Midweek Mishegoss

I had no intention of blogging this morning, but then I remembered how little you all have to live for...  And, luckily, I just happen to have some free time.

Salt, Meet Wound - There's no shortage of folks having bad weeks and months, but this guy belongs on the list.  He;s been furloughed from his new job, though I suspect those direct deposits have continued...  And it might prove to be a break, because it's delayed the moment when folks realize how incidental he is in that new position.

But still, this sucks:

The home of longtime St. Simons Island, Georgia, resident Davis Love III was destroyed by a fire early Friday morning. Love and his wife Robin were the only people in the residence at the time and escaped without injury. 

Any similarities to the Reichstag fire are merely coincidental.

“While everyone in our family is saddened at the loss of our home that was filled with so much laughter and incredible memories, we’re very blessed that everyone is safe and unharmed,” said Davis Love III, in a statement he released through Melanie Trotter, media relations director of the RSM Classic, the PGA Tour event Love hosts each fall at the Sea Island Club. “We’re very thankful to the first responders who made a valiant effort to save our home, and we’re keeping things in perspective as people across our community and around the world are struggling with the current unprecedented health crisis.” 

It’s unclear at this time what caused the fire.

Not a good time to be homeless, though they of course have the resources to muddle through.  Here's another golf venue that will need to be replaced, though:

For several years, Love has hosted the Pro-Am draft party for participants in the RSM Classic in a tent in his backyard.

I might not think much of Davis as a golf announcer, but he's always seemed a genuinely nice guy, and his statement indicates a grasp of the obvious.

Problem, Solved -  Since I first heard of the raised cups, I was all over the cheap hole-in-one issue that this guys has just landed upon:

In trying times, we all need distractions. Here’s a theoretical one.

Let’s say you’re playing golf, at a course abiding strictly by the current health and safety

recommendations. No rakes, no cart service, no high-fives, and so on. Stepping to the tee of a par-3, while keeping an appropriate distance from your partners — natch — you strike a pin-seeking shot that hits the elevated cup-liner of the hole (a precautionary tweak, made in the name of sanitary conduct). 

Question: is it a hole-in-one? To paraphrase a former U.S. President: that depends on what your definition of is is. 

In recognition of our new temporary normal, the United States Golf Association has issued a local handicapping rule for raised holes that allows you to post the “most likely score” you would have recorded under ordinary circumstances. If you’re putting, for instance, and you roll a ball that glances off the raised cup, it’s up to you and your partners, discussing the matter in good faith, to determine whether the ball would have dropped into a normal cup.

If your golf course is open, it would seem to be more than just theoretical.

I mostly agree with this:

A hole-in-one made against a raised cup is, in the view of the Etiquetteist, not an official ace either. It’s an ace with an asterisk, and is that the kind of ace you want to leave as your legacy? It is not. You want an ace that you can be unabashedly proud of. An ace you can recount to your buddies at the bar without any caveats or qualifications. 

So, be patient. Someday in the not-too-distant future, this crisis will pass, golf courses will return to their traditional setups, and in the company of witnesses, the stars will align and you will strike a tee shot that arcs elegantly through the air and lands in the cup. Talk about good reasons to celebrate.

I think that all aces with a raised cup would be discounted, so the losers would be those that hit shots that actually would have dropped.  Of course, we can't know for sure which ones those are.  Fortunately, the truth is out there:

One assumes that all supers will copy this because of the labor savings of not having to remove the cup when mowing and/or rolling greens.  Since most greens staff will be undermanned, this would seem to be of some import.

A Sad Moment - As those who have been with us for a while will know, Geoff Shackelford, a man to whom I only occasionally link, has always gone all in on April Fools Day.  Over the years he's come up with some awfully good stuff, often managing to hit the sweet spot of believability, typically with a ripped-from-the-headlines feel.  That's why today's desultory offering makes me so sad:

Postponement: April Fools Eyes Fall Schedule Slot

It's not bad, given the schedule jockeying under way, but it just makes me profoundly sad.  Geoff has link back to prior posts on this national holiday for those needing amusement.  Which is pretty much all of us...

Not Even a First World Problem - Shane Ryan wastes valuable pixels failing to deliver on this premise:

Inside the Ryder Cup’s tricky scheduling conundrum

For those playing at home, Merriam-Webster provides this definition:

 There is nothing intricate or difficult here, just cancel the damn thing.  

Shane seems not to realize the significance of his own reporting:

The PGA of America has reportedly looked at the vacated Olympic dates in late July or early August for a rescheduled PGA Championship, with the other three majors considering fall dates that come near—and in some cases after—the Ryder Cup’s current competition dates of Sept. 25-27.

For entirely logical reasons the PGA of America has chosen to prioritize their flagship event over a friggin' exhibition....  Are you taking notes, Shane?

This what passes for complications:

There has been some speculation that postponing would be a good thing. It would allow this year’s majors to be held in the fall without conflict, and it would put the Ryder Cup back in odd years, eliminating it's co-existence every four years with the Olympics. But the aftershocks would be far-reaching. The Presidents Cup (run by the PGA Tour) and Solheim Cup (LPGA) would likely be forced to postpone their 2021 events by another year, reverting to an even-year cycle, which would impact both tours’ revenue expectations and opportunities. The European Tour would also take a hit; it depends on the Ryder Cup as its “financial bedrock,” and would suffer an economic setback if the next European version wasn’t held until 2023.

Boo-friggin'-hoo... More importantly, Shane, I'm thinking that Italian Ryder Cup isn't the highest priority for the Italians just now....

What doe surprise me is that folks don't seem to get that, in a year of a dramatically curtailed schedule, an event for a mere 24 players seems less important.  Oh, and while I insist on continuing to call it the Wuhan Virus, is no one else worried about the optics of excluding Asian players?

Aren't We Already Depressed Enough? - Golf Digest has been celebrating their 70th anniversary by exhuming classics from the vault.  This, you would think, would be an unalloyed positive, yet I'm thinking it's not moment to revisit this one:

The Yips—If You’ve Had ’Em, You’ve Got ’Em

The will to live seems as scarce as toilet paper, yet they remind us of our frailties.... So much for being in this all together.

The article is from the estimable Henry Longhurst and is well worth your time, if you're able to keep social distance from the subject-matter.  Here's a little history lesson:

There can be no more ludicrous sight than that of a grown man, a captain of industry perhaps and a pillar of his local community, convulsively jerking a piece of ironmongery to and fro in his efforts to hole a three-foot putt. Sometimes it is even a great golfer in the 

twilight of his career, in which case the sight is worthy not of ridicule but of compassion. He will battle on for a year or two, but twilight it is, for “once you’ve had ’em, you’ve got ’em.” I refer, of course, to what Tommy Armour was the first to christen the “Yips.” 

When he wrote a book called The A.B.C. of Golf, Armour had no difficulty with the letter Y. The Yips drove him out of tournament golf. On a somewhat humbler level, they drove me out of golf, too, and a long and agonizing process it was, ending on D-Day, 1968, the anniversary of the invasion of Europe. On that occasion, I put my 25-year-old clubs up into the loft with the water tanks, where they remain to this day because I am too mean to give them away. 

Armour wrote graphically of “that ghastly time when, with the first movement of the putter, the golfer blacks out, loses sight of the ball and hasn’t the remotest idea of what to do with the putter or, occasionally, that he is holding a putter at all.” This confirms the description of that most distinguished of all sufferers, Bob Jones, who recorded that just before the moment of impact the ball “seemed to disappear from sight.” Jones also recorded how he once was partnered with that sterling character of the late 1920s and early ’30s, Wild Bill Mehlhorn. Poor Mehlhorn! He was only three feet from the hole, said Jones, but gave such a convulsive twitch at the ball that it shot across the green into a bunker. He then had the humiliation of exchanging his putter for his niblick, and, we may assume without being unkind, that was the last seriously competitive round he ever played.

To be clear, the mere ravages of aging I don't find meaningfully less depressing than the Yips...

It is, of course, a fascinating subject, given how little we know about the underlying neurological condition.  I've often recommended this David Owen scholarly treatise on the subject, though I always include a warning that it might hit too close to home for some.

It just seems a funny moment to depress your readership further....

Maybe Golf Digest is trying to make amends by subsequently posting this slideshow:

THE 23 MOST CALMING THINGS IN GOLF

Sorry, guys, too damn late!

Stay safe, kids.