Tuesday Tastings

A little LIV is teed up for you today, but then perhaps a palate cleanser....

OWGR, Consensus Reigns - The Official World Golf Rankings have long been in our field of vision as as a flashpoint in the PGA Tour-LIV Golf cage match.  But a scan of pieces on this subject reveals an emerging consensus:

LIV Golf's Quest for Legitimacy Rests on Its World Ranking Application—and It's Complicated

And this:

Will LIV Golf be validated by the Official World Golf Ranking? It’s an essential, if thorny, question

You say complicates and I say thorny....let's call the whole thing off.

Sean Fairholm at the Global Golf Post goes deep on the history of the OWGR, beginning with the ever-present Mark McCormack:

The start of this complicated equation begins with the OWGR, golf’s universally recognized ranking system since the week before the 1986 Masters. It was created, ironically, because

players started splitting time between Europe and the U.S, a factor which did not jibe with the Open Championship’s qualifying system. The R&A used to award spots strictly by a player’s standing on each respective tour, so some who split their time were failing to qualify despite being accomplished players.

Agent Mark McCormack, who had individually published his own rankings from 1968 to 1985, was appointed chairman, and the organization he founded, IMG, owned the OWGR until 2004. That’s when Alastair Johnston, IMG’s new CEO, recognized a conflict between his agency that represented players and what the OWGR had become – an ever-more-valuable ranking that served as a gatekeeper to major championships and sponsorship dollars.

It was then that golf’s major stakeholders came together to form OWGR Limited, a company with an office in the DP World Tour Building at Wentworth in London. With former R&A CEO Peter Dawson currently serving as chairman, the seven member entities contribute financially to the company’s operations while also serving on its board. That board includes the organizations that run each major, the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the International Federation of PGA Tours.

Bet you didn't know that.  But don't you love that seventeen year period when it was done by McCormack alone?

I do love this paragraph, although there's nothing that's actually new in it:

LIV is hoping to break open a free market of golf where players can openly compete where they wish – except, of course, for the mandatory events their own members are contractually obligated to play. This free market wouldn’t include the majors, however. All four of the most coveted events are not operated by the PGA Tour. Each has its own qualification system that relies heavily on the OWGR.

To me, that just exposes the hypocrisy of LIV's position more cryptically than I've seen previously.  They want to break the PGA and Euro Tour rules that protect sponsors and other parties-in-interest, but their own requirements will be sacrosanct.  How schadenfreudaliscious would it be to find another petro-autocracy to offer these guys even more money, yanno, just to watch Greg Norman squeal.

But did you know that the OWGR just rollled out a brand-spanking new system?

The Official World Golf Ranking ushered in a new format this week, the culmination of a four-year-long process to reimagine an adequate but flawed system.

This is no small tweak. The rules of how points are awarded have changed significantly, and the impact of this revamped ranking could be the core defender of LIV Golf’s challenge to the game’s ecosystem.

The OWGR has gone through many changes over the years, so this latest install is far from being the only one. It is poetic, however, that the OWGR made this announcement on Monday, one day before the PGA Tour won a TRO (temporary restraining order) hearing that excluded three LIV players from participating in the FedEx Cup. The timing was awkward but coincidental, since this week’s install date was set more than a year ago. While the PGA Tour and LIV are now mired in an antitrust case that is likely to overlap with at least a few, and perhaps a handful of major championships being contested in the coming years, the thread being pulled on this ugly sweater seems to end with LIV’s desperate need for OWGR points.

The first bit to note is that, as in their antitrust suit, time is the enemy:

The first obstacle for them is the most obvious. LIV officially applied for OWGR certification on July 6. But unless there is a sudden and dramatic change in OWGR rules, the earliest the league could start earning points is 2024. Even that timeline appears optimistic for multiple reasons. The first is that the OWGR takes around one to two years to process applications. The second is that LIV does not meet several criteria that the OWGR lists as mandatory to be considered, and all of those criteria would have to be in place for at least one year prior to the application being accepted.

Frustratingly (and perhaps intentionally so), good luck finding a simple listing of criteria, so we'll have to patch together disparate threads to see where their events might have issues.  Yeah, might...

Let's circle back to that golf.com item linked above:

According to the executive, a tour seeking OWGR recognition must meet upward of 15 criteria,

nearly all of which he said LIV meets, with others falling into a “gray area” that LIV believes it can get past. For starters, the applicant must be proposed for consideration by an existing tour that is already in the OWGR fold. The Asian Tour, in which LIV has invested hundreds of millions of dollars, will check that box for LIV, the executive said.

Several other OWGR criteria relate to the scheduling and formatting of events. To be eligible for OWGR points, for instance, a tour must operate at least 10 events a year.

Those events must have a minimum purse of $50,000 (LIV clears that bar easily) and an average field size of 75 players. While LIV’s invitational events, including its inaugural tournament outside London earlier this month, are limited to 48 players, its international events will feature 144 competitors, bumping its average field size above 75, the executive said.

Seems to me that we can already see Norman's nose growing (for the record, what follows is sourced to an anonymous LIV executive), as this appears to be an intentional effort to conflate the Asian Tour with the limited field LIV moneygrabs.  Good luck with that.

If you're in need of a laugh, this might fit the bill:

Take, for instance, the OWGR requirement that events be a minimum of 54 holes with a cut after 36 holes. LIV events do not have a cut. But the Tour Championship, the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play and the Hero World Challenge are also cut-free, and they all dole out OWGR points.

Look, I've been making this "hoist on their own petard" argument since forever, but when they do it the petard seem kinda flimsy.  Awarding OWGR points for Tiger's 18-player event in which he invites is friend is just wrong, guys.  It's always been wrong (fortunately your humble blogger has been calling BS on this since Day One) and you deserve to have this decision jammed back down your throat.  That said, at least Tiger has stayed bought....

I'm inclined to give the Tour a pass on the Tour Championship.  Don't get me wrong, it's a train wreck of a format and those that subject us to it should be strung up in a public square, it's just that the OWGR points seem the least of it (and they're at least awarded based upon what the guys actually shoot, not the stagger start).

But it's the citation of the match play that provoked my spit take, because it offers that lovely aroma of desperation.  Of course, you'll scratch your head and ask yourself, can there be a cut in a match play event?  There actually is in the new pool-play format, because on Friday afternoon 75% of the players go home.  So, Greg, you keep sharing your brilliance with us...

Other problems:

There are other criteria, the LIV executive said. The OWGR requires that a tour provide a pathway for its players onto the full-member tour that is proposing the application. LIV could meet that requirement, the executive said, by guaranteeing that its top five finishers receive an Asian Tour card (whether those players would opt to play on the Asian Tour is another matter). The OWGR also requires that a tour hold a qualifying school before the start of the season or offer a qualifying process into each event.

LIV will be able to check that box, the executive said, through a concept it plans to implement within the next few years, after its switch next season to a league format with 48 full-time committed players and 12 committed teams. As part of that concept, the four lowest-ranked players will be relegated and a separate event will be held that will provide a pathway into the league.

Yeah, maybe.... It admittedly gest complicated, but we've also heard talk that several of their contracts protect players from relegation, so it feels like it's more for show.

This going to get ugly and litigious, though I repeat myself.  Where LIV can, however, score some easy points, is in the strength of field numbers:

Norman also outlined that the Strength of Field (SoF) for the first three events under the OWGR calculations exceeded both PGA Tour and DP World Tour events the same week.

The LIV Golf Invitational London had a SoF of 96 and the DP World Tour Volvo Car Scandinavian Mixed the same week had a SoF of 18.

LIV Golf Invitational Portland had a SoF of 128 while the PGA Tour’s John Deere SoF was 53 and LIV Golf Bedminster was SoF 140. The DP World Tour’s Hero Open played that same week had a SoF of 17.

This strikes me as another unforced error from the powers that be.  I know nothing of how SoF is calculated, but I'm guessing it grabs world rankings of top players, but doesn't capture the depth numbers adequately.

There's little doubt that the John Deere featured an embarrassingly weak field this year, utterly bereft of name-brand golfers.  But here's the thing, I still believe it was a more difficult event to win, merely because it feature a full field of professional golfers.  beating 155 (or 143) players is harder than beating 47 players, regardless of the names involved.  Somehow our SoF numbers don't seem to capture that important fact of life, although there's nothing that will make those Euro Tour fields look impressive.

We'll continue to watch this space, but the first battle will be over the timing of the response to the LIV application, and whether Norman and the Saudis can bring pressure to speed up that process.  The calendar doesn't seem to favor LIV, but there's more going on than is visible to mere mortals. Just a reminder, that as Joe Biden went to Saudi to plead for them to pump more evil carbon, his Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into the PGA Tour.   Just a coincidence, I'm sure, but none of should assume we can anticipate what comes next.

Wither Jay - Lots of damage incurred and more to come, but what does the Tour look like going forward?  Well, the Fall isn't in especially good hands, is it?

While the best players have agreed to play against one another in a minimum of 20 events between January and August starting in 2024, the Tour’s nine official fall events are about to receive a demotion, beginning in 2023.

The top 70 in the FedEx Cup regular season points race will qualify for the playoffs and retain their cards for the next season. Numbers 71-125? They will have to duke it out during the fall to retain their playing privileges in what will essentially become eligibility events. Without FedEx Cup points at stake or any punishment for not playing during the fall, the top players have been given the option of an extended vacation from September through December. It’s the off-season some of them have long been asking for, but PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan and his business development team have their work cut out explaining to title sponsors why fields will be watered down.

“The Tour knows this isn’t awesome for the sponsors of the fall events to tell them that the guys who finish top 70 don’t have to play your events and probably won’t,” said Tour veteran Peter Malnati, co-chairmen of the Player Advisory Council. “They say they are going to make them stronger and I’m just taking them at their word for now.”

This to me is the dark underbelly of the Tour, and they deserve everything they get.  The biggest problem with the Tour is that they expanded to a year round schedule simply so no one else could occupy those periods of the calendar.   The problem is that it substantially dilutes their product, creating an endless series of mind-numbingly boring events, and devalues their brand.

Adam Schupak does reasonable job of sifting through player reaction, though I think errs in failing to note Jay's prior ambition, since postponed:

The Fall Series

Monahan added that there will be a series of up to three international events that will be played after the conclusion of the FedEx Cup playoffs. These events will be limited-field and no-cut

events and their specific format is under review by the Player Advisory Council.

The effect here is threefold: It’s a chance to gather the game’s best players, it’s a chance for top-50 pros to double-dip and increase their earnings for the season and it’s an easy enough commitment that pros can play (or not) and still get an offseason.

What of the “other” Tour pros? Those outside the top 70 at the end of the PGA Tour season will compete in a “compelling, consequential final stretch” that will determine their status for the following season.

It's unclear from the excerpt I found, but Jay's plan was the lay this on top of the existing Fall events.  So if you have the misfortune to be Sanderson Farms or Fortinet, you've sponsored an event that will be limited to Golf Channel and competing with the evil NFL, so you've already taken a healthy bite out of shareholder value.  Now Jay comes along and threatens to further diminish your piddling event by doing exactly that which LIV did to him, skimming to top players, setting up a competing event and wishing you a happy life.  What a great partner, no?

 Eamon Lynch has thoughts on the scheduling issues as well:

Lynch: In Jay Monahan's coming PGA Tour plan there will be winners, losers and still more griping players

That last bit is certainly a mortal lock... Of course, no one frames an article quite like Eamon, today going the papal route:

When it comes to making consequential changes, the PGA Tour’s Global Home has much in common with the Vatican, two cloistered realms accustomed to moving at the drowsy pace of papal encyclicals rather than with the immediacy expected in the modern world. It’s been 39 days since the Tour’s ultimate authority, Jay Monahan, issued his bulletin — let’s call it Electi pretium (“Chosen Price”) — outlining a vision to secure the loyalty of the world’s top golfers, details of which he said would be revealed in 45 to 60 days. That’s a dizzying pace for the prelates of the Ponte Vedra curia tasked with executing the particulars, as it would be for any major sports league to fundamentally overhaul how it does business.

The easy part involves money: the Player Impact Program doubling to $100 million, the $500,000 guarantee for all rookies, the modest stipend so cut-missers can defray expenses. More problematic is the radical reshaping of the product that Monahan promised at the behest of a group of players led by Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods.

As an aside, I have no heard Eamon react to being sued by PReed for defamation, which should be good fun for all except the aforementioned PReed.

Here's the gist of his thoughts:

Some of the anointed have been announced — three FedEx Cup playoff events, the existing invitationals (Memorial, Arnold Palmer and Genesis), the WGC Match Play, and the Sentry

Tournament of Champions. The remaining four are to be determined, but will likely rotate among sponsors willing to pay the premium required for elevation every few years but not annually. When elevated events are decided, where do they fall on the schedule? Most events earmarked for elite status are fixed on the calendar. The puzzle of pacing won’t be solved without some tournaments being nudged to new dates, which raises fresh considerations in every instance.

An unavoidable by-product of designating elevated tournaments is creating a caste system among PGA Tour events, one tier where elite players are guaranteed to show up, another where their presence would be an unexpected bonus. For sponsors historically focused on impacting their host communities — Sanderson Farms this week, for example — implied relegation might not diminish the tournament’s corporate value, but that view won’t prevail in every C-suite.

Elevating tournaments only formalizes the existence of a second division, since it’s always been the case that some events attract better fields. The Tour will insist that increasing the value of one tournament does not automatically reduce the value of another, but mitigating sponsor jitters is why top players must also commit to playing three non-elevated stops every year. Some events will see elite talent simply because the dates suit to fulfill their obligations.

Sponsors whose events do not now have Elevated Status include Framers Insurance, AMEX, Waste Management, John Deere, AT&T and God knows who else I'm forgetting.  When the music stops, the scrum to secure seats should be quite vicious.  But, riddle me this Batman, why would you want to commit shareholder resources to these people?  They don't exactly protect you, do they?

Eamon finishes strong as is his wont:

This entire process has been driven by unhappy players and what they need to be slightly less unhappy. Some chose the balm of Saudi cash, others opted to stay and fight for improvements to the PGA Tour. But most simply sat back and waited to see what others will serve them, ready to turn up their noses and threaten anew to go eat next door at Greg’s Grill, despite the owner’s reputation for not handling criticism well. Monahan must know that the day nears when he will have to do what every exasperated restaurant manager does: tell disgruntled diners that the menu is the best he can offer, and if they don’t like it, well then, there’s no barbed wire around the exit.

I'm sure it'll be great, though our perception of the character of these guys has taken quite the hit....

Care for some udder stuff?  Yeah, we all do...

Isn't GolfLogix, an Oxymoron - A while back I bought two green-reading books for Fairview, one from these folks:

Here’s what goes into the making of a GolfLogix green book

Amusingly, the second such book from PuttView was of little use to your humble blogger, because the arrows used to indicate slope are simply too small for my 67-year old eyes.  

But I've always wondered how they map the greens:

Chapter 2: WALKING THE LINE

The tall, slender scanning device (2), which is fitted with a wheel on the bottom and a data-collecting smartphone (4), is in some ways similar to a GPS surveyor, except that it gathers more

than 2 million data points per green. Starting with the first green, the technician (or head pro or greenkeeper) walks the scanner around the entire outline of the putting surface (3), moving relatively slowly to ensure proper capture of the data points.

“What’s crazy,” Charleston says, “is that we can pull this data off the device wirelessly, so our mapping team in Scottsdale, Ariz., can look at it in real time and see that everything was done correctly.” After tracing the green, the tech does what’s called a “looping”— rolling the scanner from one side of the green to the other, at two- to three-foot increments, to fill in the data points for all slopes and contours. The final step is to trace the outline of each greenside bunker. The process takes about 15 to 20 minutes per green.

It's $30,000 of equipment, and they'll even send it to a club with a how-to-video guide.

One last bit:

Epilogue

Open the book or app, make putts and play happily ever after.

 OK, but why start now?

A Taste of Linksy Goodness - In honor of the recently-concluded Dunhill, shall we spend a little time where golf is the greatest?  Ummm, that was really meant as a rhetorical question....

The economics of Scottish golf differ greatly from our own ecosystem, but here's something we almost never talk about:

What does it cost to maintain a Top 100-caliber links course? This one told us

Interestingly, this one comes with an irony alert:

There’s something decidedly different about the color palette you see on Scottish links courses.

Instead of lush greens, which you often find on tees, fairways and putting surfaces at top courses in the United States, you’ll see a paler green likely with some brown and gold mixed in. You may have noticed this coloring when the Open Championship visited St. Andrews this summer.

The brownish blend isn’t because these courses aren’t treated with the same care as their American counterparts — quite the contrary.

It’s largely a result of Mother Nature.

You guys saw my pics from Crail, where the turf in August was as spongey as the hood of a Pontiac....

The net result for maintenance costs? Big savings.

Neil Hampton, Royal Dornoch’s general manager, said the maintenance budget for 2022 fiscal year (April 1 to March 31, 2023) is about £1 million, or about $1.15 million. That might sound like a good chunk of change, but that’s for a 36-hole facility, which includes the Championship course, ranked No. 3 on GOLF’s Top 100 courses in UK and Ireland list and No. 12 on our World list — and which Tom Watson once described as “the most fun I’ve ever had a on a golf course.”

Comparatively, the average maintenance budget for an 18-hole private facility in the U.S. is just over $1 million annually (that figure, of course, varies regionally), according to the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America. That includes all private golf courses, not just top-ranked ones, and is roughly the same as what Royal Dornoch pays to maintain two courses.

First, it's just interesting that the club would share the information.  But it's a place I know, at least the first twelve holes (a little gallows humor there for those that were with us at the time), and I'm actually surprised that the disparity is not greater.

Dornoch is heaven on earth, so of course their golf course ifs maintained to an exacting standard.  there's two threads of interest to me here, one being that Dornoch is better funded than 99% of Scottish clubs.  As a rule, clubs spend on their golf courses what they can, and Dornoch fills every visitor tee time from April through October.  As a follow up to this, I'd love to see what a more representative links, say a Lundin Links or Tain (just to pick names almost at random) spend to maintain their links, which you'd assume is far less.

Lastly, I'd love to know whether the cost of water is included in this number.  For all their encomium to browner and firmer conditions, the thing that struck me at Dornoch was how green it was, despite the hot, dry Scottish summer.  Our host Ross attributed that to their irrigation system, and I got the sense he wasn't a fan thereof.  

Our second linksy item is merely Dylan Dethier in love:

I first fell in love with Portrush in the summer of 2019.

The Open had arrived in Northern Ireland, its first time there since 1951. The golf world arrived with it. Thousands cascaded in from the U.K. and Ireland. Thousands more, including me, came from further afield; I took a redeye into Dublin and then made the trek north, watching bleary-eyed as the Emerald Isle whizzed by. I was born and raised in a rural New England town, so while the pastoral landscape was familiar, it felt distinctly different. Older, for one thing. Secluded, for another; the landscape was timeless, outwardly unaffected by time and technology.

I loved the town first. Portrush is a tiny seaside village of 6,000 or so that sits on the northern tip of Northern Ireland. The downtown sticks out in particular, as it’s a one-mile peninsula jutting dramatically into the Atlantic. It’s built for fun: restaurants border beaches, which border pubs, which border arcades, which border ferris wheels, which border more beaches, which border the golf course. And I soon learned to love that, too.

He goes on at great length in this vein, but the reason for the love letter is that he actually got to play Royal Portrush, and he didn't hate it.  In fact, he goes on about at similarly great length:

1. The elevation changes. Like other top-tier links courses, Portrush has a breathtaking seaside setting. Panoramic views include downtown to the west, the open Atlantic to the north and a

dramatic coastline — including the craggy ruins of Dunluce Castle — to the east. But it’s rare to have a links course that features so many hills. As a result both the views and golf shots are more dramatic. The wild dunescape takes you up and around and over humps and bumps and mounds. It’s a more three-dimensional experience than your typical links. It’s also hard as hell.

2. The hole variety. Portrush keeps your head on a swivel; every single hole is oriented in a slightly different direction. Some links courses are 18-track albums, only appreciated when listened to all together. Portrush has 18 hit singles. Not just the showstoppers, like the photogenic seaside par-4 5th and the beefy par-3 16th. Every hole, from Rory’s tragic 1st to the 18th, site of Shane Lowry’s coronation, demands your attention and can be easily recalled at day’s end — ideally back at the Harbour Bar. Because, again, it’s hard as hell.

3. The setting. Plenty of links courses boast an epic history. Plenty more boast an epic coastline. Portrush has both; the hundred-year-old trophies will give away the first bit, while the chalky cliffs give away the second. Portrush’s championship layout doesn’t sacrifice in any category. This is, after all, a setting robust enough for an Open Championship and wild enough to serve as a filming location for Game of Thrones. That’s range.

Dylan is slightly over-the-top here, but only slightly.  This is one of the finest links on the planet, and since links is the best version of our game, this is simply one of the 4-5 best golf courses on our little planet.  Of course, that's just an opinion, but it is that good, because they took a piece of land made for our humble game and turned it over the gentleman named Harry S. Colt, and that might be all you need to know.

Why do I call Dylan a little OTT?  Well, with the two new holes built for that 2019 Open, I am very open to the concept that the Dunluce includes seventeen individual masterpieces, but aren't you forgetting that rather dreadful opening hole, Dylan?

Remember the nerviest tee shot of Rory McIlroy’s career? It got me, too

This is actually a piece by Sean Zak, who played with Dylan that day.

And he proceeds to tell the story of poor Rory, including his plaintive cries in the dark:

Bless the heart of Rory McIlroy who stood on the 1st tee at Royal Portrush in 2019, wind breathing in off the right. Bless his heart because Northern Ireland’s greatest golfing talent, then

30 years old, said he wasn’t trying to be the center of attention that week, as the Open Championship returned to his home country.

Bless the heart of a four-time major champion who admitted to being nervous, playing in his 11th Open but the first to be held there in more than 60 years. Bless the heart of the fan favorite whose name was right there next to the course record: 61. This scene was the kind we dream about, we being the golfers who play it and the thirsty fans who watch it.

McIlroy stood on the tee in the center of a chute created by the grandstand. He couldn’t have felt the wind quite as much as the spectators out lining the ropes. But as soon as he hit his driving iron, that right-to-left wind upgraded his patented draw into a hook. He started calling for it to sit.

Sit.

Sit.

Sit.

Sit.

Sit.

Sit.

Spoiler alert, it sat....eventually, but very much OB.

It's a pretty bad golf hole, most notably because that opening tee shot has OB bother left and right.   You don't see that anywhere, not to mention on an opening tee shot.  Down the right is the property line, so there may not be any recourse, but I've never really understood why left is also OB.  

Just not a great hole with a totally unfair tee shot, but we don't obsess over things like this in linksdom, because the opening and closing holes are invariably the weakest, because clubhouses are built close to the road, and the best land might take a hole or two to access.

I need to get on with my day, as i assume you do as well.  see you later in the week, I hope.