Bonus Weekend Content

I sat down an hour ago to bang out some of those random musings you so crave, and had no Internet.  I know, a cruel twist of fate....  Even more curious is that, while Internet service has resumed, I get a security warning when I go to GeoffShackelford.com..... Good thing we rarely link to him.

Tiger Scat - This Golfweek header seems a bit much:

Resilient Tiger Woods in the hunt at Honda Classic entering weekend

I'm fine with the "R-word", Tiger gets high marks for grinding....  It's just that I have a higher standard for the "H-word".

To me, Mike Bamberger asks the most interesting of questions:

A different game: How much patience will Tiger Woods have if golf never becomes easy for him again?

 Although I've phrased it differently, how much tolerance will he have for sucking....  But same point.

Back in the day, Tiger Woods would suck the life out of tournaments. It was all Tiger. The most extreme example of that phenomenon was at the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble

Beach, which he won by 15 shots. It was a sight to behold, one pure shot after another, with nary a practice swing. The whole thing was grooved and programmed. He was taking over the national Open in a way nobody had ever even imagined was possible. It was exciting. Also very boring. 

On a sun-drenched Friday afternoon at the Honda, Woods sucked the life out of this tournament in an altogether different way. Probably 90 percent of the walking spectators on the course were following Woods, not because he is dominant, not even because he was once dominant, but because he’s now a lot more like us: frail, flawed, trying to fit in. It’s poignant. It was only nine months ago that he was the subject of a gruesome Palm Beach County police mug shot. Here, a half-dozen or more uniformed police officers are walking inside the ropes with Woods.

I'm not sure it was necessary to bring up the mug shot, and I'm usually the one accused of overt hostility to that man....

Could Woods possibly win again? Or is he destined to do what he did here on Thursday and Friday, hit a bunch of vintage shots and others that were just plain terrible and piece together rounds that look ordinary on the card and extraordinary if you saw what he had to do to post them? How much patience will he have if golf never becomes easy for him again?

That's the same sense I had as well, that the bad shots were inexplicably bad....

“It was a good grind out there,” Woods told Golf Channel when his Friday round was

over. In fact, he said those words twice. Well, he was always a grinder, maybe the best grinder the game has ever seen. He’s shown that, for these two rounds in South Florida, anyhow, he still has the grinder mentality. 

But he didn’t win that 2000 U.S. Open by 15 because of his ability to grind. He’s golf’s 79/14 man because he had magic in every one of his 14 clubs, magic and skill and strength and speed.

OK, but that grinding is necessary if he's to win out there again.  Admittedly, not sufficient.....

I'm back after another Internet outage....  Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.  Let's catch up on some other things we missed while I was off in Wyoming.

Crowd Sourced - From Sunday night's Tour Confidential Panel:

3. After the third round at the Genesis Open, Justin Thomas said the raucous crowds were a problem, as they have been at other events this season. “At the end it got a little out of hand," he said. "I guess it's a part of it now, unfortunately. I wish it wasn't. I wish people didn't think it was so amusing to yell and all that stuff while we're trying to hit shots and play." Is Thomas onto something? Are PGA Tour galleries getting too frisky?

Sens: Careful what you wish for. You want to grow the game and broaden the audience? The audience you attract isn’t going to be as steeped in polite golf-clap traditions. Different tournaments also seem to attract a different level of yahoo-ism. Add Tiger’s return to the mix, and the electricity in the atmosphere cranks up further. So yeah, I would say more and more spectators could probably use an etiquette lesson. If you’re yelling in someone’s backswing, you don’t belong there. And if you’re yelling 'You da man' or 'Mashed potatoes!' specifically, I’m not sure you belong anywhere.

You're gonna have to pry those mashed potatoes from my cold, dead fingers.

Kidding aside, I believe this to be a very interesting subject, as the "Grow the game" mantra is accepted without reservation.  Whereas, back here on planet Earth, the process of growing the game benefits some but might annoy or impair others.

Alan Shipnuck had an interesting take on this subject in his weekly mailbag:

Should golf really be played in complete silence? What other sport demands fans keep still and quiet? -@WadePretorius 

Tennis, at least for every serve. But to me, the prevailing silence is the most intense part of being at a golf tournament. In this noisy, cluttered world we live in, you simply never get to experience that kind of stillness while being among so many people. When I took my kids to their first tournaments this was their favorite part, the delicious tension that comes with having to be utterly silent and then the release of screaming your head off when something cool happens. I'd hate for golf to lose this thing that makes it so unique. As we're seeing, all it takes is a couple of yahoos to shatter the experience for the players and fans. I hope aggressive actions by the Tour and zero-tolerance policing by fellow fans will get us through this fraught moment.

At the risk of being pegged as a senile curmudgeon, what if golf is better as a niche sport?   Were it any other business, I'd no doubt be spouting the notion that if you're not growing, you're dying.  It's further true, as noted by another writer on the TC panel, that every new generation of players will bring their own fans into the mix and of course that game has always evolved.  I guess the distinction is between drawing new folks into our game, as opposed to changing our game in the misguided belief that otherwise our game will wither and die.

United We Post - Golf.com convened a special addition Tour Confidential panel to discuss.....this?

1. The USGA and R&A have announced a major handicap overhaul, with the implementation of a new World Handicap System beginning in 2020. How significant is this move? And do you feel there’s a need for a uniform global system?

Really?  

Josh Sens: The more serious you are about golf, the more significant it is. For the casual player, I don’t see it as a game-changer. But if you you play in a lot of handicapped

matches and events, it’s a bit deal. And if you play in periodic matches against a certain sandbagger from Wales, as I do, it’s also a new dawn. Sorry, Stephen. Now you have to put in all your scores, not just the ones from “competition.” No more 15 index for you. You’ll be closer to the 5 you really are. As for “need,” I say it was needed in the same way that I need a drink every night: it’s a good thing and I’m all for it, but the world also would have survived without it.

Joe Passov: This is a pretty serious overhaul of the handicapping system, but not in a stop-the-presses way, as we experienced with last year’s proposed rules changes for 2019. Kudos to the USGA and the other ruling bodies for putting more “real world” emphasis on how we calculate scores and handicaps. As far as uniformity, I’m meh. I play all over the world, and my modest handicap seldom encounters any issues with other players and other clubs. And in fact, I always kind of liked the variety from country to country. Knowing what SSS stood for (Standard Scratch Score, in the UK) always scored me free beer in local golf trivia contests.

Standard Scratch this, Joe!

This is both appropriate and a complete nothingburger.....  I guess I'm a big winner, because I can now post all of those horrible scores I shoot in Scotland and Ireland.  Carpe diem, golf buddies, after this goes into effect you might want to avoid those $5 Nassau's with me after a trip until my index regresses to the mean.

2. What’s the highlight of the new system?

Sens: See above. I’m a fan of the change that requires our counterparts across the pond to post competitive and recreational scores. That old rule was a vestige of a bygone era. The new one makes the system more reflective of how the game is actually played today. Also: I dig the new limits placed on sudden upward movements in handicap. It makes it harder for willful sandbaggers to pad their handicaps, and for unusual runs of poor play to distort a player’s index.

Where has Josh been playing?  Because my experience is that weeks of bad scores don't move the needle, but one good one pushes me down a full tick.

Bamberger: Ultimately, it’s simpler. Net double bogey is the highest score you can make. Perfect.

Have the done away with Equitable Stroke Control?  I'll go to my grave not understand how seven can be your maximum score on a hole regardless of its par....

3. Do you suspect the changes will encourage more golfers to keep a handicap?

Is that a good thing?  Here's one answer to that query which leaves me cold:

Bastable: I like that you need only play 54 holes to get your handicap up and running as opposed to 90 under the current system. If you're ambitious (and fit) enough, you can set up a handicap in a single day. The built-in algorithm that prevents a run of unusually poor scores from juicing your handicap also makes sense. That means one or two off-weeks — and we've all been there — won't send your number surging.

Nirvana!   I know all Millennials have ADD, but what purpose is served in establishing handicaps based on such a small sample size.  That's exactly what we've been told is the problem with the U.K. system.

I'm going to leave you here and we'll talk again soon....