Thursday, July 7, 2022

Thursday Threads

Bonus Thursday content for you ingrates.  But an easy day of blogging, so keep your expectations in check.

LIV Until You DIE - A Billy Ho tirade is hardly newsworthy, though he does make some rather obvious points:

Following a hearing before Sport Resolutions on Monday, bans imposed on Ian Poulter, Adrian Otaegui and Justin Harding were lifted and they were added to the field at Renaissance Club, with more set to follow.

But while Horschel insisted he harbours no ill will towards such players, the world No 15 made his feelings on the divisive topic abundantly clear.

‘I believe they made their bed,’ said the American.

‘They decided to go play on that tour and they should go play there. They shouldn’t be coming back over to the DP World Tour or the PGA Tour.

‘To say that they wanted to also support this tour, whether the DP or PGA Tour, while playing the LIV tour, is completely asinine. Those guys made their bed. They say that’s what they want to do, so leave us alone.

‘They keep talking about how the PGA Tour doesn’t listen. I’ve been really frustrated by it because there’s a lot of guys that are hypocrites, that aren’t telling the truth and are lying.

‘I just can’t stand to sit here any more and be diplomatic about it.’

Personally, I'm just relieved to learn that he harbors no ill will....

But he's hitting on some points that seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle, most notably the damage done by defectors to sponsors and the Tour.  And, perhaps more importantly, there's no logical way in which the ambitions of the Saudis can be squared with the PGA and DP World Tour, so that happy talk requires a strong rebuttal.

Far more troubling for the Ponte Vedra suits, however, might be these musings from their stalwart, the antithesis of that strong rebuttal prescribed above:

Until this point, the PGA Tour has taken a black-and-white stance on the matter and its top pros
have supported that stance. Pros who teed it up in the first LIV event were considered to have crossed a line in the sand. They were suspended, immediately and indefinitely, from playing in future Tour events. Commissioner Jay Monahan has continually expressed no interest in partnering or cooperating with Greg Norman’s new Saudi-backed venture.

So when McIlroy suggested to BBC Sport this week that golf’s governing bodies ought to cooperate to find a solution, that marked a significant change in messaging.
 
“I think so,” he said at the JP McManus Pro-Am. “I think that needs to happen.”

Yowser!  Alarms should be ringing at The Global Home.... 

“Yeah it’s unfortunate, it’s messy, I wish it hadn’t have got that messy and in hindsight I think there were probably steps that were missed that wouldn’t have made it that messy,” McIlroy said.

“I said this back at the very start in 2020, I think in the long term it will make the game better because I think it will force the tours to adapt and change and make the product better, and focus on maybe the fan engagement side of things and focus on maybe some stuff that they’ve been neglecting over the years,” McIlroy said.

Ummm, funny, but I don't remember you saying anything remotely like this....

“Look, there’s so much chat about where the money’s coming from and Saudi and everything else, look — they sponsor so many other things and they’re all over sport,” he said. McIlroy is among those who has been critical of pros accepting the Saudi money in the past, so this was him striking a different note.

“Aramco [the Saudi government’s oil company] are big sponsors of Formula One, the Aramco Ladies Series in golf, which has actually been really good for the ladies in terms of big prize funds and so on, so I understand people’s reservations with everything,” he said. “But at the same time, if these people are serious about investing billions of dollars into golf, I think ultimately that’s a good thing.

Rory, I'm confused, is it blood money or not?   

Another point that's been left on the cutting room floor is that, it's one thing to allow the Wahabis to stage an event such as an F1 race or golf tourney, it's quite another to allow them to control the game's major professional tour.

The problem at Fortress PVB is that they've lost control of the arguments.  For instance, this guy projects as a dead ender loyalist:

“Personally, I believe there’s room in golf for lots of tours and lots of competition,” Harrington said at this week’s JP McManus Pro-Am. “The more the merrier, if you ask me.”

It’s a stark difference from what many of the non-defectors have stated in recent weeks, but for Harrington, he believes the disruption the Saudi-backed league presents might turn out to be a positive for the sport. In his view, competition breeds innovation — and that is a very good thing.

“At the moment, there is disruption, there’s no doubt about it, but disruption is not bad at times,” he said. “It looks at the moment like as I said, the PGA Tour look like they have strengthened their position and European Tour are strengthening their position. I feel there is plenty of room and time will tell.”

When you've lost Paddy....Of course, it's a bit of a freebie for him at this point, as compared to Poults, Weesty and Henrik (while the latters' 2023 captaincy was reportedly secured, there have been recent rumors):

Harrington said he hadn’t considered how the future of the Ryder Cup will be impacted by these decisions, but he did say that his time as a part of the European team is behind him.

“I had my chance,” he said. “As much as I loved the experience of being Ryder Cup Captain, and I really did, it was a tough call, and I don’t see myself going back into that arena again. It’s just the nature of the business. It’s a one-and-done, and it’s a bigger event than the individual.”

Innovation, eh?  Well, if that's all you got:

“I would have said, ‘You’ve got to think about it,” Els said. “I understand that the guys

go because of the money — it’s just a ridiculous amount — and you get to a certain point in your career, you have to consider it. But—”

And this is a big but for Els.

“—it’s not golf as we know it anymore. It’s a very different product.”

Much of LIV, of course, looks exactly like golf as we know it. Clubs and balls. Birdies and bogeys. Fairways and flagsticks. But that’s not what Els was driving at. It’s LIV’s format that he can’t get past: the absence of the pure meritocracy — beat half the field or go home with nothing — that is an inherent and integral part of virtually every other major tour.

Yeah, it's a pretty dreadful product, and he hasn't even touched on the field size.

“If it was a 72-hole system, then you’d have to look at it,” Els said. “But it’s 54 holes, no cut, shotgun start. It feels like it’s silly season golf.” Els said he would be fine with the major tours coming together during the off-season to play an unconventional style of golf like LIV has conceived, but he can’t get his head around LIV’s everybody-gets-a-trophy format as a credible way to test and identify the best golfers in the world.

“Go play this kind of format for three or four months and have your fun,” he said. “But then go play real golf after that. That’s how I feel it probably should have gone down but it didn’t.”

Sure, it's perfect for the Fall or Silly Season, but that doesn't net Phil $200 million large....

Gary Van Sickle has a good piece up at Morning Read under this header:


In less than a month, LIV Golf has changed the pro game for years to come. But will it stand up as a product? Gary Van Sickle takes a closer look.

The best thing about it's product is how bad the PGA Tour's product has become, so let's see what Gary's got:

10. The unplayable lies.

Nobody looks good wearing greed. Any number of golfers have proven remarkably un-savvy when it comes to the media. Sergio Garcia, the man-child with a long history of petulance — spitting into a cup and intentionally damaging greens, among others — had rewritten his legacy as a Masters champion and now replaced it as golf’s SuperBrat. (That’s spoiled kid brat, not bratwurst—this explanation for potentially confused Wisconsin readers.) He ripped the PGA Tour earlier this year when he drew a slow-play penalty and last week, The Daily Telegraph reported Garcia lost his cool when he heard the DP World Tour fined players $120,000 for competing in 54 Tour events without getting a release and said, “You’re f----d!”

Brooks Koepka blamed the media for overshadowing the U.S. Open by asking about the 54 Tour and then joined the defectors a week later. He didn’t lie, he claimed, just changed his mind. Sure. Bryson DeChambeau was an early rumored defector, reportedly offered $130 million. He said that wasn’t true … but he eventually joined. Who’s next to backpedal? I don’t know but somebody will tire of watching monster $4 million paydays go to the likes of Charl Schwartzel and Branden Grace and weaken.

This tweet from Alan Shipnuck is still open and somewhat applies here:

It benefits everyone when the a******es self-quarantine, but we shouldn't be surprised that the Wahabis got traction with the whiners and malcontents, no one being more whiny than Sergio, who made such a great initial impression in Saudi Arabia.

 But Harig connects the dots for us, as they're not merely whiny:

2. Surrender, Dorothy.

For many of 54 Tour migrants, leaving is a tacit admission that, “I can’t win anymore” or “I don’t want to work hard enough to compete anymore.” It is a white flag. A few months ago when the LIV Tour was still a tangled web, I mentioned something positive about it and got a reply from an adamant Twitterati, “But where’s their pension plan?” The 54 Tour IS a pension plan, buddy. They’re retiring with this sack of money. The young amateurs, however, had no direct path to the PGA Tour. So it made sense to take the money when the alternative was, if you made it through qualifying school, you spend a year as an indentured servant on the Korn Ferry Tour. The rest of you guys just gave up.

Graeme McDowell was at least honest when he told us this is golf without the grind.  Which might be quite nice for them, but eliminates any reason for the rest of us to give a rat's ass.

Yeah, we noticed:

3. The Weakest Link.

The artist formerly known as the European Tour has been exposed. In a new working agreement-but-not-quite-a-merger, the top 10 players on the ET’s Order of Merit will earn PGA Tour cards. The ET is now a feeder system for the PGA Tour. If you’ve been following closely, most ET events this year have had such weak fields, they earn only the minimum Official World Golf Ranking points. Take the money … please. Recent ET events such as the Magical Kenya Open, ISPS Handa Championship in Spain, Betfred British Masters and BMW International offered first-place prizes between $310,000 and $385,000. The LPGA Tour’s Cognizant Founders Cup paid $450,000 to the winner while the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, a major that upped its purse, paid more than those ET events paid to its first four finishers.

Which has now become Jay's biggest headaache, with the next bailout scheduled in 3,2,1....

Lastly, this obviously belonged above with the Billy Ho story:

As I noted above, of course they're angry.  Not only have they been lied to by their peers, but their ecosystem is being damaged by the defections, so why would we be surprised that they're taking it rather personally?

Links Season - It's the favorite portion of the golf calendar for your humble blogger, so hopefully you'll tolerate any excess of enthusiasm.  To celebrate the season, Golf Magazine has released a first:

Top 100 Courses in the U.K. and Ireland: Our raters’ first-ever ranking of the golf mecca

Including this lovely map:


 The winner is preordained, especially this year:

1. St. Andrews (Old)*
Fife, Scotland

The birthplace of golf features hidden pot bunkers, huge double greens, iconic holes such as the Eden, Road and Long and strategic options galore that change with the day’s wind and hole
location. On calm days, the course can appear innocuous but when the breeze picks up, the Grand Old Lady requires some of the game’s deftest shots. The Old Course, which this month plays host to its 30th Open Championship, might well possess the fastest, best turf in the sport (despite, or perhaps because of, its constant use) and no design possesses the flexibility in allowing golfers of all ages and abilities to enjoy themselves. Modern architects, take note!

The old girl deserves her due, though many of us are worried about how low the scoring might go.

I encourage you to at least scroll the list, as there's no shortage of eye candy (and, it should be noted, it's not exclusively links).  On Tuesday I posted video of North Berwick, noting that you should see the hole known as "pit".  Here I'll just include this phot of the green:


Personal scorecards are silly, but your humble blogger has played nine of that elite top ten, having never made it to the Kent coast.

To me, the rankings get more interesting as you get past the name brands, including this gem about which I'll have more below:

19. Prestwick*
Ayrshire, Scotland

This site of 24 Open Championships (including the first 12) features an irresistible combination
of quirk and muscle. The lumpiest/bumpiest ground is near the clubhouse and yields such marvels as the 1st, with a stonewall and railroad line hard down the right of the fairway, the Narrows 15th and the famous Alps 17th. Meanwhile, a brawny collection of two-shotters defines the stretch from 6-10. Add all the asks together and you have a historic course like no other. The more you travel, the more you appreciate Prestwick’s unique charms. Its influence on the direction of architecture is undeniable, thanks to the impression it made on designers from C.B. Macdonald to Pete and Alice Dye, who, a few years after their 1963 visit, included railroad planks at Harbour Town.

I simply can't see how a golf course could be more fun, and I hear talk that the club has some history.  Speaking of which, have you spent much time on this enduring mystery?


The Scottish club hosted the first Open in 1860 and 23 of the next 59. So what happened in 1925 that caused the R&A to say goodbye forever?

It was kind of a big deal back in the day....

It’s been almost a century since the endlessly eccentric links on the shore of the Firth of Clyde held its 24th—and last—Open. There is nothing directly linking the Open’s departure to inadequate acreage, although that immutable fact would have led to the course becoming the museum piece it is today. While Prestwick remains close to the hearts of those who cherish eccentricity and quirk, it would hardly provide an appropriate test for the modern “bombers” who populate the sharp end of professional golf. Drive-pitch-and-putt would be the order of the four days.

Still, it most certainly was not lack of challenge that saw the championship depart for good in the wake of “Long” Jim Barnes’ 1925 victory. Winner of the first two PGA Championships in 1916 and 1919, as well as the 1921 U.S. Open, the transplanted Cornishman hit his ball 300 times en route to claiming his fourth and last major title and the £75 first-place prize. George Duncan, 1920 Open champion, had the best score (73) in a final round in which only 28 of the 68-player field broke 80. Prestwick back then was no pushover.
The original Open Championship Belt and the Claret Jug photographed on the commemorative cairn that is placed where the first shot in Open Championship history was hit on Oct. 17, 1860.

But it's a bit of a darker tale:

More research, however, would suggest the catalyst behind the demise of Prestwick as an Open venue was likely the popularity of an ex-patriot Scot named Macdonald Smith. At least for that
one week, Smith was the 1920s equivalent of Tiger Woods in terms of fan appeal.

A quick glance at his record makes it clear that the Carnoustie-born naturalized American was one of the best players of the era. Although without a victory in any of what are today golf’s four most important men’s events, Smith won 24 times on what is now the PGA Tour (an impressive fact that has so far failed to gain him entry to the World Golf Hall of Fame) and recorded 17 top-10s in majors. That includes five top-fives in the U.S. Open, seven top-fives in the Open Championship (and no lower than a T-18 in nine total starts). In his one Masters, he was T-7. Strangely, he never played in a PGA Championship.

A bit hard to contemplate from today, but it all went bad:

Smith started his final round 30 minutes later alongside Tom Fernie and so knew with certainty that a round of 78 would be enough to clinch possession of the claret jug. And the round began
well enough with pars on the opening two holes. But soon things started to unravel, courtesy of a crowd that, by all accounts, was largely out of control. Despite it being a Friday workday, the lack of an admission charge was too much of a temptation for many fans. Hundreds took the train from Glasgow and hopped over the wall from the Prestwick station onto the first tee. It is estimated that as many as 15,000 people were in attendance that afternoon, the vast majority watching Smith.

“They wanted the Scotsman to win and all that was wrong was that too many of them wanted it too much,” wrote Bernard Darwin. “It was a fatal misunderstanding and I doubt if he ever got over it.”

That the marshals were unable to cope is clear. “There were occasions on which the players were left with such narrow lanes to play along that some could not see the flags,” was Arthur Leonard Lee’s verdict in The Guardian. The instructions advising marshals to “endeavor to keep the spectators always to the right hand side of the course both going out and coming in” were sadly lost in the confusion.

Amateur golf may have been for gentlemen, but the professional game was rough trade indeed, as anyone knowledgeable about the challenge matches of the era would know.  Though this seems more an abundance of enthusiasm combined with simply too many folks:

“Smith was quoted saying the spectators got in the way many times,” says Andrew Lockhead, Prestwick Golf Club’s archivist. “There were holes where he had to play over the heads of the people. So the crowds clearly overran the playing areas of the course. The stewards couldn’t hold them back.”

The irony, Lockhead notes, is that the spectators were all on Smith’s side. “They were just over exuberant. They thought they were cheering him on. Sadly, he didn’t seem to realize that fact and his concentration was gone.”

Just as damaging was Smith’s loss of control on the greens. Three putts at the seventh, eighth and 15th holes led to double bogeys. But his was a steady disintegration rather than a sudden and dramatic exhibition of the dark art of choking under pressure. After his promising start, Smith was three over par for the next three holes and on his way to what was surely the biggest disappointment of a distinguished but unfulfilled career.

Feels like a silly reason to have abandoned their original venue in hindsight, not that Prestwick's could have survived into the modern era.  But nice to know they were Living Under Par long before it was cool...

That's all for today, kids.

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