Bonus Pre-Departure Content

Do I take care of my readers, or what?

The final packing decisions have been made and all of my schemes have crashed against the rocks of reality...  It does not appear that we will make our way to the Anstruther nine-holer tomorrow upon arrival, because the weather sounds dreadful.  It's OK, we'll catch it at another time....

Similarly, my thoughts of stealing a round at North Berwick are for naught, as that promising Anstruther-North Berwich ferry is no more...  I guess we could say that service, you know, sleeps with the fishes.  It was perhaps too good to be true, but a boy wants what a boy wants....

So, how about some of those musings you so crave?

Wither Tiger? - I had assumed that he'd pack it in until the Zozo, but apparently he's up for the BMW:

“I feel good,” Woods said as he got out of the courtesy vehicle. “Feel a lot better than I felt last week. Felt good this morning so I thought I’d give it a go.”

Glad to hear it, but one can readily see the issue, never knowing in what condition one will awake.

Dylan Dethier thinks the man has some 'splainin' to do, as answers are required to nine burning questions.  Amusing note, the item's header specifies nine, and the item includes exactly nine....  It's just that the url promises ten....  Of such discrepancies are conspiracy theories based.

Some burn more than other for sure:

2. Hey Tiger, what was up with that oblique? 

According to Woods, the forces involved in his swing “have to go somewhere.” We’ll call this the Whac-a-Mole theory; he deals with one injury and unwittingly causes another in the process. “I tried to make tweaks all year, trying to ease the stress off my back while I was still playing. Unfortunately I haven’t really done a very good job of that,” Woods said. “And when I have, I’ve hit the ball quite well.” So yeah — no clear answer on the oblique thing. Depends how optimistic you’re feeling.

What oblique?  And since when does he play for the Yankees?

3. Hey Tiger, are you suddenly a bargain in Vegas this week? 

Much of the year, Woods has been listed among the tournament favorites. If you think this week will be like last week, it’s obviously ridiculous to invest your hard-earned cash in a gimpy 43-year-old to take on the world’s best. If, however, you see the world through Sunday Red-tinted, swoosh-shaped glasses, you’ve been handed free money: Woods at 40/1 to win the BMW Championship. Then there’s that next-level optimism: Woods is 250/1 to win the FedEx Cup. Even we at the GOLF.com Tiger Bureau can’t recommend that one — but we thought you should know.

This ties in to the Tour's legalized gambling play, which is too big a subject for today.  How'd you feel if you plucked down some shekels on the guy, and he shows up lame on the first tee like at Liberty National?  With no governance of injury reporting such as in the NFL and MLB, this would seem prone to ugliness, no?

And then on the burning issue of the day:

6. Hey Tiger, are those technically cargo shorts? 

A discrepancy remains between Woods’s tournament outfits (consistently very cool) and

his non-tournament outfits (not always as cool). Which brings us back to Tuesday, when Woods walked in from the Medinah parking lot looking stiff, sporting a white Nike shirt and some Tarheel blue shorts. Like most PGA Tour members, Woods has yet to master the longer sartorial leash he’s been given (put another way: everyone’s shorts are too long and too baggy!) but something else stands out: that extra pocket on Woods’s right side.

Can we get a ruling from Slugger White?

 It so happens that not only is golf hard, but math is as well.  Tiger had this to say about the BMW:

“I’m trying like hell to make the team on my own. To just be part of the core group of guys. Obviously, I have some work to do. I gotta play well this week to make that happen. But if not, it’s going to come down to the top eight guys, myself and my vice captains for who are the next four slots. Whether that’s me and three other guys, or it’s four other guys, either way, I’m going to Australia, whether I’ll be playing or not.”

Amusing, because it is no longer mathematically possible.  You'd think as Captain he might know that, or perhaps he relies on Bryson in this area.  

So, for Tiger to play, he'll need a captain's pick.  Remind me, who's the captain?  Oh yeah, kind of an interesting dilemma, or at least unprecedented.  Alan Shipnuck took a question on this in his weekly mailbag feature:

Who has better chance of getting picked for Presidents Cup team: Reed, Spieth, or Tiger himself? If Spieth was automatically qualified, does he blackball Reed? Since Spieth is a long shot, does it make it easier for Captain Woods to pick Captain America? -@dafrase 

This is an interesting question, given that Reed just surged to 12th in the standings and

Spieth is a lowly 27th. There’s no way to defend a Spieth pick except that he’s a popular teammate, he was one of the few Americans to show a pulse at the last Ryder Cup and Captain Woods has a lot of admiration for Jordan’s grit. But if the purpose of the Presidents Cup is to prepare for the Ryder Cup — and Woods is a future Ryder captain — it makes sense to choose both Spieth and Reed so they can hug it out and learn to coexist in the team room sooner rather than later (even if their on-course partnership is almost surely dead.) As for Woods, there is massive pressure from the Tour and TV partners for him to be a playing captain. Tiger knows that and surely would relish the challenge. But as we’ve seen, his back is so iffy it’s impossible to predict his readiness to play. Luckily the picks won’t be made until November, so Tiger can get a lot more rest and rehab before having to make the call.

Yanno, I do so hate to quarrel, but I disagree with pretty much everything he said there.

I believe that Patrick has locked up a pick with his win at Liberty, so let's just stipulate to that.  Alan notes the various forces pulling Tiger hither and yon as to picking himself, so let's just acknowledge that none of us know, though you'd like to think that he'd at least show a little form before picking himself.

But on Jordan, Alan seems to have drunk the Kool-Aid.  I guess Jordan showed a little something in team play in Paris, but not so much when golf's newest sex offender, Thorbjørn Olesen crushed him 5&4 in singles.  In fact, our Jordan has never won a singles match in either a Ryder or Prez Cup.  So I think Alan is way off base in his assumption that Jordan will be a cornerstone of the U.S. teams going forward.  Barring something special, I think Jordan stays home....

Playoff Insanity -  I've got a new golf hero, Austin Squires, who survived the Bataan Death March:

It took 3 hours, 46 minutes for Austin Squires to play four holes of golf on Wednesday

morning/afternoon at the U.S. Amateur Championship. Before you close your browser, rest assured this isn’t another story on the ills of slow play. No, this is about something far more wonky. This is a story celebrating one of the most idiosyncratic aspects of one of the most underappreciated tournaments in golf. 

As it turned out, 3 hours, 46 minutes was the time needed for the 22-year-old from Union, Ky., a recent University of Cincinnati graduate and quarterfinalist at the U.S. Amateur a year ago at Pebble Beach, to clinch the third and final spot into the match-play field and conclude a 27-player-for-three-spots playoff at Pinehurst Resort. Those 3 hours, 46 minutes, played in the sticky North Carolina air, were packed with emotions. There was joy and heartbreak, anxiousness and frustration, disappointment and relief.

27 for 3?  Yowser, that's worse than Monday qualifying odds on Tour.

And my hero?  What a day he had:

Austin Squires woke up at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday morning uncertain if his amateur golf career was already over. Thirteen hours later, he was the talk of the 119th U.S. Amateur Championship. 

The in-between was a crazy odyssey that began by finding out the cutline for match play at Pinehurst Resort had moved from four over to five over when stroke-play resumed at 7:20 a.m. A few dozen players had to finish their 36 holes after a weather delay on Tuesday prevented everyone from completing play. With the new cutline, Squires was one of 27 golfers who would play off for the last three match-play spots. 

The 22-year-old, who finished school at the University of Cincinnati in the spring, then survived a four-hole,three-hour, 46-minute playoff to get the 64th seed, an ordeal that included waiting for roughly an hour between holes as the huge group cut its way down.

Gut-wrenching stuff, but it gets even better:

His reward? Facing medalist Brandon Wu, fresh off arguably the best summer of any amateur golfer in the world. 

To Squires' credit, he didn’t flinch, bolstered by the confidence that he regained from surviving the playoff. He never trailed in the match with Wu, taking the lead for good on the 10th hole at Pinehurst No. 2 and closing out the recent Stanford grad with a par on the 18th hole for a 2-up victory.

What a crazy day in our crazy game.

The Brooks v. Bryson Cage Match -  Fox wasn't the broadcaster of the Northern Trust, but somehow Shipnuck has the transcript, presumably from mics in the cups on the practice green:

BK: Bro.

BD: Dude.

BK: Congrats on being on the cover of the new GOLF Magazine. Shipnuck got me one of those a year and a half ago.

BD: Oh, you wanna make this personal, huh? He did a big takeout on me way back in 2015, when you were still sleeping with camels on the Challenge tour.

BK: My cover story had more words.

BD: Too bad you didn’t know what most of them mean.

BK: Bro, you’re the college dropout. Pretty sure Nikola Tesla didn’t need three minutes to gag a 10-footer.

BD: Say it to my face.

BK: I just did, numbnuts.

BD: What you don’t understand about pace of play is that…

BK: Is this gonna take as long as your pre-shot routine? Because Jena is blowing up my phone – we gotta practice our walk-and-kiss ahead of me clinching the FedEx Cup.

BD: Haha, that’s a good one. I knew you were long but I didn’t know you’re funny, too.

BK:

BD: Anyway, the point I want to make is…

BK: Listen, bro, I’m already bored. In case you haven’t noticed, already this season I’ve taken Dustin’s and Rory’s manhood. Do I really need to crush you like a can of Michelob Ultra, too?

BD: No, sir. Thank you for your time. I’ll put out a statement tomorrow on Instagram.

BK: Good deal. Run along now, bro.

I'm kind of hoping that Brooks wasn't that polite....  But I'm thinking the team room in Melbourne could be awkward...

More on slow play:

Why should slow play really affect viewers that much? Can’t TV cameras just cut to players who are notoriously slow right as they are about to hit? It’s only a problem in the last couple groups on Sat/Sun, and even then, aren’t most people too engrossed in the outcome to care? -@Kyechsports (and @luxscen asked almost the same exact question) 

Well, savvy TV producers have been doing this for decades, but it’s become harder for the slowpokes to hide in the era of social media and the streaming of featured groups, when such cutaways are not possible. Indeed, Bryson’s issues last week were made glaringly obvious exactly because his whole schtick was uncut, just as we couldn’t look away from J.B.’s four-minute layup during crunch time at Torrey Pines. 

As the media landscape continues to get more fractured the TV telecast will be consumed by fewer people, and streaming and other a la carte options will make pace-of-play more important. Let’s also not forget the poor spectators on-site who have to suffer through the dispiriting lack of action. So, the very product is at stake for the Tour.

Whatya mean about the TV broadcast being seen by fewer people?  Just last week we had the Tour talking about the need for two linear channels.  

This questioner gets at an important point as well:

Will we be deprived of great tension (like Spieth at The Open) with a crackdown of slow play? Some situations require more consideration and some don’t. -@david_troyan 

I think any decent pace policy will take into account exceptional situations. Spieth wasn’t playing slow, he was just confronted with a series of unusual rulings and it took time to sort it out. No penalty was warranted. But three minutes to read a routine 10-footer on a Friday is a much, much different scenario.

I think this is a category error, as no one awaiting a ruling is perceived as playing slowly.  But tougher conditions, especially variable winds, obviously make pulling a club more difficult, and no one wants to see a penalty under those circumstances.  Also, of course, late day pressure on a Sunday does as well....  But that excuses JB Holmes going from 40 seconds to a minute or so, not the four agonizing minutes he took...  and I wouldn't actually have been all that tough on him, had he not after all that consideration, laid up and forfeited any remote chance to win.

Alan, what are your thoughts on players using social media to air opinions on issues such as slow play? Is calling each other out in a public forum good for the game or a necessary tool to affect change? Seems like a Presidents/Ryder Cup team meeting will be awkward. -@forearmshivers 

Well, it’s manna from the content gods, that much is undeniable. Like breakups, slow play discussions (and other thorny conversations) are best done in person. But what fun would that be for the rest of us?

Depends.  I'm a fan of naming and shaming, and since the Tour conspicuously refuses to do either as regards disciplinary actions, I'm rather OK with it all unfolding on Twitter.

And our arch villain isn't above using the media for his own purposes....  Catch this fluff piece that should be labelled Sponsored Content:

Bryson’s DeChambeau has come under a lot of criticism in recent days, much of it

overblown, but I won’t get into all of that. Instead, I want to focus on a new drink DeChambeau just created which, quite frankly, sounds delicious. 

I learned of it last week, when Bryson was pouring drinks for people at a promotional event at the Grey Goose 19th hole during The Northern Trust. DeChambeau and Grey Goose are teaming up for a partnership that DeChambeau says will show people a “different side” of him. 

“A lot of people know me as analytical, and I do a lot of fun and different stuff out on the golf course that people think is weird and unique, but I’m still a person,” he said. “I need some time to relax and have fun.” 

Although the name of the drink he invented — “The DeChambeau” — needs a bit of work, in my opinion. “Smashed Factor” is my suggestion.

See, he's just an ordinary guy like you and me....  Except, you know, slower.

Splitsville -  Terrible news, as I was hoping against hope that these two crazy kids could work things out:

Jason Day has parted ways with Steve Williams, widely regarded as the world's most successful caddie, citing a disconnect of "old school and new school".

 

Former world No.1 Day and Williams agreed to end their partnership after the Australian missed the cut at the opening PGA Tour play-offs event, The Northern Trust last week. 

Williams, 55, had caddied for Day in six events since June's US Open and Day missed the cut in two of them, including the British Open, while he secured just one top-10 result.

Day seems lost in the wilderness at present, though it was only last season that he racked up multiple wins.  But for the Internationals to make a run at the Yanks in December, you'd think they'd need this guy to contribute.  However, thousands of cell phones breathe a sigh of relief....

That's all for now....  I'll see you from the other side of the pond.