We'll laugh, we'll cry.... Well, you will in any event. I'll maintain a professional mien at all times....
Logo Madness - This is one the reader should feel free to laugh at, as it appears folks aren't thrilled with, wait for it, the logo commemorating next week's Open at Pebble. It so happens that a lot of thought went into it... perhaps, you'll think, too much:
The updated 2019 logo retains the tree, but removed the cliff and simplified the surrounding design in an attempt to feel “contemporary and fresh, yet also to embrace the grand tradition of this world-class tournament,” according to Seghers.
The wavy embellishment underneath the tree represents the crashing waves off Pebble’s 7th and 8th holes, as well as the wing of America’s national symbolic bird, the bald eagle. The eagle was the primary focus in the logo for the 1982 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach (see photo below).
Each stripe on the wave embellishment represents a year that Pebble Beach has hosted the U.S. Open. There are six total: 1972, 1982, 1992, 2000, 2010 and 2019.
There is also meaning behind the “chevron” shape of the logo. Seghers explains that it’s meant to evoke “a classic sense of sophistication famously associated with the legacy of golf at Pebble Beach.”
Boy, these guys are good! Or live under a rock or something.... It's not offensive or anything, but the crashing of the waves? And couldn't they work in a marine layer or two?
But that's not the amusing part. Can you guess what's got folks' panties in a twist? Anyone? Bueller?
Don't blame yourself, you'd have to be actively hunting grievances to anticipate the Twitter mobs' outrage. The issue seems to be a vague reminder of a certain professional sports team's logo, that bastion of the patriarchy:
Wow, it's uncanny. It's one of those separated at birth moments....
We don't believe in coincidences here at Unplayable Lies, but Shack was all over this one:
And it’s just a coincidence that the Patriots have won….drum roll please, six Super Bowls since 2002.
Good one. We're just lucky they came back to Pebble a year early to celebrate the resort's centennial... Don't you think that by this time next year it'll be seven Super Bowls?
For what it's worth, I prefer the 2010 logo:
And the 1982 logo was just delightfully eccentric:
Couldn't do that today, because a bald eagle could never achieve lift-off with 460cc driver in its talons.
Nobody Said There Would be Math - Mark Broadie is back with a new stat, seemingly for the sole purpose of making our heads hurt. I'll let him explain:
Brooks Koepka and Steve Stricker both shot 278 (-6) and finished an unremarkable T42 at the 2017 Waste Management Phoenix Open. The Jekyll-and-Hyde difference in how they did it was remarkable.
Koepka had serious scoring volatility: He mixed one eagle and 20 birdies with 12 bogeys and two doubles. Steady Stricker had 11 birdies and five bogeys, with no eagles or doubles. I look at these stats and wonder: Is this tournament a true representation of their scoring styles? More important, how can we properly identify a player as volatile or steady-as-she-goes?
To tackle these questions, it’s natural to look at bogey (or worse) and birdie (or better) rates. These are pretty straightforward stats. They’re also flawed, because they reward not just those who make fewer bogeys and more birdies, but those who do so on easier courses. Not all layouts are equal.
Which leads to this colorful graph:
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to find Phil's name on a graph measuring scoring volatility. Who coulda seen that one coming.
Phil Mickelson held the title last year. In fact, Lefty has finished in the top 10 in volatility in 15 of the past 20 seasons! The “Phil the Thrill” moniker certainly is well-deserved, and his historical rankings help to validate our new score-volatility and steadiness measures. And speaking of steady, Billy Horschel is the current leader in the clubhouse in non-volatile scoring, with Ryan Moore taking the honors in 2018.
Billy Ho? Didn't see that one coming...
Perhaps most interesting is its application to historical seasons. For instance, anyone who sensed that Tiger Woods was good at this golf thing back in 2000 will not be shocked to learn the following:
Looking at the bigger picture (well, back to 1999 at least), the best at avoiding bogey or worse, adjusted for course difficulty, was Tiger Woods in 2000. That season, Woods made bogey or worse on a mere eight percent of the holes he played. (The PGA Tour average was 19 percent that season.) Tiger also comes out on top on the birdie side of the ledger—again during the 2000 season—where he won nine events, including three majors.
That year, Woods scored birdie or better at an astounding 32 percent clip, 12 percentage points higher than the Tour average. Adjusted bogey and birdie rates reveal sort of a “no-duh” moment: Better players birdie more holes and bogey fewer holes. We need to further crunch the data to include what a player cards based on his skill level (“excess” birdie and bogey rates).With these final adjustments, the current season leader in scoring volatility is—drum roll, please—Cameron Champ.
Well, we haven't seen much of Cam lately, so I'm guessing he hasn't been all that good at bogey avoidance lately.
I'm a fan of Mark's work and I greatly enjoyed that evening a few years ago when I was seated next to him at the Met. Golf Writers Awards Dinner. But this stat seems thus far to tell us only that which our eyes can readily discern, which I'm guessing Mark knows quite well. I'll be curious as to where he can take this, either as an analytic or predictive tool.
Worth A Look? - A question for you kids. What's the best golf movie ever?
Sorry, it's a trick question, because there isn't one.... Sorry, Caddyshack is simply too painful to watch in its entirety, and Tin Cup is a poor man's Bull Durham. But this seems promising:
Shack has a list of participants:
We don’t get many great golf films so run out and see this wonderful look at all things caddie. Here’s the list of theaters and just some of the cameos include: Ben Crenshaw, Michael Greller, Carl Jackson, Rick Reilly, Nick Faldo, Greg Puga, Curtis Strange, Fanny Sunesson, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson, Steve Williams and Fuzzy Zoeller, plus rare footage from Augusta National!
Narrated by Bill Murray, who has some first-hand experience in the trade.
Holywood Days - Not a typo, just a different Holywood. Regular readers know that I am over the moon at The Open Championship's return to Royal Portrush in July. My excitement is a result of a profound love and appreciation of these links, as well as for the long-suffering people of Ulster.
I bring this up because The Open's webpage has a story and video (alas, a format this technophobe is unable to embed) of that day a 16-year old Rory McIlroy torched the Dunluce for a course-record 61.
That was special enough but the back nine was something else. An eagle at ten wasfollowed by a birdie at 11 and then five straight birdies to finish – including one at the treacherous par-three ‘Calamity’.
“There are not many golf rounds where I remember every shot but for that round, I do,” McIlroy said.
“I knew the record was 64. Once I got to nine-under through 16, I thought if I could par the remaining two and set the new record that would be pretty special.
“The 17th at the time was a par-five and the easiest birdie on the course. That took me to ten-under and I just thought, don’t screw this up.
“I hit a perfect drive and a good eight iron into the heart of the green. I just wanted to two-putt but ended up rolling it in. I did not care what the score was, I just wanted the course record.”
“I had my dad and a couple of uncles walking round and a mate of mine was on the bag. He had just turned 16 as well!”
Lest you be dismissive, this was in competition, specifically qualifying for the North of Ireland Championship, and the course was set up to play difficult. Though a quibble, that famous Par-3 is named Calamity Corner... See:
I'm sure I have a version of that in my own photo archives, but I'm a lazy blogger. Left is Bobby Locke's Hollow, and right is.... well, right is why Bobby Locke bailed out left all four days in 1951.
As we've discussed a number of times, they will not be playing the same golf course that Rors played, as he notes:
Will lighting strike twice?
Perhaps only Darren Clarke knows Royal Portrush better than McIlroy. The course is effectively a white blank page to the top players, many of whom have never stepped foot on the first tee box.
Yet, it also looks slightly different. The Dunluce Course has undergone several changes, with the old 17th and 18th holes removed and two new ones built into the middle of the round.
But the prospect of becoming Champion Golfer of the Year on home soil is something he relishes.
“I shot 62 at Quail Hollow in 2010 on the old set-up and then they went and redesigned it and I went back in 2015 and shot 61 on the new course.
“Hopefully the same things happen at Royal Portrush. I hold the record on the old course, but it would be special to come back to The Open and break it on the new one.”
Irony alert. This record is quite curious, in that Rory is not actually all that good at this links golf thing, more comfortable in calmer and softer conditions. Can't wait.
But The Narrative? - Hank Haney seems intent on not going graciously into that good night.... I'm pretty sure that will only make matters worse for him, though we'll get some low-impact blogging out of it.
We saw him take credit for picking the winner of the U.S. Women's Open, though from my vantage point I thought he missed it by six. Now he takes on that most recent critic:
Hank Haney refuses to back down. The embattled swing coach lashed out at TigerWoods on Tuesday, reigniting the controversy surrounding Haney’s remarks on the U.S. Women’s Open last week.
“Amazing how Tiger Woods now has become the moral authority on issues pertaining to women,” Haney wrote in a tweet. “I spent 6 great years coaching Tiger, and not one time did he ever hear me utter one sexist or racist word. Now, in addition to being a 15 time major champion, I guess he thinks he’s also a mind reader? #glasshouses”
Hmmmm... did Tiger have some kind of issue with women? I must have been away or something....Though I was reliably informed that Tiger has "found his voice", so he's got that going for him.
Mark Parsinen, R.I.P. - The man behind Kingsbarns and Castle Stuart has died:
A successful businessman turned developer and architect, Mark Parsinen created two of Scotland’s most important new courses of the last century. Both Kingsbarns and Castle Stuart have become centerpieces of Scottish golf travel, beloved European Tour venuesand important efforts in showing that a “links” could be crafted out of an undesirable site.
His death June 3 of a stroke at age 70 was met with tributes from the golf world.
“We have never worked with anyone so active and engaged in the design of a golf course as Mark was at Castle Stuart,” said architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner in a statement upon learning the news of their co-architect’s passing. “Thoughtful, passionate, articulate, and constantly probing to solve the riddles that the land provided us with, Mark was so excited to develop ‘the code’ that became our philosophy as we designed and built in the field in Inverness.”
As some of you know, I met Mark and played Cypress Point with him back in the 1980's, when he was developing Granite Bay, a Robert Trent Jones, Jr. course outside Sacramento. I didn't realize that Kyle Phillips was involved with Granite Bay, but it makes sense since Mark hired him to design Kingsbarns.
It was a very risky, but interesting thing to watch an American be the driving force behind new links projects in Scotland. A new links strike one as an oxymoron, the history and timelessness of the existing course being so integral to their appeal. But Mark proves us all wrong, building two forst-class facilities that traveling golfers and Scots enjoy equally.
That should keep you ungrateful wretches happy for the moment. Hope to see you here tomorrow as well.
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