Late Week Lamentations

The hits keep on coming....First this:

Then this:

And Then There Was Snow....

Winter has arrived early in Vermont and we're hitting the slopes and making turns tomorrow! 

Killington opens to pass holders tomorrow, and the public on Saturday. North Ridge will be open and will require walking via the peak walkway to get to the slopes.

And yet, I know with near certainty that when I make my first trip to Utah the week after Thanksgiving that I'll be skiing mud.

Calamity For Sure - It's one of the cooler trophies in golf, though one needs to know his history.  In any event, Tiger got something in the mail that he's posted all over social media:

What kind of loft do we think it has?  Because back in the day their putters had 8-9 degrees of loft, as they were putting on shag carpet.

The grooves, though, seem a tad funky:

And, as Shack points out, this may be the last of its ilk:

One of the coolest—dopiest to the kids reading out there—trophies in golf arrived at Tiger’s house and he promptly posted multiple shots of the 2018 Tour Championship’s Calamity Jane trophy.

Because the world revolves around FedEx and the gobs of money they are paying for the FedExCup, the Calamity Jane may be a 2019 casualty of the Tour Championship shifting to a handicap tournament resolving only the FedExCup.

So enjoy!

Actually, the best analogy I've heard for the new event is to an auto race, where the lucky stiff at -10 will have the pole position....

Bedfellows, Strange -  I had been reliably informed that the man is toxic.... Simply not our kind, Dearie.  So, imagine my surprise:

Trump National Doral will host its first professional golf event in more than two years this winter. 

The PGA Tour Latinoamerica has agreed to bring its season finale, the Latinoamerica Tour Championship-Shell Championship, to the Doral, Fla., resort’s Golden Palm Course. The dates for the event, which features the top 60 players on the tour’s money list, are Nov. 29-Dec. 2. 

“We are looking forward to welcoming the best talent on the PGA Tour Latinoamerica to Trump National Doral when they take on the Golden Palm for their final event of the season,” said Eric Trump, Executive Vice President of The Trump Organization. “The golf course is in impeccable shape and ready to challenge many of the best players in the world. As to the spectator experience, there is nothing like the hospitality of the famed Trump Doral.”

If these folks didn't have double standards....  well, you can fill in the rest.  And Miami is in Latin America, right?

Now Islay Me Down To Sleep.... - It's a long way to go for a pun, but exciting news from my current great white whale:

Seven years ago, former European Tour player D.J. Russell was summoned to the Isle of Islay, the southernmost island in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides chain, to iron out some of the

kinks at The Machrie, the famously quirky 1891 Willie Campbell links that used to have a dozen or more blind shots. 

“When I first got involved it was just to tweak a couple of things,” Russell recalled. But the project steadily mushroomed. “By tweaking a couple of things,” he added, “it became pretty obvious that we could do a lot more things. … We gained so much comfort with every step we made and realized that we could create something extremely special.” Design changes to a few holes turned into a total reinvention of the links, which reopened in 2017. 

Along with that came a six-hole short course, a practice range with five covered bays, an instructional area with Trackman technology, a putting course and extensive short-game area – everything you would expect to find at a top resort, except a hotel.

 And the real news is that they've got that hotel thing covered....  But lots of history to be found:

The Machrie holds a unique place in Scottish golf history. Gordon Dalgleish, a Scotsman who co-founded tour operator PerryGolf, noted that in 1901, James Braid, John Henry Taylor and Harry Vardon played a match on Islay for £100, almost as much as the British Open prize fund that year. 

In 1935, The Machrie hosted the Western Isles Open Championship, which offered prize money equal to the Open. By the 2000s, however, the remote island resort located 25 miles from the mainland had lost favor. The Machrie went bankrupt in 2010 and was acquired in mid-2011 by former BBC chairman Gavyn Davies and his wife, Baroness Sue Nye, a top aide to former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

I'd pop for the Great Triumvirate on pay-per-view before Tiger v. Phil... In any event, having gotten my sorry self to Machrihanish and Ashkernish, this is now Numero Uno on my list.  And it also tees up a return to the Mull of Kintyre, as well as other eccentric options:

Baker added that he would recommend that his clients pair The Machrie with a few days on the southern end of the Kintyre Peninsula, where they could play Machrihanish and Machrihanish Dunes. He would even send more adventurous travelers down to the tip of the peninsula to play Dunaverty Golf Club, or to Shiskine, a 12-holer on the Isle of Arran, east of the peninsula. 

Like The Machrie, all of those links, with the exception of Machrihanish Dunes, predate 1900. It would be, Baker said, “a real treat for the links aficionado looking for golf as it was a century ago.” Dalgleish, from PerryGolf, said he expects his American clients will be interested in The Machrie, though he anticipates most of the business will come from the U.K. and Nordic countries. 

“For our audience, it certainly brings it into play for somebody who maybe has been to Scotland and is looking for something off the beaten track…” Dalgleish said.

 Now you know the details of my dark fantasy life....  Hope you don't think less of me for it.

A Hard Sell - Shane Ryan is peddling the unsaleable:

Fall golf: It matters, baby! 

Or at least that’s what the PGA Tour would like you to believe. As much as the players and the fans might crave an actual offseason—and as much as player participation and

TV ratings might indicate that, well, there kinda is an offseason—professional golf now circumnavigates the calendar. As I write this, Chez Reavie is leading a sanctioned event in South Korea. Next week, the stars will be out in Shanghai. And from Malaysia to Mexico to Vegas to the Barrier Islands of Georgia, the tour rolls on after the “big” tournaments of late summer have come and gone. 

The harsh question is, why should we care? 

Well, for one, the powers-that-be have done a solid job of attracting stars to a few of the events. Justin Thomas won last year’s inaugural CJ Cup in Korea and is back to defend, bringing along the PGA Tour player of the year, Brooks Koepka, with him. And Jordan Spieth just announced that he’ll play the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Las Vegas in two weeks.

Who ya calling baby?  Seriously, you're trying to sell me on its importance with two photos of... Patton Kizzire?   The man whose hot start in the Fall of 2017 led to.... well, pretty much nothing.

Putting aside the appeal of the fall swing, and the tour’s clever ways of ensuring participation, there’s a bigger narrative to contend with: The idea that success in the fall can jumpstart a player’s season, and potentially even establish a spot in the top 30 on the FedEx Cup points list that carries through to the Tour Championship a summer later. 

If that’s true, then sure, it’s a great argument for why the fall matters. It would be like telling an NFL team that if they play really well for the month of September, they can secure a spot in the playoffs. It adds a ton of significance—if you care about the Tour Championship, the narrative goes, then it’s wise to also care about the fall.

Yes, by all means put aside its appeal, a far better strategy than attempting to establishing the existence thereof.... 

There is a larger issue in all this, that they need the wraparound season to offer sufficient playing privileges for the web.com graduates and also-rans of the Tour.  The problem is that they can't make this matter enough, and it seemed better when it was a stand-alone portion of the schedule exclusively for that bottom tier to enhance their status.  

Freddy Who? - Jim Nantz with a story from back in the day:

Johnny Miller and Jim Nantz never worked together in a TV booth, but their first

encounter came at a golf tournament decades ago. Johnny just never knew it. 

Appearing on the KNBR Murph & Mac Podcast on Wednesday, Nantz told a fantastic — and random — tale about coming into contact with Miller at a Houston Open while Nantz was on the golf team at the University of Houston. Nantz was there with several of his teammates when Miller hit an errant shot near them in the crowd. And, well, we'll let one of golf's greatest storytellers take it from there: 

"We were in Johnny’s gallery and he hit it left on the 18th hole on a cart path. And I’m standing there with Freddie Couples and Blaine McCallister. And Johnny was waiting for an official to come over and get a drop and a lot of time was elapsing and Fred happened to say without Johnny seeing him, and said “Just hit it!” And Johnny turned around and said, 'Who said that?!’” Little did he know, that would be a guy who would join him one day in the World Golf Hall of Fame and whose career he would be covering. Fred just being a little fresh and a little smart, made a little crack from the gallery and Johnny was trying to like out, ‘which one of you guys said that?!'"

 Freddy never seemed to be the heckling type...  

The Yang To Yesterday's Yin - The ladies are rock stars in South Korea, though there's very much two edges to that sword:

For In Gee Chun, it’s a story about more than her victory Sunday at the KEB Hana Bank Championship. 

It’s about the other side of the Korean passion that runs so deep in women’s golf and that makes female players feel like rock stars. 

It’s about the unrelenting pressure that comes with all that popularity. 

Chun explained where her tears came from after her victory. She opened up about the emotional struggle she has faced trying to live up to the soaring expectations that come with being a young Korean superstar. 

Her coach, Won Park, told GolfChannel.com on Wednesday that there were times over the last year that Chun wanted to “run and hide from golf.” The pressure on her to end a two-year victory drought was mounting in distressing fashion.

Yup, be careful what you wish for....  The good news is that when craving anonymity, all they have to do is play in the U.S.  Problem, solved. 

DJ's Travails - The hits keep coming for our ill-fated hero:

On Monday, a federal jury found Nathan Hardwick, Dustin Johnson’s former attorney and one of the top advisers in his golf career, guilty of embezzling $26 million from the now-bankrupt real estate closing firm bearing his name. 

It’s the latest chapter in a story that began years ago; Johnson claimed in a 2014 lawsuit that the firm of Morris Hardwick Schneider had conspired to scam him of $3 million with a made-up investment opportunity. That $3 million was apparently used to cover debts incurred by Hardwick’s lavish spending. 

Hardwick, 53, testified that he thought the firm’s funds he was spending were legitimately his. In reality, withdrawals were being made from the firm’s escrow accounts held in trust for the firm’s clients, reports Myrtle Beach Online. Law.com reports that a 12-person jury convicted Hardwick on Friday of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, 21 counts of wire fraud and one count of making false statements to federally insured banks.

To be fair (Ed: Why start now?), this goes back a few years, but it's not difficult to see why these two inevitably found each other:

Testimony in Hardwick’s Northern District of Georgia trial revealed a tawdry list of expenditures that included paying for “female social companions,” lavish private jet trips and millions in gambling losses. Included in that spending: 

-$4 million on three “female social companions,” including Katrena Corcoran of Nebraska. Corcoran testified she met Hardwick in 2008 via SugarDaddy.com and subsequently received a credit card to use on a car, clothes, shoes and makeup.

SugarDaddy.com?  Wonder what kind of website that is....   Hey, hounds gonna hound, you just don't want them doing it on your dime....

To Be ForeWarned... - And interesting, albeit depressing, treatise on the efficacy of Yelling Fore:

A real-world breakdown of what happens from the moment of club-ball impact to when the dimpled missile returns to earth is sobering to say the least. As we present a start-to-

finish timeline of what transpires, you might begin to look at the usefulness of “Fore!” a bit more balefully, as one might when gazing at the crash-preparation illustrations on airline seat back cards. “Fore!” can work, as my episode with Mastronardi illustrates. But it tends to provide the illusion of safety more than actual protection.

To begin, the average hang time of a PGA Tour player’s tee shot for the 2017-’18 season was a shade over six seconds. For everyday players, the hang time naturally is less—more in the range of 5.5 seconds. We refer to hang time because in most cases it’s the balls that hit people on the fly that are most dangerous. 

Spectators and golfers of course don’t have 5.5 seconds to duck and cover. The window is much shorter, beginning with the fact it takes a conscientious player about two seconds after impact to notice the shot has gone awry and to holler “Fore!” The 5.5 hang time and the fan/golfer collision has now been reduced to 3.5 seconds. 

It gets shorter. Once the golfer screams the warning, the sound takes less than a second to reach the potential victim’s ears. The speed of sound is 375 yards per second. But the shout can travel slower than that if the air is cold. At the moment Koepka’s tee shot struck Remande, the temperature at the Paris airport was 51 degrees, hardly balmy. And if there’s a headwind (unknown in the Koepka example), the sound is diminished because the wind tends to refract the sound, or carry it upward. The shouts in effect become quieter. And let’s face it, some shouts are louder than others. A papery, non-assertive bleat might not carry 250 yards away.

You know what else carries a shorter distance in the cold?   Obviously the focus is on the unfortunate woman hit by Brooks in Paris, and the news there is not good.  

But where does this argument take us?  It's still better to yell and allow the potential victim whatever time is feasible to turn and duck.....  Theresa took one in the head 3-4 years ago and, while she's fine, it's no joking matter....

Have a good weekend, y'all.