Minimalist Midweek Musings

Just a few notes for today, before my regular Wednesday game...

No Club Left Behind - Behind the golf ball, that is.  Shack with a letter from the Commissioner that is long overdo:

Dear Greatest Athletes In All Of Sport, 

It’s been an incredible run since the Return To Golf (© pending) started and I want to thank you for your continued use of a mask when getting Chipotle take-out. Amazing first step. Don’t hesitate to extend that face covering stuff in hotel lobbies or if you have not taken up the special NetJets offer we’ve highlighted (CODE: FLYINGCOMMERCIALSUCKS). 

Meanwhile, our positivity rates are as low as the scores you’ve been shooting. Yes, that’s an unfortunate segue to the point of this email you will not read. 

This is about the mashing. The pulping, the grinding, the grating, the smashing, the crushing, the squashing, the scrunching and the general pulverizing of grass behind your ball. As you may know by now, last week’s amazing Memorial Presented By Nationwide champion Jon Rahm (500 more FedExCup points) placed his club behind his ball and it moved ever so slightly. He meant nothing by it. However, under a very strict application of the rules, our staff assessed Jon a two-stroke penalty. 

I highlight this because Jon is not alone in this habit of getting in there and really testing out that grass behind the ball. While I certainly understand the desire to get your money’s worth, I’d like to tell you a story. See, way back in 1744, guys not nearly as athletic as you, played a lot of golf at this trench-filled place call Leith Links. It was no TPC. The course was in Edinburgh, which you probably drove by when flying in for the The Open. Anyway, those rulemaking mid-18th century non-jocks came up with the original rules of golf. There was a line about playing the ball “where it lies.” Long, boring story short (for the agents possibly still reading this), that language evolved quickly into kind of this, like, big, big rule of golf that shaped all others. Miraculously, the whole play it as it lies creed was a thing for a solid 250 years, with hiccups along the way. 

Anything you can do to not test the ground, press down, shard, grind, levigate, triturate or in general, look like you are improving your lie, would be appreciated. Especially when you’re in a featured group on PGA Tour Live or on one of our network partner broadcasts.

I would also point out that we’ll have a lot of rough at upcoming events, particularly with a PGA Championship and U.S. Open on the schedule. And of course The Playoffs© highlighting the season of championships. So talk to your teams about how to test out the ground and improve your feel for a shot by setting the club down NEXT to your ball instead of behind it where you might be seen improving your lie. Or in Jon’s causing the ball to move. Besides saving you penalty strokes and FedExCup points, this will make my next USGA/R&A rules meeting much more enjoyable.

Yours in the Return To Golf,

The Commissioner

Play it as it lies was a thing, at least until Patrick Reed...  What troubles me is that I doubt Jay Monahan even realizes how bad this looks, but it has the potential to undermine everything we think we know about these guys.

For those not taking notes, I'll embed this PReed Master Class in this dark art:

There's only one reason for your club to touch the grass behind your ball and, per our Bryson, it'll damage your brand.  

Like backstopping, this will continue to be a joke, until a significant event turns on such an improved lie...

The Road Forward - A gaggle of disparate stories about decisions to come.  We'll work in time sequence, first as relates to the PGA Championship:

Family members, agents and managers will not be permitted at Harding Park, but up to two coaches as well as a physical trainer and an interpreter (if necessary) will be allowed, subject to COVID-19 testing. No one will be allowed onto the grounds prior to getting a negative result, and all of the testing will be done away from Harding Park, starting on Aug. 2.

Steiny hardest hit.  

This is in contrast to the PGA Tour, which has allowed certain players testing positive to remain in the field, though often playing as a single.  It all seems well considered, unless and until the wrong guy tests positive...

The PGA Tour seemed to this observer very slow to realize that with a November Masters, guys might not want to make this trek:

There is also the issue of the three events that had been scheduled to be played in Asia in October: the CJ Cup @ Nine Bridges in South Korea, the Zozo Championship in Japan

and the WGC-HSBC Champions in China. According to sources at the tour, it is virtually certain that none of those events will be played in Asia, although the first two are likely to be moved to sites in the United States.

Given the restrictions in international travel, few players were going to risk traveling to or from Asia in October. “It isn’t just about getting there, it’s the possibility of being quarantined and being stuck there for a period of time,” one source said. “With the way the pandemic has been trending here, the chances that we could make the events happen even if players were willing to go isn’t great right now.”

As for this, it's about what we expect, though it's not typically said out loud:

Zozo’s defending champion is Tiger Woods. The tournament is scheduled for three weeks out from the Masters and, if it is played in the U.S., the chances of Woods playing are much greater. “They might just call Tiger and say, ‘Tell us where you want to play,’ and go there,” one player said. “As long as he enters, they’ll be happy.”

And he'll be happy to confirm with them the Friday before the event begins.  Think I'm being snarky about the Great Tiger?

There was that fire hydrant as well...

And this:

The event in China almost certainly won’t be played for a number of reasons. China has announced it is canceling all sporting events for the rest of the year except for trials leading to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. And HSBC wouldn’t want to play the event anywhere without its defending champion, Rory McIlroy. It was highly unlikely that McIlroy would chance taking a trip to China two weeks before the rescheduled Masters in November. Even if the HSBC were to be moved to the United States, it’s unclear whether McIlroy or other big names would enter that close to the Masters, which now comes near the end of what will be an active summer and fall for most players.

Well, China.  The boys will typically go anywhere for a big payday, but China?  Now?

Bob Harig has this curious piece on the Masters in which he lays out the range of alternative scenarios under which the event might be played:

 That suggests that everything remains open to possibility, from a tournament with a full

array of spectators (seemingly more unlikely now) to limited fans to none at all or even cancellation -- although the latter would seem extreme, given the relatively successful return to golf through six weeks on the PGA Tour. Not to mention, the PGA Championship is going ahead without spectators, and the U.S. Open is still hoping to have a very limited number of spectators.

Still, when the announcement was made, Augusta National bought itself the most time. The club was clearly banking on seven months being enough of a cushion to curb the pandemic and allow for some sort of return to normalcy.

The Masters is still four months off, so it's a bit early to be agonizing over it.  Nor is there an organization better prepared to absorb a revenue shortfall. Just ask Martha Burke.

Wither Brooksie - No good news here, though let's circle back and cover this poke from Brooksie:

Your humble blogger has some egg on his face, as it's been deemed the Tweet of the Century and I didn't even get the reference.  Eamon Lynch explains:

That’s when he posted a meme widely interpreted as a steroids-themed needling of Bryson DeChambeau, whose bulked-up physique and huge drives have drawn more

gasps and raised eyebrows than a streaker in church. 

Koepka’s tweet did not mention DeChambeau, but it didn’t have to. Readers decided who it was aimed at. There were those who relished the prospect of conflict between two stars in a sport that is often too vanilla. Others thought it dangerously close to a direct accusation of illegal drug use, including European Ryder Cup captain Padraig Harrington, who labeled the tweet “unfair.” At the very least, it was a coy poke in the ribs from a guy who enjoys edgy, jocular jabs at people he doesn’t much care for.

As we know, Bryson has been taking a run at 200 m.p.h. ball speed, but have you ever considered how stiff his driver shaft must be?   And yet he can do this to it:

The two guys seem destined to go head-to-head... Or they would, except that one of them isn't right:

“I just need to play good. I’ve played so bad lately,” he said. Koepka typically has this

way of simplifying things. It’s been an underwhelming restart to the season for Koepka. He finished T32 at the Charles Schwab Challenge, 7th at the RBC Heritage, withdrew from the Travelers after his caddie tested positive for the coronavirus, missed the cut at the Workday Charity Open and finished T62 at the Memorial, shooting 80 in challenging conditions on Sunday. 

Koepka has slipped to No. 6 in the world; still, he enters this week’s event as the second favorite behind Dustin Johnson and didn’t sound like he’d lost any faith in his game. 

“I’m just trying to find things. Every week I feel like the results aren’t there, but it’s getting better and better. My good shots are good, but I’ve just got to bring that bottom level up. I’ve hit some real costly shots. I seem to miss it short-sided every time and that’s been kind of the downfall of why I haven’t played well.”

That sound you hear is Brooks whistling past the graveyard....

“I don’t see it being an issue. I have my trainer coming in, he’s helped work on it quite a bit over the past eight months and I think it will be just fine,” Koepka said. “It’s not an excuse for why I’ve been playing bad, I can promise you that.”

If you say so.  Though how that squares with this remains one of life's mysteries:

The knee simply isn’t progressing, Brooks Koepka is the first to admit, at least from a clinical standpoint. An MRI last week, before the start of play at the Memorial, revealed

this unfortunate diagnosis on his left knee, and it’s something the Jupiter, Florida, resident has known for weeks.

“I’ll be honest with you, Sunday was the best my knee’s felt in a really

long time. I worked with my physio, Marc Wahl, quite a bit over the week. I don’t know. It was the first course we played where it’s actually been hilly. Going downhill, it bugged me a little bit, uphill’s fine, and that was the hilliest golf course we played,” he said. “But it feels a lot better. Just walking downhill’s a pain. It’s where that patellar extends and just try to adjust going down hills.

He just isn't right, and it's hard to think he'll be a factor until that knee resolves itself...

Did someone mention Bryson?  I'm in exit strategy mode, and I'll just leave you with this Eamon Lynch consideration of the man:

Bryson DeChambeau drawing fan hostility, but can he help himself?

 I'm assuming that's a rhetorical question...

Every sport needs a Tom Brady, an Alex Rodriguez, a Kevin Garnett—athletes whose

accomplishments win the admiration of some but whose acts and attitudes earn the loathing of many. 

Hate figures supply one of the main arteries in sports fandom, permitting us to really savor those moments when karma kicks them in the teeth. It’s not a noble sentiment worthy of the Olympic Creed, but disasters inflicted on antagonists bring almost as much joy as the triumphs of heroes. 

Social media has fueled the rip current of hatred in sport (and society), as folks once limited to braying from the bleachers have found both a wider platform and a community of the like-minded. The objects of their derision share one trait, of course: all excel in their sport. Bench-warmers don’t vex anyone. But in a pandemic when most other sports are mothballed, it’s increasingly apparent how uneasily golf co-exists with this new reality. 

The PGA Tour resolutely refuses to lean into the idea of villains being good for fan engagement.

Isn't that what Live Under Par™?

It's Eamon Lynch so give it a read.  Have a great day and we'll catch up again tomorrow.