Thursday Thoughts

A slowish day in the golf world, but we'll cover it all for ya...

In The "Zona - There's no confirmation that the Arizona Wildcats have adopted While We're Young™ as their slogan, but that Monday eagle proved to be the defining moment:

The Wildcats battled all Wednesday afternoon with top-ranked Alabama in the NCAA Championship final and came out on top in a tense showdown. The Crimson Tide took a

2-1 lead after the first three matches, but Arizona sophomore Sandra Nordaas defeated Angelica Moresco, 1 up, to make it 2-2. 

Then, junior Haley Moore rolled in a 4-foot birdie putt on her first playoff hole, the par-5 18th, against Lakareber Abe in the anchor match to secure Arizona a 3-2 victory and its first national title in 18 years. 

If only that turbulent final was the most difficult point of Arizona’s quest. The Wildcats nearly collapsed Monday on the final day of stroke play, falling from third at the day’s beginning to outside the top-eight cut to advance to match play as the action wound down. 

That is until junior Bianca Pagdanganan found the par-5 18th in two and drained a curling 25-foot eagle putt to save the team’s title chances. That eagle got Arizona to 33 over and into a playoff with Baylor for the eighth and final spot in match play. The Wildcats won.

Alas, the girls have Shack spewing spittle at his monitor:

They covered the television spectrum of awful to amazing over the course of Wednesday's NCAA Women's Golf Championship: there was the moribund Karsten Creek, a soulless Fazio design just oozing with ryegrass overseed and a level of drabness that exceeds even his established standards for expensive mediocrity. 

Worse, it was a course devoid of spectators--beyond family members and officials. The only real sound came from a plane flying above to capture great aerials.

All day there were players playing each shot as if it were their last, consulting pace of play-expediting rangefinders, only to then go to their yardage books and coaching insights as we waited, waited and waited for a golf shot to be struck. Then they got to the greens where they looked into green books and we viewers waited more to see golf shots. 

It was enough to make anyone despise what has become of the college game.

All true enough, though despise strikes me as a bit strong given the context.  Next up, the young men, though at the same dreary venue.

Shinny As Savior - Doug Ferguson with this hopeful note in his lede:

If the U.S. Open was suffering from an identity crisis, then a return to Shinnecock Hills should cure that.

Perhaps?  Though that might be asking a lot of any venue...  Doug wants it to erase memories of Chambers Bay '15 and Erin Hills '17, while Mike Davis wants to purge our collective memories of Shinnecock '04.

Mike Davis, the chief executive of the USGA, likes to think in different terms. One message from Monday's preview of the 118th U.S. Open was a stronger effort to stay

true to the architecture. In other words, allow the course to play the way the architect intended and remain what the USGA endlessly calls the "ultimate test." 

Davis conceded that the identity of the U.S. Open is more closely linked to the historic nature of the course more than how it is set up. 

"Jack played it more as a cookie-cutter setup," Davis said. "What we've tried to do is more respectful to architecture, so we've done that here. In '04, some of these fairways were so narrow that you had fairway bunkers 10 yards out in the rough. That doesn't make sense." 

He referenced the 1950s, when Joe Dey was running the USGA and Richard Tufts was the president, and there was a blueprint for the U.S. Open. 

"It didn't matter if it was Oakland Hills or Winged Foot," Davis said. "There would be fairways a certain width, thick rough, fast greens."

That cookie-cutter set-up survived into the 80's and 90', and we can only guess at the cause of the nostalgia coming from certain sources.  Geoff takes a first pass at explaining the seeming disconnect:

--Going to links style modern courses devoid of history (Chambers Bay, Erin Hills) 

--Ending the days of six inch rough off the fairways and trying to eliminate setup boondoggles 

--The brief move away from classic inland, tree-lined tests 

--Player or former player disdain for the USGA and/or Mike Davis and venting

There's way too much going on here to resolve in the moment, though that won't stop me from taking a brief crack at it.

 As Shack notes in his last bullet, there's always been a tension between the touring pros and the USGA, which is mostly a healthy thing.  But Geoff doesn't mention the series of rules infractions, think DJ and Brittany Lang, which the players just rightfully hate, especially since the USGA beclowned itself in the administration of its rules.

Secondly, with the benefit of hindsight, it was probably hubris to work in two of those non-traditional venues in such a short period, especially when the first presented such an agronomic disaster.  But, lost in that is that the return to Merion in 2013 might have been worse than the two new venues.

Fact is were at a juncture where I wouldn't know what to advise the USGA in terms of venues and set-up.  Having allowed equipment to evolve to the current state, how should the USGA set up its venues?  Wall-to-wall 6" rough off ribbon fairways can provide a stern test, though it's a dreary, one dimensional test....  It's a hell of a conundrum, no?

Shinny can work if they get some wind, but most Open venues are inland and don't feature wind as a primary defense.  I wouldn't want Mike Davis' job, though it is a self-inflicted wound.

Over To Alan - For his weekly mailbag feature...  Being the Maestro of of the Effortless Segue, we'll start with a U.S. Open query:

Do you think the USGA brass privately hates the reality of the PGA move to May, as the U.S. Open may lose some of the pre-championship anticipation/coverage that came from having 9 weeks between majors? #AskAlan -@TheBrianEvenson 

No doubt — I've personally heard a couple of blue coats kvetching about this. The build-up from the Masters to the U.S. Open was always exquisite torture. Now that our national championship is crammed between the PGA and Open Championship it's going to feel a little less special.

Perhaps, but I'm thinking the PGA should be the least of the blue coats' worries....  The PGA is like Tuesday (Seinfeld reference for those not attuned to the zeitgeist), it has no feel.

Why does the golf media try to make NCAA golf a thing? Unless you have a connection to a school playing, who cares? #AskAlan -Gus (@CCGabriel1) 

Um, we make it a thing because it's awesome. Tons of young talent, a quirky format, the aroused passions that comes only from college sports — what's not to like? Years ago I made a cameo when the NCAAs were at Riviera but I've decided next year I'm gonna go and provide wall-to-wall coverage. Hopefully I can change your feelings about the event!

Because Team Match Play rocks.  If you'd prefer to watch the Colonial, have at it....

What happened to all the good golfer nicknames? Is Sergio the Shaky Spaniard? What would DJ's nickname be? - John (by text through high school friend @anoorani) 

The former Golf World writer Jim Moriarity once described DJ as possessing "the oily gait of a jungle cat" — Oily Jungle Cat is a pretty bitchin' nickname, though I think Tron Carter of NoLayingUp may be the only person who has ever actually called Johnson that. I would offer Big Smooth if North Carolina basketball legend Sam Perkins hadn't already claimed it. I don't know, I think I'll solicit further ideas via Twitter. I agree that the golden age of golf nicknames has passed: Dr. Dirt (Brad Bryant), Mr. X (Miller Barber), Boss of the Moss (Loren Roberts), Boom Boom (Fred Couples), Mofo (Jim Thorpe), The Walrus (Craig Stadler), The Black Knight (Gary Player). "Beef" (Andrew Johnston) is a decent nickname. I like Lumpy (Tim Herron) and Smallrus (Kevin Stadler), too. But beyond these jolly, big-bodied fellows, it's pretty slim pickings.

First and foremost, Sergio is the Surly Spaniard....If only for this career highlight.

But I think the general trend holds true for most sports, no?  

Now a couple about last week's venue:

Does Trinity Forest realize how bad it looked on TV? #AskAlan -@PurdueMatt 

Well, one of the worst courses on the planet for watching tournament golf — on TV and in person — is the Old Course. Television flattens out the terrain and the course loses much of its charm and nuance. I'm afraid Trinity suffered the same fate. But once the ball was rolling on the ground, whether it was the rippling fairways or heaving greens, the course came alive. I thought it was a refreshing change of pace. 

The PGA Tour caved again to complaints from the players about Trinity playing too firm and fast. They watered the course on Thursday. The course was not designed to play wet and slow. Will the TURE ever stop catering to whiners? -Bill (@DjohnsonSwag)

Well, the Tour exists to serve those whiners, so probably not. But the softening of the course was more of an indictment of pace of play than it was an architectural or agrinomical decision. Basically, Tour players love caveman golf: get a number, make the same swing over and over to hit it that exact distance. Trinity asked different questions, and demanded a lot of thinking and strategizing for each shot. No wonder things slowed to a glacial pace — even with a softened course the first two rounds took around 5.5 hours to play. If the course had been a racetrack and balls were bouncing all over the place it would've taken even longer, which is a bad product. And so the course was slowed down. Sigh.

 Accepting that the nature of Trinity, like a links, is uniquely ill-suited to a camera lens, I thought it actually looked pretty good on my screen.  Of course, I'm a cheap date when it comes to anything links-like.

It's also tough to criticize the Tour for their first-day set up at new, non-traditional venue, though the bigger issue might have been the lack of wind.  Without a breeze, these guys are gonna torch the place, because they Live Under Par™.

And behold another of those signature segues:

If I'm living life "under par," doesn't that mean I'm below average? #AskAlan -@daver40

That's more like subpar, which is a tiny bit different in useage. Either way, I'm in awe of how hard the Tour is trying to make this work but, really, the whole thing feels… slightly below average.

Slightly?  It's really so bad and so forced that it's become a go-to quip.  Although I think a pool on the date it's quietly put out to pasture might be good fun.

Does Danny Willett make it back into the world top 30 again (ever) ??? #AskAlan -Andrew (@a_h_davies) 

Right now I'm working on a story about Shaun Micheel and it's really poignant when he talks about the burden of his similarly unexpected breakthrough, how the pressure (internal and applied by peers and reporters) robbed him of his love of the game. No doubt Willett is felling pretty beaten-down, too. But he's only 30, and the Masters win wasn't a fluke — he already had four Euro tour victories by then. So Willett has plenty of time and plenty of game to be the player he once was. But part of what made him so good was a chip on his shoulder the size of Yorkshire. He was a gritty grinder who played with a palpable hunger. Now he's financially secure and has a lifetime invitation to the toast of Augusta. Does Willett want to grind hard enough to fight his way back? Only he knows the answer to that.

Mebbe, though I've begun to wonder if we over-interpreted his play leading up to The Masters.  Much water over the bridge, and nothing indicating any kind of form on offer.

Though perhaps this might cheer him up?

Ever since Spieth threw away a prime opportunity to win back-to-back green jackets by dunking two shots into Rae's Creek on the 12th hole in the final round, he's had to face

questions about it. Two years and one major victory later, the questions kept coming Wednesday at the Fort Worth Invitational. 

In his press conference, Spieth attempted to explain how his perspective has changed, especially when it comes to handling the dramatic highs and lows of life on Tour. He called the 2016 Masters the "low point in my golf career."

"Even though it was still a tremendous week and still was a really good year in 2016, that kind of haunted me and all the questioning and everything. I let it tear me down a little bit. I kind of lost a little bit of my own freedom, thoughts on who I am as a person and as a golfer," Spieth said about the aftermath following his loss at Augusta.

He then went even further, saying, "I loathed going to the golf course for a while."

Meanwhile, the rest of us loath watching Jordan putt four-footers...  Enough with the drama, no?

 Back to Alan:

Alan, if you would be so kind, could you please retrieve your crystal ball and give us what the top 5 in the OWGR will be at the end of the 2021 season.... -@HarryArnettCG

This one made my brain hurt. But here goes: 1. Jon Rahm 2. Bryson DeChambeau 3. Dustin Johnson 4. Tommy Fleetwood 5. Norman Xiong

Fleetwood?  He's a nice player, but he's no spring chicken....  

And finally....

When will I know that I've found my feels? -Peter (@pmmacalu) 

You need more reps. It's a process. But if the feels never come, remember: It is what it is.

It never gets old, does it?

Gear Corner -  I am not now nor have I ever been a gearhead, but occasionally we check in with those so afflicted.  The Yo, Gear Guy has some interesting advice:

Andrew Chamberry on Facebook: At what point should I buy a new lob wedge? Does it really matter that my old faithful is beaten and battered from years of extensive use? 

The fact that your trusty old lob wedge is "beaten and battered" is not a problem it itself, rather it's the fact that the grooves are worn that is an issue. All wedges, particularly utility wedges like a 58- or 60-degree, depend on high spin rates to perform optimally around the greens, and worn out grooves can have a significant effect on spin rates, consistency, and accuracy. In fact, a number of years ago we conducted a test utilizing a launch monitor and found a brand new wedge produced close to twice the spin on a 25-yard pitch shot than an older model with worn grooves, greatly reducing control and stopping power. Also, because of the lack of spin, an old wedge will produce higher launch angles as the ball will roll up the face instead of being grabbed by the grooves. Bottom line, once your wedge grooves look worn its probably time for a replacement.

Talk about burying the lede....   the only thing that really matters on this subject is that chicks dig backspin

Katie Marmo on Reddit: The new Callaway stars and stripes golf balls are pretty cool looking. Do these designs have any effect whatsoever on overall performance?

Assuming when you ask about golf balls with "these designs" you specifically mean Callaway's Truvis pattern. For the few folks out there who aren't familiar with the Truvis pattern, it looks a bit like a soccer ball with a combination of white and red blocks or yellow and black in the normal models, and in some cases, red, white, and blue with stars and stripes. Simply put, no, this paint job has absolutely no impact on launch angles, spin rates, overall distance, or any other metric you might measure with a launch monitor. It's just paint. However, the Truvis pattern can be very helpful as visible technology, particularly when working on your putting or short game in general, since it helps you see how the ball is rolling or spinning. Personally I love the Truvis pattern and use a sleeve to work on my putting on a fairly regular basis. Also, I find balls with the Truvis pattern appear a bit larger than solid colored balls at address, which is nice for building confidence before you hit a full swing shot.

That optical illusion is very real, though it's worth on full shots is speculative.  But I do love those balls for chipping and putting as well.