Friday, March 18, 2022

Late-Week Lamentations

There's a couple of stories that demand attention, notwithstanding a 10:00 a.m. call on my calendar, one that requires a bit of preparation.  We'll dive in, maintain our typically laser-like focus, then clean up any resulting messes at a later time.  So, yanno, just a normal day here at Unplayable Lies.

It's On! - On the calendar, for now, that is, as it appears in the Middle East there's little value in burning the money for heat:

Greg Norman is pushing ahead with his rival golf league, announcing Wednesday the launch with an eight-tournament schedule that will begin in June and offer $25 million purses per event.

The league will be called the LIV Golf Invitational Series.

The concept that has been floating around for months and caused considerable disruption on the PGA Tour will see 54-hole events with no cuts, shotgun starts and purses that will pay $20 million for the individual portion, $5 million for the team portion, and a season-ending event that will have a $30 million purse.

In all, LIV Golf Investments, of which Norman is the CEO, is committing $400 million to launch the league with $250 million in prize money.

Still to be determined is who will participate.

Only those willing to swear fealty to Mohammad bin Salman, as well as to publicly demonstrate their obnoxious greed.  

So, the schedule:

  • June 9-11: Centurion Golf Club – London
  • July 1-3: Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club – Portland
  • July 29-31: Trump National Golf Club Bedminster – New Jersey
  • Sept 2-4: The International – Boston
  • Sept 16-18: Rich Harvest Farms – Chicago
  • Oct 7-9: Stonehill Golf Club – Bangkok
  • Oct 14-16: Royal Greens Golf Club – Jeddah
  • Oct 28-30: Team Championship

 So, Goat Hill was unavailable?  hey, we haven't had a Dan Jenkins shoutout in a while...

I can't find it right now, but Alan Shipnuck had a tweet up respecting the wisdom in choosing locales that the PGA Tour has dissed, which is certainly a hot take from a guy at the center of the vortex.

He's certainly right that the PGA's forced march out of NYC, Boston and Chicago will amuse historians, though I'm pretty sure that Jay feels that Portland and Greg Norman are an unusually good fit.  Last it made golf news, the LPGA event in The Rose City had to be relocated due to the homeless encampment in that club's parking lot.  Whether that's a bug or a feature I'll leave to the reader.

I'm with this guy on that subject:

That might strike you as needlessly personal, but to the best of my knowledge Kokrak is the only guy actually  sponsored by the Saudis.... 

The first thing you'll notice is that the schedule is Fall-heavy, perhaps partly a function of scheduling on the fly, but also seemingly focused on the weaker portion of the Tour's  dance card.  Of course, it's weaker for a reason, and that reason is mostly attributed (which is different than attributable) to the monolith that goes by the "NFL" acronym.  

The next interesting bit is to note that that first event will be up against the RBC Canadian Open, but finishing on the Saturday.  It's in London so will finish early Saturday in Brookline, MA, the significance being that any player so qualified will be headed to the U.S. Open starting the following Thursday.

The second event is the week of the John Deere, so there go all hopes of luring Jordan Spieth.... OK, that was settling an Unplayable Lies grudge from 2015, so feel free to ignore.  But that event is two weeks before The Open Championship, but I can't help but think that Gregg is dyslexic and plopped those two on the wrong continents.

The third event will compete with the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit, providing yet another schadenfreudaliscious morsel.  After Phil, the player seemingly most tempted by the bonecutters was our Bryson, who just happens to be sponsored by...wait for it, Rocket Mortgage.  Of course, petulant Bryson couldn't be bothered giving the time of the day to the press at the 2021 edition, so sponsor-abuse is a very real thing.

Geoff had a 'graph on this in his latest Quad:

Greg Norman says there are no requirements to play a set number of the eight events on the “beta” “start-up” tour. The venues announced are all second rate, but the dirty purse money is enormous. Norman said many other lame things in a podcast where the hosts seemed to really like his ideas and not have a single qualm about the money source. It’s linked below in the Listens department. The Fried Egg team analyzed the rollout in a far more rational manner.

No, there couldn't be, could there?  What I want to ask is whether there's a maximum handicap allowed?  Asking for a friend....

On the venues, there was this in addition to that tweet above:

Andy: While they nailed the city choices, the golf courses leave a lot to be desired. Rich Harvest Farms camped in Golf Digest’s top 100 for a number of years but it wasn’t because of the golf course. It’s a dumpster fire, to put it lightly. I think one of the stronger appeals for the SGL/PGL model was the idea that smaller fields of top players might be able to open doors to some courses we would not normally see host PGA Tour events. While this schedule does this, it’s going in the opposite direction! This is a list of courses that I have no interest in playing myself, let alone watching Jason Kokrak saunter about for three days. I suppose I should not be surprised that LIV has bad golf course architecture tastes when Greg Norman is captaining the ship.

C'mon, Andy, tell us what you really think.

This last question requires a bigger boat:

What’s the biggest unanswered question for you surrounding LIV’s plan?

Ummmm, all of them.

Andy: Who is playing in these tournaments? Are we going to get Asian Tour fields + Phil and Kokrak? I imagine there are a few players who will still make the jump. The guaranteed money is going to overwhelm a few players’ moral standards.

Garrett: To what extent will LIV try to obscure its connection to Saudi Arabia? The branding of the “LIV Golf Invitational” suggests a move in this direction and an attempt, feeble as it may be, to assuage players’ fears of a Phil Mickelson-style PR fallout.

Brendan: I remain extremely fascinated by the question of who will broadcast this. A quick check with some media and TV exec types yielded a near consensus that the major networks and ESPN are not options. Amazon seems unlikely given the Saudis past hack of Jeff Bezos’s phone, among other reasons. I proposed a DAZN-type streamer, but was quickly reminded that specific outlet is owned by a Russian oligarch with current issues that would make the LIV baggage seem small. But that type of streamer feels like the direction this would have to go. Do the Saudis simply fund and start-up some OTT operation? There just aren’t many options out there, but that may be irrelevant as some big rights-fee ROI is not the primary goal here, sportswashing is. As one producer said, “Good luck to them. It’s pretty tough building a first class production from scratch as Fox learned at Chambers Bay.”

Obviously the purpose of this schedule is to put the ball in Jay's court and to force him to deny waivers to PGA Tour members.  We've seen a healthy back-and-forth over some of the legal issues involved with a lifetime ban, but this seems a new front in the war.  I have trouble imagining that Jay can't legally protect his events, but my law degree remains pending.  

It may also be that this is actually helpful to Jay, in that those Brits trying to revive the original PGL concept, the one without blood money, are being oxygen deprived by the Saudis.  That remains to me the bigger threat to Jay...

But Brandan's focus on the broadcasting of these events to me ignores the bigger issue of the production of said broadcast, an extremely expensive and logistically-challenging process.  Obvious the Saudis burn untold millions on this and not think twice, but can you stand up a broadcast team in 120 days even on an unlimited budget?   

This should be good fun to watch.  Exit question: Are the Saudis stupid enough to let Greg Norman handle to analyst duties on their broadcasts, or are they still psychologically scarred from Chambers Bay like the rest of us?

There's one additional aspect to this that I want to note, mostly because it kind of snuck up on your humble blogger.  When the PGA Tour bailed out the Euro Tour, we all of course realized that the pecking order of world tours was thereby calcified.  Even so, when I heard Paul McGinley on Golf Channel say recently that that deal obviously solidified the U.S. Tour as the world's premiere golf tour, it made me sit up in my chair.  

As covered here and elsewhere, the Brits have put an offering package on the table, and that offer has been reportedly taken to the PGA Tour's Board by Rory McIlroy.  It's complicated, but there's a signing bonus paid directly to the various tours' members, and therein lies a telling detail:

I saw this first on a per player basis, but the significance went over my head initially:

The PGL proposal is also notable because, unlike the SGL, it is not just about the rich getting richer; the PGL would give ownership stakes to members of the PGA, Korn Ferry, and DP World tours. The PGL would allocate 100 million shares, with a prospective value of $10 billion. PGA Tour members would get 50 percent of the shares; 7.5 percent would go to Korn Ferry members, and DP World Tour members would get 2.5 percent. The breakdown of how the shares would be distributed is below.

I instinctively understood that Keith Pelley would now take marching orders from Jay Monahan, that the Euro Tour was, here's those words again, swearing fealty to the PGA Tour.  What I failed to appreciate was that they were agreeing additionally to be subservient to the PGA Tour's feeder tour!  

Since the days of Seve (and even before), we've seen the Euro Tour struggle to keep their members at home, losing them to the riches (and competition) of the PGA Tour.  In our Brave New World, they will now lose their homegrown talent to a developmental tour.  Am I the only one that finds this incredibly sad?

What's left in Keith Pelley's quiver except the Ryder Cup?

OK, I lied.  It's Greg Norman so it's a target-rich environment.  I want to focus for a sec on the team aspect of Norman's proposal, an undeveloped subject because there's never been any meat on those bones.  Norman went on the Sub-Par podcast and waxes philosophic on team play:

There’s so much going on here it’s head-spinning. Let’s start with the concept — 54 holes, team
play and individual play, 48 golfers — and how Norman and his team came up with it. Norman attended his first Ryder Cup last year at Whistling Straits, where he was doing radio commentary.

“I’ve never seen a team event with energy like that, and that was a gobsmack moment,” Norman, a native Australian who has lived in South Florida for decades, said Wednesday from a sleek, sun-drenched office in a high- rise in West Palm Beach.

Norman’s remarks here have been lightly edited and reordered for clarity.

“To see the interactions of players who weren’t playing on the first tee, engaging with the fans? Man, it put goosebumps on me and I’m not even American or European. I saw the value of what team sport does, the camaraderie of the players, how they want to represent their team or their country or their playing partner that given day. It was a moment. I was really into it from an emotional standpoint, from a player standpoint.

“So for me, and Sean [Bratches, a LIV Golf executive], we both got hit in the forehead with this massive energy: ‘Look at the fans, this is what they want! Individual as well as team [competitions]’. And that’s what we’re having right here, with LIV Golf.”

Is your BS meter in the red zone?  He wants to wrap himself in the Ryder Cup, ignoring that his team event will be nothing like the Ryder Cup.  I'll speak slowly, Greg, so there's an outside chance that you can follow, but the Ryder Cup is Team Match Play.  Your event will have to be stroke team play, which is quite a different thing and, amusingly, you won't have other players on the first tee because, yanno, shotgun start.

But wait, there's more!  Can you say comically disingenuous?  I thought you could.  Buried in a golf.com primer is this totally awesome detail:

2. A (weekly) player draft

LIV Golf’s proposed setup is meant to keep the series in a state of constant flux, meaning that teams will not remain the same for more than one week at a time. Rather, each of the 12 team captains will draft a new team from the pool of available players before every tournament.

Greg Norman is so comically out-of-touch that he seems to think we'll develop Ryder Cup-level passions over teams of interchangeable Tour pros that change each and every week.  

Chicks Hardest Hit - Very much a developing story, but the USGA/R&A have issued the following document:

This seems to be what passes for a mission statement:


 And this is likely the key bit:

Areas of Interest

1 - Potential changes to the testing methods for golf balls

Evaluate the effect of increasing the clubhead speed used to determine conformance to the Overall Distance Standard (ODS) to at least 125 mph and to use optimized launch angle and spin parameters (that are specific to each ball tested). In conjunction with the potential new test conditions for the ODS, the Initial Velocity Test may be modified or eliminated to provide the opportunity for innovation for shorter hitters. These potential changes would apply to balls used at all levels of the game.

2 - Model Local Rules – Club performance

Investigate the impact of a reduction of the allowable spring-like effect and moment of inertia in drivers. The governing bodies are considering these topics within the context of Model Local Rules that could be utilized for competitions involving the highest level of elite golfers. There is also interest in considering whether the adoption of these potential Model Local Rules could also allow the elimination of the MOI limit for recreational golfers, which could facilitate greater innovation and provide modest distance increases at this level of the game.

Golf’s stakeholders can provide feedback and research on these topics by Sept. 2, 2022.

It seems borderline Orwellian (and that guy is certainly having his time in the sun these days) to call it a change in the testing methodology, when what is obviously being considered is a change in the, you know, ball.

Geoff has thankfully penned a Quad post that's not paywalled, and here are his points on the ball-related issues:

  • Spin parameters? “Based on comments received in response to the 1 February 2021 announcement, The R&A and the USGA will investigate incorporation of a golf ball’s spin properties in determining these bounds.” Depending on how these are carried out, some golf balls in use today at the Tour level by top players could no longer be conforming.
  • Ball innovation for the rest? An expressed openness to eliminating the Initial Velocity test on golf balls. This could benefit more golfers by allowing for a softer ball that still flies as far. Manufacturers have reportedly indicated the “IV” test limits innovation for the average player.

 To me, it's that middle bit that is most intriguing, as Geoff alludes to in this earlier bit:

The ideas floated in Wednesday’s joint announcement could reduce the more absurd carry distances through testing and emphasizing a better ball strike. Unknown is how much more carefully players might swing under the possible changes and therefore how much distance might be lost by the world’s best. No one is willing to put a number on it until all proposals have been decided.

My frustration has long been that the focus has been only on distance, mostly ignoring the dramatically lower spin of modern balls and clubs.  This logically allows players to maximize clubhead speed and distance while mitigating the effect of the spin resulting from mishits, admittedly a simplistic framing of the issue since the lower spin itself increases distance.

But folks have been making "slippery slope" arguments on this subject, the key features of said slopes being their, well, slipperiness:

  • Different driver faces for the best? Arguably the most aggressive proposal involves restricting the driver’s “Moment of Inertia” under the banner of a Model Local Rule, a.k.a. optional bifurcation similar to “MLR’s” for green reading materials and 46-inch drivers. In this instance, the MOI might be altered to “enhance the reward of a central impact” in an effort to reward refined ballstriking.
  • Reduction in the allowable spring-like effect in drivers? In hinting at a reduction of the current Pendulum Test tolerance from 18 microseconds to 6 microseconds, it remains to be seen how much this would impact distance.
  • Different driver faces for the rest? An openness to removing MOI limits in clubs made for recreational golfers.

I'm instinctively appalled at this, as golf's difficulty is an integral part of its appeal.   The existential joy experienced when we find the sweet spot cannot be separated from the inherent difficulty of the game, and I would a deep breath before we sever that connection any further.  Of course, and I think Popeye said it best, I Yam what I yam, a single digit handicap, good but not club championship good amateur golfer, but I really want to throw a caution flag here.

I know there's a world of 30-handicappers and I come in peace to those players, but maddening challenge of our game is something we should hold onto zealously.  Whereas I feel the professional game has jumped the shark and the primacy of ball-striking skill needs, to some extent to be returned to the elite game.  Where exactly to draw that line and the extent referenced above are to me the areas we need to be discussing extensively.

So, this to me is a threshold moment, the exact point at which I start to believe that our governing bodies might actually be prepared to do something.  It is therefore the exact moment when a cold chill runs though my exoskeleton and my thoughts turn to the existential dread of, "Guys, don't screw this up!."

I'm going to leave you with this Luke Kerr-Dineen primer on this subject, mostly because he has reviewed the USGA/R&A documents and come to a different conclusion, that distance gains are moderating and that, accordingly, no action is required.  I'm ostly going to leave you to review it on your own, but this chart seems to be the key bit:


Here's his brief explainer:

As the USGA and R&A outline in one area, the average driving distance did indeed increase steadily until 2003, due to a few obvious technological factors: Players transitioning away from wooden driver heads, titanium drivers getting larger, the golf ball getting more advanced. But since 2003, that distance increase has flattened. Distance gains were negligible between 2003 and about 2014, and has started increasing again in recent years. In all, in the nearly 20 years since 2003, we’ve seen an average increase across all pro tours of between 1.9 percent and 4.3 percent.

Obviously those huge gains right after 2000 reflect the introduction of the Pro-V1 and other solid core balls, as well as the huge expansion of driver head sizes and other club technological innovations.  Luke's point would seem to be that we've reached the end of that innovation cycle, and that there's not much more in distance gains that can we wrung from drivers the size of frying pans.

There's certainly a point to made there, but perhaps not a dispositive point.  Folks make a ig deal out of recent gains coming from sources other than the equipment, which I find interesting (Track Man is quite the thing for sure), though I'm unclear as to whether that's relevant if it de-skills our game.

For instance, have baseball players not employed similar technologies and have they not gotten stronger over the years?  Yet MLB continues to play in Fenway and Wrigley, whereas Merion and Cypress Point are historical anachronisms?  Curious, no?

The other aspect in play is that I simply don't believe their numbers, mostly because they seem incompatible with my lyin' eyes  I've long harbored a suspicion that the increasing use of 3-woods and irons of tees has been buried in their aggregate numbers, which made complete sense to me when I thought then entire project was designed to allowed them to do nothing.  Now that they seem inclined to roll things back?  Developing, as the kids are wont to say.

I'll need to release you at this juncture, though we will be frequently returning to this subject.  have a great weekend.

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