Weekend Wrap

Lots to cover this morning, enough that I'll make you forgive Friday's absence.

Perez in Full - If nothing else, Pat Perez will always entertain and amuse:

Pat Perez picked up his third career PGA Tour victory on Sunday by winning the CIMB Classic in Malaysia, finishing four shots clear of Keegan Bradley. 

And, true to form, the 41-year-old was as candid as ever after his victory when asked about re-setting goals for the 2017-18 season. 

"I'm not going to change anything," he said. "I'm still not going to workout. I'm still going to have a bad diet and I'm going to enjoy myself."

You haven't been working out Pat?  I couldn't tell...Anyone that wants more Pat is directed to this January feature on the man by Alan Shipnuck.

Riffing off this event, our Tour Confidential panel got this intriguing query:

Who, in the mold of Perez, is primed to be the comeback player of the 2017-18 season?

You're gonna need a bigger mold....

Wood: That's awfully difficult criteria; there just aren't many in the refreshing mold of Perez anymore. There are quite a few candidates for comebacks, but I'll go with Geoff Ogilvy. I can't quite put my finger on it, but he seemed like he was looking at golf from a fresh perspective as an assistant at the Presidents Cup, and that could put him in a good frame of mind to play really well again.

As readers know, my man-crush on Geoff Ogilvy is well into it's second decade, and yet picking him based upon an event in which he didn't, you know, actually play seems a tad out there.

Shipnuck: Can I pick Keegan? He's been trending in the right direction for a year-plus. Luke Donald, too.

 It would of course be fun to have psychotic Keegan and his stink-eye back on the prowl, but can the guy putt well enough?  But, Alan, I'm pretty damn sure that the Luke Donald era is behind us.  Short and crooked is not a recipe for success out there.

Amazing Grayson - Have you been following Grayson Murray?  The young lad has had some recent success, including a timely win in an off-field event that should secure his playing status for the next few years.

We spent some time with Murray back when he was calling out other players on Twitter for their chosen path to the PGA Tour.  I know, that sound you hear is Dale Carnegie spinning in his grave...  Not only was it rude and ill-informed, but he was calling out players with far better resumes than his own.  Of greater concern was a profile that indicated that at every stop on his developmental journey he had similarly troubling incidents....

He caught a huge in that this item hit my monitor on a  day when I was consumed with generous feelings for my fellow man...  Yeah, it was that day.  It seems that he's some kind of personality disorder, perhaps not exactly the right concept, but he feels grievances and think he's somehow not given his due.  Probably not terribly unusual, just it occurred to me that his chosen profession might be a bad fit with his challenges, the life of a struggling pro being of course filled with stress and loneliness....  Hey, look at what this game is doing to your humble blogger, and for me it's just a hobby.

I saw this header over the week from Malaysia:

Grayson Murray has had a roller coaster of a week at the CIMB Classic

Rut-roh!  Please tell me the Twitter account is still mothballed....

It turns out that it's just the golf....

Yes, golf is weird for sure, as well as maddening and the like.  And even that 64 was a roller caoster ride, per this:

64 with a triple?  You don't see that every day.

Then this morning Shack had this video of the lad during his final round (sorry, still don't know how to embed the Instagram vidoes- anyone have a teenager they can lend me?).  You make the call, can this kid control himself for the long-haul?

Shack's focus is on the PGA Tour staff posting it and the MLB tie-in, good stuff indeed.  Just another evidence point that there's a new sheriff in town, and thank God for that.

Counselor Jordan - MJ sticks up for his buddy Tiger in an interview with Cigar Aficionado, including this:

"He's in a transitional period; we athletes, we go through that," Jordan said. "Then we have to be adults, we have to make sound decisions. He is, to me, in a very unique

situation. Tiger played in his peak somewhere towards the end of my career. And the what changed between that timeframe to now — social media, Twitter, all those types of things that has invaded their personality and their personal times as individuals. I don't know if I could have survived in this Twitter time where you don't have the privacy that you would want, and what seems to be very innocent could always be misinterpreted."

Isn't that one of the sillier things we've heard?   MJ defending his friend is well and good, but the concept that he wouldn't have adapted to the environment strikes me as quite comical.  Equally so that Tiger's issue is social media...  Given that I don't have the same reservoir of goodwill as above, I might note that Tiger's only problem seems to be that he got caught.

MJ also had this:

They also talked about the greatest of all-time debate between Jack Nicklaus and Tiger. Jordan said it's unfair to compare the two.

Unfair to whom?  Isn't it funny how Jack's friends don't feel the need to defend him from such discussions...

And Tiger has now released video of himself hitting driver, and the saliva is trickling out of the corner of the mouths of several wags....  As an example, this was another of the responses to the TC question excerpted above:

Sens: If you believe what you see on social media, there's a certain former World No. 1 who has been posting videos of himself hitting smooth iron shots in Florida. His return would be the most newsworthy of comebacks. Meanwhile, though, back here in reality, neither Rory McIlroy nor Adam Scott has exactly dropped off the map. But they've been struggling by their standards, so a return to the form we expect of them would amount to a big bounce.

Don't go there, Josh.  The first five installments of this series weren't to my liking, so wake me up after he posts a top ten.  

Yes We Can! - David Owen is back on the pages of Golf Digest with this challenge to us all:

Yes, You Can Beat Slow Play 

Shaving seconds and minutes could cut half an hour off your round.

I'm delighted to see his byline, but unsure of his current status.  He previously wrote the Muny Beat column that appeared on the back page of the dead-tree version, but that's been discontinued.

This is David with some serious suggestions that deserve serious consideration:

HIT FIRST, THEN SEARCH. If a member of your group slices one into the weeds,

play your shot before you wander over to help. This isn't rude. He'll probably have found his ball by the time you've hit, anyway, and you won't be holding up the group behind you by joining the search. 

HIT FIRST, THEN TALK. I've played with golfers who save their jokes until it's their turn to tee off. They've got a captive audience, because no one can move until they've hit, so they tee up a ball, then lean on their driver and unwind. Tell them to save it. leave your driver's headcover in your car. Ten seconds a hole? Twenty seconds a hole? Painless and easy.

I have no particular objections, as I hate slow play with a passion.  My only quibble is with the concept that a half-hour has significance....

The issue with slow play, to me at least, is waiting on tees and in fairways to hit shots....  Now I understand that the quicker the course moves the less of the itksome waits will happen, but if you think you're gonna get that guy in the second bit to give up his audience, I have some real estate in which you might be interested.

Your Cheatin' Heart -  Josh Sens writes an amusing take on cheating, offering style points where appropriate.  He includes the technique which shall forever be known to your humble correspondent as The Schrager:

3. FLUFFING UP A LIE 

Strictly speaking, fluffing should be reserved for hair salons and porn sets. But so long as you and your partners have agreed to allow it, we won't give you too much grief about it. 

Despicability Rating: 3 

But if you break the course record, it doesn't count.

My only critique is that the despicability rating should be higher for those that also position their carts between any viewers and the ball....

But I also liked that he drew an important distinction with this one:

4. THE FOOT WEDGE 

Here we must distinguish between the flagrant foot-wedge, employed out in the open

with a dramatic flourish, and the clandestine foot-wedge, used under the shadowy cover of trees. The first is a kind of performance art that we find mildly entertaining. The second locates you on the evolutionary scale somewhere between the cockroach and pond scum. 

Despicability Rating for a flagrant foot-wedge: 3 

Just don't do it on every hole. 

Clandestine foot-wedge: 10 

It's straight from the 18th green to the 19th rung of hell for you.

My favorite footwedge of all time came from a gentlemen playing the Road Hole as the bride and I enjoyed a libation at The Jigger Inn.  He had the look of having lost his will to live, and as he wedged his ball back onto short grass the entire outdoor seating area erupted in cheers and offers of a drink.

Passive Aggressiveness Much? - In an interview with Shane O'Donahue for CNN, Annika Sorenstam has some way curious remarks about her golf course design business:

"It's been tougher than I thought," Sorenstam told CNN Living Golf's Shane

O'Donoghue. 

"Being a female, when they throw my name in the ring as a designer candidate a lot of times they say, 'oh, well then this course will be short and easy.' 

"I don't know where it comes from. I think they just have that predetermined notion of women designing shorter courses, and that's not really what comes to my mind. 

"I consider myself, of course a female, but I'm also a golfer and I feel like I can play any golf course out there and I guess maybe my defensive mechanism is, 'hey, I'd play you anywhere, anytime and then we can go from there."

It's a pity party, and I didn't bring anything.....  Sheesh, her whole fame derives from having been a tremendously accomplished woman player.....  It reminds of the McEnroe interviewer that asked him, "Why the qualifiers?" in speaking of Serena.  

Shall we engage deconstruction mode?  I know, a rhetorical question....

As you know, I'm a fan of the ladies' game, but this is chutzpah....  Annika's entire career is based upon her double helping of X chromosomes, so it seems whiny to complain about the downside of it all.  In fact, why else would you hire her to design your course?

But that last bit is priceless.... She's awfully anxious to show off her BSD, but who is it that she's challenging to play?  The prospective client or the other designers against whom she's competing?

Today in Curious Flashbacks - Another Tiger item is included in this curious (that seems to be the word of the day) item from the Irish Independent by Dermott Gilleece, in which he recounts this 2004 exchange with Tiger about a tournament golf ball:

DG: "Would you be prepared to play with an official tournament ball designated for each event?" 

TW: "What do you mean by 'tournament ball'? Do you mean with the same spin rate, same launch angle, hover, same speed of core?" 

DG: "I mean a uniform golf ball that would be the same for everybody." 

TW: "So everybody plays with the same spinning golf ball?"

DG: "Same golf ball."

TW: "I don't think that would be right because there's too many guys have different games and different types of swing. But I think you should put a limit on the speed of a golf ball, the spin-rate of a golf ball. You can increase the spin of the golf ball and make it so that we don't hit the ball as far. You can decrease the speed of the core. There's different ways you can get around it so that we're all playing under certain speed limits. Hopefully that will be the answer to a lot of the problems that we're having with golf course design around the world."

This is of interest, most obviously because of the simple fact that such concerns were discussed back in the more innocent days of 2004... but also because, without going into the technical long grass, Tiger had obviously put much thought into this and saw a specific way forward.

But other than sharing this and other anecdotes, the article is a bit unfocused...  For instance, this is the lede:

Holiday golfers of dubious competence will be familiar with the experience of dispatching golf balls to a watery grave on some fiendishly tricky par three on the Iberian Peninsula. Then, almost as the ultimate indignity, there would be the presence some holes later of industrious locals laden with the same, identifiable balls - for sale. 

In no other sport is the ball a more precious part of the player's equipment. While in the process of building a score, we will scavenge for it like it was hidden treasure in hostile terrain and almost leap with joy when its beguiling whiteness comes gloriously into view.

OK, but there isn't another sport where at the professional lever the player picks his own ball...

Nor does he seem aware of the history of our game, where it took many hours of manual labor to produce a featherie....  which was so expensive that only gentlemen could afford to play the game.  Factor that in as you read his anecdote about the punishment for stealing a ball....

I'd certainly like a deeper dive on this story:

When Frank Thomas was in charge of research for the USGA, he had special tests done on earlier equipment. This led to the shock discovery that the Tourney ball used by Nicklaus for several of his 18 Major triumphs, was so poorly constructed as to make the player's achievements with it border on the miraculous.

The Big Hurt worked for the USGA?  Who knew?

But here's where he goes off the tracks:

Remarkably, Woods seemed to have no interest in gaining an advantage over his contemporaries through superior equipment. In fact, his great rival Phil Mickelson publicly acknowledged as much. And there was telling evidence from Mark Calcavecchia, a foursomes partner at The Belfry in 2002. "I hit Tiger's ball at the Ryder Cup, and it went nowhere," he said.

What does all of this prove? For one thing, it demonstrates that Nicklaus and Woods were even better golfers than we imagined.

That's not really what it shows, though I'm not sure the lede could have been buried any deeper.

We can assume that Tiger and Jack competed against peers playing roughly comparable equipment.  The far more interesting question is how the changes in equipment affect our understand of their relative greatness....  My own belief is that technology has narrowed the differentiation in ball-striking, due to distance but also the reduction in spin, and that's a point in Tiger's favor in the Tiger v. Jack arguments that MJ thinks are unfair.

Mid-Am News - The USGA's Mid-Am was recently completed, and was seemingly a workingman's love fest, the final featuring a Firefighter vs. a Wedding Caterer.  The former won, but didn't have much time to celebrate:

Parziale, 30, had taken time off from his full-time job in the Brockton, Massachusetts

Fire Department to play this week's U.S. Mid-Am. He'd played in the event three times before, but had never won a match. This time, he won them all. 

"Oh, gosh, that'll be a good problem to have, I think," Parziale said when asked how he might work major championships in among his regular shifts. "None of that has sunk in, and everything is such a blur right now. I was trying to go through my phone, and everyone has just been so supportive, reaching out, following along, it's really been incredible."

The only way this could have been better would be if he were a Northern California firefighter, but then I'm guessing he's have withdrawn.  His father, also on the Brockton force, caddied for him, so that's be cute at Augusta and Shinnecock.

But this from the TC gang gives us pause to ponder:

4. Matt Parziale, a firefighter by day, won the U.S. Mid-Amateur last week to earn a spot in next year's U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur and Masters. Parziale played on the mini-tours for a few years but regained his amateur status in 2013. In fact, according to the USGA, 43 percent of the Mid-Am field consisted of reinstated amateurs. Do you have an issue with former pros taking on full-time amateurs?

I'm actually not sure how I feel about that...  Nor do the writers, as you'll see if you click through.

That should be enough for you folks, at least for today.....