Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Midweek Musings

It's awfully quiet out there, though we've one story guaranteed to amuse you...

Golfers Behaving Badly - I'm thinking of tossing the "Random Musings" tagline and replacing it with "Golfers behaving Badly", which has clearly evolved into the raison d'etre of this little corner of the Interwebs.  Today it's Billy Mayfair's turn under the klieg lights, and you'll never look at him in the same way...   Not that you ever look at him, but still...

Ironically, we had Jeff Maggert's career highlight yesterday, and today we'll revisit Billy's:


If you follow golf, or just Tiger Woods, closely, you know the name Billy Mayfair. Woods has played in 12 PGA Tour playoffs and has won all of them but one. Mayfair needed only one extra hole, and one timely birdie, to beat Woods at the 1998 Nissan Open, as the Tour’s Los Angeles stop was then known. Mayfair enjoys telling people that he is the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.
Two now....

Billy has fallen on tough times, and is one of the guys that actually needs the senior tour.  That doesn't excuse what comes next, but it is necessary context.  Mike's piece bounces around, but I'll do my best to preserve the sequence of events.  The incidents took place at the Sherwood event a couple of weeks back, in which Mayfair needed a strong finish to qualify for the Schwab Cup season finale.  

We start on the 11th hole:
Mayfair’s first rules problem on the afternoon — Saturday, Nov. 2 — came on the 11th hole, where he had a lengthy search for ball and, later, a seemingly inaccurate recounting of the search to a rules official.
The ball search on the 11th hole was not shown on Golf Channel, although it was taped by the cable network.

Mayfair searched for his golf ball. So did his wife and Jeff Johnson, his caddie. Mayfair, in a phone interview monitored by his lawyer, said Jimenez “got on his hands and knees and searched as hard as I was.” Spectators came in, to help with the search. Two rules officials, first Tom Carpus, later Dean Ryan, arrived. Mayfair and Jimenez were out of position, though not on the clock, so the officials were close by. Everybody was looking for a Titleist ProV1X with two small red dots on either side of Titleist and a bigger black dot above the e. 
Mayfair said, “I had told Jeff to keep an eye on his watch. We knew it was getting close to the three minutes.” 
Eventually, Johnson found it. There was grass swarming it, but it was Mayfair’s ball. 
Whew.
Beware the early call, Mike, but this is how this issue ended for the day:
Brian Claar, 60, a longtime Tour player, and now the head rules official for the Champions tour, saw Mayfair briefly after Mayfair finished the round. He asked Mayfair if there had been any issues with the length of time it took him to find his ball on 11.
“I said, ‘[It took] three minutes, and he said, ‘OK, fine,’” Mayfair said in the interview. 
“We were done and he walked away.”
Hold that thought, and let's move on to the 17th hole:
Then, on the par-3 17th, Mayfair missed the green with his tee shot and his ball came to rest in four-inch long grass on a severe upslope between a greenside bunker and an elevated green. Jimenez was on the green. 
Mayfair walked to his ball and, holding his 60-degree wedge with only his right hand, stood over it in the customary address position. He put the heavy sole of his wedge in the grass behind the ball. Viewers of the Golf Channel telecast could see that clearly, via a camera set up directly behind Mayfair. The clubhead went into the grass and the ball suddenly rolled both downhill and sidehill. It was an odd, unexpected sight, but the blades of Sherwood’s long, perennial ryegrass rough were damp and weak and golf courses are incubators for the odd and unexpected anyhow. The ball rolled in the rough, on that slope, at least a half-foot. 
Mayfair, wearing wraparound shades in the autumn afternoon glare, turned around, in the direction of the Golf Channel camera, and looked for a rules official. One, Dean Ryan, happened to be nearby. Golf Channel boom mics picked up their conversation. This is all of it. 
“My ball was right here,” Mayfair said, using his club as a pointer. “I got over it. I did not touch it, I did not get near it.” 
“OK, no problem, if you did nothing to cause it to move,” Ryan said. 
Mayfair talked over Ryan’s last four words. 
“I had the club up by it, but it was not in the ground,” Mayfair said. 
“You’re good,” Ryan said.
What's the problem, you ask?  It turns out that Billy is one of those unreliable narrators:
Claar went to the Golf Channel compound. Once there, he asked a rules official in the scorer’s trailer to ask Mayfair to come to the broadcast truck before he signed his card and made it official. Mayfair arrived at the compound and Claar showed him the tape of what had transpired on 17. 
In a phone interview, Claar said that Mayfair acknowledged that he had caused the ball to move after watching the clip twice. By the rules, he should have moved the ball back to its original position and incurred a one-shot penalty. By failing to do so, the rules required a two-shot penalty, meaning he had made 6 on 17 and not a 4. Mayfair signed for 76. 
“We caught it in time,” Claar said in an interview. 
“I never knew how close to the grass the club was until I saw it on tape,” Mayfair said in a separate interview.
Hmmm... We'll never know what Billy actually knew in that moment, but is he worthy of the benefit of the doubt?  I'm going with "No" to that one:
Sunday morning, Claar went back to the Golf Channel compound. At around 8:30, he was able to get access to the feed that showed the ball search on 11, even though it was not shown on the broadcast. Claar said there was a timer on the footage. He determined it took somewhere between 4 minutes, 50 seconds, and 4 minutes, 55 seconds, for Mayfair to find his ball.

About two hours later, Mayfair arrived on the range, to warm up for the third round. “I told Billy it took him between 4:50 and 4:55 to find the ball,” Claar said. “He said, ‘Well, we have a five-minute search.’ I said, ‘No, the rules have changed this year. It’s three minutes.’ He said, ‘I didn’t realize that.’ I explained that the ball you played is deemed lost. You played the wrong ball.” 
Mayfair said that is not how he remembers the conversation. He said that Claar told him he took between 4 minutes and 4 minutes and 30 seconds to find the ball, and that he did not say he was unaware of the rule change. 
Claar said he offered Mayfair the opportunity, on the Sherwood range on that Sunday morning, to go to the Golf Channel compound and watch the replay himself, but that he did not want to do that. “I guess he believed me,” Claar said. “He was upset.”
The prior day he had admitted he was aware of the rule change reducing the search time to 3 minutes....  Except for Claar, there isn't a lot of praise to go around.  It's not often that rules officials get a call-out, but he seems to have tried to head off any penalties, in the process allowing Mayfair to hang himself with his own words.

As for our protagonist, he's attributing it all to that vast right-wing conspiracy:
“I wish this could have been handled more on an on-the-level basis,” Mayfair said. “It could have been handled better.” 
Handled better by whom, Mayfair was asked. 
“By the rules officials,” Mayfair said. “They see me searching for the ball. They know how long I’m looking for it. They have a stopwatch and I don’t.” 
Again, rules authorities disagree. They say that a central element of golf is for each individual golfer to know the rules and follow them. The rulebook contains this sentence on its first page: “You are responsible for applying your own penalties if you breach a rule, so that you cannot gain any potential advantage over your opponent in match play or other players in stroke play.”
Billy, for you to continue talking violates the first rule of holes.  You've made it abundantly clear that you would say anything that would make the matter go away, but in doing so you expected to be saved from your own worst instincts. 

Also not covering themselves in glory are the Tour and Golf Channel:
Two Golf Channel employees said the clip could not be shared with GOLF.com because broadcast rights revert to the PGA Tour 48 hours after a tournament concludes. Tom Alter, a vice president in the PGA Tour’s communications department, said the Tour could not make available a clip of Mayfair on the 17th hole, citing Tour policy. Asked about providing a transcript of the 15-second conversation between Mayfair and the official, Alter said, “We don’t have the resources for that.”
If they're not making it available, it's because they don't want us to see it.... I had been reliably informed that golf was a game for gentlemen, but I'm starting to reexamine that assumption.

Day of Atonement - Kooch faced the press yesterday and seemingly tries to atone for his behavior:
“That was a tough thing on me and my family, but it was really tough when I heard from
my grandmother and she’s reading headlines about her grandson,” Kuchar said. “I think I’ve always tried to make her proud. I’ve got kids of my own, you try to set a good example.” 
In February, under a mounting storm of Twitter backlash and a growing number of stories in mainstream publications, Kuchar increased Giral Ortiz’s payment to $50,000. He said he regrets both his actions and statements, including telling Golf.com, “For a guy who makes $200 a day, a $5,000 week is a really big week.”
I'm usually not a fan of the "Do it for the children" logic, though of course he is a father and that can be quite the driving motivator:
“It’s a moment I’m not proud of, but it’s one of those things you do your best as a father to teach kids lessons, and there’s no better thing than to show them – taking the lead and showing them the right steps to take. When you have moments you’re not proud of, you make amends for them, you do your best to make it right and try to keep moving forward and staying positive,” he said on Tuesday. “I think I equate it a lot to team sports, you know. You learn a lot in losses, you learn a lot in hard times. Certainly it’s given me an opportunity for growth, for self-betterment. I try in situations to definitely not make that mistake again but to be better in so many areas, to try to be more charitable, try to be more giving, try to take more opportunities to do the right things and do really good things. 
“I think as a whole I’m proud of the life I’ve led, I think I’ve done a lot of good, but you look back at certain instances, I’ve got some I’m not proud of. I’m proud of the way I’ve tried to make them right.”
I hope it's genuine, Matt, cause you were really kind of a dick.  

Cheap Shots - there's not a whole lot going on, so let's try to amuse with what little content is available:


As the man said, Whew!

Pretty sure that's a Dude Wipes hat, so we're all good.

HGH? -  This is the *real* reason why you’re hitting your irons longer

Not exactly the world's best kept secret:


If you're seven-iron is that strong, you don't exactly need the one-iron...

 At the Slow Group in Front? - According to this surprising study, here’s where you should never aim

 More Like No Chance - These 7 Mizzen+Main Phil Mickelson shirts are on a ‘last chance’ sale


Glad that Phil has something to fall back on if the golf thing doesn't work out, but business casual on the golf course isn't my look.



Hey, this is serious business.  Let's let Eddie Pepperell handle our hilarity.  Speaking of which, still no video of the Tin Cup moment, but Alex Myers has unearthed this still photo:


I never realized that Pepperell was blessed with such Hollywood good looks.

I'll blog further this week if there's anything worth discussing....
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