It wasn't perfect, but Bobby D. and I managed to get in fifteen holes on Friday, with the rain commencing as we played the 18th hole... Better yet, maybe another go tomorrow.
It's A Wrap - The Fall has finished, with yet another surprise winner:
Who won: Tyler Duncan (five-under 65, 19 under overall, second playoff hole)
How it happened: Simpson, the only 2019 U.S. Presidents Cup member playing on theweekend, made birdies on 1 and 3 and, after Todd made bogey on 5, led Munoz and Todd by two at the turn. Simpson made four straight pars to start the back nine but he failed to get up and down after missing the green on 14 and made bogey, dropping into a three-way tie at 17 under with Tyler Duncan and Munoz. All three then made birdies to get to 18 under, and Simpson made the second of his back-to-back birdies on 16 to get to 19 under. But Duncan birdied the 18th to match Simpson at 19 under and take the clubhouse lead. Simpson and Munoz both teed off on 18 with the tournament title within reach. Simpson could win with a birdie, and Munoz could enter a playoff with a birdie (as long as Simpson made par or worse). Munoz missed his birdie putt, and Simpson two-putted for par to force the playoff. Both players two-putted for par on the first playoff hole (the 18th), but Duncan made birdie the second time around to win the playoff.
I didn't watch any of it, though I did later see the lad's winning putt when flipping away from commercials on the Packers-Niners game.
Notably, Brendon Todd's pact with the devil seems to have lapsed:
Costliest hole: Todd started the day with four straight pars but took a disastrous double bogey on the par-4 5th. After finding the fairway he pushed his second shot into the native area right of the green. He had to drop and it led to a 6, which at the time left him two back of Simpson. Todd shot 72 and finished 4th.
Which will hopefully put an end to this little boomlet:
Should Tiger have waited and picked Brendon Todd for the Presidents Cup?
No. Next question, please....
Shack has this curious take from Steve Scott that's more than a little curious:
Brendon Todd’s average driving distance for last 6 seasons= 278.3. This year it’s up to294.5, but still ranking him 136th...well behind more than half of the @PGATOUR. (And this is before the big guns start to play)
These last 3 courses he has conquered are amongst the top 7 shortest on TOUR, all under 7,100 yds, so his timing couldn’t be better as far as his game matching up with these courses like Port Royal, Mayakoba and Sea Island.
He’s on a remarkable run, but sadly it wouldn’t even be possible at venues like Torrey Pines, Quail Hollow or Bay Hill which boast venues north of 7,450 where the bombers almost always rule.
It’s just sad that the correlation between distance and world ranking are so tight nowadays and we miss out on more great potential stories like Brendon. Keep it up B Todd and close out that rare trifecta tomorrow!
It's a nice story for sure.... But how can it be a great story, when all the great players are home with their families? Steve, who by the way is most famous for taking Tiger 38 holes back in 1996, seems not to factor in the glaring weaknesses of the fields against which Todd has succeeded.
As Eamon Lynch notes, the amperage is lacking:
This is a head start initiative for journeymen, an opportunity to bank points and coin before the elite return to vacuum up both in the New Year.
Even one of the more prominent guys in the field admits struggling to get amped up.
“I probably have the old-school mindset that the Tour doesn’t start until January,” said Zach Johnson, one of the many players enjoying a home game at Sea Island. “I’ve got to get out of that because there’s a lot of competitive golf and motivations to play in the fall.”
Awkward, as this tells us less about the event and more about the stage of Zach's career. Very rude of Eamon to make Zach admit that.
My feel good story of the week involves Employee No. 2's heartthrob:
Less than three months away from turning 50, Lumpy arrived at Sea Island with seven consecutive missed cuts and having posted one sub-70 round in past 15 starts dating back to 2018. On Friday, however, he looked like the player who won four times on the PGA Tour from 1996 to 2006, shooting a bogey-free 64 to move inside the top 20 heading into the weekend.
Making things even better for Herron? Having his 17-year-old son, Carson, on the bag.
Notwithstanding my bride's inappropriate feelings for the man, who doesn't love the Lumpster?
And for the record, this was not a Lumpy sighting:
That is an actual scuttled cargo ship that caught fire a couple of months ago. Although, I believe the cargo ship and Lumpy displace similar volumes of water.
Also, for the record, I've been planning that little bit all weekend, and did not pilfer it from the article linked above. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Girls Gone Wild - The LPGA honors the traditions of our game by awarding a big honking check:
Sei Young Kim may not have a major championship, but Sunday she had a major payday.
The 26-year-old from South Korea sank a 25-foot birdie putt on No. 18 to win the largest check in women’s golf history, taking the $1.5 million at the CME Group Tour Championship at Tiburón Golf Club.
Kim came to the 18th with a two-shot lead over playing partner Nelly Korda, but did not know that Charley Hull had finished at 17 under to tie her.
“I was thinking ‘What if Nelly made (a birdie on No. 18),” said Kim, who won for the 10th time in her career and third time this season. “I tried to make two putts. That was my mindset. After I made it, I saw the leaderboard. I didn’t know that Charley (Hull) finished at 17 under. So what if I didn’t make it, we would have gone to a playoff and that wouldn’t have been good for me. So, wow.”
That's existentially challenging, no? She makes the ultimate clutch putt, but is it clutch when you're blissfully unaware that you need to sink it?
Big money for the girls, for sure, though Charlie Hull's second place purse was a mere $480,000, quite the drop-off from the winner's check. Commence griping in 3,2,1....
Be Sure To Check It Twice - 'Tis the season, and the Tour is embracing said season by... Well, they're gonna make a list:
The PGA Tour confirmed that the policy board “has approved a number of modifications to the Pace of Play Policy.” While not all of the details have been revealed, Golf Digest has learned a few key aspects, including that the tour is moving away from a group-based system to one that focuses on individual players.
So far, so good... As were recently lectured, the integrity of the Tour cannot be questioned, so naturally they've got this nailed, right?
The focus will result in the creation of a list, another source confirmed, of the slowest players—those who repeatedly average more than 45 seconds to play a shot. The listwould not be made public, not even to the membership. But once a player is on the list, he is more likely to be timed by a rules official and would incur a one-stroke penalty for a second bad time during a round.
One player told Golf Digest that the tour is considering the addition of two more rules officials, one assigned to each nine throughout a tournament, for more thorough monitoring.
“We’re not trying to blacklist anyone,” said the player, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But it’s going to be much more fair to the majority of the players.”
So, you're gonna put Bryson and JB on double secret probation, and time them more than other players, and that meets your definition of fair? I had high hopes for the Jay Monahan era, but the Tour's penchant for secrecy remains impenetrable, and their contempt for their audience is really off-putting.
Not only does the secrecy of the list indicate a lack of seriousness, but they haven't even indicated that they're willing to impose penalty strokes on the offending players. But they also seem to not understand the nature of the problem slow play presents:
“The goal isn’t to move the needle on Thursday and Friday from 4:45 to 4:30 when you have 156 players in the field,” said another player with basic knowledge of the policy. “It’s just not going to happen. What we are trying to do as a tour is pinpoint where we are lacking, where certain individuals are lacking, in pace of play.
The Tour has actually started reducing field sizes because of the combination of pace of play and availability of daylight, so that fifteen minutes could actually six more players in the field. So, when you eliminate the possibility of actually improving anything, this is the plan one ends up with.
Rank This - Some interesting follow-up on those Golf Magazine course rankings, not least one rater explaining the fall from grace of Augusta National. Regardless of how we react to his points, this is exactly the kind of analysis I'd to see more of. But first, let's all just admit that this golf course is the ultimate one-off:
Augusta National still ranks among the top 10 courses in the world, according to GOLF’s
What’s going on here? Why have my fellow raters and I soured, relatively speaking, on Alister MacKenzie and Bob Jones’ legendary collaboration?
Augusta’s dip can be explained by the club’s unspoken dual mandate to preserve the historical integrity of the course while also running a tournament every April that must test the best players in the world. It’s a challenging, if not untenable, juggling act: simultaneously protecting the game while protecting par.
For every other track on the planet, I really only care about how it plays for its members. For this place, I'm only barely cognizant that it even has members....
Take, for example, the par-4 7th, which was designed to be a drive-and-a-pitch, like the 18th at St. Andrews, but now is a tree-choked straightaway 450-yard grind. The 11th, another par-4, has been “Tiger-proofed,” whereby with the addition of trees, rough and a new back tee, it has been squeezed and stretched into a perfunctory affair. The famed par-5 15th, which Jones intended for strong players to always go for in two, is now pinched by budding trees, resulting in too many buzz-killing layups. Others might lament the loss of the boomerang green on the 9th or the scope of the original 16th green, which allowed for more hole locations.
I've always had misgivings about No. 15, as that wedge from a downhill lie is just a horrible condition. As for the 16th green, I've been arguing that it should be blown up for years. Yes, the drama of the ball feeding to the pin is fun, but that pin position is the only one that works, so they use it twice during the week. The back right pin is the worst, unless you're fascinated by watching the entire field hitting the same forty-foot putt.
But, at a certain level, this is just a category error, judging Augusta somehow on the same basis as real golf courses. If you look at that top ten, you'll find a number of tracks (yes, The Old for sure, but also The National, Dornoch and Cypress Point) that share DNA with Augusta National, yet have evolved in quite different ways over the ensuing decades.
As a News You Can use feature, one of the raters offers this tutorial:
Hmmm....shall we see what he's got?
1. You Must Have an Underrated Favorite Course by a Famous Architect …
Any bleeping idiot can see the glories of, say, Pacific Dunes or Old Mac at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, and questioning Tom Doak’s artistry, while a ballsy move, will getyou banned from design chat rooms faster than professing a love for fivesomes. But to brag on a little-known example of his work, preferably an early course that hints at where his craft will lead — now that’s the stuff. In this vein, mine used to be Doak’s Black Forest at Wilderness Valley, a heaving, rugged 18 in Northern Michigan. It was auctioned off by the IRS last year, so, hey, you have to follow the news, too!
2. …And Have a Contrarian Opinion About One, Too.
Bill Coore is a huge jerk! Okay, terrible example — he’s actually the nicest man in golf, but you get the idea. A course rater sometimes has to go against the flow to show that he’s got a mind of his own.
One thing that has long amused me is the Fairview memberships loathing of Quaker Ridge. So, is that the contrarian view, or is my respect for it? But I actually think he's wrong about Old Mac, which I think most folks struggle to understand....
This one won't surprise you:
3. But Know the Sacred Cows
From Bobby Jones to Rory McIlroy, many prominent professional golfers have hated the Old Course at St. Andrews at first sight. It’s flat, it’s boring, it’s quirky, whatever. Eventually, they come around, and you’d better, too, if you know what’s good for you. It’s the “cradle of golf,” and you might as well criticize motherhood while you’re at it.
On the other hand, I read a piece not long ago in which it was posited that anyone that tells you they like the Old after one or two rounds is full of it. Since the place takes an eternity to understand, naturally any pleasure derived from early exposure must be suspect. You really can't win with this crowd, so it's best not to worry too much.
Of course, some things are beyond dispute:
9. Have a Favorite Strain of Grass
And it must be fescue. Case closed.
10. Study the Templates
Biarritz and Narrows, Alps and Cape — the rater knows his template holes like the back of his golf glove. He can recite his five favorite Redan holes at the drop of a bucket hat, with brownie points for a non–Macdonald- Raynor-Banks track. (Name-checking No. 2 at A.W. Tillinghast’s Somerset Hills in New Jersey will earn mega snaps.) Why are template holes so crucial? Because course raters know that even a bad template will have strategic interest, and strategic interest is to cracking the Top 100 as sweet vermouth is to a killer manhattan.
I'd imagine that there are knowledgeable folks that don't worship at the altar of links golf, though I can't imagine why. Enjoy, it's all meant to further our enjoyment of the game, otherwise what's the point?
Go Aussie! - Shipnuck's mailbag hit over the weekend, but had a couple of Prez Cup bits of interest. First, you know he'll have fun with this query:
What would be the worst-suited pairings for the U.S. President’s Cup team? -@GolfBurner
Tiger-Rickie. Because Fowler now knows the Capt. didn’t think highly enough of his game to pick him the first time around.
Bryson-Dustin. They speak entirely different languages.
Reed-JT. They’ll spend the whole time bickering about who gets custody of Spieth after the divorce.
My immediate instinct was that Patrick-JT dream team, for the same obvious reasons....
We've been down this road before, and there's some baggage for sure after Paris. The obvious issues are with Patrick and Bryson, so watch that space. Also, for different reasons, who Tiger himself plays with, and in what format.
Do you agree that the Big Easy could be the competitive and inspirational spark to forge an International Team victory at the Presidents Cup? And do you believe that Royal Melbourne offers the International Team any advantage? -@wordofmouth_tv
No doubt Ernie is beloved and respected, but I think the Americans will feel more “spark” playing for (and alongside) their collective boyhood hero, Capt. Woods. Royal Melbourne is a bigger factor. It is the opposite of a typical bomb-and-gouge PGA Tour setup. The ball will run for days there, most especially after landing on the terrifyingly sloped greens. It is a design full of nuance and subtlety, where the best way to get the ball close is often by not aiming at the flag, and a drive leaving an advantageous angle is more important than bashing one long and wrong. Els happens to have won three times at Royal Melbourne and holds the course record of 60. The Internationals will have a home-field advantage but, alas, I still don’t think it’s enough to counter a powerhouse U.S. team.
I agree with Alan's notes on the venue, but of course there's only a couple of guys on Ernie's team that know the place. It seems to me that the biggest advantage the Internationals have is the date, a time of year when players' games aren't finely honed. That's a gamble that the underdog takes to level the playing field, so we'll see how that plays out.
And on a related note, meaning that other team competition:
Would you like to see U.S. Ryder points allocated to regular Tour events (Sept-Dec 2019)? It seems a bit harsh on all the winners to-date, especially Brendan Todd? Is this deliberate to suit the elite players while they holiday and ensure no undesirables sneak onto the team? -@bcunningham0
Nailed it. And I’m perfectly okay with that!
I've long been decrying the extent to which the Tour has evolved into a closed shop, but this I'm OK with. The fields are awfully weak and the big names aren't playing, and this year part of the reason they're not playing is to pace themselves leading up to the Prez Cup. No good answer here, but the underlying question is why do we have this portion of the schedule?
Do you think the likes of Stenson and Sergio will have a chance for 2020 Ryder Cup? Where is your money for DP World Tour Championship this week? -@goufit
Man, I don’t even care about the FedEx Cup — how am I supposed to muster any interest in a lesser cash-grab? But while the Race to Dubai is meaningless, I am appreciative that we get to watch Rory do his thing on a course he has often overwhelmed. As for Stenson, 43, and Garcia, 39, they loom large for 2020. They have been the backbone of so many great European teams. Both have suffered dips in form — Stenson hasn’t won in over two years! — so Capt. Harrington’s toughest decisions will be whether to go with proven but aging warriors or pick young, ascendant talent in better form. There’s too much golf still to be played between now and Whistling Straits to know the right answer just yet.
Funny, that aging of the European stalwarts was the premise for Alan's prediction of an era of U.S. Ryder Cup dominance. Remind me, Alan, how did that work out for you in Paris?
Garrigus Unplugged - Robert Garrigus endured a drug suspension during the peak of the season, and vents his frustration. I love a good rant as much as the next guy, but I prefer them to be factually correct and coherent.... Maybe that's setting the bar too high, but here's the gist of his case:
But Garrigus claims that he was prescribed marijuana to treat knee and back pain, and had been monitoring his THC levels to make sure he remained within Tour guidelines.
“There’s something new that hurts every single day. Being a golfer for 25 years I guess that’s going to happen,” he said. “But I could be on Oxycontin on the golf course and get a TUE (Therapeutic Use Exemption) for that. I think that is ridiculous. The Tour can talk to me all they want about it but that is a double standard. If you think I’m better on the golf course on Oxycontin than I am on THC then you’ve lost your mind. It makes me laugh.”
Think of that as Count One of his indictment, and we also have two more:
“The fact that it is socially unacceptable for cannabis and CBD right now blows my mind. It’s OK to take Oxycontin and blackout and run into a bunch of people, but you can’t take CBD and THC without someone looking at you funny. It makes no sense,” Garrigus said.
And this:
“I get suspended in the middle of the year. Matt Every gets suspended at the end of the year and he misses three tournaments,” Garrigus said. “There also needs to be some discrepancy there. There’s a gray area there, but the Tour has always been black and white.”
Discrepancy? Consistency? Whatevah....
I've always been uncomfortable with the Tour testing for recreational drugs, though the illegality and the association with criminal elements in the acquisition of said drug being perhaps the strongest argument. Garrigus unfortunately finds himself in a moment when the treatment of THC is being reevaluated but hasn't been resolved. I'm also highly skeptical about any alleged medical benefits, but there's obviously a difference of opinion there.
But our hero isn't always a reliable narrator. For instance, that TUE is a bit of a red herring
“Under the WADA guidelines, there are exemptions for narcotics (such as Oxycontin) under certain circumstances but those circumstance would have to be extreme,” said Andy Levinson, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of administration. “Those aren’t the type of medications that would be given an exemption on an ongoing basis. It would be a limited time exemption.”
And the narrator has some troubling history with drugs of abuse as well:
Garrigus, whose lone Tour victory came at the 2010 Children’s Miracle Network Classic, has a history of drug problems and has spoken publicly about it numerous times before, dating back to when he checked himself into a rehab program in 2003.
But really, I'm only smoking this doobie for my pain, officer.
But then again, the rules are known to all and ignoring them can have consequences.... And while he's within his rights if other were treated with more leniency, I'm thinking that the next Robert Garrigus-Matt Every meeting at the urinal could be quite awkward.
I'll most certainly be blogging this week, though perhaps not each and every day. Check back when you can, and you'll find some of those musings you so crave.
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