Monday, March 14, 2022

Weekend, (Un)Wrapped

The event that will not die....  No leisurely Monday post for you kids today, as your humble blogger has much golf to watch from Can (See) Until Can't.

The Players in Winter - All four seasons have put in an appearance, as has wind from all four major compass points.  Michael Bamberger goes deep for the bigger picture:

You already know that Sunday night did not close with a new Players Championship champion. Thursday’s rain, working hand-in-hand with Friday’s rain and Saturday’s rain, killed any chance of
that happening. Why the PGA Tour can’t get a weather agreement with Mother Nature Inc. is hard to fathom. It has deals with most everybody else. But there it is.

The new champion — likely a player* who has never won a Players or a major — will be decided at the end of a long Monday. The third round should finish Monday morning. The fourth round will be played Monday afternoon, in threesomes, off two tees and without the customary grandeur this tournament prizes.

What a way for a fella to win $3.6 million.

Not that Anirban Lahiri, Harold Varner, Sebastian Munoz, Cameron Smith, Sam Burns, Tom Hoge and other contenders are complaining.

Though none of them would be the most unlikely winner of this event in history, as Craig Perks has retired that specific Championship Belt.

So, yes, things are a little weird at this Players. Well, what did you expect for the PGA Tour’s so-called signature event in 2022? Men’s professional golf has been running on weirdness for two years now.

You know: the pandemic; Tiger Woods terrifying car crash last year; the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots and how they caused the relocation of this year’s PGA Championship from a Trump course, in New Jersey, to Southern Hills, in Tulsa; the many reports about the prospect of an international tour, backed by the Saudi ruling class, is attempting to challenge the PGA Tour; the immolation of Mickelson, the reigning PGA Championship winner, by way of his pointed comments about both the PGA Tour and this Saudi-backed tour.

Yes, and that two years of weirdness started right here, with Jay's fumbling volte-face at the 2020 installment, when he famously whined about having 200 acres to spread the players over, thoughtfully forgetting the jammed courtesy busses and grandstands inhabited by the paying suckers.

Completely unrelated, but here's a story I missed:

We can guess who Rory Sabbatini is rooting for. Lahiri! Sabbatini was paired with Lahiri last week at Bay Hill, when the third round was played on its traditional day, Saturday. Sabbatini withdrew from the tournament after 13 holes with a knee injury but walked the remaining five holes with Lahiri, just to keep him company. That’s a rare thing to happen — if it has ever happened! Sabbatini said later that he would have only done that for 20 percent of the players on Tour. Sabbo is a particular guy.

Left unsaid is that perhaps 2 % of those same Tour players would do it for the worlds most famous Slovakian golfer....And that estimate might be high.

Azinger made a reference to players wearing sweats under their regular pants, and I naturally assumed he had consumed a hot toddy or two:

Friday brought the rain. Saturday brought the wind. Sunday brought the cold. This Players
Championship has had a whole lot of everything. After seeing a “feels-like” forecast below 30 degrees—in Florida!—Joel Dahmen decided to add an extra layer underneath his golf pants. These weren’t long johns or thermals. These were straight-up sweatpants.

“The coldest I’ve ever been on a golf course,” says Dahmen, who grew up on the Washington/Idaho border. When he was a kid, if it was that cold, they wouldn’t play. Four days earlier, during Wednesday’s practice round, he wore a polo/shorts combo and enlisted a bucket hat and shades in a long-running crusade against the sun. The course was bouncy then; now it’s pillow-soft. Sundown was 6:30 all week; all the sudden it’s 7:30. Harold Varner III is one shot back in a tournament that pays $3.6 million for first place, and he’s wearing a windshirt from the merch tent. In related news, down is now up.

The next time we'll see those ski caps will be at the Old Course, at least hopefully.  

Of course, Wrik Van Rooyen is an exception to that.  Not sure the photo is from this week, but he was rocking what one announcer called ankle-stranglers:


Of course, it tyook me a while to notice, as that porn 'stache demands respect:

Focused like a laser on the important stuff....

Here's as concise a summary of the week as I could find:

It’s been a truly chaotic week at TPC Sawgrass. Weird things are happening. Between the rain delays, the unexpected days off, the comically lopsided draw, the gale-force winds, the freezing temperatures, the water balls on 17, the ace on 17, the mood around the Stadium Course is one of pure delirium.

When do they start the slaying of the first born.  Your humble blogger is a middle child, so we anticipate no disruption in service.

Not a week for the alpha dogs for sure:

Why did golf’s superstars disappear at the Players Championship?

Let's see, checking notes, plague, pestilence, frogs....did I miss anything?

The stars faded for a lot of reasons. They got unlucky. Most of them, at least, wound up in the hellish Thursday afternoon wave, which required well-executed survival of both monsoon and windstorm just to remain in contention. They started off behind the 8-ball, and some weeks, that’s just too much to overcome.

I wonder of maybe NBC got a tad greedy.  In a typical week, the big names are split pretty evenly so that Golf Channel gets half in each of their Thursday-Friday TV windows.  This event is different, because those early week windows are so much longer.  Pure speculation....

Dylan Dethier has this on that very subject:

7 surprising players to miss the cut at the Players Championship

From a cursory glance it looked to me like all, save Tony Finau, were on the wrong side of the draw.

Of course, this guy tried to intervene:

Not really, but funny....  The only thing better might have been watching Phil in those winds.

Shall we spend a few moments on No. 17?  Eamon has some thoughts:


PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Too often, professional golf—in particular the strain presented on the PGA Tour—tilts toward the one-dimensional, not only in the repetitiveness of individual
stroke play but in the consistency of course conditions that envelop players every week like a comfort blanket intended to minimize blubbering.

What variety there is exists mostly in the questions asked hole by hole, and even that has been diminished in the modern power game as players bludgeon courses into submission rather than seduce them in the manner of yore. The Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass still poses its share of nettlesome challenges for the best players in the world, but its iconic 17th hole is the Mona Lisa of one-dimensional golf.

That’s not to say it’s a wholly lousy hole. It’s indisputably entertaining, which is no small matter when it comes to fan engagement, dramatic theater, merchandise branding and hospitality sales. It’s daunting too, a necessary stress test in the closing stretch of tournament play. In normal circumstances, it’s not particularly difficult, even for recreational chops (it’s the shortest hole on the course and the green is huge). But No. 17 is woefully lacking in the one aspect that makes a golf hole truly interesting: options.

Don't know what he's talking about.  The lay-up is on the walking path, as Jordan showed us.

But here's an interesting distinction:

Great golf holes offer a choice of routes that depend upon a player’s skill, confidence or courage. On 17 of the holes at TPC Sawgrass, a poor swing leads to car crash golf—injurious, but offering the possibility of recovery. But the penultimate hole at Pete Dye’s creation is plane-crash golf, where a poor swing is fatal. That’s why the least interesting hole here was the focus of attention when high winds buffetted the Players Championship, producing more squealing splashdowns than a kid’s water slide.

Car-crash vs. plane-crash golf...got it.

But the play in the wind was wacky fun, as Eamon notes (along with the statutorily require swipe at Brandel):

Among the spectacles that were awesome to behold in whipping winds were Brandel Chamblee’s mane and Justin Thomas’s 69. JT’s caddie, Bones Mackay, told me Sunday morning that it was among the top-five rounds all-time he has ever carried for, a captivating mix of sublimely flighted shots and clutch putts, all while knowing he had been diddled by the draw.

Twice during his round, Thomas hit pitching wedges 185 yards, while delivering a glorious 5-wood into the 18th green from 193 yards. His scorecards show two 3s on 17, but numbers don’t do justice to the situation. “When you have a 7-iron on that hole and it’s into off the left, it’s a lot more fun when someone tells you a story of them doing it versus you have to it,” he said.

That's what made it so much fun.

Tough, but not unfair. Players who spoke after Saturday’s shenanigans unanimously said the set-up was difficult (brutally so) but had not crossed the line, a gracious sentiment that is so often denied the USGA.

The essential nature of the challenge was best summed up by Keegan Bradley, who drew a stark comparison between two 9-irons hit in his round. On the 12th, it was from 95 yards. Four holes later, the same club flew 206 yards. “To me there’s no yardage,” he said. “It’s just the trajectory of your ball, whatever club you can get to fit that window, that’s the shot.”

That's what was so interesting... To a man, the players were steadfast in their opinion that it was brutally hard, but did not cross that mythical line.  For those of you keeping a scorecard at home, now we know what they mean by "fealty."

Shack had a long post up on this Saturday carnage that I'm still trying to sort through, beginning with the header:

Island Green Madness: When Unlucky Gets Confused With Unfair

Which reminds this observer of this:

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

― Mel Brooks

Back to Geoff:

An intense Saturday of rain-delayed play saw high winds after a front moved through Ponte Vedra. Temperatures dropped and the TPC Sawgrass’ 17th saw one of those days of trouble, with 19 water balls spread between first and second round play.

While that’s nothing compared to the all-time worst of 50, Kevin Kisner said the conditions produced “pure luck” and impugned The Players Championship’s “integrity.” Other players seemed to take things in better stride if you read Adam Schupak’s Golfweek wrap of the antics. Credit to players like Collin Morikawa who said he just missed his shot and while difficult, the task was doable.

And if you take a look at PGA Tour’s compilation of all 19 water balls—drop area shots included—it’s staggering how many shots were dead just a few yards off the club face. Or how many purely awful strikes were made trying to play the ball down. I estimated 9 of the 19 just were unlucky due to a gust or just missing the 3,912 green. The rest never had a chance.

Which I think gets at the most important point.  It's only 135 yards, but it makes the best players on the planet make the worst swings imaginable.  But it's also why the green is so ginormous....

Geoff also had this great graphic on what the kids like to call traj:

That's a pretty wide range of height for such a short shot.  To me, the sad takeaway is that, likely because Tour set-ups are so uniformly boring, that when called upon to keep their ball below the wind, many of them kinda sucked at it.

This was back in the Paleozoic Age, but serves as reminder that carnage here isn't a new thing:

The guy I feel worst for is Scottie Scheffler, although life has been good to him lately.  Whereas most of the leaders didn't play the hole in the worst of those Saturday conditions, Scheffler played it as his first hole on Saturday, which would seem bad enough, but when he finished No. 18 he then circled around and started his second round on Number Ten, so he had to play it twice in about three hours.  Neither attempt worked out well at all.

Gold Man - A wise man once said, stupid as stupid does.  Submitted for your disapproval:

Looks like a sawed-off finish to flight the ball, but WTF!

Even worse on video:

Explaining the inexplicable:

THE PLAYERS’ Tiffany & Co. trophy – a three-dimensional depiction of the tournament’s gold swinging man logo -- will hop off his stand and come to life on the broadcast this week. The PGA TOUR, working closely with NBC and creative agency The Famous Group, will become the first golf organization to incorporate mixed reality into its broadcast, as the trophy will digitally appear on the 17th hole.

And judging by the 28 handicapper swing—I say that with full respect for all 28’s—this will not age well.

Mixed reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds, making physical and digital objects co-exist in real time. For THE PLAYERS, the technology will be used to show the trophy taking aim at TPC Sawgrass’ famed Island Green. His shots will be illustrated with a golden trail.

That's Geoff's snark that I left in the excerpt...But as stupid a waste of efforts as this was, it got worse:


 Yeah, they had to muck up one of Tiger's better interviews...


Geoff again:

The so-bad-you-can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it “mixed reality” has earned less-than-glowing reviews after Sunday saw NBC asked Tiger to watch this grand idea. Tiger pretty much ignored seeing some strange combo of C3PO, Oscar and a 24 handicapper in his place. He was a good sport but focused more on the NBC call at the time.

Agree.  Gary Koch has milked his "better than most" call into quite the career, and I don't begrudge him.  But the underappreciated part of it all has always been Johnny's "how about in!" interjection, while the ball was still a ways from the cup.  All sorts of things have come out of Johnny's mouth over the years, but I always thought he deserved a co-credit on Koch's signature moment.  And, apparently Tiger agrees...

Whoa, Nellie! - A scary story I want to get to just in case you've not heard:

Nelly Korda, after feeling swelling in her arm on Friday, says she has a blood clot.

In a statement on her social media channels on Sunday afternoon, the second-ranked golfer in the
world said she was told to go to the emergency room after alerting her doctor. Korda said she is now recovering at home.

“On Friday I was in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL for a photoshoot and a commercial appearance,” her post said. “After a typical morning workout, my arm started to feel like it was swelling. At the advice of my doctor, I went to the Emergency Room as a precaution. I was diagnosed with a blood clot.

“I am currently at home getting treatment to eliminate further risks. I will communicate my status as and when and there is more information. In the meantime, I want to thank everyone for their support and ask for privacy for all our family during this time. I hope to be back soon! Thank you. [Prayer emoji.]”

You don't need me to point out that Nelly is at an age where things like this shouldn't happen, which somehow makes this all the more foreboding.

You also don't need me to tell you that it hits just as the LPGA heads into its descent into Mission Hills, and that eagerly awaited J.Y. Ko - Nelly face-off.  Let's hope this is a freakish one-off and that she's back soonest.

Wither The Bone Saws - I'll Take Unlikely Headers for $2,000, Alex:

Only 81?  Now I see that progress Mr. Norman was telling us about....

 It's actually better than that, because it's Geoff blogging this Eamon Lynch bit:

Chatter about a prospective Super League has taken on the feel of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” in which a misbegotten band of barflies (like Jimmy Tomorrow) are forever promising
progress that never materializes. Unlike the patrons of O’Neill’s saloon, it’s possible—even likely—that the Saudi-financed concept will advance, or at least make noise. Whispers in hallways at the Players Championship persist like herpetic hypothesis: on what players might yet jump, on what Phil Mickelson will do next, on how the Saudis will pivot.

The latest conjecture has the Crown Prince’s coat holders planning to stage a tournament with an enormous purse that could dwarf the $20 million offered at the PGA Tour’s flagship stop in soggy Florida. The goal would be to engineer litigation by inviting Tour members to compete while hoping commissioner Jay Monahan denies the permission required to do so, thereby presenting an opportunity to challenge his control over where members play, or to at least jeopardize the Tour’s tax-exempt status as a 501c organization.

Herpetic?  I'm not actually sure it makes any sense, but happy to have it added to my dictionary....

This isn't the time for a legal deep-dive, but if the event is scheduled against a PGA Tour event, I'm not sure there's much there.  I'm also not sure that Jay would be stupid enough to take the bait, although I'm equally sure that Phil is.

But stay tuned...

I'm going to release you here kids, as I have an unconscionable amount of golf to watch today.  I'm thinking I'll drop in tomorrow to wrap the festivities, but that should be considered a leaning, as opposed to a promise.

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