Weekend Wrap

I'm hoping that so much time has passed that you'll forget that I snuck out on Friday.... Of course the joke was on me, given the quality of my play.

JT in Full - That Thomas kid might just have himself a career, but see if you can spot the gaffe:

JEJU, South Korea (AP) — Justin Thomas beat Australia's Marc Leishman on the second playoff hole Sunday to win the inaugural CJ Cup in South Korea and cap his

breakout year on the PGA Tour. 

Thomas sealed his fifth PGA title in 2017 — and his first of the new 2017-18 PGA season — when he birdied the second extra hole and Leishman made bogey after finding the water. 

The pair went to a sudden-death playoff after completing the first U.S. PGA Tour regular-season event in South Korea tied at 9-under 279.

Mr. AP (the item is unbylined), you know that September 2017 is a distinct season from October 2017, and results thereof shall never be combined.

Now the Tour is struggling greatly with sponsorships at home, but seemingly uses its expansion to the four corners of the world as a misdirection.  Nothing to see here, literally as it turned out....

On the not so positive front, there was the collapse of Golf Channel's feed as players were headed to the second playoff hole and the announce team was reiterating the "big feel" of the event. Unfortunately, someone at the event forgot to extend the satellite window.

Oops!   Here's Golf Channel's statement:

The satellite path of the television feed provided by tournament organizers stopped feeding at 2:30 a.m. ET. Golf Channel personnel immediately alerted the tournament production group to the problem. We apologize to our loyal viewers who stayed up late to watch coverage live. The CJ Cup at Nine Bridges playoff will be available shortly in its entirety via Golf Channel Digital and will be replayed on Golf Channel today from 6-10 p.m. ET.

Maybe they assumed that if the event were as prestigious as they pretended, that it would necessarily have an 18-hole playoff on Monday?  And Shack has some fun with the nonsense, including the fact that CJ's majordomo comes with lots of baggage:

First, the good news. Justin Thomas won the inaugural CJ Cup in a playoff over Marc

Leishman to cap off a breakthrough season (Will Gray's report here). Wait, no, to kick off the new season. Either way, he's very pleased to be shutting down for a while to enjoy a well-earned vacation.

Also, wasn't it great to see CJ Group Chairman Lee Jay-Hyunon the 18th tee to help with the playoff draw? Still fresh off a pardon and a little time in the slammer, the Chairman seems to have recovered from a kidney transplant.

 It's a game for gentlemen....

Shack also has some tasty excerpts from the Monahan/Votaw pressers, including some delightful translation misfires:

Q: It’s great that we have got another event in Asia. From the next season, 2018-2019 season, you are going to make some big changes with possibly the playoffs coming soon and the PGA Championship moving. It looks to me as though you are going to free up more dates in the fall, in the post-labor day area. Are you planning more tournaments in Asia? Japan or China?

Jay Monahan: I would answer that by confirming that we have what you just mentioned, which is we have the commitment to move the Players to March and PGA Championship to May. You were right in that it does freeze some time in the fall. The next step we are going to take in order affect change is to essentially complete other parts of our schedule the tournaments that exist in that pre-labor day window in the U.S.

But we are a global game. If you follow the logic trail of being here, you look at the fact that you’ve got 3.5 million participants and 36 million rounds of golf played, we love what we are seeing in terms of emergency screening technology, the fact that we’ve got such a rich number of players.

Most of you will struggle to understand the importance of emergency screening technology, but I can assure you it was a killer point in the original Klingon.  It also distracts from the niggling detail that those 3.5 million souls are barely scratching out ten rounds per annum...

No doubt it's a global game with strong interest in Asia.  As to whether this Tour needs to be running events there, I'll defer to the six people watching when the screens went dark.

Q: Are you surprised to see only a few foreign press covering the event, given that this event is quite significant? Why do you think that there aren’t many global press covering this event here? 

Ty Votaw: There is no question that we are very excited about the opportunity to be here, first time being an official event. The media landscape in all countries is changing and as you know, the golf media in the US is also changing with decreased budgets and decreased stabilities to cover even some domestic events in the US. We now have opportunities with other platforms and other areas.

Significant?  Oh, never mind.... There's lots more discussion in Geoff's post, if you can't get enough of the opportunities and platforms....

Hopefully Jay Monahan is saying what he needs to say to buy time to fox the hot mess that Nurse Ratched left him.....

Meanwhile, On the Home Front - Because things are all coming together so well in its traditional market:

The upscale food chain that turned “The Colonial” into the “Dean & DeLuca Invitational at Colonial” is on the verge of pulling out early, two years into its six-year commitment

with the event. 

Dean & DeLuca has notified the PGA Tour and Colonial that it may be unable to meet its financial obligations for tournament sponsorship in 2018, according to a letter from Colonial Country Club president Rob Doby to its members obtained by the Star-Telegram. 

“While certainly disappointing, it is not a situation that we as a Membership and Staff are unfamiliar with,” Doby wrote. 

The board is scheduled to meet with Dean & DeLuca representatives as early as Thursday about potentially renegotiating the terms of the contract, but at this point the club is preparing to look elsewhere for a title sponsor.

For those of you keeping a scorecard, that's three events in the coming season with no sponsors, including the Houston and D.C. stops.

We know contraction is coming, we just didn't expect so many events to be volunteering....

Sergio in Full - Perhaps it's from watching too much baseball, but doesn't the home team always win?

In the just over six months that have passed since Sergio Garcia famously won the

Masters, the Spaniard has had a lot going on. There was marriage to new wife, Angela. There is impending fatherhood to look forward to next March. And there has been much wearing of the iconic green jacket at functions around the globe. All have kept the 37-year-old busy off the course. 

On the course things have been a little less exciting. A tie for 10th at the Tour Championship was Garcia’s best post-Augusta finish on the 2016-'17 PGA Tour. And T-2 behind Andres Romero at the BMW International Open in Germany last June has been his best effort on the European circuit. Not awful by any means, but it would be fair to say that finally breaking his long-standing major duck has hardly been the prelude to a string of further and immediate successes. 

Until now anyway.

Doesn't he know not to wear a red belt after Labor Day?

Though I do think the Tour Confidential guys are a bit overly optimistic:

3. On Sunday, Sergio Garcia won the Valderrama Masters for his third victory of the year (he also won the Omega Dubai Desert Classic in February and, of course, the Masters). Now married, with a major title and a baby on the way, is it possible that the 37-year-old Garcia's best golf is still ahead of him?

Shipnuck: It's fun to think so. Sergio has always been such a flighty guy and clearly he's never been happier off the golf course, so why not? His swing still has the same explosive athleticism of his youth, and he seems to have conquered his demons on the greens. I can't wait to see where he goes from here.

Perhaps.  I'm not especially down on Sergio, though the combination of family distractions and equipment changes makes me think the lights are flashing yellow.  And it's just so hard to win out there....  In fact, I'm so happy for him that as long as he doesn't spit in another cup I'll lay off him.

This Week in Rules Fiascoes - Did you hear about the Ladies' event this week?  OK, I see now what a silly question that is... here's the only reason this might have come to your attention:

The deluge of rules controversies is ever-present in the pro golf game, but if they don't occur at a major, they often get overlooked. The bizarre brouhaha at this week's Korean LPGA event is an exception. 

During the first round of the KB Financial Star Championship at Black Stone Golf Club, players struggled to identify exactly where the fringes ended and the greens began. Two players, Choi Hye-jin and Park You-na, accidentally marked and picked up their balls in the fringe thinking they were on the green, resulting in two-stroke penalties for each player, according to a report by Reuters. 

Apparently four other golfers had made the same error in round 1 but were not penalized. Given the unequal nature of the enforcement of this rule, officials later decided to rescind the two penalties. That's where the controversy begins. 

The decision caused an uproar among the golfers in the field, with impassioned arguments and threats of quitting on both sides of the debate. After a long meeting Thursday night, the officials decided the best course of action was to erase the first round scores entirely. 

According to Reuters, the controversy was so bad that the lead rules official Choi Jin-ha resigned from his position.

Can't anybody here play this game?  The Tour Confidential panel took this on, though I think it was the question that was the misfire:

5. A Korea LPGA event wiped out its first-round scores after some players were penalized for marking their ball on the fringe — players had trouble deciphering the green from the fringe — while others were not. (The head rules official even resigned due to the fiasco.) Where does this episode rank in the pantheon of bizarre rules controversies?

This to me is not really a rules issue, in the sense that there's nothing wrong with the rules.  There seems to have been a misfire in the course set-up and with the folks administering the event, and I can't imagine how this wasn't picked up during practice rounds and the Pro-am.

But this, as well as the satellite feed issue from Korea, is what inevitably happens when an organization is spread too thin.

Oh, and then there was Scot McCarron..... Whatcha gonna do?  The ball was in play.

Wither Tiger - It is officially the Silly Season, and that TC panel got another silly question:

2. Last Sunday, Tiger Woods tweeted a video of himself hitting driver, and a day later reports surfaced saying he was cleared to resume full golf activity. His former coach, Hank Haney, said on Twitter that Tiger's new move is "a swing he could win with." Are you more bullish about Tiger's prospects than you were, say, two weeks ago?

Given that he hasn't had either a sex scandal or a DUI in the last two weeks, sure....  But that's setting the bar pretty damn low.

Bob Harig takes a shot at the meaning of the video here, but it's all rather tiresome.  I think the deepest meaning is probably psychological...  Any time he's willing to share and actually has a golf club in his hands is a positive.  That said, we know nothing about the state of his body and whether it can withstand the punishment of Tour speed swings.

Get 'Em While You Can - It's Baaaaack:

The buzz in the GolfWRX forums this afternoon: Costco’s Kirkland Signature Four-

Piece Urethane Golf Ball is back in stock.

Now available to members only online, the K Sigs are still retailing for $29.99 per two dozen; $4.99 shipping & handling. Orders are limited to two (24-packs) per member, and of course, supplied are limited. 

Referred to colloquially as a “K Sig” by its many admirers, Costco, it seems, has no intention of halting production of the controversial, disruptive golf ball.

A three-piece, 338 dimple golf ball appeared on the USGA’s conforming ball list over the summer, leading many to speculate that the embattled four-piece ball had indeed met its eternal demise. 

However, the packaging for this Four-Piece Urethane Golf Ball is the same as the popular, and routinely out-of-stock ball whose production was halted in January.

I'm not sure whether this is the same ball as the original, which came from excess TaylorMade cores.  It's of course also interesting that they seem to be moving forward despite the certainty of a protracted legal battle with the folks at Acushnet.   

A Tale of Two Nines - Jorge Fernandez-Valdes shot a ho-hum two-under 70 in the Lexus Peru Open over the weekend... and by ho-hum I of course mean deliciously wacky...  Not a card we see often...or ever:

I'd make a joke about the ill-timed swing juice at the turn, but that's not really how it went down....  He was fine until that 18th hole, and I haven't seen a description of that quad went down... But it no doubt cost him a pretty penny.