Bonus Weekend Content

Just a few stray thoughts, with the tape of the Australian Open women's final playing in the background.  Do we think Rory watched it?  How about Erica?

Cutting It Close - I suppose it was more entertaining than the average Friday on Tour, but let's start with with Patrick Reed's acknowledgement of his role in the proceedings:

Patrick Reed has never disguised his hero worship of Woods. Three years ago they were paired together at Torrey and Reed had to watch with abject horror while Tiger suffered

through the chips yips. It was the golfing equivalent of finding out that Santa Claus is actually your mom. Reed and Woods were paired again this year, and even though he dusted his idol by four shots during the first round, Reed was giddy talking about Tiger’s play afterward. It was a sharp contrast to a decade earlier, when Ernie Els, Sergio Garcia, et al were palpably oppressed having to continually discuss Woods’s greatness. After answering a bunch of questions about nothing but Tiger, Reed excused himself to sign autographs. As he was walking away a reporter said, "By the way, good round.” Reed laughed at the joke and said, "Don’t worry, I know it’s all about Tiger.”

It is, Patrick, though I took time out of blogging the first round to worry about your game.   

That's from Alan Shipnuck's game piece, in which there's much to mull over.  First, the inevitable "G" word:

2. Tiger can still grind 

The back-nine of his second round was about as tense as a Friday afternoon in January

can be. After playing his first nine hole holes (having begun on the North Course’s 10th hole) in two over par, Woods and everybody else knew he needed a rally to have a chance of making the cut. Birdies at the 1st and 5th had the crowd in full-throat, but on the 6th hole Woods whipsawed a drive miles right. Still well short of the green after his recovery shot, Tiger summoned an impossibly towering pitch that stopped stone-dead on the devilishly firm green to save par. 

“That was special,” said Charley Hoffman, citing that shot as Woods’s best of the round. “That’s who he is.”

Well, I'll stipulate that that's who he used to be.... But there's little doubt that his making the cut is a result of that short game.  And quite a bit of luck.... 

This to me gets at the heart of the matter:

3. Tiger’s up-and-down play should bring a healthy recalibrating of expectations 

It is utter madness that the current odds at vegasinsider.com list Woods at 15-1 to win the Masters, with only Dustin Johnson (8/1), Jordan Spieth (8/1) and Rory McIlroy (10/1) as heavier favorites. A couple of days before the Farmers Insurance Open began, Tiger’s old swing coach Hank Haney predicted a top-10 finish. From a guy who hadn’t played a meaningful golf tournament in a year. On a tough, tight, penal golf course. Riiiiight.

Yup.  Folks were way too giddy after Albany, so where do we stand, Alan?

While it’s fun to partake in all of the hype, the hard facts are that Woods is 42-years-old with a fused spinal cord. It is indeed encouraging that he is generating more clubhead speed than before his back surgeries began, but over the first two rounds at Torrey Pines there was a perceptible awkwardness to many of his follow-throughs. He had a dreaded two-way miss going with his driver and his full-swing wedge shots were maddeningly imprecise. Across the first two rounds, he ranked 125th in driving accuracy, hitting only 39.3% of fairways, while reaching 58.3% of greens in regulation, to rank 101st. (On the bright side, his wedge play around the greens was reliable and occasionally spectacular, and both Hoffman and Woods chalked up his bogey on the 8th hole to a maddeningly firm green.)

Woods recently jettisoned his swing coach, Chris Como, and he is clearly still trying to figure out how to play with a reconstituted spinal cord. “I’d like to meet somebody [else] who can swing it over 120 miles and hour with a fused back,” he said during a pre-tournament press conference. “Do you know anybody? That’s what I mean, no one understands that. So I have to rely on my own feels and play around with what my body can and cannot do. It’s not going to look like it used to. I don’t have the mobility that I used to and that’s just the reality. Now it’s just a matter of what can I do, and that [takes] practicing and getting my feels and trusting and experimenting a lot to try to figure out what can this body do.”

This is going to remain a work in progress, perhaps for the rest of this season. It is folly to expect too much too soon.

Tiger talking about his swing has always been a curious thing....  remember a few years ago, when he had to retool his short game to match the "release point" of his new swing?  Yeah, I'm still scratching my head over that one.... He retains enough flexibility to generate that clubhead speed, you would think the GOAT could settle on a swing within any constraints.

Alan also channels his inner Jaime Diaz (forgive the long excerpt, but he does have great anecdotes):

5. For all the talk about Woods’s back, this comeback may be determined by the metaphysical

Tiger has not been the same player or person since Thanksgiving 2009. Something fundamentally changed after he suffered the worst public shaming of the Internet age. This new frailty played out between the ropes even in 2012 and ’13, when he was still whole, at least physically. Woods won eight times during those two seasons and summited the World Ranking, but he repeatedly failed in the tournaments that mean everything to him, the major championships, making the kinds of miscues that were unfathomable before the scandal, when his mental toughness was his greatest difference-maker.

He developed a palpable stage-fright, the nadir coming on his first hole at the 2015 British Open, on the Old Course, site of some of his greatest triumphs. On the tee, wielding a mid-iron, he hit it so fat the gouge that was left behind became a macabre monument to a lost genius. Then Tiger duffed his next shot into the burn, effectively ending his tournament after one hole. Now he has to transcend more humiliations, returning to golf just months removed from both hacked nude photos and the dash cam video of his DUI being on public display.

On Friday morning, Tiger was pounding his driver long and straight when he was just one of the guys on the driving range, but there was nowhere to hide once his second round began, on the North Course’s 10th hole, a benign par-5 he needed to birdie to build some momentum. Instead, he hooked his drive so far left (60 yards? 70 yards?) it almost reached a bunker on the South Course’s first hole. On the 13th hole Woods uncorked another vicious hook, into the canyon. That necessitated a penalty drop and begat a double bogey. On the 17th hole he blocked a drive 40 yards right, squandering another par-5.

After a lovely up-and-down for birdie on the par-5 5th hole, which gave him a fighting chance to make the cut, Woods flared a drive on number six so far right it again almost reached the wrong hole. (He managed to save par with an against-all-odds pitch.) No player is going to hit every fairway but misses of this magnitude feel more like much more than technical imprecision.

Is there no statute of limitations on that fire hydrant?  It's almost a decade ago and he's made his peace with his family....

Also, as I've long wanted to ask Jaime, Y.E. Yang predates the fire hydrant, but is never mentioned in this context.  

Amusingly, he give Elin props in another context....

Josh Berhow again posts nine number from the round, though this seems more of stretch than yesterday.  This does provide some needed perspective:

886 — Days between Tiger's last PGA Tour weekend round — Aug. 23, 2015 — and his next, Saturday.

But this one understates the issue:

3 — Fairways hit out of 14, which includes only one on his final nine.

I'd love a stat that told us by how many aggregate yards he missed the centerline of the fairways.... He missed badly and both ways.  

In some ways, Tiger's play has been the opposite of expectations.  The concern about is short game has obviously not proven out, though there was that one poor chip from a tight lie, but his full swing looks to be a mess.  I expected a little better yesterday, but I'm guessing so did he.

The Show -  Lots of coverage of the annual PGA Merchandise Show from Orlando, such as this Golf Digest offering of cool stuff.  Your mileage may vary there, but who doesn't like the super luxe aisle, with the inevitable pimped out golf carts:

The Golf Digest gearheads take a shot at the broader trends to be discerned from the show, such as:

Technology Continues to Expand Our Game

So much for paralysis by overanalysis. After years of existence on the sport’s periphery, the application of statistics and data-driven technology is no longer a novelty in golf. Judging by its presence at the show, it’s a mechanism at the heart of all things golf, be it instruction, management, equipment or just plain recreation. Examples include more in-depth output from launch monitor and simulator readings; digital apps that track your playing performance with your clubs and share the info with your mobile device; smart systems in golf carts to identify what parts of the course act as bottle necks; and suits that deduce what parts of your golf swing are causing problems like hooks and blocks. These breakthroughs have been talked about for years, although always using the future tense. As this week’s show proved, the future is now. —Joel Beall

Don't we kind of hear this every year?

But is this because they're all going on Shark Tank?

The Inventor’s Spotlight Lacked its Usual Punch

The designated area for entrepreneurs and creators is one of the most popular and intriguing areas of the convention floor. Though that remained the case in 2018, the showcased appeared to have fewer participants than usual. Two exhibitors blamed the costs associated with a booth license for the sparse crowd; another mentioned the ease of direct marketing to one’s target base via email, social media and other digital channels versus the cattle call environment of the show. While the former is understandable, there’s still value in the face-to-face rapport the show offers. Moreover, the PGA of America does its best to give this group its own platform, highlighted by a separate awards ceremony. With some of the show’s most memorable products and pitches deriving from the Inventor’s Spotlight (to say nothing of the cast of characters it tends to attract), let’s hope this field gets a bit of rejuvenation in 2019. —JB

Or perhaps it's because, as it appears in this photo, they were displaying in the mens' room:

Bad Lie of The Week - Shack has lots of good photos in his latest Instagram round-up, featuring Joe Louis of all people.

But how about this lie that Paul Dunne drew at Emirates Golf Club:

I'm kinda curious as to how this one turned out....  That's all for today, folks.