Tuesday Tastings

A little of this, a little of that...

Dispatches From The Sponsorship Front - A/K/A, Contraction, Where Art Though.... Colonial lives, thanks to the tender mercies of Charles Schwab:

FORT WORTH, Texas – The longest-running PGA Tour event still played at its original site has a new title sponsor, one already deeply involved in golf. 

I'd have airbrushed out the D&D signage.

The PGA Tour and Colonial Country Club announced Monday that financial services provider Charles Schwab & Co. will take over as title sponsor starting in 2019. The four-year agreement goes through 2022. 

Local companies are backing the event after upscale grocer Dean and Deluca withdrew as title sponsor after only two tournaments of a six-year deal. The companies include American Airlines, AT&T, XTO Energy and Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway.

This year's playing will be The Fort Worth Invitational, and I'd encourage them to include either FW or Colonial in the new name.  If you have actual history, don't be shy about leading with it.

And no need to mourn to loss of Quicken Loans in D.C., as they have other plans with a venue upgrade:

Detroit -- The PGA Tour has ramped up negotiations in recent weeks on bringing a

tournament to the City of Detroit, and an agreement is believed to be close, according to a source with knowledge of the Tour's scheduling discussions. 

The source requested anonymity because an official announcement has not been made.
The tournament likely would debut in 2019, and be held at Detroit Golf Club, making it the first PGA Tour tournament to be played within the city limits. 

A high-ranking employee at Detroit Golf Club declined comment when reached by The Detroit News on Monday. 

A title-sponsor candidate would be Dan Gilbert's Quicken Loans, which sponsored The National in the Washington, D.C., area from 2014-17, but pulled out after last season’s event. Quicken Loans had told the PGA Tour that its priority is a tournament in Detroit.

I'll yield the floor to Shack with some background on the club:

The rumor mill has been suggesting a Quicken Loans event in the Detroit area is inevitable, so for me the pleasant surprise is the selection of Detroit Golf Club. 

With two Donald Ross courses and a delightfully old clubhouse, it's a grand and bold selection. There is plenty of space, though it'll be tough to see what happens to the short, delightful South Course around tournament time. For architecture geeks it'll be a great chance to go look at some very special Ross green complexes.

Better get those green-mapping sensors deployed quickly, as we wouldn't want to make the guys have to use their eyes....

But, as hinted above, if the D.C. event is to be replaced, I'm still not clear on the body count from schedule contraction.  I count three so far, the one playoff event, Houston and Firestone/Memphis.  Don't we need one more?  I have no shortage of suggestions, but strangely no one has called to ask.

You're Gonna Need More Lipstick - John Feinstein and Shane Ryan have been going back and forth on bad behavior, and the former is back with this dubious item:

A little fire in Sergio Garcia isn't necessarily a bad thing

Also, I hasten to add, not necessarily a good thing.  OK, let the man talk, I hear you say:

It didn’t take long for the video of Sergio Garcia hurling his driver off the fifth tee at TPC San Antonio on Friday to go viral. One caption read simply: “Bad Sergio.” 

Garcia, as the video shows, had to wade into bushes left of the tee to recover the driver, which clanked off a rock. From there, he shanked a chip from left of the green and ended up making bogey on the short par 4. He ended up missing the cut by a shot—the first time in 15 years (a remarkable stat in itself) he had missed back-to-back cuts. 

Perhaps Garcia’s meltdown was just the product of the pent-up frustration he kept inside two weeks ago at Augusta National when he hit five balls in the water on Thursday at No. 15 en route to making a 13. That pretty much finished any notion that he might win a second consecutive Masters. 

Regardless, while no one is going to applaud a club-throw, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to see Garcia show some passion and frustration. He’s been remarkably calm so far in 2018. In fact, other than a brief swing at a gorse bush at last year’s Open Championship, he’s been almost zen-like since his victory at Augusta a year ago.

I don't think John fully understands the concept of Zen, but so be it....And Sergio of course broke the first rule of Tommy Armour, who advised tossing the club down the fairway to avoid any excess walking....

But John, I completely get that we don't want these guys to enjoy playing badly, but was this also not a bad thing?

One Of These Is Unlike The Other - You perhaps heard that big-knocker Alvaro Quiros had a high finish at the Euro Tour event in Morocco last weekend.  We haven't seen much of the Spaniard lately, so good on him for working his way back to borderline relevance...  Lord knows, this game is hard.

Fresh off declaring DJ's insane drive at Kapalua the most important, significant, memorable golf shot ever, Brandel Chamblee is back to over-interpret the Spaniard's return to form:

Watching Alvaro Quiros finish second this past week in Morocco, I was reminded of just how rare it is for player to come back from the depths of golf hell. 

Quiros, a player of immense ability, hype and length, won the Dubai World Championship – his sixth win in four years – to close out 2011 and then went down the rabbit hole of trying to change his golf swing. He would miss 11 cuts in 2012 and either miss the cut or withdraw in another 41 European Tour events over the next four years. Because he hadn’t won a major championship, his epic backwards slide in the world rankings (435th prior to this past week) mostly went unnoticed – but it was far from unusual.

Immense ability?  get real, Brandel, he was a guy notable simply because he hit the ball far....  And he knew he had a very limited set of skills, and that's why changed his swing.  But look who Brandel is comparing him to:

The guy on the lft was the best player on the planet for a bit, and the guy on the right managed to win himself an Open Championship.  The guy in the middle won a few minor Euro Tour events, but never had the full complement of skills to project as a top ten player.

I think there are great stories to be told about the grinding that goes on among tour rabbits as fortunes wax and wane.... But it's a fairly significant category error to have Quiros compared to David Duval.

Doesn't Fit The Narrative -  Luke Kerr-Dineen is also guilty of over-interpreting data, though we can have a little fun with it:

That trend has been starting to slow recently, as investors fear the end of this bull market

run. Yet there's one small group of stocks that continue capturing the affection of Wall Street. 

And those are the golf stocks. 

At the close of trading on Friday, Callaway (which trades under the symbol ELY) had spiked 15 percent over a three-month period while Titleist's parent company Acushnet (trading under GOLF) was up 10 percent. The S&P 500 Index, by contrast, was down almost 6 percent over that time.

Say what?  I had been reliably informed that our game is in its death throes, so this can't be true.

No doubt Callaway has had the best recent product cycles, and they've even made a splash into the ball business with the Chrome Soft.  They at one point also had a valuable interest in Top Golf, and I'm not sure whether that's a factor in their stock price.  Acushnet, of course, has the most valuable book of business in our game, the Titleist ball business.

Though I'd caution against getting carried away with any growth forecasts.  Golf remains a niche sport...

Cheap Shots -  In which we maturely analyze the headlines of the day:

Finally, A Solution for Slow Play - PHOTOS: Goose attacks Michigan high school golfer during play

His last few years, he was a living statue at shortstop - WATCH: Derek Jeter's golf tournament had a living statue that hilariously terrified everyone.  Though I should thank him for the valuable parting gift of Giancarlo Stanton.

Braking News - By the numbers: Distance off the tee really does pay dividends

Payback For Elin? - Man arrested after chasing, striking woman with golf club and hitting police officer

Oops! He forgot to click his heels three times - Rory McIlroy on if he'll win the Masters: 'I truly believe it'll happen'

Here's to her making another one three years from now - Natalie Gulbis goes from considering retirement, to making first cut in three years

Per Vegas, the tooth fairy has better odds - Yoenis Cespedes of the N.Y. Mets believes golf could cure his batting ills