I'll warn you that my heart isn't fully in it this morning. But, while our regular Wednesday game has a road trip today, it's too late a start to justify stiffing you. Perhaps just a couple of items...
Who Ya Got? - Bob Harig at ESPN has the all you need to know, first with the timing:
That is no different now as the United States and International teams will finally be determined this week when Tiger Woods makes his four selections for the U.S. squad (Thursday) and Ernie Els does the same for the International team (Wednesday).
OK, and is there any perspective you'd advise us to apply?
One thing to keep in mind: Nobody at this point "deserves'' a pick. That comes up often as the debates ensue over why certain players should round out the 12-man squads.
Fair enough, though I wonder if we can really hold the line on that....
Ernie bats lead off, so shall we start there?
Automatic qualifiers: Marc Leishman, Hideki Matsuyama, Louis Oosthuizen, Adam Scott, Haotong Li, Abraham Ancer, C.T. Pan, Cameron Smith
Hmmmm...what do we think? I mean, a couple of those guys used to be pretty good.... But it's awfully underwhelming.... I think ll need to strengthen the team considerably, so I'd recommend he add stalwarts such as Bobby Locke, Peter Thompson, Roberto de Vincenzo and .... well, what? I see, they're not available....OK, so who is?
Among the possibilities: Jason Day, Jazz Janewattananond, Sungjae Im, Justin Harding, Ben An, Adam Hadwin, Brendan Grace, Joaquin Niemann
Did Ernie know this when he took the gig? Or was he too busy watching replays of last year's Ryder Cup?
The reason that roster seems so weak is because, wait for it, it's so damn weak:
The lowdown: The highest-ranked International player is Scott at No. 17 in the world. If Woods were to pick himself, Finau, Reed and Woodland, all four of his choices would be ranked ahead of the highest International player. As it stands now, seven of the U.S. automatic qualifiers are ahead of Scott.
The only American ranked lower than Scot is our Kooch (#22), but at least he's a big tipper.
Harig has two locks, and I agree completely:
The (Big) Easy call: Day is going to get picked. The fact that he didn't make the team on his own is somewhat stunning, but his experience and the fact that he is from Australia -- giving the team four Aussies -- is just too much to pass up.
The locks: In addition to Day, Im is an obvious pick. The South Korean golfer finished 11th in the points and was the PGA Tour's rookie of the year with 10 top-10 finishes on his way to qualifying for the Tour Championship. He also finished second in Mississippi and tied for third behind Woods at the Zozo Championship.
Don't forget that Day can also putt, and that's always helpful... That said, I can't actually recall Day ever playing well in this event, but home cooking and all. Im is, I think, also a lock, just a better player with a far higher ceiling than the others.
It's hard to think of Grace outside the bubble, but he's really been quite dreadful recently:
The choices: Niemann, who won the Military Tribute at the Greenbrier, appears another strong possibility for Els, but the last two choices are far from easy. Ben An was 15th in the points but has been a steady player for four years. He'd also make an excellent partner for Im in the team competitions. Grace seems a long shot -- he just missed the cut in Bermuda and he has fallen out of the top 100 in the world -- but he did go 5-0 at the 2015 Presidents Cup, has experience and makes for a good partnership with Oosthuizen.
That field in Bermuda was shockingly weak for an official PGA Tour event, so just a little outside isn't very good at all. I think if you're resigned to defeat, you have to put Jazz on the team, just to amuse ourselves at Sir Nick's attempt to pronounce it.
Perhaps I should have led with Shane Ryan's piece on the five things to look for in a Captain's Pick:
5. Form
As strange as it might sound, a player’s form entering a match-play exhibition doesn’t matter as much as logic says it should. Yes, you can find examples of bad form persisting, as we famously saw with Webb Simpson in the 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, but more often the cauldron of a Cup renders recent results less critical than many believe. The heightened pressure, along with the format change to match play and the addition of a team, tends to stop individual momentum.
Last year’s Ryder Cup outside Paris is a perfect example. Thomas Bjorn went with four veterans, none of whom were playing remarkably at the time (and one, Sergio, was looking quite bad), and still they wound up ranging from “very good” to “spectacular.” Meanwhile, Tiger had just won the Tour Championship and Bryson DeChambeau had won two PGA Tour playoff events, and as two of Jim Furyk’s captain’s picks they ended the weekend with zero combined points.
Thanks, Shane, it's helpful when you shoot down your own points, relieving me of the necessity to do so. That's why you always favor the better player, because captain's picks are like a box of chocolates...
But this is the one that amuses most:
4. Chemistry
This is another paradoxical element that’s simultaneously important in certain ways and also completely overblown. Nobody wants to invite a clubhouse cancer into the mix. Still, for the same reasons mentioned above, match-play events tend to blur the lines of camaraderie. Who can forget when Bubba Watson missed out on a captain’s pick in the 2016 Ryder Cup at Hazeltine National but decided to become the world’s greatest teammate as an assistant captain? Then there’s the old canard about how Europeans supposedly get along better with each other than Americans, which is fascinating until you learn—from any European you ask—that it simply isn’t true. We as journalists and fans are tempted to craft chemistry narratives, but more often than not the heat of competition makes for strange bedfellows. So while everyone on Team USA might like Rickie Fowler personally, it wouldn’t necessarily behoove Tiger to take him over someone less popular like Patrick Reed, nor should any American in his right mind be upset at pairing with Reed.
And yet, that smiling photo from 2017 reminds us more of 2018, no?
Now Shane does call out the experience canard as well.... That's something we obviously see more in that other event, where Ryder Cup experience is usually shorthand for experience at losing. But his conclusion is a cry for help:
These last two categories are why Tiger should pick Kisner, even though he probably won’t. It’s also why it won’t matter—in the Presidents Cup, he has a wealth of “good experience” at his disposal, from Fowler to Reed to Spieth to himself. Els, meanwhile, has almost none, and will be reduced to stocking up on either rookies or bad experience. With a 20-18-2 record in his Presidents Cup career, maybe Els should shock the world and beat Tiger to the punch by calling his own number on Wednesday night.
Yeah, if he wants to ensure that they continue to lose.... and especially to lose big.
I'll leave the U.S. for tomorrow, just to ensure that we have something to talk about...
Phil On Phil - Before the inevitable snark, let's take a moment to reflect on Phil's remarkable longevity:
While Phil Mickelson was playing this weekend in China, a result in Japan brought his remarkable streak to an end.
Mickelson entered the WGC-HSBC Champions ranked No. 50 in the world, and he finished T-28 after a final-round 68. But Shugo Imahira's runner-up result at the Mynavi ABC Championship on the Japan Tour will be enough to jump from No. 53 to No. 50 when the rankings are updated Monday morning, knocking Mickelson down to 51st.
It will mark the first time since November 1993 that Mickelson is outside the top 50 in the world, ending a streak of 1,353 straight weeks.
Mickelson reached 17th in the rankings following his win at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February, but he's been in the midst of a pronounced slide ever since. He hasn't cracked the top 25 since the Masters and told reporters this week in China that at age 49 his issues were as much mental as physical.
This is just off-the-charts amazing.... And he won at Pebble a mere nine months ago, so perhaps the burial is premature.... But those nine months haven't been good, and he tries to explain:
"I just haven't played well. Just had a lot of stuff going on, and I just haven't been really focused and into the mental side," Mickelson said. "I haven't seen good, clear pictures. I haven't been as committed and as connected to the target. I just haven't been mentally as sharp the last six, eight months."
Yeah, that last estimate seems on the low side... But, perhaps today I should just let it pass and allow the man to bask in our adulation. No, I feel fine, why do you ask?
On Records - Geoff, with the help of Gar Van Sickle, has an interesting take on records, first with this on Sam Snead:
I’ve been uncomfortable with the belittling of Sam Snead’s 82 wins, because while therecord books do credit him with some odd wins, he’s also had many chipped away from his career mark since tied by Tiger Woods.The bashing also ignores that the war years stripped Snead of opportunities to win at the peak of his powers.
Me too, even though I've partaken of some of the bashing.... Not bashing, per se, but there's just no way to reconcile the historical record to the modern world. The war is something I'd not considered, but he also started his career in the throes of the Great Depression.
Our old friend Van Cynical, now banished to the pixels at The Morning Read, shares some of the amusing history of Snead's win total, which has been as low as 81 and as high as 84, the number Snead himself advocated. Here's just a little sample of some of the silliness involved:
Fast-forward to 1995, when the PGA Tour was the last to know that the British Open – or Open Championship, as the Brits prefer – was kind of a big deal. Yes, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. It has been only 24 years since the PGA Tour decided to acknowledge the Open as an official PGA Tour victory. I guess the Tour wanted to make sure that the Open’s first 135 years weren’t some kind of fluke. Anyway, adding the British lifted Snead’s “accepted” victory total to its current 82 level.
It's so much worse than that, Gary.... I threw out Bobby Locke's name above, as he won four of those Open Championships. The Tour wasn't especially open to foreigners in that era, and when Locke ventured to America with great success, the great American players took it as an existential threat and.... well, they had him banned. Certainly a proud day in golf history....
For what it's worth, Gary points at other records that are equally suspect:
Applying modern standards would alter other significant records. If team titles don’t count, Byron Nelson’s record 11 straight victories would be cut to 10 and his 18-victory season in 1945 would be reduced to 17 because one win was the Miami International Four-Ball, which Nelson won with partner Jug McSpaden.
There are other gaping holes in the Tour’s records. The main one worth mentioning is Byron Nelson’s streak of finishing in the money in 113 consecutive tournaments. It was broken by Tiger Woods, who extended his streak to 142 tournaments. Except, Johnson noted, from the 1939 PGA Championship through the 1950 Los Angeles Open, Ben Hogan was in the money 177 events in a row.
Did Hogan maybe miss a cut during that time and therefore not appear in the final tournament results, which happened occasionally? Did he have a missed cut that is unfindable because it didn’t appear in a newspaper box score? Possibly. The same can be said of Nelson’s record, which the Tour accepted on the basis of an Oklahoma golf statistician’s say-so. Neither proposed record is bulletproof.
It's quite the rabbit hole, as Gary makes clear. It's a lot of wins, but we can never sort out the plusses and minuses of each era, so we can all agree that 82 is a lot of wins.
Peaking Early - An 11-year old girl just had the craziest round of her life, or anyone's life for that matter:
We all have one of those stories about a crazy round we once had. I know I have a few of them. But this one, from 11 year-old Gabriela Hitoshi, might just top them all.
Playing in U.S. Kids Golf’s South American Championship, the 11-year-old Brazilian started with a bogey on the first, but quickly made up for it with a birdie-par-hole-in-one-bogey-albatross-eagle stretch. She made three eagles in four holes, and a bogey in between!
She cooled down with three-straight pars, then followed with back-to-back birdies.Presumably exhausted from all the ups and downs which preceded it, she closed with two bogeys in her final four holes — but was still good enough for one of the most eventful 65s you’ll ever see. Amazingly, it wasn’t enough to win the event; she finished third. But, on the bright side, her final-round 65 was a full 10 shots better than her previous round.
There are only a handful of folks known to have made a hole-in-one and an albatross in the same round, one of which was hoops legend John Wooden:
Golf Digest also lists something even more incredible: a golfer having a hole in one and a double eagle in the same round. It doesn’t give odds, but just think in terms of double O.J., or maybe triple. Golf Digest says that feat has been reported as happening four times in history.
One of the four was by John Wooden.
It was 1947, and Wooden, 36, was soon to move to UCLA and change the course of the school’s athletic history.
Touchingly, Wooden's family found the scorecard from that day after his passing. Gabby, I can only hope that rest of your golfing life isn't a letdown.
See you folks tomorrow.
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