Late-Week Lamentations

We've got a little news, and the kind of over-wrought commentary that blogs itself...

Captain Courageous - I'm shocked..... shocked, I tell you:

Tiger Woods, the rookie U.S. Presidents Cup captain, called on Tiger Woods the experienced player to bolster an American team looking to win for the eighth straight

time in the biennial competition, making himself one of his four wild-card picks on Thursday night for the 13th Presidents Cup in December in Melbourne, Australia. 

Woods, 43, also selected American firebrand Patrick Reed, with whom he fizzled in team play last year in the Ryder Cup in France, and first-time players Tony Finau and Woodland, the U.S. Open champion. Finau, who had a solid Ryder Cup debut last year as a captain’s pick, going 2-1-0, and Woodland were ninth and 10th, respectively, in the final U.S. qualifying standings. 

The four join the automatic qualifiers, who were, in order: Brooks Koepka, Justin Thomas, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Cantlay, Xander Schauffele, Webb Simpson, Matt Kuchar and Bryson DeChambeau.

This piece isn't the source of that snark, though even here there's a bit of nonsense:

Although Finau, 30, and Woodland are newcomers, their place in the standings made them almost certain selections. Meanwhile, the candidate on the shakiest ground was Reed, of all players, who has been America’s toughest competitor in these team matches with a 7-3-2 mark in the Ryder Cup and 4-3-2 record in the Presidents Cup.

Finau played last year in Paris, so he's a "newcomer" in only an over-legalistic sense of the term...  As for this bit, can anyone help me out here?

“Rickie is a good friend of mine and I’ve known him for a long time. We kept it short. There was no reason to get into a lengthy conversation,” Woods said. “He obviously was going to be hurt and disappointed by it. I’ve been on that side. It’s not easy.”

Ummmm, Captain, when exactly were you on the other side? I remember you stringing Watson along unnecessarily in 2014, but he had said mean things about your comportment on the golf course, so he had it coming....

 You guys know that Mike Bamberger and Alan Shipnuck are among my favorite golf writers, each of whom adds a unique personal perspective to their hot takes.  But while we understand that sports journalists will at times become boosters for the events they cover, we expect at least a little ironic distance to make that Faustian bargain palatable.  Not so much in today's offerings, first Mike's header:

Tiger Woods as a Presidents Cup playing captain only raises the stakes in Australia

What stakes?  It's the friggin' Prez Cup, and exhibition that has never been competitive, that will air in the middle of the night in December....  Anyway, let's let Mike explain:

Tiger Woods as a playing captain, the first one since Hale Irwin in 1994, is a

development that will have implications that go way beyond the one week at Royal Melbourne and what he, and the teams, will do there. This is a development that will actually inform the rest of his golfing life. 

Ditto for everything related to these international events, both the Presidents Cup and the Ryder Cup. Both those events will get a boost that will last for years, all because of the simple act of Tiger Woods being on this U.S. team. We’re talking the next 20 or 30 years. 

The 2036 Ryder Cup is going to be at Congressional. That’s not even 17 years away! Tiger won’t be the captain of that team, but he’ll be around as an advisor, telling Little John Daly, Ryder Cup rookie, stories about Big John from back in the day.

Care to tell me how?  As for Little John, no need for Tiger to tell those stories, as Big John's Tour disciplinary file remains publicly available.  

I see Tiger as playing captain as an interesting one-off.  Mike, on the other hand, thinks it will change everything that comes after...

You want howlers?  How about this comparison to Michael Jordan?

Tiger’s going to figure out what Tony Jacklin figured out, what Connie Mack figured out, what Michael Jordan figured out: getting yourself connected to a team can keep you in the game in a meaningful way for years and years. Most people want to feel productive. It’s in our DNA. Tiger will always be driven by money. It’s in his nature. He will always be driven by competition. Ditto. And he will increasingly be driven by a desire to be on a team, to be attached to something bigger and more important than himself. Because he doesn’t have much experience in that, and it shows.

Errr, Mike, basketball is a team game.  I agree that there's a potentially interesting point to be made about the lone-wolf nature of golf, but I'm pretty sure Mike didn't get near it. 

If that's not amusing enough for you, get a load of this graph:

The lone-wolf life is OK, for a while. But being on a team is a far better way to live, in the long haul. Then, at the end, you’re alone again. Drop the needle on Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game,” if you’re so inclined. When Tiger drives himself to the course, you just know he’s rocking out to Joni.

Yeah, Mike, that's the way to appeal to those stubborn millennials....  Anyone volunteering to inform Mike that, as a folk singer, Joni didn't exactly rock out.

With Shipnuck, I'll start with his rousing coda and work backwards:

So now the powerhouse U.S. team is set, featuring 11 of the top 16 players in the World Ranking. (World No. 1 Brooks Koepka continues to rehab after a late-August stem-cell treatment to repair a partially torn patella tendon in his left knee; Woods demurred on Thursday when asked for a status update and said he has until the day before the competition begins to name a replacement.) “It was a difficult process,” Woods said. That’s over and now the fun begins, an international goodwill exhibition that really serves as an X-ray of Tiger’s soul.

Alan, before writing that, did you stop to consider the possibility that Tiger has no soul?  Now, Alan does a reasonably good job of sorting through the issues involved, though framing it as a window into the man's soul is quite off-putting.  First, on Phil:

When he won the Crosby Clambake in February, it seemed like Mickelson was a lock to play under Tiger, setting up a delicious dynamic. But over the last nine months, Phil, 49, has been in the most sustained slump of his Hall of Fame career, and in recent weeks had practically begged Capt. Woods not to pick him. Was this a crafty ploy by the one-time psychology major? If so, Tiger didn’t take the bait. He went one step further by not naming Mickelson a vice captain. (Woods did say he could add another assistant at a later date but he didn’t sound very excited about the prospect.) Hmmm, maybe all that yukking Tiger and Phil did around the promotion of “The Match” wasn’t as genuine as we were led to believe. [Eye roll emoji.]

It's that Vice Captaincy that would seem to be the slight, no?  Though, if we assume that Phil has the Bethpage captaincy locked up, it's not an unduly long wait for payback.

And on our favorite problem child:

The Reed pick is equally enlightening, in a different way. Woods went out of his way to mentor the misanthropic Masters champ at last year’s Ryder Cup, even as Tiger was visibly gassed from his monumental comeback win the week before at the Tour

Championship. But Reed violated the omertà that Woods insists upon from his intimates, telling reporters that Tiger had actually apologized for his ragged play at Le Golf National. Reed burned up more goodwill with his subsequent sniping at Jordan Spieth, his onetime Cup partner, who preferred to play with lifelong best friend Justin Thomas. Who can blame him? Dysfunctional people make bad teammates, as Reed proved. This Presidents Cup selection process, then, was a referendum on Reed, who in August won a FedEx Cup playoff event and has been playing great ever since. Would the one-time Captain America be welcomed back into the team room, or was Reed now truly radioactive among his peers? Woods granted him at least a temporary reprieve. Perhaps the former member of the Ryder Cup Task Force is playing the long-game, knowing a rehabilitated Reed can be an important part of future U.S. efforts. Or maybe this a window into Woods’s insatiable need to win. In explaining the Reed pick, Tiger hailed him as “a person who is as fiery as they come. A great team guy in that you know he’s going to give you absolutely everything he has.” For better and for worse.

Like Alan, I thought that bit was Patrick's biggest faux pas in Paris, far more telling that the Jordan nonsense.  But now that I have an unobstructed view into Tiger's soul....  Sheesh, Alan, do you take a shower after you type such nonsense?

 As for the former golden child....

As for Spieth, this snubbing puts an exclamation point on how far he has fallen. Even though he had a ragged 2018, he was one of the few Americans to show a pulse at the 2018 Ryder Cup. But the ballstriking woes and disappearing acts on the weekend that have followed were simply impossible for Capt. Woods to ignore. Winless over the last 28 months, Spieth, has now received a brutally honest assessment from Woods, his boyhood hero. The long road back to stardom just became a little more emotionally fraught.

OK, that "pulse" included quite the Sunday beatdown from Thunder Bear...  In fact, Jordan has never won a singles match in either cup, making his contribution minimal to negative.  

Alan wants to take an inventory of Tiger's soul...  me, I'm just hoping he hits a few fairways and makes a few putts.

Does Anyone Know The Rules? - Quite the cycle of rules issues recently, and the players come off looking quite amateurish.  We've got some new stories, but recent stories include a player having their caddie align them for a day and a half before anyone notices, as well as the LPGA Q-School incident in which the perp accused all her peers of cheating....

At the Korn Ferry Q-School we find more trouble:

Luis Gagne committed one of golf’s ultimate sins, and doing so cost him dearly. 

Gagne opened the second stage of Korn Ferry Tour Q-School with a one-under 70 and would have been in a tie for 41st with three rounds to play at the Plantation Preserve in Plantation, Fla., but we’ll never get to see how those rounds would have played out. Gagne was disqualified for forgetting to sign his scorecard before leaving the scoring area, and that results in a, yep, you guessed it — disqualification.

I feel strongly both ways...  How can you make it to second stage on not know that you have to sign your scorecard?  That said, it's the job of tournament organizers and rules officials to avoid any penalties, so how do you let the guy walk with his John Hancock on his card?  And really, would it be so awful if you texted him to come back and sign it?

And the ladies yet again:

TRINITY, Texas – Less than a week after a rules gaffe rocked LPGA Q-School, a scoring blunder has led to a stunning disqualification in one of the game’s most prestigious amateur team events. 

After the opening round of the Spirit International Amateur at Whispering Pines Golf Club on Thursday, U.S. captain and LPGA star Stacy Lewis discovered an innocent, yet costly, error on the signed scorecard of her women’s team, comprised of Wake Forest star Emila Migliaccio and Kaitlyn Papp, a standout at the University of Texas. 

Migliaccio and Papp’s total four-ball score for the round was correct, but the card also showed that Migliaccio had made a 2 at the par-3 3rd when, in fact, it was Papp who had birdied the hole.

When Lewis reported the error to tournament officials, her team was disqualified under Rule 23.2b, which states that “each score on the scorecard must be clearly identified as the score of the individual partner who made it; if this is not done, the side is disqualified.” 

“Some rules in golf are harsher than others,” Lewis said after the round, reflecting on the cruel turn of events. “This is overly harsh.

It is harsh, but it's also very clear...  But, yanno, girls and math.

Good luck with this, Eamon. 

The Winds of Waugh - Seth Waugh has a vision for the PGA of America, though the vision isn't necessarily shared by any dues-paying members of said organization.  The held the groundbreaking for their new Frisco, TX facility, and Seth showed his common touch.  It so happens that some of his members question the half-billion dollar project:

Since the plan was formally announced last December, after Golf.com first broke

extensive details in March 2018, a vocal minority of PGA Pros have taken to Twitter and other forms of social media to expense their displease on the plans, claiming it will not help the general membership, only top executives.

How dare the have opinions!  Who do they think they are?  But Seth puts them in their place with this candid response:

“This project is to benefit the 29,000 (members), it’s certainly not for me,” Waugh said.

No, Seth belongs to Cypress Point, The National, Deepdale, Seminole and about fifteen other clubs, so he'll only show up at Frisco for those major events.  But as to how this massive complex helps the assistant pro at Goat Hills CC (apologies to Mr. Jenkins), Mr. Waugh chooses not to explain.

Now, there's all sorts of grandiosity on display:

“We can never please everybody, not everybody is going to like this, but there are not many sites in the middle of the country with 600 raw acres to build the Silicon Valley of golf,” said Waugh.

What does that even mean?  You're building a couple of golf courses, it's not exactly the Hoover Dam.  

He has these promising words:

“Over the last 25 years, we’ve done a lot of try to kill golf. We’ve made it too hard, too expensive and taking too long. The one thing we haven’t done is make it too fun. This project is a chance to push back on that.”

To be fair, he's also hired a very good architect in Mr. Hanse.  That said, how this changes the state of play is left hopelessly vague, though I'm pretty sure the key word here is "fun".

I'll leave you there and wish you a pleasant weekend.