Tuesday Tastings

Got a few things to amuse you today, beginning with this nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Mayakoba Memories - In which the Kooch rescues his moribund golf career, yet manages to squander his reputation:

Victory at the Mayakoba Golf Classic last November for Matt Kuchar should have been one of golf’s feel-good stories of the year. 

The couple in happier days.

After all, it snapped a four-year winless drought for the popular veteran who banked $1.3 million in prize money for his effort. And he did so with his “lucky charm,” a fill-in caddie, David Giral Ortiz, who goes by the nickname “El Tucan.” 

Yet this story took a turn for the worse in January while Kuchar was on his way to victory again at the Sony Open of Hawaii with his regular caddie, John Wood. PGA Tour Champions pro Tom Gillis leaked word in a tweet that Kuchar had paid his caddie far less than the customary 10-percent rate of the winner’s check. Despite Kuchar claiming it was a “non-story,” – further evidence of his tone deafness in this matter – it grew into national news and the social media uproar that ensued sullied his former choir-boy image.

Summaries can be hard, but do take a moment to appreciate how poorly that last graph captures the events.  Exactly no one is arguing that a fill-in caddie deserves 10% for a win, but Kooch did far worse than simply call it a "non-story".  I tend to be understanding of cheapness as a character flaw, being of an age where I've had lots of experience with folks who came of age in a different era....  Of course, the protagonist in this morality tale doesn't have that excuse available to him.

But just a reminder that Kooch's behavior in the aftermath was pretty ugly.  Now we all can be prone to doubling down on our mistakes, so it leaves us unclear exactly what kind of man our former hero is.  But a reminder that Kooch said two things that really stick with this observer:

1. He noted that the amount he gave El Tucan. $4,000 per my memory, was a lot for a guy that makes $100 a day.  Tone deafness doesn't get much deafer than that...., and;
2. When Tom Gillis reported the payment inaccurately as $3,000, Kooch called a flea-flicker, indicating that the payment wasn't the $3,000 nor was it 10%, avoiding the overt lie but clearly intending to lead us to the logical conclusion that he paid El Tucan somewhere around the midpoint, which strikes most of us as where it should have been.

That last point seems to be the most damning, because it confirms Kooch's knowledge that he underpaid the man....  he wanted the credit for paying a fair amount, without parting with the greenbacks....Of course, life doesn't work that way...

We recently had a piece on the nicest guys on Tour and, notwithstanding Kooch's anibus horribilis, he still got honorable mention.  To me, the message is that we can't really know these guys from their public personas....  I hope he really is a nice guy, and that this was some sort of aberration.  But the way he clung to his position makes me skeptical....

Scenes From The Country Club Life -  Alpine Country Club is a great place, a Tillinghast design on a beautiful piece of property in the Northeast corner of New Jersey.  I've been lucky enough to play it a couple of times, though none recently....  An amusing story of entitlement gone haywire, but first let Geoff frame it in an old Dan Jenkins bit:

Our late, great friend Dan Jenkins certainly would have filed Rodrigo Torrejon’s story under the old “nothing a good recession wouldn’t fix” files. In a nutshell: a New Jersey woman sued Alpine Country Club for $30,000 when a waiter spilled wine on her Hermès purse, only to be outdone by the club suing the waiter.

Not only is any mention of Himself appreciated, but it's so timely given the fervent desire of the entire Democratic primary field for a recession.  Funny that.

The gist of the story is quite amusing, though the story omits quite the important data point:

On Sept. 7, 2018, Beyder was having a meal at the Alpine Country Club when a waiter spilled red wine on the pink handbag, according to the lawsuit. The handbag was rare – having been discontinued – and essentially irreplaceable. The bag was a 30th birthday gift for Beyder from her husband, Errico said.

For nearly a year, Beyder tried to resolve the dispute with the country club directly, Errico said, but the club dragged out the discussions and stopped being responsive. Even the insurance company was dismissive and failed to understand why a bag would cost so much, she said.

This story can be enjoyed merely as a tale of conspicuous consumption gone wrong, and enjoyed on that basis.  But the lawsuit took a strange turn:

In a response to the lawsuit filed Oct. 29 by Maryana Beyder against the Alpine Country Club in New Jersey, the club denied almost every one of Beyder's allegations – including that it was liable for the damage to her Hermès Kelly bag – and capped off the response by suing its own employee, according to court records. 

The action is called a cross-claim, in which one defendant sues another in the same proceeding. 

"So basically, what this is is that they're asking the employee to pay whatever they owe under the law to my client," said Alexandra Errico, Beyder's attorney. "So they're suing their own employee that they hired."

I know that an employee can't sure his employer, at least he can't sue for injuries sustained.  Can an employer sue an employee?  I don't actually know the answer to that....but I guess we'll find out.

I think the most curious question relates to the plaintiffs.  Specifically, are they club members?  It's journalistic malpractice not to disclose that, because it changes everything, no?

I've actually had a fair amount of experience in this area, and I suspect that the plaintiffs are not members...Though it's a far better story if they are.

Hosung For The Holidays - And you say that I never get you anything....  Submitted for your approval, seven minutes of Hosung Choi doing Hosung Choi things:

OK, there's way too much filler, but he's far more worthy of a sponsor's exemption than Tony Romo or Steph Curry.  If you something more compatible with contemporary attention spans, I'll suggest you click here and just watch his winning putt.  Or, this will give you flavor of it:

Frankie's Fall - A perfect synechdoche of the madness of the game we love.  We open in April at Augusta:

‘People told me it would be hard to beat last year, nearly impossible in fact, but until that 

day at the Masters I picked it up where I left off, and then it stopped,’ said Molinari. ‘Confidence plays a big part in any sport but particularly in golf. 

‘I was feeling good coming to Augusta, everything was going my way. After that, it became many little things that I didn’t do quite as well. My ball striking wasn’t as good and I didn’t putt as well. For over a year, it felt like I was pushing a boulder going upwards but then it started going the other way and it has been hard to stop it.’ 

Molinari’s results underline his candid assessment in stark detail. In the 10 months leading up to the Masters, he won four times worldwide and became the only European to win five points out of five at the Ryder Cup. He drove down Magnolia Lane having claimed the Arnold Palmer Invitational with a brilliant final round 64, and followed it by reaching the semi-finals of the WGC-Match Play.

I remember Ed Pavelle, an astute observer of our game, asserting on that Saturday that Molinari would not give Tiger an opening.  He looked in complete control of his game, then came to that treacherous 12th tee:

‘The Machine,’ as he is often known, was purring as he took the lead heading into the final round of the Masters. He was poised to become the first golfer since Tiger in 2001 to hold the Claret Jug and the green jacket at the same time. With the ending of that dream, as he says, everything changed. In the 13 events since, Molinari has not mustered a single top-10 finish to fall from sixth in the world to 12th.

Perhaps his warranty expired?  Yanno, somewhere on that walk from 11 green to 12 tee....  Alas, it's a mortal lock that he'll find it again in September 2020.  

Stat So? - Brian Wacker explores the use of big data in golf, but his case seems a bit underwhelming to this observer:

Which is why his swing coach, Scott Hamilton, reached out to a statistician to delve into the data built up over Stallings’ 10-year career. The examination included everything from the schedule Stallings was playing, to what areas of his game that he should work

on the most. The results were eye-opening. 

“My short-game coach [Jeff Pierce] suggested increasing the lofts in my wedges to allow for more versatility around the greens, even though I’d used a standard setup for forever,” Stallings says. “I also became more focused in my practice and built in more drills around the green.”

To say it helped would be an understatement. In the entirety of the 2018-’19 season, Stallings holed pitches/chips four times. Through just five events in 2019-’20, he has already more than doubled that, knocking it in the hole 10 times from off the green. Last season, Stallings ranked 116th in strokes gained/around the green. In the still small sample size of this season, he’s first.

If you need that Cray supercomputer to tell you to hole out more often, perhaps you've chosen the wrong line of work?  The more so as it was driven by this keen insight:

Scott Stallings hadn’t been very analytical in any facet of his life, but when the three-time PGA Tour winner was told he was one shot a tournament away from qualifying for last season’s Tour Championship—and, more dauntingly, one shot a week away from losing his card—he started re-examining his game. 

“A quarter of a shot a day and one a tournament is worth millions,” says Stallings, 34, who in 26 starts during the 2018-’19 PGA Tour season finished 105th in the FedEx Cup standings and earned a little more than $1 million. Conversely, Jason Kokrak, the last man in at East Lake, earned more than double that. “A margin of 58 shots over the course of a year,” Stallings says, “is not a lot of variance.”

If I shoot lower scores I'll make more money?  Wow...please tell me you haven't shared this with anyone else.

Another advocate is one of our faves, the overly-emotional Billy Ho:

It wasn’t until after the 2012-’13 season that Billy Horschel started to care about stats and began taking a closer look at them. Brandt Snedeker had already enlisted the services 

of numbers guru Mark Horton when Horschel, who shares the same coach as Snedeker, Todd Anderson, asked Anderson if he thought Horton’s services could be useful. 

To that point, Horschel had won once in three seasons on the PGA Tour.

The next season? He won twice and captured the FedEx Cup, something Horschel said he’s not sure would have been possible without the information Horton had provided. The two have worked together ever since. 

“He dissects why guys played well in the past at certain courses, what they did to play well there, and helps put together a game plan,” Horschel says. “I now have a way to practice that week going into a tournament and know how to prepare for that event. Then come tournament time, I know where to be aggressive and where not to be aggressive.”

Which of course only begs the blindingly obvious question of what's happened subsequently?  To wit, you're more likely to see our Billy Ho on a milk carton than a leaderboard.

I think there's a fascinating piece to be written on this subject, though Wacker doesn't seem to have put in much effort to find it.  It would involved players using these stats to learn things about their games previously unknown to them.  Wacker, in contrast, spends many pixels about player figuring out that certain venues aren't good for them.  Me, if after a few tries at an event I've never seen a check with a comma need, maybe I'd try somewhere else.

That's all for today, kids.  See you soon.