A last minute decision to play golf this morning, so I actually prepped a portion of this post for you yesterday afternoon. See, I'm always thinking of my readers...
Zurich Stuff - The event itself wouldn't warrant much discussion, excepting perhaps their bold break from 72 holes of stroke play. Brian Wacker shares that sentiment:
Once an overlooked stop sandwiched between the Masters and the Players Championship (more recently the PGA Championship), the tournament in recent years often lacked star power muchless an identity. And while 72 holes of stroke play is the purest determinant of the best player each week on tour, it became clear that something different was needed in the Big Easy.The first year of the new team format was telling: It drew seven of the top 11 and 13 of the top 25 in the Official World Golf Ranking.The luster hasn’t worn off, either. This year’s field includes five of the top 10 in the OWGR—Rahm, Morikawa, Xander Schauffele, Tyrrell Hatton and Patrick Cantlay—and 11 major champions. Two of the teams—Rose/Henrik Stenson and Louis Oosthuizen/Charl Schwartzel—include a pair of major winners. And there are seven more top-25 players in the field, too.
Watching them play two days of alternate shot is good, as is the very process by which they pair up.
For instance, there's those guys trying to reclaim lost glory:
Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson have a unique, shared history in golf.
The two go way back to their amateur days, but are most known for their dominant partnership in the Ryder Cup, where they boast an impressive 6-2 record. Rose won the gold medal in the 2016
Olympic Games, beating Stenson, the silver medalist. Both players have won 20-plus professional events worldwide and each has earned a FedEx Cup title, Stenson in 2013 and Rose in 2018.
But that shared history and past success has yet to make its way to TPC Louisiana and the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. In two previous appearances together, the pairing missed the cut in 2017 and finished T-19 in 2018, poor performances by their lofty standards.
JR showed signs of life at Augusta, if briefly, but the last I've seen of Henrik was on a milk carton. Another team similarly in search of lost glory can be found here as well.
These two might be a pick.... if it were a long drive contest:
But to hear Finau tell it, there is at least one pro who can bomb it past him: Cameron Champ, hispartner in this week’s two-man team event at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, who ranks third at 318 yards behind only Wyndham Clark and Bryson DeChambeau. When Finau and Champ were asked who was longer, neither pointed at himself.
“He’s pointing at the wrong guy,” Finau said.
“No, no,” said Champ, who explained why Finau’s “puny” average driving distance of 305 yards doesn’t tell the full story of his prodigious length. “As people notice, he takes it back a little bit shorter than normal, but when he takes it back full, he is the longest on Tour.”
One of the other bits of fun this week are the walk-up songs. The vast majority have never previously passed your humble blogger's ears, but wasn't it just recently we were discussing mullets?
Cameron Smith’s mullet has been the talk of the PGA Tour for so long this season that it deserves its own song. But until someone puts words to music (we’re thinking of you, Sam Harrop), we’ll just have to make do with Jay Powell’s “The Mullet Song.”
For that, we have fellow Aussie Marc Leishman to thank. Someone had to come up with a good walk-up tune for the first tee at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans this week, and Leishman delivered.
“He’s already entered it. I didn’t even get a choice,” Smith explained. “We’re going to be rocking that going to the first tee.”
How did Leishman settle on “The Mullet Song?” He googled “mullet songs” and the rest as they say is history.
They have Google Down Under? Who knew?
These guys would be your favorites, and it appears to be love:
With Cantlay, they form the highest-ranked team in the field this week with both players in thetop-10 of the official World Golf Ranking (Schauffele No. 5, Cantlay No. 10). The budding bromance between Cantlay and Schauffele ignited at the 2019 Presidents Cup in Australia when they bonded playing gin on the flight and ended up as partners in all four of the team sessions of the international biennial competition. Ever since, they’ve become regular practice-round partners.
“It’s very competitive, and we feel like when we play against each other it sort of sharpens ourselves for the best week possible,” Schauffele explained. “We know our games inside out, I think that will give us an advantage.”
Cantlay has been on a run of missed cuts, whereas I've been reliably informed that Xander pured his tee shot on No. 16 at Augusta.... Not sure why he thought we needed that assurance, unless concerned that we might over-react to the ball coming up thirty yards short.
But just a kind word for the Zurich sponsors, who took an afterthought of an event and turned it into something different. There's only two weeks on Tour when they're not playing 72 holes of stroke play, and this is one of them. A bit of a trick there, though, because they are, in fact, playing 72 holes of stroke play, they're just doing it in fourballs and alternate shot.
And the leaders in the clubhouse after the first day of best ball are.... Team Norway.
Alter Cockers - Your humble blogger's game is in the crapper, but other old-timers seem to be doing OK. You know, guys like Westwood, Cink and Lydia Ko. OK, that last one isn't receiving mail from AARP just yet, but she's been in the wilderness long enough that she seems as old as the other two.
First up is last week's winner at Hilton Head, Stewart Cink. Mike Bamberger has him talk about short putting, after we all saw Cink using almost a false start on his short putts. Here's what he tells himself over the ball:
“You probably see me mouthing something to Reagan [Cink’s caddie and son at Hilton Head], or you might audibly pick it up on the coverage: I like to remind myself is that I want to be on the mountaintop of trust before every putt. Those aren’t just words to me. I’m actually trying toconstruct my pre-shot routine so that that’s what I’m focused on consciously. I hate the word ‘routine’ because that’s not the right word for what we do. It’s an operation that requires focus and cadence, and I’m trying to hit my little spots along that routine. By the time I finish that routine, the ball is already rolling.
“You probably have heard me or see me mouth the words, ‘Mountaintop of trust.’ Or, ‘Mountaintop of peace.’ You know, little phrases like that. I’m really just saying it so I can hear myself and remind myself.
“It’s a path to success. Obviously, I want to make the putts. I don’t want to miss putts. But I believe that the way to keep myself the calmest and the way to keep my stroke doing what it’s supposed to do is through the process and staying calm and focusing on something I can control, as opposed to something you can’t control. If you depend on something you can’t control, you’re just going to end up frustrated, and I don’t want to be frustrated.”
Whatever gets you through the night...
Eamon Lynch takes a well deserved break from writing about Tour compensation programs to talk about these older players and their not-so-inevitable comebacks:
Lynch: Jordan Spieth, Lydia Ko step back from abyss, but resurrections are rare, even for the greats
But whatever led them back to the winner’s circle—determination, talent, hard work,perseverance—it was assuredly not the mawkish twaddle that they were just too good not to be there again.
Just as cemeteries are full of indispensable people, lesser Tours and broadcasting booths are peopled with those thought too good not to win again. Some of the falls from grace were so precipitous as to become shorthand reference points even for casual fans.
The obvious one is David Duval. He won 13 PGA Tour titles in under four years, culminating in his Open Championship victory at Royal Lytham 20 years ago. A few months later in Japan, two days after his 30th birthday, he cashed his last winner’s check.
The Claret Jug can seem a poisoned chalice for some of its recipients. Ian Baker-Finch won it a decade before Duval, but six years later he wept in the locker room at Royal Troon when he couldn’t break 90 in the opening round. That afternoon he withdrew from the Open and quit tournament golf.
The focus on Ko and Spieth is more than a little misleading. They're anomalies in that they lost their form while still incredibly young. In this excerpt Lynch details some of the many that were never heard from again:
Seve Ballesteros won three Opens but was only 38 years old when the victories dried up, his swing and body decayed beyond repair. A friend of mine once asked Seve—a man not given to modesty—who would win if Europe’s ‘Big Five’ of the ‘80s faced off at their best. “Sandy would win,” Seve replied firmly. “But I would be second.” Yet Sandy—as in Lyle, Open and Masters champion—was finished even earlier than Seve, at age 34, not counting a European Seniors win and a couple of hickory events in his native Scotland.
Lyle’s Open came at Royal St. George’s, where the championship makes its overdue return (pandemic permitting) in July. Four years earlier at RSG’s, Bill Rogers won the Jug, one of seven worldwide titles the 30-year-old Texan claimed in ’81. By ’88, Rogers was working in a San Antonio pro shop, burned out and far removed from his last win. Yani Tseng won two Women’s British Opens among her five majors and 15 LPGA titles, all in a four-year span. She was 23 when the slump started. She’s now 32 with a world ranking of 1,025th. We can reach back further. Ralph Guldahl: 16 wins, three majors, done at 29.
Tangentially related, Daniel Rappaport rates the best old-man seasons ever in golf. Now, a spoiler alert, while there are other names invoked, on the subject of winning late in life, there's only two names that matter. Here's the first:
Sam Snead, 1957Snead was born within months of Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson in 1912, and while the other two players arguably had better peaks, Slammin’ Sammy had the longevity. Snead won his first PGA Tour event in 1936 and his 82nd/last in 1965, and he racked up 18 victories after turning 40—that’s second all time to a man we’ll discuss in a minute.After turning 45 on May 27, 1957, Snead won his next start at the Palm Beach Round Robin, a now-defunct event that featured a very strange scoring system. He followed that up with three straight top-10s in the U.S. Open, the Western Open and the PGA Championship, added two more runner-ups at the World Championship of Golf and the Miller High Life Open. The highlight of the year came in his last start at the Dallas Open Invitational, where he shot 11-under 60 in the second round—then the lowest-recorded score in tour history—and shot 20 under par to cruise to victory.In total, for a season that featured two wins and three runner-ups, he earned a grand total of $28,261.
Sam Snead, 1960Slammin’ Sammy was back at it 1960, winning twice before May 1—at the De Soto Open Invitational and the Greater Greensboro Open. It was Snead’s seventh victory in Greensboro but not his last (that would come five years later), just before his 53rd birthday. It seems only fitting, given his remarkable 40-plus record, that Snead still holds the record as the oldest winner in tour history.Snead played 11 times during the 1960 season—when Arnold Palmer was at the top of his game, winning eight times that year—and the 47/48-year-old Snead finished in the top 25 in all 11 starts. In addition to the two victories, he posted a runner-up at the West Palm Beach Open Invitational and a T-3 at the PGA Championship.
And the second:
Vijay Singh, 2008Singh is perhaps the poster child for late bloomers, with 22 of his 34 PGA Tour victories coming after his 40th birthday. That’s the most for a 40-plus-year-old player, and he made quite a push after turning 45 in May 2008. Singh won the WGC-Bridgestone that August and a month later won the first two events of the FedEx Cup playoffs en route to the FedEx Cup title.
With his three victories and the FedEx Cup honors, Singh made more than $16 million in on-course earnings that season. Nothing like filling out the career earnings—Singh is fifth all time—when you’re closer to 50 than 40.
Others, such as Julius Boros and Kenny Perry deserve mention, but these are the gold standard for winning in their forties. Cink gets a mention as well, as it's hard to quibble with two wins... Well, my quibble isn't with the winds, it's just that they seem like different seasons to this observer.
Lastly in this category, Gary Van Sickle assesses the World Golf Hall of Fame prospects for the current generation of players, with some surprising conclusions. For instance, who could have seen this one coming?
Tiger Woods. The Hall of Fame changed its minimum age requirement to 50 the year before Woods would’ve been eligible or he would already be inducted with his contemporaries such as Phil Mickelson and Ernie Els. With 15 major titles and 82 wins, his choice doesn’t need discussion. Prediction: A dead-solid lock. A Zurich.
Given that he's already bene voted in, that's quite the bold prediction, Gary. Oh, and what's a Zurich?
Here, I tend to think that he's already a lock. But given that he's only 27, the value of a prediction seems marginal at best:
Jordan Spieth. This isn’t as easy as you might think. Two major championships ought to get you into the hall, right? Ask Andy North and John Daly how that worked out. But Spieth has three majors among 12 PGA Tour victories and is only 27. He’s coming out of a slump and appears to be getting closer to the form he had in 2015 when he chased the third leg of the Grand Slam to the 72nd hole of the British Open at St. Andrews. It’s hard to believe he isn’t going to pile up more victories. It’s also hard to believe he’s not going to win another Masters. He’s got a win, two seconds and two thirds. Augusta National is right up his alley. But let’s say he doesn’t win anything ever again. That would mean he landed his third and final major, the British Open at Royal Birkdale, at age 24. Would he be looked at as a great champion or a very good player who had a three-year hot streak? I’d invoke the Larry Nelson rule: three majors and you’re in the hall. It took awhile before Nelson finally got inducted with his three majors and 10 total wins. Spieth has three and 12, respectively. Prediction: Highly probable. Don’t mess with Texas.
the better question might be, what more would he need to accomplish?
But this is where it gets interesting:
Lee Westwood. No one has embodied The Nearly Man more than England’s affable Westwood. He achieved the rare Third-Place Slam, finishing third in each of the majors. His 19 top-10 finishes in majors include three runners-up and sixth thirds. Westwood has been all over the majors like drool on a bulldog. You can’t overlook 44 worldwide victories, including 25 on the European Tour, however, despite winning only twice on the PGA Tour. He’s a Ryder Cup warhorse who is likely to break Europe’s all-time appearance marks this September if he makes the team. In addition, he’s got the longevity factor. He was the European Tour’s Golfer Of the Year in 1998, 2000, 2009 and … 2020!. That’s a Nicklaus-esqe 22-year spread. Colin Montgomerie made the hall with a major-less record not equal to Westwood’s. Prediction: Probable. No major, no matter in this case.
To me, Lee Westwood is the perfect inductee if you want to run a Hall of the Very Nice Players. Good career, but never a dominant player, never even the best in the world at any time (and yes, I know he rose to the top of the OWGR for an hour and-a-half, but that's just math). But now we see the wages of enshrining Colin Montgomerie, who was a far better player than Westy.
But, at leats Gary takes a moment to make us laugh:
Rickie Fowler. No majors, but he did invent the color orange. Prediction: Nope.
He'll console himself with all those PIP bonus checks...
Ryder Cup Fever - Daniel Rappaport updates us on U.S Ryder Cup points standings:
U.S. Points Standings (top six automatically qualify)
1. Dustin Johnson
2. Bryson DeChambeau
3. Justin Thomas
4. Collin Morikawa
5. Xander Schauffele
6. Brooks Koepka
7. Patrick Reed
8. Tony Finau
9. Webb Simpson
10. Daniel Berger
11. Jordan Spieth
12. Billy Horschel
13. Patrick Cantlay
14. Harris English
15. Scottie Scheffler
To which he appends this assessment:
LOCKS: Johnson, DeChambeau, Thomas, Morikawa, Schauffele, FinauThe general golf public may have just become familiar with Willy Z—that’s a thing, by the way—but he’s been rubbing shoulders with golfing elites since he was a kid. When he was 6, he got alesson from Ken Venturi. As a teenager, he got tips from Lanny Wadkins. He trains with Jordan Spieth, plays money games with Tony Romo. He was born in San Francisco and bred in Dallas, but doesn’t it seem like he has a bit of Hollywood in him? That, of course, is a good thing in a lights-camera-action event like the Ryder Cup.And despite being six months older than Collin Morikawa (wrap your head around that), Zalatoris has rookie energy, another key component in the perfect team-room potion. Now, will he continue on this heater that has taken him from the Korn Ferry Tour to No. 27 in the world in the span of seven months? Golf greatness is fleeting. Players get hot and players get freezing cold. But if the Ryder Cup were today, it’s hard to imagine him not being on the team, even if he’s only 18th in the latest standings. Which is absolutely, completely and totally wild when you consider where he was in his golf career this time last year.
Zalatoris making the team isn't a crazy thought, but if the Ryder Cup were today, Will would be watching it with his buddy Tony Romo. Which isn't to say that he couldn't make the team, but he'll have to make it with his play between now and selection day.
As impressed as we all were by the kid at Augusta (and Winged Foot, as well), he needs to show a lot more. Not only is his rookie status a negative, but he's just not a very good putter. Let's give the kid a little space and see how his career develops before throwing him into that cauldron.
Here's Rappaport's guess of the team per current standings:
We also have an update on the Euro points list:
Euro points standings (top four auto qualify)
1. Tommy Fleetwood
2. Jon Rahm
3. Tyrrell Hatton
4. Rory McIlroy
5. Victor Perez
6. Matt Fitzpatrick
7. Bernd Wiesberger
8. Robert MacIntyre
World points standings (top five not qualified off Euro points)
1. Jon Rahm
2. Tyrrell Hatton
3. Rory McIlroy
4. Lee Westwood
5. Tommy Fleetwood
6. Matt Fitzpatrick
7. Victor Perez
8. Paul Casey
9. Viktor Hovland
10. Robert MacIntyre
11. Sergio Garcia
LOCKS: Hatton, Rahm, McIlroy, Casey, Hovland, Fitzpatrick
I too think Casey will be there, though I don't see that a sbeing locked down. What do we think of Rory as a mortal lock? Hard to see him not on the team, unless of course you've seen him play recently...
Sadly he's going to just miss out on a playoff. pic.twitter.com/qoa7iGqGZh
— Monday Q Info (@acaseofthegolf1) April 19, 2021
He had a very respectable 50 on the outgoing nine, but then just blew up coming home...'
You might think that they would screen entrants, because this is big time golf. But this is how the player in question rolled up to the first tee:
This man rolled up to the KFT Monday Q, was blaring music from his WAGON. And is.....playing in the Monday Q.
Can we get him and Cowboy Qualifier into Zurich or is it too late pic.twitter.com/CGSvdiOElX
— Monday Q Info (@acaseofthegolf1) April 19, 2021
Hey, it's a collared shirt... Well, it's collared, I'm not actually sure whether it's a shirt.
A man by the name of Connor Murphy turned in a 108 at the Bridges Golf Club in Gunter, Texas, which was serving as the qualifying site for the KFT’s Veritex Bank Championship. For those of you scoring at home, that is 36 over par, a score that was last among the 139-player field by 16 shots. It was a bit of a rough start for Murphy, who opened with an 11. Wasn’t a great finish, either, carding a 12 on his final hole. Murphy did manage to make a birdie and four pars on his day, which is one heck of a bounce-back effort. Conversely, there’s a chance Murphy’s performance was just that: a performance.
Murphy is listed from Encino, Calif. The only records of a person with that name from that city show a Connor Murphy of Connor Murphy Fitness, which points to several popular social media accounts. Murphy clearly has a following, boasting over 2.46 million YouTube subscribers and nearly 500,000 followers on Instagram. (Warning: Some of Murphy’s content is not safe for work.) In his last YouTube video, titled “The Day I Realized I Was Going to Win the US Open,” Murphy shares his belief that, yes, he’s going to win the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines this summer. Whether this is Murphy’s true aspiration or a stunt is up for interpretation, although several posts from Monday signal the latter.
The Tour got played. You'd think they'd be embarrassed, if only for this guy:
Josh Hart, a pro from Jupiter, Fla., was able to post a two-under 70 while playing with Murphy. The score was four shots out of earning a spot in the Veritex Bank Championship, but at least Hart has a heck of a story to tell.
I'm guessing that he wasn't very amused.
Is Your Arm Locked, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me? - Support for Billy Ho. from a man that knows a bit about putting:
Billy Horschel made waves last week when he came out against the arm-lock putting at the RBCHeritage as he said that “guys are doing it too good.” With the putter “locked” against the arm, the face is more stabilized than when the grip rests in a player’s hands. Horschel argued that constitutes anchoring, which is banned under the rules of golf.
Horschel is not alone in that assessment as Brad Faxon, commonly referred to as one of the best putters of all time, added his voice to the anti-arm-lock brigade.
“In my opinion, we have to get rid of the arm-lock,” Faxon said on Sirius XM PGA Tour Radio. “It’s absolutely anchoring. If the USGA doesn’t think it is, then they need to look at themselves in the mirror.”
While Fax will draw listeners, it's really more of a split verdict:
According to Rule 10.1, a stroke is defined as: “Fairly striking at a ball with the head of a club. The fundamental challenge is to direct and control the movement of the entire club by freely swinging the club without anchoring it. … The player must fairly strike at the ball with the head of the club such that there is only momentary contact between the club and the ball and must not push, scrape or scoop the ball.”
As Luke Kerr-Dineen detailed earlier this week, arm-locking escapes the wrath of the rulebook under that definition. Because the putter is resting against the arm, which is moving free and independent of the body, it is legal. There is no fixed point that the putter rests against.
We can all see that the arm is different than the torso, we're just unclear as to whether it's different enough. I think it should be banned, but I also want to try it for myself... Does that make me a hypocrite? Or just nuanced?
Bams on PIP - We went deep on PIP yesterday, and I wasn't intending any follow-up. But Mike Bamberger's take on the ethos of our game is always worth your time. Apparently it wasn't Eamon Lynch that broke the news:
The plan had been in the works for some time. In a manner of speaking, Greg Norman broke the story, or some of it, 11 months ago when he told GOLF.com:
“What I’m hearing is that the PGA Tour, against all their bylaws and governances, is talking about putting aside a $40 million pot for eight players, with $8 million for the top player,” Norman said then. “The PGA Tour is re-tweaking their model with the PGL out there. If you’re player nine, 10, 11 or 12, I think you’d be pretty pissed off.”
For a man who hasn’t played the Tour in 20 years, Norman, who lives in South Florida, hears a great deal. He had a keen interest in this issue because years ago he promoted the idea of a World Golf Tour. In more recent years, pre-pandemic, a group, backed by Saudi money, emerged, trying to launch something called the Premier Golf League. Norman had a heightened interest because the PGL, as a concept, was a descendant of what he was proposing.
Yeah, which means he has baggage... but I'd like to hear more about those by-laws...
In his own inimitable manner, Mike makes an eloquent case for the status quo ante:
What I find so dispiriting about PIP — love the name, though! — is that it undercuts what makes the PGA Tour the PGA Tour in the first place. The Tour is a series of athletic competitions, played across the country and sometimes in exotic locales beyond our borders, by which talented golfers play a difficult sport strictly by its well-defined rules and get paid on the basis of their scores.
Their scores! What they shoot! You can be cranky or aloof or gracious or whatever. Your prize money is your prize money.
It was (it is) the best example of the free market, sports division, at work. No guaranteed anything. You could have a bad haircut, crooked teeth, baggy slacks. Didn’t (and doesn’t) matter. If you and Brandt Snedeker both shoot 277 for a T3 finish, you both got $588,624 by direct deposit.
Yes, but the kids today will find that racist.... Yanno, disparate impact and all. But Mike makes a case that I tried to get at yesterday:
Everything else was (and largely is) rewarded by the marketplace. Your shoe deal, your club deal, what you would get for a corporate day. Maybe you cared about that stuff, maybe you didn’t. That’s where these X-factors and Q-ratings mattered.
Yes, and it's extremely important that the Tour stay out of that arena, though they have no intention of doing so.
Mike really nails it here:
The core value of the PGA Tour has always been for the golfers to get paid for what they do on the course, to bring some diversion to the cities they visit and to leave those towns in better shape than they found them. (The charitable arm of the whole thing.) Other outfits, not the PGA Tour, will take care of the rest, paying players for having a pleasing swing, nice hair, large Instagram following, etc.
If the Tour thought the PGL was a threat, that the PGL could lure away its top players with guaranteed paydays, the Tour should find a way to let the top players make more money that is in keeping with its core values in the first place. In other words, something that relates strictly to athletic performance. Scores shot. Scores shot within the rules.
Like many, I'm still coming to grips with that fact that, in the midst of a pandemic that has eliminated spectators and associated revenues, that the Tour just happened to have $40 million in change under their sofa cushions. Faced with that fact, a reasonable man might wonder why fifty employees had to be laid off last year, allegedly because of the very same pandemic.
But if there's an extra $40 mil large, that's great. Just jack the payout schedules accordingly, but make them earn it on the golf course. Obviously they get paid in other ways, and good for them. But, as Mike argues convincingly, the Tour has no business awarding players based upon anything that doesn't go on a scorecard.... It's a break with tradition but, more importantly, it's a break with propriety. The Tour should not be judging its members on any basis other than scores.
I shall leave you there and wish you a great weekend. A reminder that I won't be with you on Monday, but we'll catch up on Tuesday and things should revert to normal after that.
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