Tuesday Trifles - Abridged Edition

I had a full day of blogging planned, but a couple of kitties parked themselves in my lap for an extended duration, so you'll have to make do with a couple of silly stories to get you through the day.

A Low Bar Indeed - Sports journalism is, alas, what it is, so there's little point in whining about it.  But Golf Digest is in full PR Flak mode with this Shane Ryan piece:

7 unsung heroes of the PGA Tour fall season (so far)

No doubt you'll agree that the best part of that header is the parenthetical, because the wraparound portion of the schedule is no doubt headed to a rousing coda at....checks notes, Sea Island.

Shall we see what Shane thinks he has?

1. Mito Pereira and the divine approach

"Who is Mito Pereira?" you might reasonably ask, if you're not a devotee of fall golf. We'll forgive you for not knowing the Chilean 26-year-old who started his 2021-22 season by finishing

third in the Fortinet Championship, and made three more cuts before a Friday 78 cost him last week at the Mayakoba. In fact, Pereira comes from the Korn Ferry Tour, by way of PGA Tour Latinoamerica. He was one of the unfortunate souls who had enough points on the Korn Ferry Tour to reach the big time before the pandemic hit, but then had to start all over. It turned out, the second time around was even better with three KFT wins earning him a promotion to the PGA Tour—and then three straight top-10s there last summer to get him comfortable with the big leagues. He had arguably one of the best seasons (relatively speaking) of anybody in the world.

Now he's top 20 in the FedEx Cup standings, and the stats show why he's been so successful: his iron play. Pereira is second on tour in strokes gained/approach, gaining a massive 1.422 on the field in 12 measured rounds. Granted, that's still a small sample size, but when you look at the rest of the list, you're already seeing names like Collin Morikawa, which is a good indication that Pereira could be for real. If so, it's great news, because stats show again and again that the approach game is the most important for overall success. Morikawa, currently the game's foremost iron genius, can attest to that, having won two majors and five tournaments overall even though he occasionally struggles putting. If Pereira keeps it up, he's going to keep winning.

That "devotee of fall golf" is a good one.... We've been covering the ratings, Shane, and there's about six such devotees... I agree that Pereira is an awfully good story, my enthusiasm tempered only by those extremely small sample sizes and weak fields.

I'm with Shane on this one as well:

2. Matthew Wolff's comeback

There are times in life and sports where talent just speaks for itself, and Wolff, with two top-10s and a T-17 in his three fall events, is showing that even an incredibly tough spell can be overcome with sheer ability (and a good deal of resilience, too). Wolff's mental-health struggles in 2020 and 2021 have been well-documented, and considering how low he fell after his incredible debut on the PGA Tour, the bounce-back here is really impressive. Wolff's game looks to be razor sharp, and he's clearly a different player than the one who was disqualified from the Masters and took a two-month break from golf to address his problems. Now he's out there shooting 61s, and it's good to see him back.

Was that actually a mental-health crisis?  Certainly Golf Digest thinks so, as they have a standalone section on their home page devoted to the mental health crises in golf, as apparently there's even a mental health crisis among superintendents.   Shark, jumped.

I think it's an interesting story to watch such an accomplished collegiate player come out, find immediate success, but then struggle to deal with the nature of Tour life and have it drag his game down.  It seems however, that we no longer expect people to encounter challenges, so when it briefly jumps the rails it's automatically a mental health crisis.

But how do you extol Matthew Wolff with discussing that swing....well, it's that pre-shot trigger move more than anything.  It's a just a better game with that swing on TV on Sundays, no?

Shane's ode to the unsung falls off pretty dramatically form there, as sometimes folks are unsung for cause.  As a pretty damn good example, Shane is pretty quick to part with the Sunjae Im Award:

4. Cameron Tringale, autumn's iron man

There have been seven events thus far and nobody has played in all seven.  There are three guys that have played in six, and Tringale apparently won the award on a match of cards....

But, really, we're now awarding struggling pros that play fall events to improve their status?  

My hero award for the fall goes to Jay Monahan, who has done the impossible.  In a world in which PGA Tour playing privileges are the ultimate scarce natural resource, he has done the impossible, to wit, he has created an event for which he can not fill the field.  Take an extra fiver out of petty cash, Jay.

The Irony, She Burns - As noted immediately above, the fall wraparound portion of the schedule is a dumpster fire, but far from Jay's only headache.  As we've discussed with increasing regularity, he's got all sorts of other issues, including sitting with an awkward two World Golf Championships in his portfolio, too little for any critical mass but also two legacy sponsors that have dramatically overpaid.

Jay has also had a Mexico problem, having run into their arms to sever ties with the dreaded Orange Man, but then dumped unceremoniously by Grupo Salinas., at least as relates to that Mexico City WGC.  But Grupo Salinas is back per this Tour press release (good luck finding any coverage on the major golf sites):

Vidanta Vallarta in Vallarta, México to host Mexico Open

Grupo Salinas, PGA TOUR continue commitment to promote golf in Mexico

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO – The PGA TOUR and tournament host, Grupo Salinas, announced today that Vidanta Vallarta in Vallarta, México will host the 2022 Mexico Open, April 25-May 1, 2022, previously listed on the 2021-22 PGA TOUR Schedule as the Mexico Championship.

The Mexico Open, which dates back to 1944 and is considered Mexico’s national championship, will appear on the PGA TOUR schedule for the first time as an official FedExCup event, offering 500 FedExCup points to the winner and a purse of $7.3 million. The field of 132 players will include 12 sponsor exemptions, with a minimum of four players from Latin America.

Since 2017, Grupo Salinas partnered with the PGA TOUR to stage a TOUR event in Mexico – the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship – with efforts to inspire and grow the game in the country, especially among juniors. Starting in 2022, the Mexico Open will continue Grupo Salinas’ commitment, uniting the PGA TOUR with the history of professional golf in Mexico in the form of the Mexico Open.

The link is to Shack, where you can read the entire press release, assuming you have  a sufficiently high tolerance for pain.  But, spoiler alert, there's one niggling little detail that's not to be found amid all the B-School boilerplate, that being the actual venue.  Hmmm, my irony meter just jumped into the red zone:

The organizers of the WGC Mexico City Championship are back, minus the city and the WGC moniker, announcing a PGA Tour stop in late April. The new location is Puerto Vallarta’s Vidanta Vallarta resort. Conspicuously left out of the press release: the course to be played.

However, the resort did confirm that players will be teeing up on The Norman Signature Course. As in, Greg Norman, the man currently helming a possible global golf tour hostile to the PGA Tour’s interests. I’m sure it’s just part of a slow drip approach to revealing this exciting news.

Hmmm...Norman?  Hasn't that name been in the news recently?  No word on whether the resort features those Norman pimped-out golf carts that were going to revolutionize the game....

Full disclosure, your humble blogger has been predicting a bear market in PGA Tour sponsorships for, well, I don't even know for how long.  It seems pretty obvious to me that the companies paying the freight cannot possibly be realizing an appropriate return on that investment, and would logically react accordingly.  To date, the Tour has successfully replaced each lost sponsor at higher dollar levels, so am I wrong or just early?

Today In Silly Penalties - There's a lot of silliness in our game, though I'm hardly an advocate for a game without a certain level of absurdity.  After all, bloggers have needs as well...  This one is slightly more complicated, as there's no real argument against the rule involved.  It's just that the cause is so profoundly silly...

The good news is the happy ending:

Call it patriotic penalty strokes.

Team USA’s Sam Bennett, a senior at Texas A&M, was playing the first hole of the final round of

the Spirit International Amateur Championship at Whispering Pines Golf Club when he reached into his golf bag and noticed something was wrong. There was a 58-degree Ping sand wedge that he didn’t recognize.

“I was like, ‘Oh, crap!” Bennett said.

It turned out that it belonged to his teammate Rachel Heck. That gave him 15 clubs in his bag a violation of Rule 4.1b, which limits the number of clubs a player can carry to 14. The penalty is two strokes per hole and applies based on when the player became aware of the breach.

Why patriotic?

According to Team USA captain Stacy Lewis, Heck figures she leaned her club against Bennett’s bag when she applied stars and stripes temporary tattoos to the cheeks of her male teammates, Bennett and U.S. Amateur champion James Piot of Michigan State.

Heck and her fellow teammate Rose Zhang already were rocking a star on their right cheeks and a heart on their left cheeks, just as they had done at the Curtis Cup earlier this year.

Any chance that this might discourage the younger generation from their love of body ink?  Yeah, good luck with that and get off my lawn.

Team Anxiety - You can read that header as you like, but this pairing just makes me laugh out loud:

Lexi Thompson has had quite the pairings in her four years playing the QBE Shootout. The LPGA star – just the second woman to ever play in the PGA Tour team event – has played with Tony Finau twice, and Bryson DeChambeau and Sean O’Hair once.

Back this year after missing the 2020 event due to a conflict with the U.S. Women’s Open, Thompson finds herself paired with two-time Masters champion Bubba Watson, who came to the Solheim Cup to support the team this year and has a new book out.

Sponsored by Xanax?

Greg Norman is still hosting the event, so it should be deliciously awkward.... 

As I said up top, abridged.  Not sure of our schedule for the week ahead, so glad to have posted some amusing bits to tide us over.