Midweek Musings

I shan't keep you for too long, as you'll want to enjoy the final day of the PGA Tour's off-season.... It seems to fly by in something like a couple of weeks these days.

Solheim Stuff - Mike Bamberger devotes this weeks Seven Things exclusively to this event, some of which I like very much:

7. Juli! 

The best think about this year’s Solheim Cup — the three-day women’s team event modeled on the Ryder Cup and starting on Friday at Gleneagles in Scotland — is that it gives us a chance to see Juli Inkster in action. Yes, the Hall of Famer is 59 and she’s not playing. She’s the U.S. captain for the third straight time and looking to go 3-0. But she is also one of the most underappreciated major figures in the game. Her TV work for FOX is excellent. (Candid and insightful.) Her swing is a study in repeatable funk. (She was second in last year’s U.S. Senior Women’s Open at Chicago Golf to Laura Davies, finishing 10 shots behind her and almost laughing about it.) And she just brings an incredible pure-jock, California spirit to everything she does. You could hand her a Ryder Cup team to run and she’d do great.

I don't agree with him about her work on Fox, but I have enjoyed her time as Captain of these teams.  I thought she handled things great four years ago when her squad was playing poorly until gimmegate, and I also thought she handle Annika's nonsense well.

Speaking of whom...

6. Memory Lane 

One of the great things about these match-play team competitions is that the players get revealed in ways that they are not during stroke-play events. As Tom Lehman once said, “If we played match play every week, we’d be as bad as the tennis players.” In other words, in match play everything becomes more personal, and in team play you’re playing for something bigger and more important than yourself. The greatest example of this ever comes out of the 2000 Solheim Cup, at Loch Lomond, in Scotland. 

On the last day, in a close competition, Kelly Robbins and Pat Hurst of the U.S. were playing Annika Sorenstam and Janice Moodie, who were one down going to 13. That’s when Annika, at the height of her powers, chipped in from 25-feet, to likely square the match. Except that Robbins, backed by her captain, Pat Bradley (Keegan’s aunt), required Sorenstam to play the shot again, because she had played out of turn. (Per the rules, they could have let it go.) Annika cried. Annika cried! Her mascara ran so much she looked like Gene Simmons in his Kiss prime after a hot show in Dallas, circa 1983. The Americans went on to win that particular match, suggesting that there may not be a god. But the Europeans won the Solheim Cup that year, proving that there is. It would have to be about the best example of poor sportsmanship in golf in history. Annika said then: “The whole team is disgusted. We all ask ourselves: Is this how badly they want to win the Cup?” Beautifully said, and the answer was obvious.

Team Match Play is so epic, it can even bring Annika to tears!

It so happens that there's a piece of Fairview lore related to this.  Ed Pavelle, who only won twenty club championships, had the same happen to him.  He holed a chip shot on the third hole during a Club Championship match, only to find out that he ha inadvertently played out of turn and was required to play it again.  It's Fairview lore because he had a better answer than the cold-blooded Swede, he holed the second one as well...

We've had a brother act in the Ryder Cup, now we've got this:

3. Sister act 

Jessica Korda, 26, and her sister, Nelly, 21, are on the U.S. team together for the first time. They will certainly play together at least once. They might play together four times. Nelly Korda’s swing, for you kids out there, is about as good as a swing could be, a study in up-and-down simplicity, along the lines of what Louis Oosthuizen does, who is far shorter than she, demonstrating that good mechanics are good mechanics, regardless of body type. And she does it with a neutral grip. Mesmerizing.

Only Mike could talk himself into a woodie over a neutral grip.

Remember those girls awaiting their clubs?  Aer Lingus is maximizing their no-bad-publicity week, but I do love this header:

American Solheim Cup player Angel Yin still awaits clubs, socks

Yeah, I'm guessing that one of those is more important than the other.   If I were Juli I'd consider that Aer Lingus might want to get the good press going, and not get her clubs for Friday's kickoff....

And buried deep in the piece is this little slam at the venue:

Because the course is straightforward, Inkster doesn’t believe the delay in play will be particularly bad for Yin’s game, though she will have to know her lines off the tee because of her great distance.

I guess it's all right in front of you, as the kids like to say...

Danielle Kang has become one of the better interviews in our game, and she had this about match play on a recent podcast:

“You’re trying to take souls, you know,” Kang said with a smile. “You’re going there to make people cry at this point, just crush the other team. That’s the fun of it. We don’t ever get to do that. We’re always alone. We’re always by ourselves, playing for us and our caddie and our own little team.

Take souls?  How good is that?

Feel free to start with Suzann.

 Keely Levins focuses on the relatively inexperienced U.S. Team:

With Ally McDonald replacing an injured Stacy Lewis on Tuesday in the American lineup, captain Juli Inkster now has six golfers on her 12-player squad who are playing in their first Solheim Cup. McDonald joins Nelly Korda, Megan Khang, Marina Alex,

Brittany Altomare and Annie Park as newcomers. It’s the largest group of rookies for an American team since the inaugural event in 1990. In 1992 (when Inkster played her first Solheim Cup) and 2002, Team USA has had five rookies. 

In addition, three of the six “veterans” on the U.S. team (Danielle Kang, Jessica Korda and Angel Yin) have only competed in the Solheim Cup when it’s been played stateside. Although not technically rookies, they’re new to a Solheim Cup in Europe, where the majority of the crowds won’t be rooting for them. Since Solheim Cups draw the biggest crowds in women’s golf, that matters.

But Juli is having none of the usual nonsense:

It’s common for captains to pair rookies with veterans to help ease nerves and have a steady voice for advice. Yet Inkster won’t have that luxury. 

“We're not doing a veteran with a rookie. I'm going to send a couple rookies out there together,” Inkster said. “They've got to grow up sometime. Everybody's a rookie once. And I just happen to have six of them. So we're just going to throw them out there.”

 Just put your best players out there, and let 'em play.

Brian Barnes, RIP - Can you remember that which you read 45 seconds ago?  Specifically, Mikey Bams on the subject of team matches making reputations?  Allistair Tait has a wonderful remembrance of a man whose career covered more than just that one magical day:

Aside from the day he dined out on for the rest of his career, Barnes played on five other

Ryder Cup teams. He was a perennial member of the Great Britain & Ireland side between 1969 and 1977, and kept his place in 1979 when Continental Europeans joined the fray. He compiled a 10-14-1 record in those matches. Very respectable considering he was on five losing sides and a member of the 1969 team that halved at Royal Birkdale.

The English born Scot won nine European Tour titles between 1972 and 1981. He also won two Senior British Opens. His 1995 win in that event was quite emotional as it took place on the same course Royal Portrush father-in-law Max Faulkner won the 1951 Open Championship.

And how about that great photo to accompany the piece, which comes from the 1982 Bob Hope Desert Classic.  Amusingly, no further details are deemed necessary... Tait also delves into the darker side:

Not everything was rosy in Barnes life though. He fought alcoholism for years, an addiction he took to the fairways. He was known to fill his water bottle with vodka and orange juice during rounds. He once marked his ball on the 18th green of the 1982 Scottish Professional Championship with a can of beer before putting out to win. 

I was fortunate enough to cover Barnes during the last few years of his career. I remember walking into my hotel for the 1990 Scottish Open at Gleneagles to find an inebriated Barnes behind the bar serving beers. When the barmaid tried to move him from behind the bar, Barnes picked her up around her waist and playfully bounced her up and down.

But it's that one day for which he'll be best remembered:

Brian Barnes will be forever remembered as the man who once beat Jack Nicklaus twice in the 1975 Ryder Cup. Nicklaus asked for it.

Here's the background on how it all came about:

Barnes’s famous Nicklaus double was part of an Arnold Palmer set up. U.S. captain Palmer approached Great Britain & Ireland counterpart Bernard Hunt and asked him to name his best player to play Jack Nicklaus in singles. Hunt picked Barnes and the two

captains arranged for the pair to play in the final morning singles match. Barnes ran out a 4&2 winner. 

The Ryder Cup featured two singles sessions in those days. Barnes was surprised to find himself out against Nicklaus in the final afternoon singles match. He shouldn’t have been. Nicklaus wanted revenge, and had made sure Palmer fixed the draw so he could play the Scotsman again. 

Barnes walked onto the first tee and Nicklaus said: “Well done this morning, Barnesy, but there ain’t no way you’re going to beat me this afternoon.” 

Nicklaus birdied the first two holes, but Barnes fought back to win 2&1 in what would turn out to be the greatest day of his career.

Is this a great game, or what?  RIP.

An Ode To Loopers -  Brad Klein, best known for his writing on architecture and course design, pens an ode to caddies that's worth your time.  To me, the best parts are the historical bits, though I do think he makes the case for looping as a great job for youngsters:

It’s a position I have been keen on since I started looping at a private club on Long Island back as a 14 year old and that subsequently strengthened through engagement as a looper 

The author with his best known client. 

during summers on the PGA Tour. It’s an attitude that has never waned and that comes out even now, decades later, during casual rounds with friends, or even people I have met on the golf course for the first time. I eye their game but also their whole attitude – not just to golf but to how they play and how they handle themselves during a round.

I’ve always thought caddying was more than about earning spending money as a kid. It was about learning how to be an adult and how to handle myself with strangers, occasionally in awkward circumstances. A bad yardage, a lost ball or a botched shot – the stuff of everyday golf provided an occasion for how I handled myself and how I responded to what my player said and did. 

Did he blame me, curse me, accept it as rub of the green? Would I learn from my error, so that next time I'd be more accurate in my distances or track the ball more precisely? 

The beauty of it was that it was only just about golf, with no spillover effect and no major consequences beyond the immediate round. A round as a caddie meant four hours in a laboratory of life skills, honed in a safe environment, to be tested in later life.

About that history...  He shatters the myth of the name coming from a French word:

There is reference to caddies dating back as far as 1691 at St. Andrews. The name of the trade appears to derive from a Scots term for a luggage handler or valet. A far more intriguing derivation traces the lineage of the term to an Anglicized version of the late 

That's Old Tom on the far left.

Medieval French term for military “cadets” – young men training for status as soldiers in the field who carried the weaponry to battle but did not actually engage in combat. That genealogy, while suggestive, remains romantically wistful but unconfirmed if not simply untrue. 

Initially, they were semi-professionals or aspiring to play for a living and earn their money through gambling on the links. Others were seasonal workers, mainly fishermen, looking to supplement their income. Among the 21 registered caddies at St. Andrews on a list that appeared around 1870 were three who would go on to win Open Championships: Thomas Kidd Jr. (1873), Robert Martin (1876, 1885) and Willie Fernie (1893). In between loops at St. Andrews, early caddies would help on the maintenance crews. Among the many jobs that Old Tom Morris held at St. Andrews was that of caddie supervisor.

Brad covers the effect of golf carts on the practice, and extols the revival in caddying programs.  But in doing so, he strangely ignores the biggest threat to them, the desire of the IRS and state taxing authorities to classify caddies as club employees, and to withhold taxes.  

Today in Activation - We don't get a lot of hard data about the economics of the sponsorship of PGA Tour events, so I was hopeful about this header:

What does American Express get for sponsoring a PGA Tour event?

In fact, my default assumption is that golf-mad CEO's are pissing away shareholders' money so that they can play in the Pro-Am with Tiger or Phil, but perhaps Larry Bohannan of the Palm Beach Desert Sun can set me straight:

Activation. That’s the word the PGA Tour uses to describe the benefits that one of its tournaments can provide in return for the millions of dollars a company spends to be a title sponsor. 

It’s how a company uses its sponsorship as a marketing or advertising tool — think of it as the plan a company uses to justify the money it is spending to be part of the PGA Tour.

Wow!  I see now the error of my ways...  I mean, "Activation", that's some serious MBA speak, no?

“We certainly feel that this is a perfect fit for American Express and it’s a perfect fit for us,” said Jeff Sanders, executive director of the tournament that was known last year as The Desert Classic and will now be known as The American Express. “It’s the prefect match, because this is a local, regional, national and even international event. It draws professionals and pro-am players from all around the world. And American Express is certainly one of the biggest companies in the world.” 

It is fair to ask why a company accustomed to sponsoring some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world would be interested in the financial commitment – generally twice the amount of a tournament’s purse — to any regular PGA Tour event. The desert tournament’s purse this year was $5.9 million. Stephen J. Squeri, chairman and CEO of American Express, said in a statement announcing the sponsorship that his company just wants to be associated with golf.

Do we think that they can generate $12 million of value for their shareholders from this sleepy event?  Why do you think they use mind-numbing terms like "Activation"?  If the benefits were tangible, they'd use those to support their case...  

There's more of the same, though no one seems to learn from their mistakes:

Local officials are happy with the new sponsorship because American Express brings financial backing and prestige that surpass the last two title sponsors. American Express is a much larger company than Humana or CareerBuilder, which each struggled at time with activation of the sponsorship. Those struggles included concerns for Humana about spreading a health and wellness message out and changes in the landscape of insurance after passage of the Affordable Care Act. CareerBuilder was concerned the money spent wasn’t helping to grow its business or its name recognition. 

American Express, on the other hand, is closer to the size and worldwide recognition to BNP Paribas, the title sponsor of the internationally renowned tennis tournament in Indian Wells each March. The company had nearly $37 billion in revenue in 2018 and is one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I certainly understand why the Tour is crowing about this...  It's just unclear that it does anything for Amex, a position with which AMEX agreed sixteen years ago.  And which, I'm guessing, they'll come back to in, say, 2021.

I'll leave you here and hope to see you tomorrow.