Late Week Letdowns

The weekend beckons, though we might be under a few inches of water by the time it arrives...

The Dublin Doubleheader, Part I - I din't see any of it, but those distraught at the end of this young man's made cut streak can take heart:

DUBLIN, Ohio – Collin Morikawa had the perfect remedy to get over missing the first cut of his professional career. 

Make six birdies and an eagle in your next round. 

The emerging youngster out of Cal, who won the 2019 Barracuda Championship in just his sixth start as a pro, showed no ill effects from missing the cut in the Travelers Championship two weeks ago that ended his streak at 22. With a bounce back 7-under-par 65, he took up residence atop the leaderboard after Thursday’s sweltering first round of the Workday Charity Open. 

Playing Muirfield Village Golf Club for the first time – “I fell in love with the course right away,” he said – Morikawa quickly put his first missed cut in the rearview with an eagle on the fifth from inside four feet and then six birdies in his next 11 holes. His lone blemish came on the last when he missed the green.

Making a bunch of cuts in a row is more statistical oddity than crowning achievement, though it's equally true that the absence of a Saturday tee time makes it hard to win.

Those conversions led to a 1-stroke lead over Adam Hadwin. Two back at 67 were Zach Johnson, Hideki Matsuyama, Aaron Wise and Nick Taylor. Justin Thomas and Patrick Reed were in a group at 68. 

With his usually stout iron play – he hit 14 of 18 greens in regulation in the first round – and his consistent accuracy off the tee – he hit 12 of 14 fairways in regulation – Jack Nicklaus’s revered layout at Muirfield Village seems an ideal fit for Morikawa for this week’s Workday and next week’s Memorial. 

“It’s a beautiful track,” he said. “It’s a very tough course obviously, but you just have to map your way around it. You’ve got to be really smart. If you’re not in the fairway, you’ve got to make sure you play smart. So I was playing smart but I felt good with my irons, so I was able to attack some pins when they were accessible, so we’ll see how everything plays out tomorrow.”

Is it tough?  This week?  It's been shortened and the greens slowed (stimping a mere 11 this week), so I'm not all that sure.  Though the absence of any 63's or 64's at least differs from that which we've seen since the restart.

It seems this group didn't get the memo to Live Under Par™:

COVID positive group finishes above par at Workday Charity Open

I'm sure I'll be the only guy to use that bit, no?

The three teed off starting on the back nine Thursday at 9:13 a.m., a tee time that hadn’t been on the schedule. All three finished above par on a hot, steamy day, with Frittelli and McCarthy posting 1-over-par 73s and Watney struggling to a 77 in a round that included three double-bogeys.

That's about it for their golf, as the remainder of the piece addresses the revised protocols and the basis on which the three were allowed to play.

But we often trot out headers along the lines of "Don't Know Much About History" , disturbing often in describing the folks who administer our game.  But my new favorite player just has to be Dylan Frittelli, whose major claim to notoriety has always been being Jordan Spieth's teammate on that Texas national championship team.  See is you enjoy what he does here:

Frittelli said he drove straight from his housing to the golf course – with his golf shoes on – and went straight from his car to the practice ground. 

“I stretched at home. I ate breakfast in my hotel room and then straight to the parking lot and felt like Walter Hagen, just walked straight on to the driving range,” he said with a smile.

 A Tour player that knows golf history?  I'm gonna need a moment to collect myself...  I just didn't see that coming.

The reference is to the class issues that permeate so much of golf history.  While the U.S. reflected such class divides, Ground Zero was the United Kingdom, where the professionals were treated in such a way to reinforce the notion that they would never belong, as per this from Hagen's World Golf Hall of Fame page:

When he won the 1922 British Open at Royal St. George’s, Hagen’s reaction to professionals not being allowed in the clubhouse was to hire an Austro-Daimler limousine, park it directly in front of the clubhouse and change his clothes and take his meals in the car.

Well played, Dylan.  How many of the golf writers to whom he was speaking do we think got the reference?

Have we reached Peak Phil?  If you're looking for the elusive synechdoche of all that's wrong with modern golf, as well as our Phil, you could do far worse than this:

Phil Mickelson was stunned. He deeply exhaled, the air puffing out his cheeks. Mickelson had hit his tee shot in the water on the par-3 16th hole at Muirfield Village

Golf Club, missed his bogey putt short and left and was walking toward finishing up his five. It would put him 4-over over his past five holes. It would put further down the leaderboard, all the more frustrating after he had shot a 4-under front nine during Thursday’s first round of the Workday Charity Open.

On his next swing, Mickelson was stunning.

He unleashed his drive on 17. His face this time showed no expression as he watched the ball sail while walking four steps forward to pick up his tee. It came to rest 394 yards away, tied for the fifth-longest drive the five-time major champion has hit on the PGA Tour since 2002, which is as far back as the Tour has recorded drives online. Even at 50, Mickelson can take our breath away.

Phil makes an ugly double, but all's good because he hits a bomb off the next tee...  Sheesh!  Want to know what he made off that bomb?  A par...  That makes up for the double, right?

Phil has developed a late-career obsession with those aforementioned bombs, though he might want to focus a little more on the numbers that go on his card.

Of course we're all a little obsessed with distance, and I did enjoy Justin Thomas' walkback of prior comments:

Thomas said he was next to DeChambeau on the range at the Travelers Championship

last month. 

“It honestly was frustrating because he’s hitting it 350 in the air and you could put a blanket over about half of them,” he said. “That’s what’s unbelievable. People don’t understand how hard it is to hit it that straight at that high speed. It’s really, really hard to hit a ball straight at 110 miles an hour swing speed, let alone 130 miles an hour swing speed and to do it consistently. Obviously he had some foul balls at a place like last week where it looked like he could hit it anywhere, but for the most part he’s driving it on a string really far. Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty unbelievable.”

That is the point that many are missing.  He's carrying it 350, and mostly hitting it where he wants to.  A little intimidating for sure....

But this was my favorite bit:

“It’s obviously working for him,” said Justin Thomas on Wednesday at the Workday Charity Open. “I went from kind of being a little skeptical about it to maybe saying some things to realizing he was beating me every week and I should probably shut up and just start playing better for myself.”

On the contrary, JT, you keep talking... It's actually Bryson that needs to shut up.

The Hits Keep Coming - Lots of bad news on the college front, including this most recent news from Hanover, NH:

The changes, which will eliminate five varsity athletic teams and a number of staff positions, will give Dartmouth more flexibility in admissions, reducing the number of recruited athletes in incoming classes by 10%. The move also contributes to the steps Dartmouth is taking to address budget challenges, including a projected $150 million financial deficit brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The teams to be eliminated, effective immediately, are men's and women's swimming and diving, men's and women's golf, and men's lightweight rowing, dropping to 30 the number of varsity teams. A total of about 110 student-athletes participate on these five teams.

And the carnage doesn't end there:

In addition, Dartmouth is permanently closing the Hanover Country Club—which is owned by Dartmouth and operated at the College-owned golf course—after years of the club's running in the red, with deficits expected to swell to $1 million a year.

H/T Shack for this lively and engaging piece on the golf course:

“Our group of guys affectionately refers to HCC as ‘the freak show,’ ” says Scott Peters, a former club champion who grew up playing HCC with his brother Mike, while his

father, Seaver Peters ’54, was Dartmouth’s athletic director. “There are walkers, joggers, the cross-country team, sledding in winter—there’s always something walking or running past you on the golf course. I’ve been there so long I don’t even notice it anymore. That’s part of the charm of a college course.”

 Of course, there's this:

Students have long enjoyed other course activities that give “twosome” a new meaning. Miller wrote about them in his memoir: “Of all Dartmouth big weekends, Green Key was the sweetest. You could go picnicking, hiking or swimming.…Best of all, it was warm enough to get laid on the golf course.”

If it's the golfers getting laid, that's truly a man bites dog story.  The whole piece is worth your time...not only is a ski jump involved, but Hillary Clinton attempts to tell amusing stories...  I know, just when you think you've seen everything...

We've discussed Yale, but Josh Sens does a deeper dive on that abused icon:

No one would dispute that Yale Golf Course, a Golden Age collaboration by the celebrated architects Seth Raynor and Charles Blair Macdonald — with nods to St. Andrews and North Berwick — is a gem. 

But many now feel that it’s a badly tarnished one. 

After closing at the end of the 2019 season, the vaunted New Haven, Conn., layout, which sits about four miles west of the Yale campus, has yet to reopen. In early March, its longtime superintendent moved on to another job. Less than two weeks later, the pandemic hit, and the university itself shut down, shifting all of its classes online. With the campus closed and other university facilities darkened, the school was compelled to cut back on course maintenance, reducing its grounds crew to two workers per day for a total of four hours. That skeleton staff kept to the scaled-back schedule for the next three months. Though the staff has now been beefed up to pre-pandemic numbers, there’s no hiding the ill effects.

Recent photos, snapped by members of the semi-private course and shared with GOLF.com, along with other images circulating on social media, show large swaths of burnt out and barren turf. Spotty, unkempt tees give way to forlorn greens and fairways, and bunkers sprouting pygmy forests of weeds.

Josh does touch on the unfortunate but widely known fact that maintenance has long been an issue here:

This is not the first time conditions at Yale have been called out. But the impact of the

Yale's iconic Biarritz green.

pandemic appears to have pushed matters to a breaking point. Those who have been around the course for decades say that the design has never looked so undernourished.

In an email to GOLF.com, Yale athletic department spokesman Mike Gambardella dismissed the notion that the school was uncommitted to caring for the course. To the contrary, he said, the athletic department has been working on a plan to “bring the course back to its glory.” That plan had been working, Gambardella said, with the course “better maintained last year than previous years.”

Covid-19, he said, threw a wrench in the works. 

“Due to university limitations, our ground crew was short staffed for a couple of months but as of last week we are back to fully staffed,” Gambardella said, adding that all decisions have been made with “the safety and well-being of our employees at the forefront.”

Forgive me if "Working on a plan" doesn't inspire confidence....  But I'm prepared to give up gems like this as long as all twelves Vice Chancellors of Diversity and Inclusion aren't affected.

On a related note is this Gary Van Sickle item:

Whistling past the golf graveyards

In which he takes a tour of abandoned golf courses....  Such pieces are always sad, as each example is logically the place where so many people learned the game.  That said, not only will some golf courses inevitably dies over the years, but some actually deserve to die.  I'm not trying to be a downer, but lots of bad golf courses were built, and we further know that way too many golf course were built as part of real estate plays,  It's just that the two golf courses discussed above have unique histories, and one is of obvious architectural merit. 

If You Build It... - When in doubt, it's never a bad idea to consult this guy:

“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” - George Orwell

Which is a public service at the moment in which the mob has come for Orwell.... Yanno, guys, he meant it as a cautionary tale, not so much as a how-to guide.

The reference is to this bit of shocking news from the Tour:

WGC-FedEx St. Jude will alter exemptions in order to increase field size

The guys don't want to play in Memphis in the dog days of summer?  Really, who coulda seen that one coming?

Last year’s World Golf Championship in Memphis, which was awkwardly scheduled the week after The Open Championship in Northern Ireland, included just 63 players and the event had just 71 players in 2018. 

The WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational will be played at TPC Southwind July 30-Aug.2.

Which is awkwardly scheduled the week before the PGA in San Francisco...  I get that FedEx gets what they want, but how are they liking it so far?

When you can't get the guys to show up for big-money, small field, no cut events, perhaps a reassessment is indicated?

Old Timey Stuff -  Who doesn't love vintage golf photography?  The USGA has acquired a great collection, of which we'll share a few:

As the primary steward for preserving and celebrating the history of the game, the USGA has expanded its extensive golf photography holdings with the recent acquisition of the Howard Schickler Photography Collection, the world’s most significant private collection of original early golf photography. 

The collection contains more than 1,000 high-quality, historically and artistically important golf images from the 19th and early 20th century. Many photographs feature top American and British golfers, both men and women, from the mid-1800s to the 1970s. The collection was amassed over decades by collector Howard Schickler, sourced from the collections of some of the game’s most influential figures, including the personal collections of Old Tom Morris and F.G. Tait, the Auchterlonie and the Foulis families, the estate of Billy Burke and the collections of Ed Dudley and Bernard Darwin.

Some great ones for sure.  I've previously shared photos of the St. Andrews cemetery with you, but how great is this:

Old Tom Morris walking towards young Tom's grave site in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1895.

A large gallery watches a match between Chick Evans and Francis Ouimet at the 1919 U.S. Amateur at Oakmont (Pa.) Country Club.

And this from right across the street:

Blogger is going hinky as I add these photos, and you can see the effect on the formatting of the post  That's from the 1911 U.S. Amateur held at Apawamis Country Club.

Click through to see more samples.

I shall release you here to begin your weekend.  Hope to see you Monday.