Tuesday Tidbits

With the cancellation of a charity outing today, we've got all the time in the world....

Girls Rule - Though not quickly, one is forced to note....  The girls wrapped up their individual competition and crowned a worthy champion:

Kupcho made it official Monday at Karsten Creek, claiming the NCAA title that should have been hers last May. 

The Wake Forest junior won by two shots – the same margin she blew a year ago – for her fourth victory of the season, vaulting her into contention for the Annika Award.

“It’s just exciting to get here after everything I’ve been through,” she said. 

Entering the final round in a share of the lead, Kupcho birdied the first but played Nos. 5-7 in 4 over par. It seemed like another collapse was brewing. 

“I told her she’s going to have to face some adversity at some point,” said Wake Forest assistant Ryan Potter, who walked alongside her Monday. “There was a lot of golf to play, especially on a course like this.” 

A birdie on 11 sent her on her way. She added a birdie on the drivable 12th, dropped another one on the par-5 14th and then canned a 60-footer for birdie on 16.

As Lavner recounts, she had her hands on the trophy last year, then dunked a short approach on the 17th hole.  The gods being the bastards they are, her last two holes this year featured no shortage of water in which her 2018 dreams might have been submerged.

The individual competition also serves to qualify eight schools for the match-play team competition, and have you ever seen a team playoff?

Bianca Pagdanganan figured she would go for the two-putt on Karsten Creek Golf Club’s par-5 18th green. 

She didn’t know where her Arizona team stood, and two putts from mid-range would mean a closing birdie. But then her killer instinct arose. 

“For some reason I just had a lot of confidence in me standing over that putt,” Pagdanganan said. “I saw the line and I knew I was going to make the putt.” 

Her slippery 25-footer started left, slowed late, took a huge curl right and dropped into the center of the cup for a momentous eagle. As Pagdanganan prepared to putt, assistant coach Derek Radley had whispered into the ear of freshman Yu-Sang Hou, “She’s making this.” 

And then all the hysteria broke loose. As it turned out, Pagdanganan (who finished second individually at 6 under) needed to make that putt to take the Wildcats back from the dead and give them a chance to finish in the top eight after 72 holes of stroke play and reach match play at the NCAA Women’s Championship.

That was quite the shock.... They prevailed in the playoff, which was quite the madcap affair that strained the resources of the Golf Channel team, requiring coverage of five holes simultaneously.... A bit maddening, actually, when the whole event was put on hold so an official could check the line of a drive for a player whose score was never going to be counted.

Shack had this take on it all:

--Six hour rounds.

--Players pushing around grocery cart-sized trolleys with corporate-emblazoned umbrellas. 

--Coaches interjecting mind-numbingly simple advice adding to the excruciating pace.

--A lush, tree-choked, traditionally anti-septic Fazio design free of spectators that even friends and family passed on coming to see. 

--The debut of a new episode of Driven delayed two hours. But boy those OU and OSU boys know how to board a private jet and leave the bag loading to a luggage handler! America!

Never realized Geoff was such a Rickie fanboy, but I'm not much concerned with the nature of their grocery carts or umbrellas, though the golf did feel painfully slow.

A reminder though that this was just the appetizer for what comes next, team match play.  Which , if you haven't previously tuned in, really rocks.  Give it a try, as the rain will keep you indoors for sure.

RIP, Carol Mann -  One of the greats of the women's game has passed:

Carol Mann, a two-time major champion who won 38 LPGA Tour titles, has died. She was 77. 

The LPGA Tour issued a statement Monday that Mann had died Sunday at her home in The Woodlands, Texas. LPGA Tour officials said a family member notified them of Mann's death. 

Her major titles were the 1964 Women's Western Open Invitational and the 1965 U.S. Women's Open. She won 10 tournaments in 1968. 

Mann also served as LPGA president from 1973-76. She was an analyst for men's and women's golf on ABC, ESPN and NBC.

Here's my favorite bit from the tributes:

Carol Mann stood six-foot-three, or five-feet-15, as she liked to say, but she stood out in golf for altogether other reasons.

That little bon mot is a fine way to remember Carol.  RIP.

Restating The Obvious - I know this John Feinstein item has to be important, because it tops Golf Digest's homepage.  In it, he uses Paul Goydos as a framing device to inform us that it's not all peaches and cream out there:

“If Lucas was a lawyer and he came home after a bad day and the exact same thing had happened, it wouldn’t have been any kind of story,” Goydos said. “But because he’s a professional athlete [and a U.S. Open champion], it’s all over the Internet and the news. Things happen in people’s private lives all the time. But when you’re a public figure, they tend not to be private.” 

There is a tendency for those who watch great athletes perform to think the rest of their life is as easy as they make playing a sport appear to be. After all, those who succeed at the highest levels of sport make money that few people can even relate to. 

“People think because you’re making a lot of money—whether it’s as an athlete or an actor or any other job where you perform in public—that you have a perfect life,” Goydos said. “In reality, that’s often far from the truth.”

I'm sorry, has Lucas Glover's play since 2009 made the game of professional golf seem easy?  Feinstein basically uses the piece to knock down a straw man, i.e., he discredits something that no one is arguing or believes.

And, just to beat us over the head with this obvious point, he includes a picture of that most famous Escalade.  Read it if you must....

Filling A Void That Fails to Exist - The need for this fails to present itself:

A new global golf circuit is being planned, multiple sources have confirmed to Reuters, in what would be the biggest upheaval in the professional game in decades.

To be named the World Golf Series, the circuit proposed by the British-based World Golf Group has been in the planning stages for more than a year. 

The group hopes to stage 15-to-20 yearly tournaments around the world, each offering a purse of close to $20 million (15 million pounds), according to sources familiar with the plans. 

Such a figure would dwarf the prize money currently on offer on the game’s richest circuit, the U.S. PGA Tour, whose biggest purse this season is $11 million. 

Several blue-chip sponsors are believed to be on board for the World Golf Series if top players can be signed.

I really wonder who thinks this is a good idea, because it actually sets us back.  This is the kind of nascent threat that makes those defenders of the faith in Ponte Vedra Beach fill every week on the calendar, which sucks the oxygen up for other tours and the amateur game.  

Ask yourself, is the professional game lacking in big money opportunities for the best players in the world to compete against each other.  To me, the arguments against it (OWGR points and the like) are less interesting than that there are people who see a need for this....

Stop With That Word - The USGA held its media day at Shinnecock, and I can see where this subject was bound to come up:

Monday morning, as sunshine basked over Shinnecock and a steady wind blew, the U.S. Golf Association held its annual U.S. Open Championship media day and executive director Mike Davis made it clear that is not going happen again. 

“It’s been 14 years, and it’s a different time, with different people,” Davis said. “When you set up a U.S. Open, it is golf’s ultimate test and is probably set up closer to the edge than any other event in golf. The difference between then and now is that we have a lot more technology and a lot more data. And frankly, what basically happened then was a lack of water.” 

Davis said that with better weather forecasting, an improved ability to predict and monitor wind direction and moisture meters in the greens, the USGA should be able to maintain the course more effectively, pushing the game’s best players while maintaining fairness.

That's fair enough, as 2004 was a galaxy long ago and far away.  Mike had some comments that we should store away for mid-June to assess:

But this is still going to be a U.S. Open, an event that the USGA pridefully calls the

toughest test in golf, and as courses go Shinnecock Hills is as blueblood as it gets. The club, which is 127 years old, was a founding member of the USGA and in 1896 hosted the second U.S. Open. The course has been strategically stretched to 7,445 yards leading up to this championship, to challenge the 156-player field and make them think. 

“We didn’t add distance just to add distance,” Davis said. “What we really did, and we did it in concert with the club itself and also with some work with Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, that architectural firm, is we really wanted to bring the shot value back to what (William) Flynn had designed in the late 1920s. So we looked at each drive zone and said, ‘what would it take to get the drive zone back into play?’ So I think we are excited because now all of a sudden some of the cross bunkers that are in play, some of the lateral bunkers that are in play or some of the shots, I mean take the second hole, it was always meant to be a long downwind par-3 that you can bounce the ball in. We now have that again.”

I might have provided an oxymoron alert for that "Strategically stretched" remark, though we'll really just have to see how it plays.   The Coore-Crenshaw appeal to authority is curious, in that they had just completed a widening of the golf course , when along comes the USGA to bring deep fescue to within a few yards of the fairways.  Tom Meeks was unavailable for comment....

But I have a bone to pick with Mr. Davis about this comment:

“Looking back at 2004, and at parts of that magnificent day with Retief (Goosen) and Phil Mickelson coming down to the end, there are parts that we learned from,” Davis said. “I’m happy we got a mulligan this time. We probably made a bogey last time, maybe a double bogey.

Davis even joked that stroke control might have kicked in.

Hey, I like an Equitable Stroke Control joke as much as the next guy, but I find his use of the M-word really off-putting (recall that he did the dame after DJ-gate at Oakmont).

He needs to banish that word and concept from his vocabulary, as golfers don't get do-overs.... You're not getting a mulligan for the 2004 Open, you're setting the stage for the 2018 Open.  And you're only getting the one shot at that, so don't eff it up.....  And don't come back Monday morning asking for a mulligan.

Bomb & Gouge, An Analysis - The WSJ awakens to the reality that is 21st century elite golf:

A few years ago, veteran pro golfer Davis Love III took his son to see the renowned sports psychologist Bob Rotella. Dru Love, who was then playing for the University of Alabama, was struggling badly with his driver, so Rotella asked him some questions. 

Who were his favorite golfers? “Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson,” the younger Love said.

And how often do they hit the fairway? “Oh, they hit it all over the place,” he replied.

“So,” Rotella told him, “why are you worried about how straight your drive is?” 

This is the point to which golf has evolved in the power era: The solution for an aspiring Tour pro worried about missing the fairway is to stop worrying about missing the fairway. It’s not a mind trick. It can be a sound strategy. “Genius,” Love III said. 

Long and wide off the tee is beating short and straight more often than not, a shift that is upending not just how golf is played but how players think about the game. “Bomb and gouge” has gone from a novel concept—bombing the ball with a driver and gouging it out of the rough—to something approaching religion on the PGA Tour.

Pretty amusing, in that this trend is more than a decade old.... But it all seems like some great revelation to them, as with this:

And there are still exceptions. Webb Simpson won the Players Championship while ranking last in driving distance and first in driving accuracy for the tournament. But for the most part, what lies beyond the short grass instills little fear in today’s bombers. 

“If we played courses where you really couldn’t miss the fairway and be the best player in the world, these guys wouldn’t miss,” said Ogilvy, who is also a course designer. “But because they can get away with it, they do it.”

What Geoff is saying is that the guys bomb it for the same reason that a dog licks itself, because they can.   Except at places like Sawgrass  Harbor Town and Colonial, as well), where they'll be punished severely for the lack of accuracy.  Has anyone told them there's horses for courses?

Balls, Said The Queen - Eamon Lynch has a worthy profile of Wilma Erskine, the boss at famed Royal Portrush.  Folks will presumably get to know her over the next year. as she runs a tight ship and doesn't suffer fools gladly.  It's easy to assume that it's a cushy gig, but that hasn't always been the case:

And business is a lot better than it used to be. 

When Erskine took over in 1984, Royal Portrush was a decaying institution nearing the

end of its first century. It was a second club for many, and the first to be dropped in a tough economy. Visitors were rare. Just last week Erskine produced a club diary from 1985, with every tee time handwritten. She gave it to a new hire in the reservations department. 

“See if you can find a fourball from America,” she instructed him. 

Back then, Northern Ireland was 15 years into a bloody conflict that still had a decade to run. Golfers weren’t exactly knocking down the door on the northern side of the Irish border. 

“There wouldn’t have been any Americans in those times,” Erskine said. “The business has completely changed in thirty-odd years.”

This is one of the great links in the world, and I'm ecstatic to see the Open return next year.  That said, tee times aren't getting any easier to book....