Your Friday Frisson

We're on the clock, so let's skip the preliminaries....

Ladies' Day - They get a practice round today at The National, all 72 of them, but only thirty have tee times for tomorrow:

There was no escaping the leaderboard watching Thursday or the reality that loomed for players riding the cut line at the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur. 

Every time the digital scoreboard rotated back to the leaders, this ominous message displayed. 

Jennifer Kupcho

“Exactly 30 players advance to final round. Playoff if necessary.” 

Knowing that, so many women came out of scoring with a measure of cautious relief, having posted three-over totals in the clubhouse through two rounds at Champions Retreat. Most of the afternoon, that number looked safe with the wind picking up and the pressure mounting as the day wore on. 

But with closing par 5s on both sides of the course, late birdies quickly changed the math. When it was done, 11 players stood tied for 21st, leaving an 11-woman playoff for the last 10 spots in Saturday’s final round at Augusta National Golf Club. Only one would be left devastated.

That's crazy for sure, but I have to ask, where would the harm have been in allowing that 31st young lady to play?  Is Jeff Knox unavailable?

 This I like:

Sent out in three groups in the order in which they finished, nine players got to return safely to the clubhouse with pars on the first playoff hole. Only Spain’s Ainhoa Olarra and Italy’s Alessia Nobilio had to play on to the par-3 17th hole with bogeys. 

After making double bogey on that hole earlier in regulation to fall into the playoff, Olarra poured in a 25-foot birdie putt to book the final spot in Saturday’s final round at Augusta National. An emotional Nobilio has to settle for a consolation practice round with 41 others on Friday in expected rain. Olarra was elated. 

“It felt really good actually,” said Olarra, who works as an auditor at Deloitte since graduating from South Carolina last year. “It was just a nice way to finish.”

You go, girl!

Meanwhile, at the other end of the leaderboard, soon-to-be LPGA rivals Jennifer Kupcho and Maria Fassi will face off in the final pairing on Saturday that everyone anticipated. Kupcho’s streak of seven consecutive tournament rounds in the 60’s – with two wins and a second-place finish in her past three college starts — ended with her only two bogeys of the tournament on the last five holes Thursday. 

Her second-round 71, however, has her at five-under and one shot ahead of Mexico’s Fassi, who birdied two of her last three holes to stake a spot in the final pairing. 

“It’s going to be a birdie feast out there,” Fassi said. “It’s going to be a lot of fun. She’s great to play with and we’re good friends, so if it’s going to be with her in the final group, it’s going to be a really fun one to watch.”

Did she just predict a birdie fest through Amen Corner?  Who wants to tell her about Clifford Roberts?  Please, girls, no references to body bags and bikini wax....

Saturday should be interesting....

Ladies' Day: Part II - I did have the chance to watch some of the Dinah, and am quite relieved to read this:

Lexi Thompson is in her happy place at the ANA Inspiration and it pays off with an opening 69

That's good to know...  

Good thing. What’s to complain about at a venue that has treated her so well,

notwithstanding one regrettable incident, a four-stroke penalty she incurred for having not replaced her ball in the identical position in which she had marked it in Saturday’s third round. The penalty was assessed on Sunday and was two shots and an additional two for having signed an incorrect scorecard. It cost her a victory; she finished second.

Short memories help in golf and Thompson apparently has one. “This is one of my favorite tournaments,” she said on Tuesday. “Every year I just enjoy the drive over from San Diego [and the Kia Classic] to Palm Springs. It's just absolutely beautiful here. 

“Just to be back it brings back so many great memories. I just love this golf course. I get to hit my driver everywhere. It's just so much fun to be here this week.”

Yup, just that one little regrettable incident....  Because of that, we had to give up "dormie"....  I exaggerate, of course, but it was part of a series of events that led us to our current state of play.

Two points to make...  First, we also love the drive from San Diego to the desert, in fact Employee No. 2 and I were reminiscing as we watched the ladies.  But also, after an especially violent swing on a wedge shot, the bride told me that she actually doesn't like to watch Lexi play, as her swing has none of the grace and fluidity we expect from the pros.  I couldn't agree more, but all I could add was, "If you think that's bad, you should see her brother's action".

For such a powerful and potentially dominant player, she seems quite emotionally fragile.... 

From Lexi to Lexicology - Well, I am the segue savant, after all.... Geoff has a post on the language of our game, including that Alistair Tait piece we had earlier in the week.  But also a second item in which you'll quickly note that I'm not the only guy referencing the year of our Lord:

Golf Life: The death of the hazard, 1744-2018, R.I.P.

The modernization efforts by the U.S. Golf Association and R&A have been lauded and criticized, depending whom you ask, but little attention has been paid to the fact that on Jan. 1, for the first time since the original rules were put in play on April 2, 1744, by The 

Gentlemen Golfers at Leith Links near Edinburgh, Scotland, the word “hazard” no longer appears in golf’s rulebook. 

By the way, that was Rules 5 and 13 of the original Thirteen Articles, with which I won’t trouble you other than to say it had something to do with “wattery filth” and “Scholar’s Holes or the Soldier’s Lines.” 

The noble and ancient hazard has an undeniably romantic, literary ring to it yet finds itself cast out in favor of the rather anodyne, bureaucratic sounding “penalty area.” But fear not, these new penalty areas come in both red and yellow!

I'm not certain, but it seems he's not a fan of the new terminology....

“Hazards – how well chosen the name!” wrote Robert Hunter in “The Links” in 1926, a 

Shack used this photo in his post, but I've no clue as to its origin.

book that clearly influenced his role in the development of Cypress Point and its world-famous penalty area to the right of the 15th, 16th and 17th holes. “Without well-placed hazards, golf would fail to arouse and to satisfy man’s sporting instincts,” wrote Hunter, adding, “They are risks; and penalties must come to those who take risks and fail.” 

Perhaps the much-maligned committees in St. Andrews and Liberty Corner, N.J., could have called these newly designated zones “failure areas” instead? Who wouldn’t want to see Twitter’s response to that?

It's such an elegant appeal to authority, with only one minor niggling detail....  One of the charms of Cypress Point, or at least it was when I was there long ago, are the local rules.  One of which is that the Pacific Ocean is in play, to wit, it was not previously a hazard and is therefore not now a penalty area.

But his point is valid nonetheless....

It's very curious as to how we all have been taken by surprise, in fact not realizing the extent of the changes until the Match Play last weekend.  But they will have to pry hazard, all-square and dormie from my cold, dead hands.

On Marion - We had a recent reference to Bobby Jones and his relationship with strong amateur women golfers, about which I mentioned Marion Hollins.  Wouldn't you know it, Mike Bamberger has the timely link to this David Owen's profile of Hollins in The New Yorker.  It's quite the header for sure:

The Woman Who Invented Augusta National

Hollins marched with suffragettes in New York City and promoted sports for women and children. She also raced cars and was the only woman in the United States with a men’s polo handicap. In 1926, in California, she went to work for Samuel F. B. Morse, a distant 

cousin of the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had acquired an enormous piece of property on the Monterey Peninsula, a hundred and twenty miles south of San Francisco, and Hollins helped him develop it. The centerpiece of Morse’s project was the golf course known today as Pebble Beach—but Hollins built him an even better one: the Cypress Point Club, two miles to the north. When Morse’s chosen golf architect, Seth Raynor, died shortly after beginning work on Cypress Point, Hollins replaced him with Alister MacKenzie, a British physician, who had collaborated on several courses in the United Kingdom but was barely known in the United States. MacKenzie credited Hollins—in a memoir that wasn’t published until many years after his death—with the design of Cypress Point’s most famous hole: the sixteenth, a par three, on which the ideal tee shot has to carry two hundred yards over an ocean inlet, from the top of one cliff to the top of another. Raynor had said that the shot was too difficult, MacKenzie wrote, so Hollins dropped a ball to the ground and showed him that it wasn’t. Cypress Point is currently No. 3 on Golf Digest’s biennial list of the hundred greatest courses in the United States; Pebble Beach is No. 7.

Is that enough golf history packed into one paragraph?  I actually haven't yet read to the end of David's piece, though I have read his book.   Which I recommend highly, especially this time of year....

I'm particularly enamored of the ways in which the threads of history interweave....  For instance, Pebble Opened in 1919 and, at the height of his powers, Bobby Jones made the trek west to play in it....  It didn't go well, though perhaps we're better off as a result:

In 1929, Jones was unexpectedly beaten in the first round of the U.S. Amateur, at Pebble Beach, and suddenly found himself with nothing to do. He played a casual round at Cypress Point, which had opened the year before and which he had never seen. He then accepted Hollins’s invitation to play as her partner in an exhibition match on opening day at Pasatiempo, a course that Hollins had developed on her own. She had discovered the property while riding horseback in the hills above Santa Cruz, and, with financing from a wealthy Englishman she’d met through a friend of her father’s, had bought five hundred and seventy acres and hired MacKenzie to design the course. The project eventually also included a swimming pool, tennis courts (with clay imported from France), bridle trails, a steeplechase course, a beach club on Monterey Bay, and dozens of homesites, on one of which MacKenzie and his wife built a house. During the exhibition match, MacKenzie walked along with Hollins and Jones.

Ain't history grand?  There's a body of thought that Jones and MacKenzie might have previously met in St. Andrews, but nobody knows for sure.  But there's little doubt that Jones' unexpected free time on the left bank introduced him to MacKenzie's work, not to mention the alt-history we could envision had Seth Raynor not passed away unexpectedly.... Great stuff.

In that same piece, Make also had this bit, which seems to me ahistorical:

6. D-C-P meets the USGA

When the kids compete in the finals of the Drive, Chip and Putt competition at Augusta National on Sunday, you can be sure that officials from the USGA will be watching closely. When some of the best junior golfers started going to the belly putter before they even knew the word yip, the USGA started to worry about anchored putting in earnest. Now, many of the kids straddle their putting line, get their fingers in the air and do the dance of AimPoint. Dustin Johnson and Adam Scott and others will tell you it helps your putting game, but it’s tedious to look at and makes the game slower. You can guess how the USGA feels about it. If enough kids start doing it, you can also guess what might happen next.

Really?  Because I was pretty sure it was yippers such as Keegs, Ernie and Adam Scott winning majors that caused the USGA to belatedly awaken.  Although I completely agree that an 8-year old with a belly putter is  a bad look....

Bromance On Hold? - There have been a spate of recent stories of media companies and players jockeying fro position to stream and broadcast golf content.  We have Rory and his Golf Pass initiative, in which he really wants to make our golf experience better....  personally, I'd prefer he dial in his distance control with his wedges, but maybe that's just me?

Tiger also signed a deal with Discovery Channel as part of their GolfTV initiative, though as I recall any such content will be unavailable in the U.S. for many years.  I just don't see who has time for this additional content, but one assumes these guys know what they're doing.... or not.

As part of that latter deal comes this news:

GolfTV plotting Tiger Woods head-to-head matches

According to Zaslav, one match has already been planned for Tokyo, Japan with GolfTV

and Woods happy to “play around with the format”.

Zaslav added that Woods was a key figure in the planning and implementation of these events, adding: "Tiger is going to decide what is the best format. Should it be one-on-one? Two-on-two? Should we have two matches going on at the same time. But he’s all in." 

"We could bring in some local players, we could evolve the format so that it really works," continued Zaslav.

So where does that leave his bromance with Phil?   Is this how Tiger punished Phil for winning The Match?

He added: “[Woods] can have a direct relationship with people that love golf and figure out what they want to see and what they want from him.” 

The GolfTV head-to-head concept follows the Woods v Phil Mickelson matchup hosted by Turner Sports as a pay-per-view event on its B/R Live platform last year – an event that logged 750,000 unique users. 

Zaslav referenced the Turner Sports event, saying: "We looked at it and said '[that's] pretty interesting'. One million people came in and wanted to watch it - could we improve on it? What could we do? So we're going to do a number of those type events [and] Tiger's excited about it." 

Woods recently lost out to debutant Lucas Bjerregaard at the WGC-Dell Match Play in Austin, Texas.

And how many of those 750,000 had a positive experience?

I had to leave that last bit in, because I'm sure the Dane would be flattered to be referred to as a debutant... 

Have a great weekend.