Weekend Wrap

You know the drill... I offer authoritative insights as to golf events I saw none of, after which we remind ourselves that it's a mere 175 days until the Masters.  

Dateline: Las Vegas - He went on quite the heater, but who knew scorecards come in differing shades of red:

Sungjae Im rides bright-red scorecard to blowout Vegas victory

In Vegas, sevens are typically the number of choice. On the slot machine, three sevens means you’re a big-time winner. On the blackjack table, three sevens makes 21.

But on the golf course, threes typically get the job done. Sungjae Im made a whole bundle of ’em on Sunday at TPC Summerlin en route to a rout at the Shriners Childrens Open.

Im began his final round in a share of sixth place. He cut into the lead with a birdie 3 at the first. He parred 2 and 3 and then really got going, reeling off eight birdies in his next 10 holes to break away from a crowded field. He made nine threes in his first 12 holes. He was nine under par through 13 holes. And then he coasted to the house with five par for a final-round 62 and a four-shot win in the desert.

Im continues to be younger — and better — than you think. He plays so well and so often that we’re used to his name on just about every leaderboard, but Im is just 22 and he’s now a two-time PGA Tour winner.

Nine threes in the first twelve holes?  That's obviously pretty sick, but he had eleven threes for the day, which might be the more memorable stat...  Do they keep records of such?  Interestingly, when Jim Furyk shot 58 at Hartford, he had "only" seven threes....  Of course, Mr. Furyk had four deuces, only three of which were on Par-3's, so perhaps we've spent enough time on this?

I did flip to Golf Channel during commercials and the leaderboard seemed compressed, until it wasn't:

This is a funny reminder of Im's vagabond lifestyle pre-Covid:

For Im, the win serves as a reminder of how much has changed since his last one. At the time of the 2020 Honda Classic, Im played so often he didn’t even have a home base — he just lived hotel to hotel, week to week. Now he has a new caddie, a new trainer, a new place of residence and a new trophy to store there.

“Buying a house in Atlanta, obviously hotel-to-hotel was not easy, but having somewhere to settle down, to have my house and Atlanta, it’s great to commute, it’s a huge airport, there are a lot of flights to everywhere, so it all came together very well.”

Yeah, when the powers that be order us to shelter in place in our holes, it's good to actually have a home.... 

I'm going to segue into a related item from one of our Monday staples, the  Golf.com Tour Confidential roundtable in a second, but it's worth making a rather obvious point.  This is the second straight week in which this feature, designed to recap the major golf news of the weekend, has ignored the PGA Tour event of the week.  All available evidence is that Jay Monahan is impervious to data that conflicts wit his worldview, but that might be a pretty good indication that the Wraparound season isn't working.  I've got more in that vein as well....

The most interesting aspect of  the 2021 Shriner's Children's Open might be... well, I'm playing you, because there really isn't one... But we do have a story peg, because 2021 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the last time this event was interesting.  One of my open browser tabs is this PGATour.com reminiscence of a manic period that was triggered by the exclamation, "Hello, World!":

Vegas Jackpot

The first week of October, Woods still on the hunt to earn enough to garner a card for 1997, he

showed up to the Las Vegas Invitational, and that was when everything finally would fall into place. Rested, he opened with 70 in the 90-hole event, then shot rounds of 63-68-67-64 (his 63 included a ball in the water, and instructor Butch Harmon said Woods “should have shot in the 50s”). Woods defeated Davis Love III in a playoff.

Said Love, “We were all trying to postpone the inevitable.”

The postponement wasn’t going to happen. As for the card he was chasing, Woods now had secured one, exempt on the TOUR for the next two seasons with his victory. Q-School is one tournament that Woods never did enter.

I do hope you're not triggered by how young he looks in that photo, but I've another means of reminding you how often the world has turned since then.  Davis Love was still using a persimmon driver that week.... 

That aforementioned Tour Confidential panel has no interest in the current event, but did riff off this anniversary for this bit:

5. This week marked the 25th anniversary of Tiger Woods’ first of 82 PGA Tour wins, at the Las Vegas Invitational. Many of Woods’ wins are burned in our memory banks — 1997 Masters, 2000 U.S. Open, 2019 Masters, et al. — but which of Woods’ more under-the-radar victories do think deserves more attention?

Sens: For some reason, his win at Cog Hill in ’97 comes to mind. Toward the end of his first full year on Tour. I’m pretty sure it was this fourth win of the season. They let the ropes down on 18, and a swarm of spectators rushed up behind Tiger as he played the final hole. An early sign of the coming madness.

Dethier: His most recent W at the Zozo Championship still doesn’t get enough love. The 2018 Tour Championship was his official return. The 2019 Masters was the completion of his comeback and the crowning achievement of this miraculous new chapter. But the 2019 Zozo was validation that that Masters win wasn’t a fluke — this cat could still play.

Reilly: Being the Long Island homer I am, I have to go with Tiger’s ‘02 U.S. Open win at Bethpage Black. I grew up 15 minutes away from Bethpage, and when the U.S. Open was announced, it consumed the area with excitement. The excitement was about getting to watch the world’s best struggle on our pride and joy. Bethpage is the epitome of New York tough, if you will. It lived up to the hype as 155 golfers finished above par for the championship. The only player who finished under par? Tiger. It was an equal testament to the greatness of Tiger and Bethpage.

Colgan: A win that deserves more attention from me: his victory at the 2009 Memorial. That weekend, I witnessed my brother win a dollar off my grandpa off their biannual “Tiger Woods vs. the field” bet. Andrew took Tiger and watched as he stunned the field with that famous chip-in on the 11th, and then birdied 17 and 18 to close out the win.

Kinda amusing to hear Tim Reilly wax nostalgic about that 2002 Open, given how miserable it all was.  A good portion of the field was unable to even reach the fairways on Nos. 10 and 12, and then there was the crowd taunting Sergio as he gripped and ungripped his club approximately 42 times before each and every shot.  Good times!  But under the radar?  Yeah, that's quite the stretch....

The only other bit from Vegas that's of interest to your humble blogger is this bad break suffered by the comeback kid:

Matthew Wolff hit his tee shot on the 13th at TPC Summerlin, it surprisingly stopped just a foot from the lip of a fairway bunker, and Jim “Bones” Mackay winced.

No stranger to caddying, Mackay is familiar with both the work of a good loop, and that of a bad one. And this?

“This is horrible,” the analyst said on the Golf Channel broadcast.

Wolff’s ball, Mackay saw during Sunday’s final round of the Shriners Children’s Open, had come to rest in a groove in the bunker left by a bunker rake and failed to trickle down into a more manageable shot. While you could successfully argue that Wolff shouldn’t have been in the sand in the first place, you could also make the point that he’d at least get the common courtesy of having the people in front of him clean up after themselves.

From his near-impossible position, Wolff hit hit his ball just 19 feet.

It looked like this: 

Here's a bit more:

“The reason this ball didn’t release back down in the bunker some 15 feet is it got caught up in a bad rake job,” said Mackay, both Phil Mickelson’s former longtime caddie and Justin Thomas’ new one. “So just a nightmare scenario for Matthew, who can’t get this ball back to the fairway.”

“Awful,” analyst Curt Byrum said on the broadcast. “He’s got to be frustrated right now.”

So, with cameras and spectators everywhere, why aren't they telling us whose bad rake job it was?

I almost forgot this bit, which actually covers last week's tournament.  Not sure what the Ponte Vedra Beach suits think they're accomplishing, but no one is watching.  Via Shack, here are the ratings for all televised sports for the week ended October 3, 2021:

Here's Geoff's deservedly snarky take:

I’ve seen golf lose out to pretty much all of Animal Planet’s programming slate and Everybody Loves Raymond reruns before—as happened last weekend—and did not expect any self-respecting American sports fan to tune into the 2021 Sanderson Farms last weekend with so much else to watch. We had the MLB season coming to a close, more great NFL games, and total fatigue having set in on the PGA Tour’s oversaturated “product.”

Still, a .15 and average viewership of 247,000 and only 17,000 in the 18-49 year old, is pretty shocking to see in print given the Sanderson Farms doing 450,000/.29 last year.

Pretty embarrassing, or would be if these folks were capable of embarrassment.  Though there was worse:

This also means the weekend’s European Tour event at St Andrews and the LPGA’s ShopRite did not draw a Golf Channel audience large enough to register a rating.

Ouch!

Dateline: West Caldwell, NJ - Perhaps it's a shame that, per the item just above, no one is watching, because this girl is actually pretty special:

Jin Young Ko dominated the Founders Cup on Sunday in New Jersey, claiming a four-stroke win with a final-round score of 68. But of course, that wasn’t a surprise. None of it was. Not when

your past three weeks have gone as well as Ko’s have.

To call the stretch Ko is on “a heater” would be a vast understatement. Rather, Ko is on an absolute scorcher. So hot is she that on Sunday, she tied an LPGA record for the most consecutive rounds in the 60s.

Yes, Ko has now shot 14 straight rounds in the 60s, a run of dominance unmatched by anyone not named Annika Sorenstam, who achieved the feat in 2005. Not since July has Ko recorded a round in the 70s in professional play, a stretch dating back to her five-over 76 in the third round of the Evian Championship on July 24. It’s been 60s ever since for the 26-year-old, and now, Sorenstam and Ko are tied in history.

I had wanted to watch some of this event, because the event was held at the iconic Mountain Ridge Country Club, a faithfully-restored Donald Ross classic, which my Wednesday Game visited last year around this time.

While Nelly Korda is a deserving top-ranked player, Ko could well be the challenger the ladies need.  This streak is amazing in its own way, but potentially even more impressive was that she won the ladies' season-long competition last year while playing in a mere four events.

As we did above, let's turn to a tangentially-related bit form that TC panel.  Scroll down to my prior post to see my epic rant on the subject, and compare and contrast to the rather muted reaction to the Dinah defenestration:

3. One of the LPGA’s majors received a sizable shakeup this week, as the tournament now known as the ANA Inspiration will move from Mission Hills Country Club in California to Houston in 2023 and to a later date in the spring (potentially avoiding a conflict with the Augusta National Women’s Amateur); it also will be renamed the Chevron Championship and receive a 60 percent purse increase. While the payouts and exposure are no doubt positives, the move will at least be somewhat bittersweet, as the event has been held at Mission Hills since its inception in 1972, with the winners diving into Poppy’s Pond since 1988. Good move overall?

Sens: Bad move for anyone inclined toward nostalgia or deeply wedded to tradition. But I doubt you’re going to hear any players complaining. I hope they find a way to keep the ceremonial winner’s plunge into a pond.

Dethier: TBD. If the Chevron is fully committed to creating an event with the atmosphere and depth of the setup at Mission Hills, absolutely. Avoiding the ANWA is smart, locking down an enthusiastic sponsor is crucial, and a pay increase is a big, big deal. Let’s hope the golf course can properly showcase the elite field, and let’s hope it’s here to stay.

Reilly: Dylan summed it up well. While it’s always a bummer to lose out on a historical connection to an event, it’s too soon to say if this will turn into a better play for the long term. The LPGA has forward thinkers running the show, and that’s what they’re trying to do. At the very least, moving the timing around is a wise decision.

Colgan: Tradition is great! Money and exposure are greater for the women’s game. The big questions surround Chevron’s involvement, for sure, but the number of zeroes attached to their financial commitment would seem to be a fairly good sign they’re into it.

They're into it until they're not.... that typically happens right around when they see the first TV ratings.  

But riddle me this, Batman.  How is the Chevron any different than the Evian?  Now answer the same question about the Dinah?  

Of course, I also love that bit about "avoiding" the ANWA.... Remind me, who had that date first?  And are we still crediting the Lords of Augusta with supporting the women's game after destroying their most important event?

Dateline: Jacksonville, FL -  The intersection of Phil Mickelson and the rulebook has long been an interesting place, but am I the only one that finds this more than a little dodgy?

Phil Mickelson, under a pre-2019 rule, may not have won this weekend’s Champions Tour event.

But this, of course, is 2021.

During Sunday’s final round of the Furyk and Friends tournament, Mickelson shot a four-under 68, finished two shots ahead of Miguel Angel Jimenez and won his third senior circuit tournament in just four overall starts. All of that, however, was in question on the par-4 16 at Timuquana Country Club.

There, after slicing his tee shot into the trees, he began to clear pine straw around his ball ahead of his second shot — only for the ball to roll a half-turn to the left as he stood to the right of it. Mickelson would plead his case to an official, arguing for an application of Rule 9.2, which had been revised in early 2019.

As you know well, my brains travels on a solitary course, so this triggers a recollection of how Phil benefitted from a change in insider trading laws, but I guess that's not important now...

According to the USGA, the rule now states: “A player, opponent or outside influence is found to have caused the ball to move if the player, opponent or outside influence was known or virtually certain to have caused it to move; otherwise it is assumed that natural forces caused it to move.” Prior to 2019, according to a USGA release, the ruling would have been based on “weight of the evidence/more likely than not.”

“And then later, the ball moved an inch or two,” Mickelson was heard telling an official on the Golf Channel broadcast.

“OK, you’re just going to have to determine if you caused the ball to move,” the official said.

“Yeah, I know I didn’t, but — because the stuff I moved wasn’t around the ball. … I just didn’t know what the new rule is. The old rule was … “

The official then described that rule.

“Yeah, it was a minute at least,” Mickelson said.

“But you’re just going to have to make that call whether you caused it to move,” the official said.

“OK, very good, thank you,” Mickelson said.

So, since we think golf is a microcosm of life itself, I see this in our future:

District Attorney: OK, you're just going to have to decide whether firing that bullet into his head caused him to die.

Suspect: OK, very good, thank you.

On a more serious note, our rules makers have long struggled with the concept of intent, and that 2019 Rules Revision is riddled with land mines such as this.  Will any player ever admit to causing their ball to move in the future?  Not bloody likely after this....  Thanks, Phil, you're contributions to our game are such that you can take the rest of your life off...

Today In College Golf - It's long been said that the plural of "anecdote" is "data", an amusing but tenuous premise.  But it just so happens that we have two examples of a trend for you, one that I kind of like.  The first is a story that broke a while back that I never got around to blogging:

JR Smith will get a chance to shoot his shot.

Smith, who played 16 seasons in the National Basketball Association before joining North Carolina A&T’s golf team this summer as a walk-on, will play in his first collegiate match next

week the school announced. The tournament is Elon’s Phoenix Invitational, being played at Alamance C.C. in Burlington, N.C.

Smith earned his tee time by advancing in the team’s qualifying tournament by a stroke.

Smith, who bypassed college in his basketball career when drafted straight from high school to the NBA, enrolled in school following his NBA retirement and was given a waiver by the NCAA to play on the golf team in late August. He was drawn to North Carolina A&T due to his interested in HBCUs.

As for his game, Smith has been playing for the better part of a decade and said earlier this summer his handicap hovered around 5.

I like it, but I also understand the argument that could be made against it, that he's already had his moment in the sun, and that therefore an opportunity has been denied to a younger person whose character is still being developed.  

See if you like this one any better:

WSJ’s Jason Gay profiles Debbie Blount, an underclassman and Georgeia’s Reinhardt University and playing on the golf team. The sophomore is 63.

Now she longed for a change. “After my husband passed away, I was getting stale,” Blount

said. “I love golf, but I’d lost my passion for it, and I was looking for something fun and different.”

Her path returned her to Reinhardt, a school she considered more than four decades ago. “It was the combination of golf and getting a degree,” she said. “I probably would not have gone back to school if I couldn’t play golf.”

It was a momentous choice. Blount’s the first person in her family to attend college.

“She’s doing something that she’s always wanted to do,” said Blount’s mother, Loraine Seidel, now 95. “Debbie, when she makes up her mind to do something, she does it.”

I don't know which detail I like more.... The 63-years young woman carrying her bag, or the 95-year old mother explaining her child's willful behavior.

Brooks v. Bryson - It's for sure reached its sell-by date, but since the TC panel went there...

1. The latest chapter in the Bryson–Brooks saga was written this week, as the rivals will try to settle their long-running feud on the day after Thanksgiving in the fifth version of the Match. Perhaps fittingly, the event will be played in Vegas, the Entertainment Capital of the World, over 12 holes at Wynn Golf Club. What’s the best-case scenario for how this event plays out?

Josh Sens, senior writer (@joshsens): Brooks out-drives him on every hole, but Bryson trounces him in the match, giving them both reason to be irked.

Dylan Dethier, senior writer (@dylan_dethier): They each decide to take the match itself very seriously, try earnestly to beat the hell out of each other, and at one point, one of ’em snaps at the other and it leads to a lengthy conversation about how this whole thing makes ’em all FEEL. And then Phil and Barkley come in for post-convo analysis.

Tim Reilly, Director of Social (@LifeofTimReilly): The best-case scenario is some real-life drama breaks out. A lot of this “feud” has felt far too manufactured these past few weeks. We need an authentic war of words to break out to keep this interesting. Outside of that, I’m hoping there is an awakening from course designers and owners who tune in to create more 12-hole courses. That’s the perfect length to satisfy the needs of hardcore golfers and keep those new to the game interested.

James Colgan, assistant editor (@jamescolgan26): Best-case scenario? We leave with fewer than 50 cringes. Worst-case scenario? The cringing never stops.

Those of you that have no lives might have noticed that I usually delete their titles and Twitter handles from the first Q&A.  In this case I didn't, only because Tim Reilly's title amused me.  I'm assuming that the word "Media"  =got somehow elided, but that's just a guess.

In reading the answers you might have cause to remind yourself that these are best-case scenarios...  It also might help to be reminded that there won't be anything else to watch, and the weather isn't likely to be conducive to actually playing golf, but the bar has been set awfully low.

But I do agree that the one interesting aspect is the twelve-hole match, which seems worth trying.  It might still be too long, though even eighteen holes is a complete crapshoot, so any concerns of competitive insignificance are already moot.  Just to head off the most obvious of rejoinders, am I safe in assuming that the winner gets a week in Philadelphia?

They go for one more on this topic:

2. The shorter length of this Match will separate it from previous iterations. How else would you like to see event organizers shake up the Bryson v. Brooks showdown?

Sens: Left-handed long-drive contest. Arm wrestling. Spelling bee.

Dethier: Let’s first acknowledge that the 12-hole thing is (at the very least!) a smart thing to test out. Previous editions of the Match have … kinda dragged. But I think Josh is on the right track. Throw a bench press on the 8th tee and see what happens?

Reilly: Let Bryson and Brooks choose who caddies for the other guy. I saw this brought up by a commenter on Instagram, and I love it.

Colgan: Love the above ideas, particularly the bench-off. Also, give us a Manningcast-style broadcast with Tiger Woods. Four hours inside his brain would be nothing if not illuminating.

James Colgan must not have seen the prior installments, because they confirmed one important fact, to wit, that there's not much of interest inside Tiger Woods.  deal with it, buddy!

As you no doubt observed, today features the most tenuous of segues, almost stream-of-consciousness pairing of stories.  In the vein, the aforementioned James Colgan provides the connective tissue here to a dystopian future:

PGA Tour’s big gambling announcement hints towards golf’s future on TV

And here is that "Big announcement":

“Sportsbook operator PointsBet will provide live betting odds during PGA Tour telecasts on NBC, Golf Channel and Peacock as part of a three-year content and marketing extension that also will include sponsorship of a free-to-play prediction game scheduled to launch in January.”

So, the broadcasts that can't seem to find time to show actual golf shots, will now add another distraction?   Here's Colgan's take:

“Sports gambling has arrived as part of golf coverage, and it’s here for good.”

It may or may not be here for good, but is it good that it's here? 

But see is you can suss out the flaws in this analogy:

At Caesars Sportsbook in Washington, D.C. last weekend, I watched as crowds of close to 100 people lined up outside the entranceway prior to the afternoon kickoffs on a college football Saturday. The interior was packed with people and the building was easily the busiest on the street. As the crowds gathered, the first-ever PGA Tour sportsbook, which is set to open in Arizona, seemingly took shape in front of my eyes.

But another small piece of that answer was revealed two weeks ago, when NBC Sports and PointsBet experimented with airing live odds information during the broadcast of the Fortinet Championship — an experiment the Sports Business Journal report confirmed will be part of our Sundays to come on Tour. For those who tune into the action with a vested financial interest, the news is welcome, perhaps even celebrated. Now, those fans will have access to betting information as it happens on their “first screen” — their television — presumably helping to seed more interest in wagering and helping to further inform those who already do. Moreover, the segment is likely to be one of the more palatable forms of sponsorship integration for the PGA Tour, whose telecasts have struggled with forced “activations” for years

The first and most obvious point is the vast difference in audience size between the two sports....  

But the larger point relates to the nature of the golf audience and their appetite for gambling odds.  This seems to me to be another example of our games leadership pissing on their core audience to chase a preferred demographic.  

The purpose of legalized gambling is to separate the rubes from their money, which seems an odd objective of the PGA Tour until one realizes that their in it for their own vig.  It also seems quite possible to this observer that they'll piss off the core audience only to find that the millennials would rather bet on football or basketball....And that doesn't even touch on the risk of having those with skin in the game close enough to the players to intervene in the proceedings.... What could go wrong?

OK, kids, that's a wrap for today.  I will see you down the road.