Thursday Threads

A last minute decision to play this morning, so just a couple of quick bits.  Then I'll likely next see you on Monday morning.

Phil in Phull - He Came, he saw and he rocked those aviators:

Phil Mickelson put the over-50-set of golfers on notice that he’ll be a force to be reckoned with, should he decide to play on PGA Tour Champions. Mickelson posted 5-under 66 in the final round to go wire-to-wire and win the Charles Schwab Series at Ozarks National by four strokes over Tim Petrovic.

“Sometimes you just run into a buzz saw,” Petrovic said. ” I ran into a Phil buzz saw this week because he made a lot of birdies.”

Ozarks National is located not far from Branson, Missouri, where the likes of crooners Andy Williams, Glen Campbell and Dolly Parton enjoyed performing during their golden years. In almost any game played today, the half-century man is long gone, having stepped aside to make room for the young. Except in golf. At 50, Mickelson’s competitive juices still are flowing.

Mickelson became the 20th player to win in his senior debut, joining a fraternity that includes Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Lanny Wadkins, and just last month, Jim Furyk. Even Tiger Woods took notice.

We'll get to Tiger's comments in a sec, but just let the concept of this as U.S. Open preparation sink in, and you'll no doubt understand his chances at Winged Foot.  Yeah, holding off Tim Petrovic on a golf course featuring 70-yard wide fairways is just like...

As for the Striped One, he couldn't have been more complimentary:

Look, it’s easy to laugh off Mickelson’s achievement as an unfair matchup, the golf equivalent of LeBron James rolling over a neighborhood pickup basketball game. Mickelson’s odds to win the tournament were as low as +220 (bet $100 to win $220); that’s getting in the neighborhood of prime Tiger right there.

Woods himself knows just how much of an advantage Mickelson currently owns. “He was already one of the longest hitters out here [on the PGA Tour],” Woods said Wednesday at the BMW Championship, “and now he goes to where he’s going to pick up a huge advantage off the tee ... There’s no reason why he can’t win every event he plays out there. He’s got such a big advantage over the rest of the field just with sheer length.”

Out there?  Passive-aggressive much?

Phil getting phaves at this moment in time isn't a surprise, though here we have further hagiography on of that other gig:

A few weeks after Phil’s debut, you can count Brandel Chamblee and Paul Azinger among those

impressed.

“I love Phil,” Azinger said. “I thought he was awesome in the booth. He could do that anytime he wants. He and Faldo went at it kind of like Faldo and I went at it. I think it’s nice to have a foil sometimes, and that’s kind of how that looked to me.”

Chamblee echoed Azinger’s sentiment, even going as far as to compare Lefty to another star player turned right-hand-man to Jim Nantz.

“I think honestly he could get in the booth and be Tony Romo-esque,” Chamblee said in a conference call with media Monday. “He sounded like — look, he’s got a little bit of — and he’ll admit this, he’s got a little BS in him. He’s got a little — he wants to figure things out. He wants to give you the needle. He wants to have fun. He’s enjoyed — he enjoys all the smack talk in the game, and that makes for great commentating.”

I think the comparison to Romo is quite apt, as neither has sniffed a PGA Tour cut in some time...

I do think he was very good in the booth, though I think part of that reaction is the comparison with the lifeless CBS crew.  I can't imagine Phil having interest in the gig for the long term, though, so I tend to minimize the excitement level.

Boys v. Girls -  A couple of interesting thumb-suckers via Shack that riff of last weekend's viewing alternatives.  First, this from The Fried Egg's Andy Johnson:

Hit and Run vs. Home Run Derby

The appeal of women’s professional golf in the power era

During the 2020 Women’s Open, played at a windy, 6,632-yard Royal Troon, we saw just that. Cunning and shotmaking came to the forefront. The competitors’ typical trajectories and spin rates brought slopes on and around the greens into play. Fronting bunkers were intimidating, often prompting players to aim away from a pin if they had a poor angle.

 As a diehard golf fan, I felt how a diehard baseball fan must feel during the postseason. In playoff baseball games, the margins are slim, and the most successful teams manufacture runs in nuanced ways: hit and runs, safety squeezes, pitch-outs. Similarly, the Women’s Open highlighted precise driving, well-struck long irons, varied short-game play, and patience. This is the kind of stuff that tragics love and obsess over. And in golf, despite advances in equipment, the intricacies we crave can still be found in women’s tournaments because the scale of the players’ games fits the scale of the venues.

At the PGA Tour’s Northern Trust, on the other hand, those scales were completely mismatched.

Fronting bunkers?  Oh, never mind, though you'll want to see his take on that other golf as well:

At the PGA Tour’s Northern Trust, on the other hand, those scales were completely mismatched.

Dustin Johnson went 67-60-64-63, causing many to wonder whether TPC Boston, in spite of a recent renovation by Gil Hanse, was already out of date. But the low scores themselves are less important than how they were achieved: a monotonous repetition of crushed drivers and three-quarter wedges. I don’t mean to discount Johnson’s incredible performance against a strong field; he played the modern men’s game as well as it can be played. But it was all pretty simplistic compared to what we saw at Royal Troon.

If the Women’s Open was like playoff baseball, the Northern Trust resembled the Home Tour Derby: a fun, once-a-year exhibition that typically turns into a yawner after a few minutes. I suspect that distinction will only become clearer without new equipment regulations.

Writing from Down Under, Dan brown has a very similar take:

At the same time the TPC Boston was giving up birdies like they were jellybeans, across the Atlantic, the world's best women's players were having a hell of a time at Royal Troon.

With 65-kilometre-per-hour winds ripping off the Firth of Clyde on Scotland's west coast, this classic 140-year-old links was baring its teeth. The leader after the first two rounds was Swede Dani Holmqvist.

She shot rounds of 70 and 71 to be 1-under, the only player in red figures.

The cut was set at 9-over par. Three golfers had rounds of over 80 in the first two days and still played the weekend.

And it was glorious to watch.

It WAS glorious to watch, though I think there's quite a significant category error involved.   As y'all know all too well, I'm a fan of the women's game and its unique charms, but I think here the bulk of the credit is due links golf, and especially links golf played in weather.

All the same, I couldn't be happier that folks noticed...

The C-Word - At his BMW presser, Tiger had his own unique take on a crowd patron-less Masters:

“It’s going to make a big difference to all of us,” Woods said Wednesday at the BMW Championship. “It has out here week-in and week-out. We just don’t have the same type of energy and the distractions.

“There at Augusta National, you just have all those roars that would go up if somebody did something, somewhere, and then scoreboard watching and trying to figure out what’s going on, there aren’t a lot of big leaderboards out there, so that will be very different.”

Augusta National announced earlier this month that the Masters, now rescheduled for Nov. 12-15, would be played without patrons for the first time. Woods said when he first went to Augusta to play a practice round in 1995, it was “eye-opening” just how much room there was on the course when it wasn’t lined with 40,000 spectators.

“When you put 40,000 people on such a small piece of property – I know there’s no rough, but it gets confined,” he said. “But this will be very different. This will be a fun Masters, and I’m looking forward to defending.”

Confined?  Though perhaps it's that "small piece of property" that's the stranger bit...

There's been lots of speculation about how the fan-free environment might hurt Tiger, though it's hard to draw conclusions when he's played so little...The best news is that if this Masters isn't your cuppa, it's a short wait until the 2021 edition.

If Phil is heading to the broadcast booth, wither Tiger?  Well, perhaps he can reinvent himself as a swing coach (or even a life coach):

Jason Day has yet to settle on a new swing coach after recently splitting with long-time instructor

and mentor Colin Swatton. In the meantime, he's relying on a pretty good source for some help: Tiger Woods.

During a teleconference with several Australian golf writers on Tuesday (hat tip to our friends at Australian Golf Digest), the 12-time PGA Tour winner revealed he's been leaning on the 15-time major champ for advice of late—both concerning the golf swing and overcoming career obstacles.

“I have been talking to Tiger about his swing and what he’s been through,” Day said.

One doesn't need to look far for the logic of that dropped dime:

"Well, Jason and I have had a great relationship for a very long time, since he's been on tour, and yeah, we've talked about a number of things, and obviously one of the topics we do tend to talk about because we both have bad backs now and mine is a little bit more progressed than his, is trying to deal with it, trying to manage it, and the evolution of the swing," Woods said. "We can't do what we used to do, and how do you evolve that and still be effective. But also recovery from day-to-day. Recovery techniques have changed over the years, and lifting protocols have changed. So that's a lot to do with it, but yeah, the swing does evolve, it does change. You can only swing the club how the body allows you to do, and I know that firsthand from all my nine previous procedures that I've had done to my body. It's just one of those things that as we age we wear things out."

More than a decade younger, Day is looking to get out in front a bit of that aging process. But he's also not looking to do anything drastic.

“I just feel like I’ve asked questions and he’s willing to answer them, and I’m trying to make changes right now in my swing," Day said. "I’m trying to make slow changes because I really don’t want to mess with my playing feels."

Why wouldn't you?

Rules Officials to the Stars -  Two titans of the rules world have retired:

That’s what John Paramor and Andy McFee have done, with a distinct style, for the European Tour for more than four decades, with Paramor beginning in April 1976 and McFee in September 1983. Each eventually ascending to chief referee status on the circuit.

This fall, the duo will work their final tournament. Paramor and McFee will step down after the European Tour’s flagship event, the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, on Oct. 8-11.

Their place in the game is significant—European Tour chief Keith Pelley referred to each as a legend, and both have presided over important and innumerable rulings through the years. Good friends, they recently sat down to reminisce about some of their more memorable moments here.

Paramor is the better known in the U.S., but they've both worked this turf well for many a year.

Besides thanking them, the real reason to blog the retirement is to revisit Paramor's most notable ruling, an encounter with a certain Spaniard very much in the lion's den:

In the lead for the most of the tournament and with the spectators eager to see their prodigal son win on home soil, the Spaniard suddenly found himself tied for the lead with Bernhard Langer after failing to birdie the par-5 17th. Then Ballesteros pushed his tee shot at the 18th to the right and his ball settled behind a tree. Seeking relief because of animal hole behind his ball that he said interfered with his swing, Ballesteros called for an official.

Enter Paramor.

“Just behind it was this massive hole that some animal of some description almost certainly dug there,” Paramor recalled. “It did take me a long time and I thought, This is not going to go well for me, because obviously in a tournament in Spain. The vast majority of spectators are Spanish. They were desperate for Seve to win.”

And Ballesteros was desperate for relief. Under the Rules of Golf, he would be entitled to a free drop had the hole been caused by a burrowing animal.

Paramor determined it wasn’t because there was no evidence (animal droppings) it had been and at one point stuck his finger in the hole while examining it. That’s when he felt the Spaniard’s hand on his shoulder and heard him say to be careful because whatever had caused the hole might bite.

“What a lovely thing to say to me in that moment of very, very high pressure,” Paramor said.

Gentlemanly indeed.

But a moment later, with lips pursed, Ballesteros shot Paramor a parting death stare. Then he went on to bogey the hole to lose by one.

Well, Seve.  We're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, which preclude me from speaking of Seve.... Let's just say that he saw lots of penumbras in the rules book, and needed to be stared down more than just this one instance.  But Paramor was one who had the requisite cujones... 

Have a great weekend and we'll catch up on everything Monday morning.