Monday, November 28, 2022

Weekend Wrap

 I didn't watch much golf this weekend, how about you?

I did, however, watch the U.S. - England match on Friday afternoon and was substantially less bored than anticipated.  A bit high-scoring for my taste, but I made it all 90+ minutes.  I fully intend to watch tomorrow's game, as I noted the bravery of the Iranian players in my previous post.  But a little bravery here as well:

The US Soccer Federation briefly displayed Iran's national flag on social media without the emblem of the Islamic Republic, saying the move supports protesters in Iran ahead of the two nations' World Cup match Tuesday in Qatar.

Iran's government reacted by accusing US Soccer of removing the name of God from their national flag, and the Iranian football federation said their country will lodge a complaint with FIFA over the scrubbing of the Islamic Republic emblem.

"Measures taken regarding the Islamic Republic of [the] Iran flag are against international law and morality, and we'll pursue this through FIFA's morality committee," said legal adviser to the Iranian Football Federation Safia Allah Faghanpour. "They must be held responsible. Obviously they want to affect Iran's performance against the US by doing this.''

"FIFA's morality committee" is the single funniest bit I've heard in ages, so good that I won't taint it with a lame barb of my own...  I always like to remind folks that, when the Iranian people were in the streets risking their lives to protest the brutal regime, Barrack Obama sided with said brutal regime.  One assumes his Mini-Me will do the same, so good to se eour soccer federation has a bigger set than Foggy Bottom.

Shall we pick over some golf stories?

LIV In Your Stocking - This one has me scratching my head, though I'm still trying to figure out what's going on behind the scenes:

While LIV Golf attorneys are trying to shed light on the PGA Tour’s organizational structure and financial dealings as part of an anti-trust lawsuit, the head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has insisted it shouldn’t have to do the same, claiming “sovereign immunity.”

According to a report from Bloomberg News, PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan on Tuesday asked a federal judge in California to quash a request by the PGA Tour to compel their testimony and produce documents for a lawsuit accusing LIV of unfair competition for offering players lucrative deals to break their PGA contracts.

The original suit, which was filed back in August by Phil Mickelson and 10 other golfers, was taken over by LIV Golf, which is under the PIF umbrella.

However, officials for the Saudi-run firm said they only have high-level oversight over LIV Golf and don’t deal with day-to-day operations. The request also stated the move could set a “dangerous precedent” if PIF had to reveal its books, as the company has investments in major corporations like Walmart and Starbucks and could be ripe for similar requests over any suits filed against companies it holds. The wealth fund, which was organized in 1971 as a means for the Saudi Arabian government to invest in various projects and companies, is currently estimated to be worth $676 billion.

And we should just take their word for that?  Slightly above my pay grade to speculate as to whether, having asserted themselves into the antitrust suit, their own internal deliberations would be excluded.  I would think the Tour might have a tortious interference claim at some point, and would justifiably want to  assert that against all logical defendants.

But if you're in, "Haven't I heard that elsewhere" mode, it's for good reason:

The Biden administration has determined that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin
Salman, should be granted immunity in a case brought against him by the fiancée of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whom the administration has said was murdered at the prince’s direction.

A court filing was made by Justice Department lawyers at the request of the State Department because bin Salman was recently made the Saudi prime minister and as a result, qualifies for immunity as a foreign head of government, the request said. It was filed late Thursday night, just before the court’s deadline for the Justice Department to give its views in court on the immunity question and other arguments the prince made for having the lawsuit dismissed.

“Mohammed bin Salman, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is the sitting head of government and, accordingly, is immune from this suit,” the filing reads, while calling the murder “heinous.”

Heinous?  Does Phil know?

Weird, huh?  Just a reminder that, as he traveled to the Kingdom to give that heinous guy a fist-bump, Biden's Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into the PGA Tour.  That to this observer is less surprising than the fact that, having been publicly humiliated by MBS, that investigation appears to be ongoing, and now the administration is providing legal cover to the Crown Prince.

As long as we're on LIV, care to sample the worst Eamon Lynch column evah?  Eamon's been my go-to guy on the LIVsanity, as he's one of the few golf journalists that seems willing to call these guys out for their boorish and avaricious behavior, always wrapper in colorful metaphors and framing devices.  But, while he's far from the first to phone one in this time of year, this is really a sloppy effort:

Eamon's ledes are typically best in show, though you'll feel him straining on this one:

The only shared commonality between Jay Monahan and Charles Dickens — other than both debuting to American audiences in Boston — is that each created a PIP that inspired great
expectations among the lower orders. Dickens’ ‘Pip’ was the protagonist of his exquisite 1861 novel; Monahan’s is more prosaic: the Player Impact Program, his widely-criticized plan to reward those players who most impact the PGA Tour’s business.

Monahan’s PIP only measures positive impact, so Greg Norman doesn’t number among its beneficiaries. But, like Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations, much of what transpires is due to his unseen hand.

Positive impact?  Funny, you mention those prior year results below, so you're conceding that Bryson, Brooksie and Phil provided positive impact?  

This week, the Tour announced the final results in the only season-long race whose standings it doesn’t aggressively promote. The PIP pot doubled in 2022 to $100 million, and so did the number of recipients, to 20 (with three more added for reasons too byzantine to bother with here). Tiger Woods collected $15 million to go with the $8 million he received from the inaugural PIP pool last year, despite Phil Mickelson’s Trumpian attempt to prematurely declare a victory he hadn’t earned.

That’s $23 million just for being Tiger Woods. But then, it took a lot of work to become Tiger Woods, and Tiger Woods adds immense value to the PGA Tour, to a multiple of $23 million. It also took a lot of work to become Rory McIlroy (second, for $12 million in ‘22), Will Zalatoris (9th, $5 million) and Viktor Hovland (20th, $2 million). The respective deservedness of others on the PIP list — everyone below Woods in the mortals division — will be debated. This is a sport where competitors like to boast of eating only what they kill (never entirely true) and because a perception exists that PIP payouts are entirely unrelated to how recipients perform inside the ropes (also not entirely true, but less true this year than it was last).

Eamon is doing that which he would excoriate any other journalist for doing, making an unsubstantiated assertion.  It's fine that you think Tiger underpaid, but that's not journalism, that's your private opinion.

Yes, it took a lot of work to become Tiger, but Eamon ignores the bifurcated compensation system of golf, as virtually everyone making this argument does.  That hard work involved in Being Tiger Woods is reimbursed by Nike, Monster and his other various endorsements.  To the extent that those have diminished, that's because of his personal scandals and general prickishness...

 To see Eamon's finger on the scale, this is buried deep within the bowe3ls of his article:

Woods’ value to the PGA Tour is diminished only in that he can no longer compete with the consistency and frequency he used to.

Remind me again, how many PGA Tour events did Tiger play in 2022?  Consistency?  Frequency?  Eamon's article includes a photo of Tiger at a non-PGA Tour event, because he didn't play any actual Tour events in 2022, which is a bit more significant than Eamon seems to want to admit.

One of the favorite devices of hack journos is the "Some people say" trick, which frees said hack journo to tell you what they themselves are thinking:

If the entire program is, as many suggest, a transparent sop to secure player loyalty against LIV, it has been remarkably ineffective, at least based on season one. Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bubba Watson all split after receiving PIP bonuses of at least $3 million, though DeChambeau is irked that he hasn’t been paid in full on account of not having completed the necessary obligations to collect before he departed.

Among the many people, yup, Eamon himself.

There's a saying in the legal world that bad cases make bad law.  The problem here isn't so much Tiger, who is a one-off for sure.  The problem can be found in that Cameron Young/Hideki story we had last week.  Think the other guys noticed?  What happens when they all want $2 million to stay?

Other Fallout - I had mused earlier on this subject, but I take this to mean that the bromance is well and truly dead:

Does that mean we won't get Brooksie-Bryson II?

Alas, he's not wrong about this:

Mickelson, who competed in four iterations of The Match, was once the event’s heartbeat. He was a natural fit for The Match’s wall-to-wall approach, and his charisma and free-wheeling nature made him the ideal character for the event driven more by its star power than its golf prowess. In The Match’s earliest iterations, Mickelson was essential in helping the event capture the sport in the goofy, friendly light Zuriff envisioned.

These matches have been pretty dreadful in general, but whatever life they've shown portends ill for the future.  For instance, of the four playing on the 10th, only JT has shown any kind of ability to entertain, and that was really just the once.

The second and perhaps larger problem is that it was far more fun watching the amateurs play than the pros.  I don't hold out much hope for this franchise, at least until Charlie Woods is old enough to play in it.

Riffing On Alan - Alas, I'm already fighting the clock., so some anaerobic blogging is just what the doctor ordered.  An Ask Alan fulfills that need perfectly, though I'll start in semi-serious mode.  Shipnuck has puzzled me for some time, I thought his biography of Phil pulled way too many punches, and his attitudes towards LIV have struck some odd notes.  On that theme, let me juxtapose two, non-contiguous Q&A's from this effort:

Given the tour’s limited resources, why give $15M to the semi-retired guy who is already a gazillionaire and then $28M more to the three guys (McIlroy, Spieth, Thomas) who constantly say it’s not about the money? Seems that PIP money would be better suited for the Korn Ferry Tour and securing the talent pipeline? @kylelabat

Well, Tiger Woods left a lot of money on the table when he spurned LIV Golf, and the Tour is using the Player Impact Program as a kind of installment plan to make him whole. In Year 1, the PIP was a fun talking point, and Phil and Tiger trading barbs on social media added an exclamation point to the experiment. Now the whole thing just feels gross. The PGA Tour’s strongest argument in differentiating itself from from the competition was that it’s a meritocracy and LIV’s guaranteed money is anathema to the culture of the sport. But now the Tour is giving away $100 million willy-nilly in a desperate attempt to buy the loyalty of its top players—how is this different than LIV’s signing bonuses? The PIP is money for nothing, and as this question suggests, could be better spent cultivating future stars.

Am I the only person counting down the days until LIV resumes? I have a hard time watching what the PGA Tour has become. #askalan @Joecattle101

Well, I am also looking forward to the LIV reboot, but that’s months away. We’re going to see a lot of Tiger in December, and then the Tour hits the ground running right after New Year’s with a stacked field on a wildly interesting course, Kapalua. The big-time tournaments just keep coming with the West Coast swing juiced by elevated events. We don’t know what the Tour has become yet; as with LIV, the 2023 season will be crucial for assessing a tweaked product. So don’t give up yet.

Let me see if I have this right.... Alan is bemoaning that the LIV threat has caused the PGA Tour to become more like LIV, which he characterizes as "just gross."  Yet, he can't contain his excitement for the resumption of LIV..... Must be great to be Alan and not be constrained by any requirement of consistency

Perhaps the most interesting part would be to explore what that questioner meant by "What the Tour has become", because if it's a gross-out, the tour with PReed, the shirtless Shark and Phil would seem to have the superior firepower.

Apparently there's a guy with Prez Cup fever:

Adam Svensson comes through with the victory! Svensson, Connors, Hadwin, Pendrith, Hughes…With the next Presidents Cup being in Canada, what is the maximum number of Canadians that could realistically be on that team? @HeavySvenB

The zealotry of Canadian golf fans never disappoints! Nobody anywhere else in the world is thinking ahead to the Presidents Cup in 2024, but I respect the angst baked into the question. All the fellas you mention here are fine players, and each of them could be in the mix when the International team comes together lo those many months from now. I say the more Canucks the better—it will give the home team more of an advantage and some identity to an event that still needs it.

I hear that Pfizer is working on a vaccine for that, one vaccine mandate we can all get behind.

Never heard of this, but it sounds pretty boss:

Is the Wishbone Brawl the best event in golf? #AskAlan @ElNino22

It has to be on the short list. I’m really excited to get to the second annual Sandbelt Invitational, to be played in Melbourne the week before Christmas; it appears to have some of the same freewheeling DNA as the Wishbone, and the playing fields are wondrous. But part of what makes the Wishbone so fun is how humble and welcoming Goat Hill is as the host venue. There’s just some secret sauce to the Brawl—in the last two years, both Fred Couples and Geoff Ogilvy have said that the event is as much fun as they’ve ever had on a golf course. Many of the spectators would agree. If you’re a golf fan in Southern California (or willing to travel), I would implore you to add the Wishbone to your bucket list.

I've got an OWGR item that will have to wait until tomorrow, though I'll use this one here just to be able to close that browser tab:

World Golf Ranking: Rahm, Rory, Fitzpatrick and Hatton are a weaker field than PGA’s snoozefest in Sea Island? @thomas_fabick

We had a long conversation on this topic in this week’s Fire Drill podcast, but succinctly: The
changes in the OWGR date to 2018 studies about how to modernize the mathematical formula that seeks to quantify the unknowable. In August 2021 the tweaks to the algorithm were announced, subject to a 12-month comment period. In August 2022, the new math became the law of the land. Folks affiliated with LIV Golf, the Asian Tour and the Euro Tour have all variously felt targeted by the changes that sought to make the OWGR more meritocratic. A crucial change was that the ranking eliminated the minimum number of points that had been allocated to various tours based on their historical strength. This has hit the Euro Tour hard as its diminished fields are no longer being artificially propped up, which led to Jon Rahm’s scathing comments at the tour’s season-ending event. The ranking has also become more biased in favor of full-field events. The thesis is sound: Given the depth in professional golf, it’s harder to beat 155 players than 50, no matter who they are. Dubai had more star power, but the winner in Sea Island had to fend off three times as many players, any of whom is capable of shooting 62 on any given day. I like the new ranking—it makes sense to me. And I love all the controversy it has created…yet another gift from the content gods.

Makes sense to me, as well.   Though I mostly wonder about the response the Spaniard and his Mrs. have received to that photo....

Why can’t caddies use pull carts? Is there any good argument besides tradition? @ALX_ACH

Optics. It would add some clutter in the fairways and around the greens, but more than that, carts would destroy caddies in the popular imagination as rugged, hard-living ruffians who do an honest day’s work. Optics is why the PGA Tour leadership has resisted rangefinders; these handy devices could speed up play but it’s an untraditional look that subverts the romance of the player-caddie strategizing and their old-school math.

Funny, but caddies in Scotland and Ireland have long used pushcarts, and I kinda hate it.  Yeah, it's the ultimate first-world shine, but it means the caddies sometimes have to take a different path, which affects the experience a bit (though I'm more sympathetic if they're double-bagging, which they never do in Scotland).

A shame he couldn't do more with this one, not that I remember who was who:

If you were going to compare prominent people in the landscape of professional golf to characters on The Sopranos, who would you choose? I’ll go first: Greg Norman is Richie Aprile. @ZitiDoggsGolf

Oh, man, one of my failings is that I never got that intoThe Sopranos. I need to binge it before I dare answer this question. But if you want me to do The Wire or Mad Men or Game of Thrones or Entourage, I’m game.

Kids, I have to leave you here.  We'll pick up the thread as the week progresses.... 

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