Late-Week Laments

 Wow, lot's to discuss, especially since I probably won't see the keyboard tomorrow...

TV Alert - U.S. Amateur - In all the excitement of the PGA and the Wyndham Rewards (OK, kidding with the latter), your humble blogger neglected to inform you of the playing of the U.S. Amateur this week at Bandon Friggin' Dunes...  It's real and it's spectacular...

Shack had this preview post as they headed to match-play, and Golfweek has this game story from yesterday's round of 64:

U.S. Amateur: Stewart Hagestad draws on experience; Jonathan Yaun drops well-timed birdies

The names are almost irrelevant, though Mid-Am Hagestad is by now familiar to us from his Masters and Walker Cup experiences.   But the real reason to tune in is that it looks like this:

In this year in which the R&A finds it inconvenient to hold their Open Championship, we'll take our linksy goodness where we can find it...

Here's the TV schedule from Geoff's post:

Thursday 6-7 p.m. (Live, Round of 16) Peacock

7-9 p.m. (Live, Round of 16) GOLF Channel

Friday 6-7 p.m. (Live, Quarterfinals) Peacock

7-9 p.m. (Live, Quarterfinals) GOLF Channel

Saturday 7-10 p.m. (Live, Semifinals) GOLF Channel 

Sunday 7-10 p.m. (Live, Championship) GOLF Channel

Last night's coverage looked.... well, spectacular, which is pretty miraculous given how little time the NBC crew had to pull it together:

Seven weeks ago, the U.S. Amateur at Bandon Dunes couldn’t have been further from the NBC Sports radar.

 The event was set to be produced by NBC’s competitor, Fox Sports — as all USGA events had for the previous six years and, under the terms of its billion-dollar agreement, would for the following six. The time for negotiating live sports rights deals comes roughly once a decade, and it’s an incredibly high-stakes process. Networks have to negotiate the value of their projected advertising dollars against the threat of losing out to competing networks, while leagues rely heavily upon the money generated through deals to fund their growth.

In short, the USGA wasn’t looking to negotiate a new broadcast partner smack dab in the middle of its gargantuan agreement with Fox, and decades of accepted knowledge told us Fox wouldn’t dare jeopardize their deal.

The Par-3 16th hole at Bandon Dunes.

 Here's just a bit more:

After finally landing on location, the NBC crew devised a plan: rather than fit the course to the broadcast, they would fit the broadcast to the course.

 “There’s going to be a lot of movement because the terrain here at Bandon Dunes doesn’t necessarily allow you to put cameras and towers everywhere,” Burkowski said. “I guess it’s sort of that Chambers Bay feel of wow, this is not something we’ve visually seen before, so it’s going to be a lot of moving around, trying to showcase the golf, the beautiful scenery all around.”

The links-style setup at the Dunes course lent itself well to the NBC team, which hosts the Open Championship each year.

Yanno, it's not called the Dunes course.  Why, because they have two of them.... Pacific Dunes in addition to the original Bandon Dunes.   

It is funny, because I poked Mike Bamberger earlier in the week because of his dream rota of Left Bank PGA Championship venues that included this resort, noting that Pacific Dunes tops out at 6,600 yards.  

Based on the broadcast last night, Bandon Dunes has been extended to some 7,200 yards, sounding very comparable to the length of Harding Park.  Given the ever-present wind, that's plenty to challenge these guys, at least in match play.  

Before we go, there was an epic rugby scrum at the end of medal play:

BANDON, Ore. — Put together 264 golfers of closely matched skill sets. Have them play 36 holes to whittle the collection to just 64. Both the odds and logic say you’re going to get a bunch of them trying to squeeze through a bottleneck to safety. It’s the beauty of the USGA’s format for the U.S. Amateur, creating more drama for those on the bubble than the contenders for medalist honors.

It can also be a royal pain, especially when there are too many stubborn golfers who won’t go away. For Wednesday morning, it looked like a charge to the hills for the Gold Rush up here when 18 men, having tied at two over par, took to the 10th tee in three groups omn the Bandon Dunes course to battle for a mere three spots in the match play that begins later in the day.

The competition lasted all of two holes, with Cameron Sisk, a soon-to-be junior at Arizona State and Evan Katz (senior, Duke) scoring birdies on the first hole. Aaron Du, originally from China and set to begin college at Cal, notched the lone birdie on the second hole to complete the match-play field of 64.

Epic for sure, but not remotely close to a record:

Eighteen people—one for each hole if they went out in singles in a shotgun start—seems particularly onerous and complicated to manage, but the USGA has been doing this a long time and has seen far bigger traffic jams. In fact, 18 gets kind of an indifferent shrug. The record is 33 playoff contenders for 10 places in 1988 at Virginia Hot Springs. On four other occasions there have been at least 25 contestants, and it could be argued that the most sinister playoff came at Pinehurst just last year, when 27 poor souls were scratching for three spots—a nearly four-hour ordeal well documented by Golf Digest.

I'd have sent them out in one, eighteensome... 

Very much worth tuning in if you've never seen the place, and I do always recommend this interesting history of it's creation as well.

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like... - Don't think I've used an Eagle's reference previously on the blog, so we've got that going for us... As you guys know, I assume golf sponsorships to be a house of cards that can't survive much scrutiny, essentially the use of shareholder money to get CEO's into Wednesday Pro-Ams....

That said, the Wyndham Rewards program initially made a modicum of sense to this observer.  The FedEx Cup is quite the hot mess, mostly due to the Tour's inability to choose between a season-long competition and a high-stakes shoot-out...  It's neither fish nor fowl, though it tends towards the latter, which is how you get Bill Haas, Billy Horschel, Brandt Snedeker and the like as your winners...

So, I remember thinking, Wyndham stepping up to put serious scratch on the table based upon regular-season results seemed like a good idea at the time.  And for golf fans perhaps it still is, yet I find myself wondering what's in it for those beleaguered shareholders, the more so because 2020 can't be a very good year.  So, how exactly does this work?

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Justin Thomas shot only one round in the 60s at Harding Park, tied for 37th and lost the No. 1 ranking that he had held all of one week.

The week wasn’t a total loss.

Thomas has played so well this year with a PGA Tour-best three victories that he is assured of being the No. 1 seed when the FedEx Cup postseason begins. That also means he wins the Wyndham Rewards for leading after the regular season, which comes with a $2 million bonus.

So he earned $45,000 from the PGA Championship, picked up $2 million and likely will lose $5,000 or so from missing a putt (not because of missing the putt, but because of his verbal reaction to why the ball didn’t go into the cup).

Ya got that?  He wins the $2 million large without, yanno, playing the Wyndham, which one assumed to be the whole point.  It's not easy being a shareholder these days...And, they're paying full pop on the bonus pool despite both not having spectators and, I nailed it, it not being such a great year.  

Tee up that class action lawsuit...

DATELINE: Augusta, GA - It's official, there will be no galleries, spectators, crowds, mobs....what's that word?  Oh yeah, there will be no patrons:

Augusta National Golf Club announced Wednesday that no patrons will be allowed on site for the 2020 Masters when it's held in November.

The news comes two weeks after the USGA announced that the U.S. Open, scheduled to begin Sept. 17 at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y., would be played without spectators, and a week after the mayor of Augusta said he was expecting crowds to be barred from club property.

When the club originally announced the tournament’s postponement from its traditional April date to Nov. 12-15, Augusta National chairmen Fred Ridley said he would welcome “all existing ticket holders to enjoy the excitement of Masters week,” contingent on favorable counsel and direction from health officials. Unfortunately, the United States has been unable to curb the COVID-19 outbreak, and the tournament’s home state of Georgia continues to be a hotspot with only Florida and California having more active coronavirus cases.

That last bit is quite the red herring....Because the disgrace of having active cases would, in a rational world, pale in comparison to this other stat:

 

I just thank my lucky stars that I don't live in one of those dystopian places like Florida or Georgia... Now, about that Faucci guy that thinks Cuomo did such a bang up job...

Not that I mean that as criticism of this latest announcement, as it's far more important that we have the event than that we worry about crowd noise and the like.  I think it'll be fascinating to see the place without grandstands, and I suspect that CBS will be back to full strength by then.  Of course, Tony Romo might need to spend a week with a substitute play-by-play man, though that assumes that golf will have priority...  It should, but who knows what the contracts say?

Bob Harig has his own take here, though I was most interested by this rather minor detail:

It will offer those who had tickets or badges for this year a special "exclusive'' opportunity to buy merchandise online, a potential windfall but one that can't make up for all the hardship of this year.

Hardship?  At Augusta National?

For those unaware, Augusta does not sell Masters merchandise online.  Yes, they're all captains of industry, but they give up their predatory capitalistic instincts when they drive down Magnolia Lane... They leave millions on the table routinely, so it's amusing to see them act like normal folk.  No doubt they're sitting on a file of 2020 logo gear, and need to find a home for it.... See, they're just like us.

Iron Byron in the Spotlight - This is easily the most interesting item of the day:

We robot-tested modern equipment with a balata ball. Here are the fascinating results

But I've been reliably informed that any infinitesimal distance gains are directly attributable to ab crunches and core work...

To understand how far golf equipment has come, it’s important to go back and look at where we started. No, this isn’t a nostalgic look back at featheries and gutties, but rather at the juncture in

our game where the biggest distance spike occurred. It was roughly two decades ago that Tiger Woods put the golf world on notice when he first employed a solid-construction, multi-layer Nike Tour Accuracy at the 2000 Deutsche Bank-SAP Open in Hamburg.

Woods wasn’t the first to embrace solid construction in the professional ranks, but he was the harbinger of change: a megastar who forced the rest of the Tour to reconsider their ball of choice, which, at that time, was predominantly wound construction featuring either a liquid-filled or solid center. The convergence of Woods’ near-immediate success with Tour Accuracy and introduction of Titleist’s Pro V1 saw solid-construction, multi-layer balls become the norm almost overnight.

Not of the purpose of that red herring in  first graph, because we now know that Tiger's fifteen stroke win at Pebble in 2000 comes with a potential asterisk, since he was the only player in the field utilizing a solid-core golf ball.  

This is a deep dive into the effects on a wide range of swing styles and speeds, and the effects differ based upon those parameters.  But this to me is the money bit:

If you were to combine the modern-day Tour driver with a Tour-level balata at mid or mid-high spin, a distance loss of 40-plus yards is possible.

And that's just the ball...  Marry that new ball to 460cc drivers with space-age materials, launch monitor fine-tuning of launch conditions and  all those ab crunches, is it any surprise that folks are talking about 8,000+ yard golf courses?

As for the threshold issue of the day, whether our governing bodies have the will to act, news broke earlier this week that they've assumed the position...  Actually, it looks more like punt formation:

Will golf’s ruling bodies roll back the distance golf balls travel, or take other steps to contain yardage gains at the elite professional levels? As when watching Bryson DeChambeau hit tee shots, you’ll just have to wait a little longer for the next stage of distance studies to land.

The United States Golf Association and the R&A have delayed any further release of information in their study of the distance debate in golf until March of 2021, the governing bodies announced Monday.

No hurry, as these things only get easier to address with the passage of time (h/t reader Mark W.).

I'll release you here, though there's more that I had hoped to cover.  Not sure when we'll next meet, so check back early and often...