To take my mind off our need for snow there's nothing better than a deep dive into...yup, Patrick Reed. Really the gift that keeps on giving...
Thoughts On The "C-Word" - Sometimes stories age well in the first 24 hours, so my decision to ignore this bit from the Sunday playoff might have been prescient:
As Reed’s 8-foot birdie try on the third playoff hole ran past the cup, a person from the crowd could be heard shouting, “Cheater!” The scream did not happen during Reed'sstroke, but Reed appeared to immediately glare at the person and muttered something that was not picked up by television microphones.
"That was pretty unfortunate," Golf Channel announcer Dan Hicks said. "You see Reed glaring up into the stands. Someone yelled as loud and as clear as day, 'Cheater!' "
While Reed went on to make his comebacker for par, Justin Thomas followed with a tournament-winning birdie to relegate Reed to a runner-up finish.
Dan, I think "undeserved" is the word you're looking for, at least according to Webb Simpson.
But see what you think of this framing 'graph:
Reed is accustomed to inciting a response from fans, dating to his shushing of the European crowd at the 2014 Ryder Cup. But the taunts have become more frequent since Reed received a two-shot penalty for brushing back sand behind his ball in the Bahamas.
Oh yeah, those are exactly the same kind of thing....Sheesh!
This is also suspect reporting:
Reed, whose career has been filled with controversial moments, accepted the penalty but didn’t admit to purposely committing the infraction, instead blaming the camera angle.
It's a bit more complicated than that... I don't really think anyone actually thought he was doing the excavation job with the explicit thought of improving his lie. Yet, the problem is in his reaction, but some thought might be needed there to understand the misfire.
Randall Mell has a more interesting take, first arguing for an intervention:
The PGA Tour brass and Reed’s team would do him a giant favor if they cornered and confronted him about how his golfing “sin” at the Hero World Challenge last month is not just a stain upon his reputation, but a deep bruise upon his sport, one that threatens to swell into something worse.
Because Reed is in denial.
He still doesn’t see what just about everybody else saw in the replay that showed him scraping away sand from the back of his ball with those practice swings in that bunker in the Bahamas. He doesn’t see how even the most reasonable of his peers can’t dismiss that as an honest mistake.More importantly, Reed doesn’t see the damage his denial continues to wreak upon a game already being tested by the creeping incivility of other sports, how he’s accelerating that challenge to the game’s honorable traditions.
That’s why Reed’s team and the Tour would do us all a giant service with an intervention.
OK, but a few reactions... First, the proposed intervention would necessarily conflict with the reaction of the American team, including its Tour overseers, who offered uncritical support during the week that followed the incident.
Second, why is this the Tour's responsibility? If one of there independent contractors, hypothetically speaking, just happens to be an a*******e, how is that any of their affair?
Because this isn’t even really about Reed’s welfare. It’s about where the game is being further pushed if he doesn’t admit his need for forgiveness and seek some sort of absolution. It’s about how even reasonable golf fans are willing to accept heckling when it’s aimed at a player who is so remorseless in his indiscretion.
The sport is in trouble when heckling can be justified as defense of the game’s honor.
Another straw man bites the dust... Because who exactly was justifying the heckling? I do think there's a sense that Patrick had it coming, but to me that's a different issue.
If that heckler had spouted off in Reed’s backswing, the game would have been wounded in a way none of us wants to see. We all would have been left to wonder if that fan dictated Sunday’s outcome, instead of the players we invest so much into following.
Nobody wants that. Nobody’s paying to see Joe Yahoo decide who wins and loses a playoff. That’s the difference between golf and football. A heckler in golf can be like a fan in football sneaking on to the field to trip a receiver racing up the sideline. The sport’s just different that way.
Reed lost to Justin Thomas Sunday, but we are all going to lose if that line of civility continues to move in professional golf.
Remind me, why do golfers play in complete silence? That's obviously beyond our scope here, but needs to be mentioned I think.
Of greater relevance, shall we insert a "Live Under Par" promo here to demonstrate how two-faced the Tour is on such subjects? If we're worried about fan comportment, might we consider limiting alcohol sales? Nah, nothing to see here....
Now we move in an interesting direction.... Are you familiar with the term "Gusted"? In his post-playoff interview, Patrick accused the wind of affecting his putt. Chris DiMarco begs to difer:
“Is there a bigger d*** in the world?” Chris DiMarco tweeted in a post that included a recording of Reed’s Golf Channel interview, in which Reed cited the wind as interfering with his missed putts, after the playoff loss in Hawaii. “Own your stuff. Always excuses. Just say you cheated and you got beat!”
DiMarco isn’t some lunatic on the Tour fringe. He’s a highly respected and well-liked PGA Tour Champions player, a three-time PGA Tour winner, two-time Ryder Cup player and two-time Presidents Cup player. He deleted his tweet the day after, but it was up long enough for his followers to understand the depth of his disdain for what Reed has brought to his sport.
I had turned it off by then, but I guess he should have just tamped down an imaginary spike mark....
In all seriousness, I'm completely open to the concept that Patrick is the biggest d*** out there. But, if you're gonna hang him for that offense, you'll be stringing up every Tour pro we know and love. It's never their stroke or read, otherwise it would chip away at their reservoir of self-confidence.
It's at times like this that a weary nation turns to Mike Bamberger who, after an amusing attempt to encourage us to shower love on the villain, gets to the crux of things:
The situation became much worse when Reed claimed, preposterously, that a camera angle made his excavation project look worse than it was.
Then the matter took on even deeper meaning. Not because Reed got heckled when he went to Australia the following week, to play in the Presidents Cup, handpicked for the team by Tiger Woods. It got worse because there was no honest accounting of what he did and why it was an affront to golf. Not by Reed, not by Woods, not by Reed’s teammates, not by any PGA Tour official.
Granted, the timing could not have been more awkward. They were there as a team. But the silence implied tacit approval, or at least the idea that Reed’s act was no big deal. And that’s even more worrisome. Reed didn’t even seem embarrassed to be caught. How could his touring brethren not be just downright pissed that he wasn’t playing by the rules? In a sense, he was stealing from them.
Nothing excuses what that spectator did, but if Reed would have owned his failings, or if his fellow professionals would have called him out on his flagrancy, there likely would not have been that one-word outburst.
If golf is on the road to anything goes, on the part of players or spectators, the professional game will be on life support before Tiger gets his 18th major.
Remind me, whose idea was it to put the guy on the team?
Geoff goes an interesting direction, though I have qualms:
Ultimately this all ignores what I see as equally important: has the lack of any significant punishment for Reed increased the likelihood of more fan incidents? We considered this going into the Presidents Cup, and now we know how those crowds treated Reed (not well).
But punishment for what? For stupid comments in a post-round interview? Geoff even has this comment from the Commish:
“Golf is a game of honor and integrity, and you've heard from Patrick,” Monahan said. “I've had an opportunity to talk to Patrick at length, and I believe Patrick when he says that [he] did not intentionally improve [his] lie. And so you go back to that moment, and the conversation that he had with [rules official] Slugger [White], and the fact that a violation was applied and he agreed to it, and they signed his card and he moved on. To me that was the end of the matter.”
Penalizing guys for being a*******s is the ultimate slippery slope, although unfortunately Robert Allenby was unavailable for comment. Though, Jay, you might want to review those comments from Slugger White, which seem.....well, lets just call them regrettable for now.
There's old saying in the law, that bad cases make bad law, which I think applies here. Patrick's offense was relatively minor, it's just that he's a man with a full line of baggage, and this is troubling on top of the things we've learned about him from, say, his college teammates. You know, those guys that wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire...
But, while I'm not sure what Shack sees as a logic for the Tour penalizing Reed, there is one place a penalty would have seemed...well, obvious. Did you happen to catch who caddied for Patrick this week? You put your hands on a spectator, and I really care hos boozed up and offensive the lout was, and you're back on the bag for the next event? Not even a faux jet-ski accident, Jay? Nice little mob you're running there...
Let me suggest that we take fan reaction to Reed as a market correction, about the only thing that might modify future behavior. At least in the face of a feckless Tour...
But one last thing that makes me believe our future is trending on this arc:
It has been a part of the sport for some time and it won’t be silenced. Players just have to come to terms with it. Not with the racist or homophobic comments, mind you, for those demand immediate eviction for the offending party. But heckling will continue to echo in the quiet chamber of golf and players will have to deal with it just as they deal with difficult putts for par.
That’s especially going to be the case with golf’s enthusiastic move into legalized gambling here in the states. Expect a few fans, emboldened by social media, mouthing off at tournaments as they tear up losing tickets.
Isn't it more likely that the issue becomes bettors trying to affect the outcome? But combined with the "Live Under Par" nonsense, it seems the Tour is playing a dangerous game.
Just because we're on the subject, the artist formerly known as Van Cynical has an interesting take on the current state of golf gambling:
Last month, I made my first legal online golf wager in America when I took the International team in the Presidents Cup at 2.8-1 odds. I saw the Internationals as underrated and thought the Americans might suffer from jetlag and a little less motivation than the Internationals, who were desperate to win the event for only the second time in three decades. The Internationals took a 10-8 lead into singles and then got steamrolled, starting with lead-off batter Tiger Woods. I lost. I was the sucker who took the sucker bet.
Ah, well. For all the effort I’ve put into my new gambling hobby, I’m pretty much only slightly above the initial amount I put into my account. There is a reason it’s called gambling and not free money. The sharps count on us suckers to lose, and that is usually a good bet, as it turns out.
On the plus side, my new hobby so far has cost less than my other hobby, playing golf. And now I have two hobbies at which I’m not very good.
Heh, he'll have lots of company. Of course, bad golfers keep playing, but bad golf bettors? TBD, at best.
But is this really all that's on offer?
The PGA Tour has flipped on gambling. It had long opposed the idea, but officials now see how much revenue could be theirs and are staking their claim. The PGA Tour was planning to launch its own betting platform in 2020, but details are unclear about when or how that’s going to happen. But with the Tour sitting on a vast database from ShotLink, which tracks every player’s shots, there is potential for live in-game wagering.
Perhaps odds on a player hitting a par-3 green in regulation. Or odds on which player in a threesome hits it closer to the hole. You know, the kind of things you hear fans betting on with one another when they’re sitting around those par-3 greens while soaking in the sun and pouring down an adult beverage.
Sounds so awfully compelling.... Again, view of the world is that golf is a uniquely compelling place for participants to wager on their own play. As for betting on the play of others, it's always struck me as an awkward fit. I'm hoping that's how things play out, because it'll be better for our game. But none of us can know with any certainty.
However, the current news cycle does have a story on wagering opportunities worse than golf.
The Anti-Patrick - This use of the Royal We in golf goes way beyond Patrick, but Shack has some fun with Justin Thomas using the first-person pronoun in speaking of his 18th hole adventures:
Q. Two things on 18 in regulation, a nice moment to reflect on. On the second shot you had, did you hit a bad shot or was it a bad lie?
JUSTIN THOMAS: It was a really bad lie. It was the wrong club. I should have hit a 5-wood. It just -- I had no chance to get it to the green. The only good thing about a 3-wood was that it was going to cover more if I slightly pulled it, not hit it as far left as I did. But I mean, as steep as -- the thing is the farther down you get it, the flatter it is. I hit that drive so bad and so far off the toe that I didn't get it far enough down to be flat. It just was -- with a one-shot lead that was so stupid. I would have been better off hitting a 6-iron than a 3-wood. It doesn't make sense.
If I just would have made 4 there I would have won the tournament in regulation. Obviously if I made 5 I would have, but standing on 18 tee, I'm like, we make 4 we're probably going to win this thing, and boy, I botched it up pretty badly.
He does slip up a bit there at the end, but in an acceptable direction. "We're" probably going to win, but then "I" botched it up.... The judges have ruled this acceptable usage.
Or just say you got "gusted".
Harshing The Narrative - I've been reliably informed that golf is a game for gentlemen, so where might this go?
Undercover Caddie: Do tour pros cheat? Here's your answer
Breath deeply, at least according to this one source, not really:
Which I don’t understand. I’m happy to answer, and do every time. In my eyes, ischeating a problem on the PGA Tour?
Not really.
Yes, we all have stories. Hard not to after nearly a decade out here. But it’s not as prevalent or excessive as some might believe. Even the players who carry less-than-stellar reputations, or have been dinged before, are not as bad as they’re portrayed. In my estimation, and talking with other caddies, these guys often make unintentional mistakes that rarely happen twice.
That actually conforms to my understanding, hence my frustration with the Tour and its omerta on disciplinary action. But yeah, I want to hear the stories as well... While he's got the goods on one Euro, we'll see if a name gets offered up in the next few days, here's the real extent of his concerns:
Now, there is one problem area, and that comes to hazards. It’s not an epidemic, but more and more, players are incorrectly dropping. It can be hard to be precise—how can you really be sure where a ball enters when you’re 300 yards away? Just recently at a fall event, a number of players hit it into the water on one hole and dropped farther up than they should have, mostly because where the ball crossed would have left a third shot where you couldn’t reach the green. If you’re looking for a future controversy, this will be the subject.
That doesn't surprise, and we got a little peak at this in Sung Kang- Joel Dahmen imbroglio...
Future Venues - The Forecaddie has the skinny on future Prez Cup venues:
We already know that the 2021 edition of the biennial competition is a USA home game at Quail Hollow in Charlotte. But The Forecaddie has gone ahead and made a down payment on an AirBnb North of the Border after hearing from multiple sources that the 2023 Presidents Cup is expected to return to Royal Montreal Golf Club, which hosted in 2007. Anyone think Mike Weir for International Team captain, eh?
Good golf course and makes the travel/timing issues easier to manage. But for 2027, an eccentric choice:
The bigger question is 2027, where the likes of Argentina, China and Mexico will be seeking to host for the first time while Australia and South Africa will be under consideration for an encore performance. But let’s not forget another country with Presidents Cup aspirations. New Zealand is turning into quite the golf destination and Royal Auckland is prepping for its potential close up.
“We want to be in the frame for that discussion,” said Rob Selley, general manager of Royal Auckland.
In March, the club will open a new clubhouse and the first 18 of 27 planned holes from a renovation by Nicklaus Design (conducted by senior design associate Chris Cochran) after merging with neighboring Grange Club. Royal Auckland is situated in a cosmopolitan city with plenty of accommodations and close enough to the airport (roughly 20 minutes) that you can see planes overhead from several fairways. Then there is the 300-acre footprint, which would include nearby King’s College, to handle all the necessary infrastructure, not to mention that the 18-hour time difference with the east coast of the U.S., which will be even better than Oz for prime-time golf.
Frank Nobilo for Captain? But who in this age would hire Jack for a renovation? Still, many will be disappointed that in a country featuring Kauri Cliffs, Cape Kidnappers and the like, this is where they go....
Handicap Stuff - I've got to move on to other obligations, but there was a Q&A in yesterday's Tour Confidential on this subject that I found s minor interest:
5. The USGA and R&A’s unified World Handicap System kicks off in 2020, which, in short, will make a more uniformed system for golfers around the world. A few highlights: Eight rounds, not 10, will count toward your handicap; the minimum round requirement to get a handicap was lowered to three (or six nine-hole rounds); handicaps update daily; and a playing-conditions calculator takes into account the weather. What do you like best about the new system, and do you see any downsides?
Kerr-Dineen: I sort of like all of it, to be honest. It’s more modern, more accessible, and more fair. People love to rag on the USGA whenever the U.S. Open rolls around, but when it comes to their governance of the game for recreational golfers over the past few years, they keep making progressive, forward-thinking decisions.
Sens: I second Luke’s sentiments. Specifically, I love the daily updates and the way it takes into account playing conditions, a huge and long-ignored factor, especially for those of us slogging around public courses. The most obvious downside is no fault of the system. It’s user error/apathy; most of the golfers I know can’t be counted on to post their scores in a timely manner. I include myself among them.
Zak: Daily updates are so obvious, I’m almost annoyed that we didn’t have them before. Bravo, nonetheless. Anyway, my favorite part is just making it WORLDWIDE. I was very annoyed to not be able to play handicapped games appropriately over in Scotland. Or add those scores to my index. I’ve read a bunch on the possible downsides, but it’s just a complex system. I’m not sure those downsides (or some others) were truly avoidable.
Dethier: There will no doubt be complications from users posting scores on incorrect dates and skewing the adjusted scoring averages, but hey — if the USGA can do daily updates, we can try to keep up, too. Good stuff, this.
Aren't these guys supposed to actually know things? They're blown away by the daily updates, and apparently unaware that we've had daily updates for as long as I can remember. It was called the "Trend", but it was there on an immediate basis and at Willow Ridge my groups used it for our games.
They also love the playing conditions adjustments, blissfully unaware that with complication comes problems... This remains a common theme of these pages, our governing bodies fixing things that aren't broken. All Square, for instance.... so complicated.
But of course it's the net double bogey max that is likely to torment golfers, especially combined with the daily updates. The chances of players getting this consistently correct approach zero, but by all means cheerlead the nonsense.
I need to move on so, we'll have more as the week unfolds.
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