart pretty much all about virtue-signalling).
But Justin Thomas sounds every bit as whiny and privileged as Colin Kaepernick, and golf will suffer from that comparison....
Linksy Excellence - I caught just a bit of the final few hole from The Old Courses, this being the takeaway:
Ross Fisher was left to rue a missed putt on the final hole after setting a new course record at St Andrews in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship.
The 36-year-old carded a final-round 61 to finish second, three shots behind defending champion Tyrrell Hatton after threatening to score a magical 59.
Fisher required an eagle on the final hole to close on 59, but left himself a long, uphill putt that finished five feet short and then his birdie putt rolled narrowly past.
He kinda gagged on that putt for 60, but I'm only surprised that this didn't happen sooner...
But it's the combination of Fisher's round with this that has the Twitterverse apoplectic:
Having welcomed an addition to his family last week, Tommy Fleetwood so proudlyadded an entry to his rapidly-expanding CV on Friday. A course-record 63 anywhere is impressive, but at Carnoustie it verges on the remarkable.
Dubbed the “Beast of Angus”, the links is widely regarded as one of the toughest courses in the game, having claimed many scalps of the decades, most infamously that of Jean van de Velde at the 1999 Open. But For Fleetwood it was not a case of “Carnasty”, but “Carnicey” as he waltzed around with nine birdies and nine pars, including a three on the 18th where the Frenchman took that treble-bogey seven 18 years ago.
Carnicey? That's a new one...
Given the nature of the event, a Pro-Am for all four days, this is inevitable in a week with only a wee breeze.... Shack has all of the reactions here, and I've nothing to add. With our governing bodies abdicating the case for bifurcation couldn't be clearer, I just can't see who will take it on and save is from the madness...
'Tis the Season - No, not THAT season..... Lord knows, I think we have another month before we start tormenting ourselves with Christmas carols...
But it is the season that we play the "Leaf Rule", meaning of course that conditions are not optimal. Remember Matthew Southgate? He took it on the chin for a leaf rule that's actually a rule, but I like his reaction to it (a review of the incident and video can be found at the link):
“It was poor from me to not know the rules of a game I’ve played since I was two. I take full responsibility. People say it’s bad luck but it’s not bad luck because I should have replayed the shot and could have made four. But I didn’t and it became nine, and that became me missing my card. I’ve only got myself to blame. I’m not annoyed with anyone else.”
The best wishes of his peers have not assisted much either; and neither has their collective ignorance. I asked 10 different pros at the Dunhill Links if they were aware of that particular rule and all admitted they were not.
Selection bias, perhaps? There being no trees in linksdom, there are accordingly no leaves...
I'd just like to contrast that reaction with Rory's from Abu Dhabi a few cycles back, where he petulantly informed us that he's got better things to do than reading the rule book.
And contrast this bit with JT's reaction above:
“And people also say I was unlucky because I had the cameras on me at the time. But if they weren’t, I’d have a PGA Tour card and I would have it by breaking the rules. And imagine 10 years down the line when a leaf hits someone else’s ball and I’d see it and think, ‘that’s what happened to me and I shouldn’t be here’. How bad would that feel?”
Perhaps a reporter might note this reaction and contrast it with, oh, I don't know, Tiger's?
Amateur Doings - This was announced last week, and color me skeptical:
For nearly 30 years the U.S. Mid-Amateur champion has received an awfully big spoil for his victory: an invitation from Augusta National to play in the Masters. Now a
Poster child Stewart Hagestad. victory in the premier amateur event for players 25 and older will come with a second major carrot. During Thursday’s evening reception for the 264 players competing in this year’s U.S. Mid-Am, which begins on Saturday at Capital City Club in Atlanta, USGA president Diana Murphy announced that the winner will receive an exemption into next year’s U.S. Open.
Similarly, the winner of the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur next month at Champions Golf Club in Houston will get into next year’s U.S. Women’s Open. Additionally, the winners of the U.S. Junior Amateur and U.S. Girls’ Junior this past summer, Noah Goodwin and Erica Shepherd, will get exemptions into their respective Opens as well.
Second prize is an exedmption into two U.S. Opens....
Before I weigh in, I'll let you know that Shack is favorably-disposed to the move:
While some might see this as chipping away at qualifying spots for the U.S. Open and U.S. Women's Open--because it is--the move seems like a smart way to validate the importance of other national championships. Given that these winners get to the Sectional stage and many have qualified for the Opens anyway, it will give the events and amateur golf just a bit more of a boost.
I think the Mid-Am is the more justifiable of the two, although there's irony to be savored. The fact of the matter is that the Masters is such a get for these guys, that the marginal buzz from a slot in the U.S. Open will get lost in the shuffle...
But sending a Junior to the U.S. Open is just silly... It's a complete waste of a spot in the field of our national championship.
Fan Behavior - I've previously noted that the 2024 Ryder Cup scheduled for Bethpage has me concerned about fan behavior. Last week Audrey Leishman, she of the near-death experience, filed this blog post about fan behavior at Liberty National:
The rest of the week didn’t get much better nor did the insults. Someone yelled“Blooming Onion!” to Marc. Check yourself and your facts because that’s not Australian in the least. Another yelled, “avocado!” at him. I feel sorry for you because if you don’t understand how delicious an avocado is, then you are living a sad, sad life. “You eat cereal with a fork!” Oh friend, maybe that’s actually you who does that, because how would you even think to say that? I understand that this was not every fan. In fact, I believe that most of the people acting that way were not actually golf fans. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that they were the loudest and that the people around them did not ask them to stop.
I didn't know that Audrey is American and I'll note that listening to fans screaming at one's husband is likely a difficult thing, though there are far worse things than "Blooming Onion" for sure.... In fact, i smiled a little when I saw that...was that wrong of me?
What's hard is that she takes exception with some of the language used, such as this:
After the first day, the Internationals were obviously down. I was watching the Golf Channel and heard Brandel Chamblee say, “If you’re Captain Nick Price, what do you do when you’re looking at a massacre?” Well, Mr. Chamblee, after the devastating tragedy in Vegas this week- I want to ask you: Was that kind? Necessary? True? I don’t think it improved upon the silence.
I'm sorry, but I think Audrey is just being a little over-sensitive here.... yes, Brandel could have used the word "rout" instead of Massacre, but let's remember that the Las Vegas shooting hadn't yet happened when Brandel spoke those words.
Now our Tour Confidential panel took this issue on, but appropriately focused on last year's Ryder Cup:
1. Marc Leishman's wife, Audrey, wrote a blog post criticizing American fansfor the way they treated International players at the Presidents Cup. She said she was "thankful my boys weren't there to see the way people were treating their daddy." Rory McIlroy also had a fan kicked out at Hazeltine during last year's Ryder Cup (he probably deserved it for his expletive-filled rant), and Sergio Garcia called the way that same Ryder Cup crowd acted "quite poor." Do we have a problem here?
John Wood: Absolutely. I am working on an essay about this exact subject, and it's much too long to write here, but hopefully in the next few days it will be ready on GOLF.com. Stay tuned.
Jeff Ritter: John, that was a masterful way to request a deadline extension on your essay! A seasoned journalist couldn't have done it any better. And I agree. It's not the majority, but a few knucklehead fans have popped up in the past two U.S. team events and had a negative impact. Gotta clean that up. I'm just not sure how.
Reminds me of the Gabby Gifford shooting, a direct result of Sarah Palin's martial imagery.... Except that it wasn't.
Things that are competitive will never be free of martial imagery, nor should they. We can, however, expect and demand civility from a crowd of golf spectators. though the enforcement mechanisms are a challenge.
I'm profoundly worried about Bethpage, though that's a few years off.
Gotta run, but I promise more tomorrow.
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