Tuesday Tidbits

A slightly tardy arrival at the keyboard this morning, so thanks for waiting....

Scenes From The Sectionals - I did manage to make it out to Old Oaks yesterday afternoon, and ran into everyone from Kelli Kraft to Bobby D.  I'm pretty certain that that's the first time those two names have ever appeared in the same sentence.  So, who made it?

It is called the longest day in golf, a name bearing affection, excitement, drama and heartache. Ten U.S. Open sectional qualifiers were held on Monday, with invites to 

Anyone remember this guy?

Pebble Beach on the line to 60 lucky individuals. To earn a trip to the Monterey Peninsula, players have to survive 36 holes and some of the stiffest competition the game has to offer. A sentiment underlined in Columbus, where half the field was comprised of players who compete the previous week in the Memorial. 

Qualifier tickets had already been punched via regionals in Dallas and Japan. The Texas site produced notables such as 49-year-old former Masters winner Mike Weir, Web.com Tour player Scottie Scheffler (the 22-year-old has already locked up his PGA Tour card for the 2019-'20 season) and Oklahoma State's Austin Eckroat, while half the Japanese field withdrew before completing their round.

Yeah, that Japanese qualifier put Walton heath to shame.  Here's Geoff's take on the prior leader in the clubhouse:

Hey only 20 WD’s this year at the Walton Heath qualifier. I had the over 23…

 I'll lead with the one that I actually saw:

Century Country Club & Old Oaks Country Club, Purchase, N.Y. 

The most popular firefighter in golf is back on one of its biggest stages. Former U.S. Mid-Am Champ Matt Parziale, who finished tied for low amateur honors at Shinnecock, earned one of the four spots available at the Purchase venue, his one-over score good enough for T-2 with Andy Pope. Wake Forest's Cameron Young took medalist honors at four under, while Rob Oppenheim beat Kelly Kraft in the second hole of sudden death to capture the final slot. 

Teenager Garrett Engle missed the playoff by two shots. PGA Tour players Jim Herman and J.J. Henry also missed out. 

Qualifiers: Cameron Young (a), Matt Parziale (a), Andy Pope, Rob Oppenheim

That is Matt Parziale in the photo above, who you might remember from his magical week at Augusta.

I've mentioned David Pastore a few times in these pages, anointing him the Official Struggling Tour Professional of Unplayable Lies™, an honorary title at best.  David's brother Paul works at Fairview, and made it through Local Qualifying.  That's who I went out to see, and ran into several of my fellow club members.

Paul was paired with the aforementioned Kelli Kraft, and I was able to pick them up on the 17th green, their 8th hole of the afternoon round.  I've played with David a couple of times, but not with Paul to date.  It was a little shocking to see him him blowing it past Kelli, a man that's made a living on tour.  he was a good thirty yards past him on some holes, but the difference inside 125 yards was quite telling.

I followed Paul and Kelli through the seventh hole, but things were going per-shaped for Paul.  However, Kelli was grinding as he was close to the number needed.  I decided to start the long walk home (all but the first and last holes of Old Oaks are across Purchase Street) after they finished that seventh hole, but as I looked back I saw Paul and Kelli preparing to hit their approach shots into No. 8.  

Kelli hit first, and it was a curious shot for a guy with his name on his golf bag.  The 8th green is a two-tiered affair, with the pin located on the front portion.  Kelli's approach shot hit on the top tier, and took a sizable hop and settled on a downslope in the rough.  The greens were not lightning fast due to all the rain we've received, but the caddie-player discussion centered around the line needed to keep the ball on the green.

I sensed that the next couple of minutes would determine whether Kraft might qualify, and it was well worth delaying my departure.  Despite his caddie imploring him to put height under his chip, that was a big ask given the downslope lie.  His chip came out low but soft, initially begging the issue of whether it would even reach the ridge.  It barely scaled the summit, then trickled some ten feet past the pin.  His par putt was equally dramatic, initially hanging on the lip...  Well, more than just initially, as we saw Kelli give it the arm-motion countdown.  Then, conceding defeat, he moved to tap her in, whereupon the ball dove six inches down.

Had he qualified, this would have been the defining moment.  Alas, a near miss, but fun to watch him go about his business.

I'll compile a list of qualifiers, and you'll see quite a few familiar names:

Walton Heath Golf Club (England)

Qualifiers: 1: Dean Burmester, Sam Horsfield, Marcus Fraser, Clement Sordet, Matthieu Pavon, Lee Slattery, Marcus Kinhult, Rhys Enoch, Adri Arnaus, Justin Walters, Daniel Hillier (a), Thomas Pieters, Merrick Bremner, Renato Paratore

Streamsong Resort, Streamsong, Fla.

Qualifiers: Callum Tarren, Luis Gagne (a), Guillermo Pereira

Gotta say, 36 holes in Florida in June...  You have to want it bad.

RattleSnake Point Golf Club, Milton, Ontario

Qualifiers: Tom Hoge, Sepp Straka, Austin Cook, Hudson Swafford

Hawks Ridge Golf Club, Ball Ground, Ga. 

Qualifiers: Ollie Schniederjans, Noah Norton, Chandler Eaton, Roberto Castro

Does one of those names ring a bell?  Shack touts a longshot:

Todd Kelley reports on the top college players who made it, including Duke’s Chandler Eaton. Uh, 90 years ago, Chandler Egan unveiled a redo of Pebble Beach and reached the 1929 U.S. Amateur semifinals on the course he designed. Just saying…

Woodmont Country Club, Rockville, Md.

Qualifiers: Billy Hurley III, Joseph Bramlett, Ryan Sullivan

Brookside Golf & Country Club and Scioto Country Club, Columbus, Ohio

Qualifiers: Luke Guthrie, Anirban Lahiri, Sam Saunders, Jhonattan Vegas, Rory Sabbatini, Jason Dufner, Chesson Hadley, Erik Van Rooyen, Luke Donald, Aaron Baddeley, Brandon Wu (a), Ryan Fox, Collin Morikawa (a), Kyoung-Hoon Lee

This is always the biggest qualifying site, as all the non-exempt guys that played in Jack's event stick around to play here.

I'm thrilled that my favorite Slovak golfer qualified, along with Kiwi Ryan Fox, who is insanely long.  Not that that will be all that helpful at this specific venue, but it's not only chicks that dig the long ball.

Big Canyon Country Club/Newport Beach Country Club, Newport Beach, Calif.

Qualifiers: Chun An Yu (a), Haydn Shieh, Richard Lee, Stewart Hagestad (a), Andreas Halvorsen 

Springfield Country Club, Springfield, Ohio.

Qualifiers: Zac Blair, Chip McDaniel, Brian Stuard, Nick Hardy, Brett Drewitt 

Wine Valley Golf Club, Walla Walla, Wash.

Qualifiers: Eric Dietrich, Matthew Naumec, Spencer Tibbits (a)

It's a great day for golf, and I love the mix of grizzled veterans and kids.  The USGA has posted a slideshow of photos from all the qualifying sites as well. 

On Pebble - Shack has been posting flyover videos of the holes for a few days now, and has therefore reached Peak Eye Candy.  Specifically, the seventh and eighth holes today.  I think Pebble is sufficiently familiar to us all that I don't feel compelled to go along for the ride, though when he posts the old-time photos it's quite a different matter entirely.

For instance, get a load of this photo of the 8th green at the 1929 U.S. Amateur:

Look at that right bunker that seems to scale the cliff!  Compare and contrast to the current green, which appears to have lost much of its original left side:

Which begs the question, do women know about shrinkage?  Seinfeldian references aside, the loss of area on these greens is quite dramatic, but at least they've rebuilt the two most problematic examples from 2010, Nos. 14 and 17.  My guess is that we'll identify a few more that need attention next week, as it's not a factor in the soft and more amateur conditions during the clambake.

He's also got an interesting photo of the 7th green:

Here's Geoff's take:

I won’t bother with the 1929 look as we focus on the present, but I had to grab the 1972 version (above) so you can see how much of the green had been lost by then. And yet, there was a nicer shape on the right side defining the back right peninsula. 

Either way, with shape and character or more circular, the 7th is arguably golf’s most dramatic location and dramatic shot, and one fine place to hang out during next week’s U.S. Open.

He won't, but I will.... here's what this iconic hole looked like at that 1929 Amateur:

Which do you prefer?

One interesting aspect to an Open at Pebble, is that it's a fairly recent thing.  That 1929 Amateur was an inadvertent event of historic significance, with Bobby Jones shockingly losing in the first round, and using his free time to play Cypress Point and Pasatiempo with Marion Hollins.  As you might have heard, Jones went on to build a golf course with the designer of those two gems, and it's had some enduring appeal.

John Strege has a fun item on the decision to take the Open to Pebble in '72:

Pebble Beach is located in a forest, though not the Amazon Rainforest or the Siberian taiga. Either might have been a reasonable assumption given the USGA’s handwringing over taking the U.S. Open to the Del Monte Forest for the first time. Remote was an understatement to the blue-blazer, blue-blood denizens from the northeast. It was part of California’s own flyover country, somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles, its most populated neighboring city the farming hub of Salinas. 

“Pebble Beach was at the end of the world,” the late Frank Hannigan told me once in recalling the USGA’s concerns. Hannigan was its tournament relations manager then, before becoming its executive director. “We considered going to Pebble Beach for the ’72 Open very risky. There might not have been anybody there. We thought, ‘People can’t get to Pebble Beach.’ The U.S. Amateur was played at Pebble Beach [in 1961] and nobody was there.” 

Turns out, though, that the earth wasn’t flat and Pebble Beach wasn’t teetering on its edge. Many found their way to Pebble Beach, including this writer and friends, who bought tickets at the gate, though the ability to do so perhaps suggests the USGA’s crowd concerns were not necessarily unfounded. The Open was not a sellout.

John also adds some fun history, reminding of another era in which the USGA attempted, with decidedly mixed results, to expand the rota:

The USGA tepidly agreed to an Open at Pebble Beach only after Del Monte Properties president Tim Michaud offered the association a $250,000 guarantee, “so you won’t lose money,” Hotelling said. “You’ll make money, guaranteed, no risk.” 

At the time, the USGA was in the midst of expanding its portfolio of Open courses beyond the traditional sites—Oakmont, Oakland Hills, Baltusrol, Merion, Winged Foot and others, Fay said. “Seventy-two at Pebble Beach, 1970 was Hazeltine [National Golf Club], 1969 was Champions Golf Club in Houston, 1976 was the Atlanta Athletic Club, 1964 it went to Congressional, ’65 was Bellerive. They were sort of in the midst of taking a look at fresh faces.”

Didn't like Chambers Bay and Erin Hills?  Those were home runs compared to Hazeltine (anyone seen Dave Hill lately?), Bellerive and AAC!

But color me skeptical on this rousing coda:

“The combination of characteristics of that golf course are not reproducible anywhere,” Tatum said. “The routing is absolutely brilliant. It picks up as much of the coastline that makes it so very special as you can get in that property. 

“Pebble Beach as an Open site is as good as it gets.”

In fact perhaps they give the game away above that, with this:

In 1992, on a difficult course in windy conditions, Kite at a less dramatic juncture delivered an equally important and memorable hole-out, a chip from gnarly rough behind the seventh green. 

Tiger in the 2000 Open produced a highlight reel all his own, winning by a record 15 shots. “Just the perfect display of golf,” runner-up Ernie Els called it. “If you want to watch a guy win the U.S. Open playing perfectly, you've just seen it.” 

And Graeme McDowell of Northern Ireland was a popular winner of the 2010 U.S. Open, though his victory likely broke the chain of Hall of Fame winners at Pebble Beach.

Popular?  Next thing you'll tell us is that he's a good dancer and makes all his own clothes.

That 2010 Open was more problematic than they want to let on, making this a high risk week for the USGA.  As you no doubt know, I've been a Pebble skeptic for many years....  Oh, it's pretty great at its best, but there's far more undistinguished holes than you'd suspect, and their small greens are a tough fit with U.S. Open conditions.

I'll remind you that those Saturday pins on Nos. 13 and 15 last year were perfectly fine at 10:00 a.m., not so much mid-afternoon and later.  Seaside golf courses change dramatically during the day, as does the strength and direction of the wind.  When you're trying to present a stern test, that necessarily means you have the golf course on the edge....

To everyone that says that the USGA can't screw up Pebble, I say they've already done it twice.  It's also conceivable that they'll go too far in the opposite direction, think Sunday at Shinny last year.  I'm almost to the point where I'd suggest that USGA stick to parkland golf courses...

Where There's A Will... - Alistair Tait chronicles the Euro Tour's attempts to rid the game of the scourge of slow play:

“Our aspirational goal is to cut 15 minutes off a round on a daily basis,” Pelley said during the 2016 Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship. 

The Tour introduced a policy that included increased fines, but it obviously hasn’t had the desired effect. 

“The problem is players don’t care if they are five, 10 or 20 minutes behind,” Molinari said. “They just play at their own pace. If they make 1.5 million euros a year and they pay a few thousand in finances, then they don’t care. When you have some players with that attitude, then it spoils it for everyone else.” 

The tournament committee met at Hillside Golf Club during the British Masters, and slow play was discussed at length.

Sure, professional golfers do pretty much everything at length.

But see what you think of this:

Pelley told Golfweek that steps are being taken. 

“What has to happen is we collectively as administrators have to get on the same page on slow play because it isn’t just a European Tour issue,” Pelley said. He added that administrators from the European Tour, USGA, R&A and PGA Tour met in April in Augusta, Ga., to discuss the issue. Talks will resume at the British Open at Royal Portrush. 

There is a will to tackle this issue across the game,” Pelley said.

And the evidence of this will is what exactly?  Because I see none of it....

 I'm off to Wykagyl today, but will look forward to our time together tomorrow.