You'd swear they're playing golf, at least from the quantity of open browser tabs. We've got a little news, but also some really good longer reads. Perhaps a fresh pot of coffee?
The State of Play - The PGA Tour seems to be operating under the flawed premise that we miss them:
PGA Tour officials are expected to announce this week their intention to resume the tour season, halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on June 11-14 at the Charles SchwabChallenge, multiple sources have told Golf Digest. It’s also expected that fans will not be allowed to attend that first tournament at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth. As the Tour looks to follow health and safety guidelines set by government and health officials, other early tournaments also are expected to be played without spectators.
The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on the Tour’s behalf. Tour officials discussed plans with the Players Advisory Council during a conference call on Tuesday.
Late last week, the Tour sent players a memo saying that it was targeting a return at Colonial. The memo cited the tournament’s original date on the tour calendar of May 21-24, but also said the Tour was evaluating options to “preserve the maximum number of events we can while giving us more time as the crisis evolves.” Sources previously told Golf Digest those options focused on moving the Charles Schwab Challenge to June. The RBC Canadian Open, originally scheduled for June 11-14, will not be played, sources have said, freeing up the date for another event.
I don't have a problem with this per se, though it certainly concentrates the mind on the inconvenient fact of how little these events matter...
Shack continues to be a harsher critic than I, initially blasting the Tour for releasing the news during the week during which we were all supposed to die. That didn't play out as predicted, but Geoff now has this to say:
Yes, postponed or cancelled events like the Olympic Games, U.S. Open and Open Championship will be replaced by PGA Tour events. It’s a little hard to picture, but we’ll go with it and watch how this is rolled out. Namely, will there be any suggestion of measures taken to ensure all can safely travel to and play in these events?What precautions are being taken for everyone else besides players?
One big change from rumored concepts: the RBC Heritage Classic that would be played this week will now move to the end of June as the second stop after Colonial. Travel between states remains a huge concern, while the U.S. has a travel ban on visitors from many parts of the globe.
He obviously thinks this is being rushed, though we need to distinguish between the timing of announcements and the timing of actual events. Geoff also harps on the irony of Tour events filling the void of cancelled events such as the U.S. Open and the Olympics, though why that would surprise anyone is a mystery. Obviously holding an event in Texas or Hilton Head vs. Westchester County is just an entirely different matter, especially to the extent that it might happen without spectators.
Though here we can credit him with a bullseye:
On a lighter note, no word yet on the Wyndham Rewards points ramifications, though layoffs, salary cuts and other struggles for the hotel chain might influence that.
Except, of course, for his making fun of it.... Your humble correspondent has long believed and occasionally articulated the premise that golf sponsorship could not survive much scrutiny. One assumes the day of scrutiny is upon us, and a travel company such as Wyndham is purpose built for this moment of reckoning.
Unsurprisingly, the folks in Europe have been more forthcoming:
The Telegraph published a memo from Euro Tour CEO Keith Pelley to players on
As long as Keith can remain the leader in eyewear fashion... Tuesday, in which Pelley outlined what players should expect when their sport returns.“Our tour has enjoyed a significant period of growth in recent years, in terms of prize funds, playing opportunities, and the overall standard of our events, as well as our broadcast product," Pelley said. “The impact of coronavirus has stopped this rapid momentum in its tracks and it will, in fact, require us to reassess many elements."
Some of those alterations could include the elimination of "top class players' lounges or courtesy car services," but the biggest involves the cutting of tournament earnings.
"Prize funds will also most likely be different," Pelley said. "The reality is, the pandemic is going to have a profound impact on the Tour financially, as well as many of our partners, both in the sponsorship and broadcast areas.”
Ya think? The Euro Tour, lower on the golf food chain, will logically feel this first and hardest, at least as compared to Ponte Vedra Beach. But it is amusing that Keith cushioned the blow in dealing with perks first, only then dropping the hammer.
This alternate report on Pelley's comments buries a couple of items of potential curiosity:
The BBC reports it has seen an email that European Tour CEO Keith Pelley sent in which he says players should expect reduced purse sizes and potentially two events in the same week. The Tour may also institute 14-day quarantine periods for players traveling to events.
Two events a week? I've no clue as to how that would work in the age of television, not to mention spreading already weak fields over multiple events. But who will sign on for the Andalusia Masters if it comes with a mandatory 14-day self-quarantine? I guess it's a pity to run a Tour where the players actually fly commercial...
In related news, Seth Waugh spent some time with the folks at SiriusXM, though they naturally didn't ask him the obvious question on most American's minds. But he did have these comments about the PGA Championship:
Waugh appeared on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio Tuesday morning to discuss plans for the PGA Championship at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, which was originally set forMay but has been rescheduled to Aug. 6-9 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He remains optimistic that Harding Park will be able to host a “fairly normal” championship in August, but acknowledged the possibility that plans could change, noting that the association is working on contingencies if needed.“If the safest and/or the only way to [hold the PGA] is to do it without fans, we’re fully prepared to do that,” Waugh said. “We believe that having it as a television event is worth doing regardless of whether there’s fans there or not.
“Obviously that’ll change the experience, but we think the world is starved for entertainment—particularly in sports—and we think golf has the unique ability to be first out among sports in that we’re played over a couple hundred acres.”
So, a fairly normal PGA without fans? Got it....
So, here's my question for that man-of-the-people Seth. According to the National Golf Foundation, 48% of U.S. golf courses are open for play (though I also saw a 44% estimate as well)..
According to Geoff:
A member of ten golf clubs—including Seminole in Palm Beach near PGA headquarters where he spends his winters—Waugh serves on various boards and still works in the finance sector. He’s also one of the managing partners of the Pebble Beach Company.
A simple question for Seth... How many of those ten are open for play? C'mon, Sethie, this is important. Save the NGF some money, as you alone can offer them a statistically significant sample size.
Upon Further Review... - I felt that my Doug Sanders obit didn't do the man justice, and apparently John Feinstein agrees. So do read his tribute, as apparently Sanders was his first interview:
Ten years after I watched that Bob Hope playoff—six years after St. Andrews—Sanders was the first golfer I ever interviewed. I was a college junior, and in those days, theGreater Greensboro Open would send credential forms to student newspapers around the state of North Carolina. I filled one out and showed up for Saturday’s third round at Sedgefield Country Club.
I wanted to write two stories: One on what it felt like to be at a professional golf tournament for the first time, the second on Doug Sanders—if he’d talk to me.I walked the back nine with Sanders and, after he signed his scorecard, I nervously walked up and introduced myself.
“Student newspaper at Duke, huh?” he said. Then, before I could think of a clever response, he said, “Come on inside. I’ll buy you a beer and we’ll talk.”
And so, we did. I illegally sat at the bar (I was 19) with Sanders, and he regaled me with stories for a solid hour. When I told him I was sure he was sick of being asked about St. Andrews, he laughed and said, “Not nearly as sick as I get when I think about missing that putt.”
I spent an hour with Sanders that day and had enough material for three columns. He explained to me that his phone-booth swing had come about because of a neck injury that made a fuller swing impossible. My only complaint was, after the time in the bar I had to hang around the media room for an extra hour before I dared get behind the wheel of a car.
How can you not like the guy?
Between the nature of that loss at St. Andrews and his "Peacock of the Fairway" reputation, we somehow lost sight of the fact that he was a really good player. The putter was his nemesis, as it is for so many, but twenty Tour wins is a great career, and his honesty in discussing that moment on the 18th green of the Old Course is the model for others to follow.
He was just a unique character and awfully good at the game. He'll be missed.
Scenes From Crail - As new overseas members of the Crail Golfing Society, we obviously receive the club's e-mails to its members. It's an interesting contrast to our home club, as they've been communicating more frequently and in more detail than Fairview.
Most of this has come over the signature of the club's Captain, Jim McArthur, immortalized in these pages for a certain birthday phone call. As you are no doubt are aware, golf in the UK is in full lockdown, and they are under strict guidelines that allow only the most basic of maintenance. That said, sometimes our minds wander and contemplate what else can go wrong. Here's one small entry in that category:
On Good Friday there was a gorse fire on the Coastal Path adjacent to the 7 Green Craighead which required the attention of the Fire Brigade who responded very quickly bringing the fire under control very effectively and staying on for a while to ensure that the fire didn’t start up again. However, what a waste of valuable resources in the current difficult times.Special thanks to them for responding so quickly and preventing the fire spreading onto the golf course.
As some folks might not know, gorse is highly flammable. In fact, the Bandon Dunes resort might well not exist but for that fact. It just seemed a perfect story for the current moment.
Architectural Musings - As noted above, I have some great long-form reading for you, pretty much all via Shackelford. First, as part of our focus on Masters week, Geoff links to a number of really interesting items via noted MacKenziephile Josh Pettit. First and foremost is this 1932 piece from the Good Doctor:
The Architect of the Augusta National Writes of Its Promise
This is before the completion of the golf course, which MacKenzie never saw. But he obviously never learned about setting low expectations...
He does, however, lay out his standards for judging the quality of a golf course:
Seeking to create the “ideal” course, the question naturally arises as to just what the “ideal” course should be. Bob and I found ourselves in complete accord on what we conceive to be the essentials of such a course:
1. A really great course must be a constant source of pleasure to the greatest possible number of players.
2. It must require strategy in the playing as well as skill, otherwise it can not continue to hold the golfer’s interest.
3. It must give the average player a fair chance, and at the same time, it must require the utmost from the expert who tries for sub-par scores.
4. All natural beauty should be preserved, natural hazards should be utilized, and artificiality should be minimized.
We can only wish that they had taken the Good Doctor's admonishment regarding the greatest number of players literally. It is an enduring tragedy that two of his most famous creations, and I include Cypress Point here, are inaccessible to most of us.
In support of his first and third tenets, MacKenzie cites the old standby:
Now to get back to the golf course. Doubt may be expressed as to the possibility of making a course pleasurable to everyone, but it may be pointed out that the “Old Course” at St. Andrews, Scotland, which Bob likes best of all, very nearly approaches this ideal.
Next comes an argument we've previously discussed, one that seems to involves a settling of scores:
It has been suggested that it is our intention at Augusta to produce copies of the most famous golf holes. Any attempt of this kind could only result in failure. It may be
MacKenzie and Jones. possible to reproduce a famous picture, but the charm of a golf hole may be dependent on a background of sand dunes, trees, or even mountains several miles away. A copy without the proper surroundings might create an unnatural appearance and cause a feeling of irritation, instead of charm. On the other hand, it is well to have a mental picture of the World’s outstanding holes and to use this knowledge in reproducing their finest golfing features, and perhaps even improving on them.
At Augusta we are striving to produce eighteen ideal holes, not copies of classical holes, but embodying their best features, with other features suggested by the nature of the terrain. We hope for accomplishments of such unique character that the holes will be looked upon as classics in themselves.
We'd benefit here from someone better versed in this era, as I can only understand these comments to be critical of the Macdonald/Raynor template holes. Of course what he's actually dismissing is a straw man version of those templates, as Macdonald himself argues in virtually identical terms of applying the design principals of said great golf holes to terrain at hand. As we like to say here, the Good Doctor is noting a distinction without a difference.
Of great interest is that MacKenzie takes us through his Augusta National routing, sharing his inspiration and thoughts on each hole. But note the thinly-veiled disdain for Macdonald's versions:
Hole No. 4 “Flowering Crab Apple” — Regular Distance 160 Yards — Championship 170 YardsThis is a very similar hole to the famous Eleventh (Eden) at St. Andrews. There have been scores of attempted copies of this famous hole but there is none that has the charm and thrill of the original. Most copies are failures because of the absence of the subtle and severe slopes which create the excitement of the original, and also because the turf is usually so soft that any kind of a sloppy pitch will stop. Previous failures, followed by, comparatively speaking, increasing success may have given us sufficient experience to warrant us in hoping that here at last we may have constructed a hole that will compare favorably with the original.
His argument seems to devolve to "Mine is better than yours". Or, given the timing, mine will be better than yours...
But his discussion of the next hole might just surprise you:
Hole No. 5 “Magnolia” — Regular Distance 445 Yards — Championship 470 YardsThis will be a similar type of hole to the famous Seventeenth, the Road Hole at St. Andrews. A group of tress forms a corner of the dog-leg instead of the station master’s garden and the green itself will be situated on a similar plateau to its prototype.
Did you know the fifth was a "Road Hole"? And by the way, what is a Road Hole? That's actually a daunting question because it's a very difficult hole from which to deduce the design premise. Anyone want to take a stab at this one? Bueller?
It just so happens I've had this browser tab open for a while:
What makes a road hole one of the most iconic holes in all of golf?
Part of the diffiuclty in analyzing this template is that there isn't a hole in golf more affected by external elements than the original. Not only do you have a damn hotel affecting your tee ball, but at the green we have a cinder road and a stone wall. Call me crazy, but those are all irrelevant to the strategic values of the hole, but equally hard to ignore.
In that item linked above, here is the decsription of a "road hole":
The road hole template is one of the most iconic and well-known in the game. Taken from the 17th at St Andrews, the hole is tough with no reprieve or way to avoid the danger.
The hole usually features an option on the tee. One side of the fairway is wide open and easy to find. The other is guarded by a hazard or bunkers, possibly with a forced carry (a hotel at St. Andrews). Taking on the hazard does give a much better angle of attack into the green.
Up at the green, there is a large pot bunker guarding the front portion of the green, angled to the easy side of the fairway. The green is shallow between this front bunker and a hazard (the actual road at the Old Course) that runs along the back opposite side of the green.
If you play to the safe side of the fairway, you will have a longer approach in, over the pot bunker, and balls will often roll into the back bunker or the hazard. It is an immensely difficult shot. Keeping the ball up the tough side of the fairway makes for a much easier approach shot where you can avoid the pot bunker. The problem is, the road hole makes finding the strategically beneficial side really hard.
As with most of the other template holes, CB Macdonald found the idea while at St. Andrews University (he didn’t have to travel far to find this one) and brought the idea with him when he started designing courses in the U.S.
I'm not sure he quite captures it, though I'm equally unsure that any of us truly have. His description of the tee shot seems to me wasted effort... It is an unusual tee box for sure, one that will discombobulate most players because of the proximity of the Old Course Hotel. But on repeated play that discomfort will fade, and the test is fairly conventional as the author notes. The hotel grounds (most importantly, the Jigger Inn) feature OB right of the landing area, which is the better angle into the green. The author also fails to note that this might be the earliest instance of a double dogleg, the tee shot favoring a fade but the approach better suited to a draw.
To me, the design principal is the severe right-to-left angle at which the green sits, with that dastardly Road bunker perfectly positioned to do land office business. But the green is also quite narrow, and features unique hazards to the player protecting against the dreaded bunker. It's those features off the back of the green that prove to be the hardest to replicate, at least in the examples I've been able to play.
This schematic of the fifth at ANGC does not evoke memories of St. Andrews to this observer, though your mileage may well vary.
One seems very much unlike the other, no? But this is the fun of it all, and Road has by now evolved to cover just about any and all brutally difficult Par-4's. Of course, Road used to be a Par-5, and most of us would be wise to play it as such (though we're always looking to pull off the heroic shot), and play our second shot short-right. We'd make many more fours that way, and way fewer sixes....
You'll want to scroll through that entire MacKenzie piece, if only to see how different many of the greens look.
Also from Josh Pettit comes this on the MacKenzie short course, ironic since we just had that tease about the Seth Raynor routing of Cypress Point:
Just as any architectural layman will know the name Frank Lloyd Wright, such is true of most golfers and the name Alister MacKenzie -- if for no other reason than The Masters and the Augusta National Golf Club. But few know about the guest house at Fallingwater. Even fewer know of the “little course” at Augusta National. Moreover, in the same way Wright scrupulously labored over the design of the auxiliary structure, so too did MacKenzie with the Augusta National Approach & Putt Course. The key difference: Fallingwater's guest house was actually built (in 1937) two years after the completion of the main house, but MacKenzie’s plan for a short course never came to fruition. Nonetheless, supplemental features of works by significant architects are fraught with great interest, at least to the lionizing historians that work to document their careers.
Stored away within an archive of work from the landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted in Brookline, Massachusetts, sits the only known copy of MacKenzie's plan for the Augusta Approach & Putt Course -- a document that has remained unknown to the golf world for the past eighty years:
 |
| A rendition of MacKenzie's plan laid over a 1938 aerial photo of the site that remained undeveloped until 1958 when the club built the Par 3 course (Courtesy of Pacific Golf Design) |
Far more interesting than the version that actually was built in the 1950's.
In this same Augusta-centric context, Geoff linked back to this wonderful 2015 Karen Crouse profile of the legendary Herbert Warren Wind. Wind is most famous for naming Amen Corner, though that to the man himself was just a bit:
The widely held belief is that Amen Corner has sacred roots. It made sense to theAustralian Jason Day, who said, “You pray to get around it without running into disaster.” Day’s countryman Adam Scott, the 2013 champion, chipped in, “Otherwise it can be the Blasphemous Corner.”
Wind’s inspiration, though, came from a 1930s jazz recording, “Shouting in the Amen Corner.” In an article for Golf Digest in 1984, he said that he was aiming for “some colorful tag like those that Grantland Rice and his contemporaries loved to devise: the Four Horsemen, the Manassa Mauler, the House That Ruth Built and the Georgia Peach.”
“The only phrase with the word corner I could think of (outside of football’s ‘coffin corner’ and baseball’s ‘hot corner’) was the title of a song on an old Bluebird record,” Wind wrote.
He used “Amen Corner” only six times in the next 31 years, according to an online search of The New Yorker’s archives. Wind’s nephew, Bill Scheft, a staff writer on “Late Show With David Letterman,” was not surprised.
“Herb was like a comic who comes up with a bit and delivers it to an audience once,” Scheft said. “It was nothing he was going to repeat because he was always striving for better bits.”
And a bit written on deadline to boot. I used to love his long-form New Yorker pieces, and his North, To The Link of Dornoch helped kindle my love of the links... So, what are you waiting for, just go read the damn thing.
Lastly, please pause to pay homage to another of those seemingly effortless segues for which I enjoy renown. In this case, Australian course designer Mike Clayton makes his case using the Good Doctor's words:
In the early 1930s, Alister MacKenzie wrote The Spirit of St Andrews. It expanded on Golf Architecture (1920) and became one of the great golf books.
MacKenzie died not long after he finished the manuscript, which lay dormant among a pile of family papers until the mid-1990s. To the sport’s great fortune, his stepson discovered it and arranged for its belated publication.
For those who administer the game – and those who worry about its future – MacKenzie remarkably addressed several of the problems facing today’s game.
He railed against the use of long rough as a penal hazard. He forcefully argued the ball was going too far. He told us why people gave up golf. He spoke of the role of committees.
Unsurprisingly for one with such strong and well-articulated opinions, MacKenzie had little patience for committees and those he perceived as having little knowledge of the subject of his expertise: “It is strange that a committee consisting of doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers who, no doubt, recognise the importance of mental training and experience in their own profession, attach so little importance to it in golf course architecture.”
Shamefully, that very tome sits unread on my credenza.... Maybe sometime when I'm under house arrest at home..
But what is Clayton's case? He's making a rousing argument for the merits of.... get this, unfairness:
What changed was the introduction of the concept of “fairness” and the idea formulated primarily by Americans and adopted largely by Australians (and most others) that you had to be able to see where you were going. The notion of the “blind shot” was seen as somehow silly, poor design and something to be avoided by course architects at all costs.
Bunkers in the middle of fairways came to be viewed as poor hazards catching “perfect” drives. Yet if the measure of a perfect shot is its position in relation to the one following how could a drive into a bunker possibly be seen as perfect?
That two players could hit almost the same shot and come up with two quite different results also was seen as being unfair and the result has been a sanitisation of the original game. Architectural quirks, the luck of the bounce and multiple ways of playing a shot and a hole make the game unpredictable and offend the “predictable” crowd.
I agree completely, but you know how folks are. That's why in Tom Doak's Grand Rapids, MI office, fair is often referred to as the "F-word".
Closer to home, we have a perfect illustration of this mindset at Fairview. Ours is a 1968 Trent Jones design, and over the winter Rees Jones rebuilt all of our bunkers. The ninth hole isn't one of our strongest, a short (+/- 300 yards), uphill Par-4 playing to a raised green. The severe slope of the green is it's primary defense, but the fairway pinches in from the right at about 200 yards. Over the years there have been a variety of hazards in this spot, from a tree to a bunker, long fescue and, most recently, severe mounding. The logic seemingly being that you need to at least give the player something to think about off the tee of such a wee golf hole.
Our plans for the bunker restoration called for adding the bunker back in this spot. However, during construction, the Jones organization elected to not build that bunker, because it can't be seen from the tee box. That sound you hear is Dr. MacKenzie spinning in his grave, given that approximately none of the bunkers on the Old Course can be seen when playing towards them. Yet, somehow that little golf course retains its enduring appeal...
I would urge you to give Clayton's argument serious consideration. There's little in our game that beats the thrill of watching a golf ball react on the ground, but the appeal thereof involves the widest variety of outcomes. So, it's long past time for us to rally behind the intrinsic unfairness of golf.
I shall release you to get on with your day and we'll hopefully catch up again later in the week.
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