Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Midweek Musings

A few bits we need to catch up on, then who knows where the currents will take us....

Another Elevated Event - I'm reminded of this Churchill quote about the U.S.:

Winston Churchill once famously observed that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.

You'll understand why Winnie popped into mind as relates the this news:

At long last, a mixed-team event will return to the LPGA and PGA Tour schedules, with the QBE Shootout adopting the format beginning in 2023, the Associated Press has reported. The AP ‘s Doug
Ferguson notes that players were informed of the change at a meeting last week in the Bahamas during the Hero World Challenge.

John Daly and Laura Davies won the final staging of the JCPenney Classic at Innisbrook in 1999, the most recent mixed-team event that was sponsored by the LPGA and PGA Tour. Brittany Lincicome remembers it well. She grew up not far from Palm Harbor, Florida, and worked as a standard-bearer at the event from ages 12 to 16.

This year, both Nelly Korda and Lexi Thompson are participating in the QBE at Tiburon Golf Club in Naples, Florida, site of the LPGA’s season-ending CME Group Tour Championship. The purse this week is $3.8 million, with each team splitting the $950,000 winner’s check. There are 24 players in the field.

The obvious reaction, as captured in that quote above, is what took them so bloody long.  Obviously it would be better to do this during the season, but that triggers all sorts of FedEx Cup issues, maybe the singular would be more apt, given that the guys just won't show up without them.  

So, if you're going to diss the ladies and only hook up (perhaps not the best choice of terms) with them in the Silly Season, couldn't you have defused this minor issue by doing it five years ago?

But, while that JC Penny event had some history to it, at also had the one regrettable instance of the patriarchy inflicting emotional harm among those most vulnerable.  It's actually hinted at here, but without the requisite photo:

The history of the mixed-team event dates back to 1960 with the Haig & Haig Scotch Foursome. The great Mickey Wright won it with Dave Ragan in both ’61 and ’63. Notable winners of the JCPenney include Curtis Strange/Nancy Lopez (1980), Tom Kite/Beth Daniel (1981) and Fred Couples/Jan Stephenson (1983). Daniel also won it twice with Davis Love III (1990 and 1995).

Kelli Kuehne made a memorable pro debut at the 1996 version at Innisbrook’s Copperhead Course when she paired with Tiger Woods (in matching red and black Nike outfits).

It was those very matching red-and-black outfits that was so triggering:


It might have been appropriate to put Tiger and his partner in matching outfits, had Nike actually made women's golf clothing.  As it was, we can only wonder why they hate women so....

Doug Ferguson, who broke the news, had this on the timing:

The PGA Tour had been working on converting the World Cup of Golf into a mixed-team event, but progress was slowed when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.

Yeah, you mean that's the excuse they gave the ladies....  Of course, the next question is blindingly obvious, who will play?

Money will be an incentive for LPGA players. The key is how many top PGA Tour players are interested, though not many of them play now in the QBE Shootout. The field of 12 teams this year has nine of the top 50. Max Homa at No. 16 is the highest-ranked player.

Participation of top players is what contributed to the demise of the JC Penney Classic.

Jay will somehow have to produce a credible coterie of his guys.  Though that's harder given how many events they will now be required to play during the January-Augusta season, though we still don't know what he intends for that Fall period.

Higgs In Full -  Harry has always seemed an engaging sort, as long as he keeps his shirt on, that is.  He had some recent comments on a podcast that I think are worth considering, first on the recent changes:

“I think the Tour is doing a better job,” he said.

Higgs’ comments came on the heels of a host of changes made by the Tour and go in effect next
month. In short, 20 players will be defined as “top players;” the device in which the Tour will define those players will be the Player Impact Program, and it will receive a $100 million purse to reward those players; and the 20 players will play in 12 so-called “elevated events” — with purses that have increased to between $15 million and $20 million — the four majors, the Players Championship and three other tournaments, for a 20-event schedule.

“Basically those events need to generate a s**t ton of revenue to offset the cost of pumping money into purses, pumping money into bonuses,” said Higgs, who last season lost his Tour card, but will still play in some events. “If those events generate a ton of revenue, more than what we are putting into every pool, with purses, bonuses, all this stuff, all the money that is being shelled out, then we’re cool, we’re fine. We’re going to be just great. Every event is going to continue to run.”

Say what?  If I understand Harry, these events have to generate enough additional revenue to justify the increased purses AND the PIP bonuses?  Is that a reasonable expectation, given that these events already had the strongest fields?  Given that the rights fees are a done deal, how much additional revenue can they generate from tickets, concessions and merchandise?

But that last sentence is really curious, no?  If these elevate events "work" then the non-elevated events will necessarily be fine?  That seems odd logic to this observer and I would posit that the nice folks at Honda seem to agree with my take.

But his logic gets even more curious:

And if they don’t ‘hit?’ Higgs believed the Tour would consolidate its money into just the aforementioned 20 events.

“If they don’t generate the revenue we think, or we’re hoping, then there is no way that there is anything other than a 20-event PGA Tour schedule starting probably year 2031,” he said on the podcast. “And then the rest of the events kind of, I would imagine, mix in with European Tour and Korn Ferry Tour, and there’s some kind of hybrid tour that’s just underneath that that feeds X amount of players into the big tour every year. And whatever number that may be, who knows.”

 Does he know that the sponsors get a vote?

What's interesting to me is that that 20-event schedule sounds very much like what the Tour should have been all along.  The best players won't play any more than that, so they've been peddling inferior product for a long time.  I always anticipate sponsor pushback and desertion, though they do seem to keep finding willing suckers.

I have no problem with Tour running additional events that allow players to enhance their status, though the branding thereof gets problematic.  In fact, I liked the old Fall Finish which served exactly that purpose, and showed us Tour-level talent fighting for their professional futures.  Harry makes exactly that case:

“So if we got a … elevated schedule and the lesser ones are not elevated, but if you play good golf in those, you can get into the elevated ones, that’s awesome. That’s something I’m sure you would watch, I’m sure almost every listener would love to watch and follow along. But they make it too f***ing hard to follow along. I don’t trust them to tell the story the way that it should be. I cannot wait to watch — I hope I’m not playing in it — I cannot wait to watch Q School next year. To just see the difference in like the top five guys — the top five finishers get to the PGA Tour. That adds a zero to every check that they make for the next year. It’s a f***ing zero. It adds a zero. And I don’t trust any of them to portray to me in the appropriate way to captivate me to stay and watch for four days. I just don’t trust them to tell the story the way that it should be.

That should be compelling (and, indeed, I thought it was), but the reality is that, absent prominent players, no one will watch (heck, not too many watch even when the alphas are playing).  

Before we move on from Harry, he took some potshots and some of our favorite punching bags:

“I want to be kind in the way that I say this because I have played on Tour for now this is my fourth year, I see the amount of work that goes into showing us play golf, and it is ridiculous,” Higgs said on the podcast. “And I really, really appreciate all the work that they all go through to do that. But at the end of the day, they do a s**t, s**t job of telling the story of what’s going on.

Really, what could be kinder than telling folks that they do a s**t job?  Strike that, telling them they do a s**t, s**t job?  Mind you, I completely agree...

The best part is he names names:

“Well, it’s like, I didn’t particularly care to turn on my TV and listen to Nick Faldo,” he said on the podcast. [Faldo, CBS’ main analyst, retired from broadcasting this and has been replaced by Trevor Immelman.] “I don’t really know him that well. I’m sure he’s a decent guy. I didn’t particularly care. The reason I didn’t particularly care is I never saw the man. Like, he’s there Wednesday to Sunday. Just come out on the driving range. Now whether people talk to you or not, who knows. But listen to what’s going on. Trevor Immelman is taking his place — I see the man everywhere.”

 Don't forget the marbles in his mouth....

Calling out Faldo is fine, your humble blogger has never had a good word for the man.  But how is it that Harry is only tacking Sir Mumbles to task after he's left the booth for good?  

Admittedly, some of this is generational, as Trevor is far closer in age to these guys than Faldo is.  But I'm not sure this is the objective:

“Everywhere. I think he’s going to do a great job,” Higgs said. “Colt [Knost, a CBS analyst], obviously he’s easy. Colt is everywhere. And Colt has the relationship with a lot of the current top-level guys. And even some of the not-so top-level guys. He has a relationship with them. It’s going to be easy for him to tell the story.

“Now when it comes to n**-cutting time and the story needs to be told, everybody needs to stop talking and let Colt talk. Because he’s the one that has the story. Just stop. Just stop talking. We’re going to listen to Colt for an hour, for the end, because Harry is about to win, and Colt knows him really well. Or whomever it may be.

“Any time one of those Presidents Cup guys from the International team is about to win this next year, Immelman should be the only one talking for an hour. Because he has all the detail. He spent two years cultivating relationships with those guys. And then a very, very spirited week with them. He knows those guys. Everybody stop talking. Let’s listen to Trevor.”

I don't think you need a personal relationship with each player to call a golf tournament.  In fact, it would raise issues.... 

But, really, all I want CBS to do is show some actual golf and shut the eff up.  

OWGR, A Deep(er) Dive - Your humble blogger's mind keeps drifting back to that Tiger presser at Albany, which I found to be an unmitigated disaster.  I've never been the man's biggest fan on a personal basis, but the praise for his candor seems really inapt, given the whopper he told about Tour finances.  Pro tip:  Any time you lose a fact check to Phil, you effed up big time... Totally an unforced error.

But his comments on the OWGR were equally bewildering, maybe more so.  I think he's dead-ass wrong on the merits of his argument (which mirrors Jon Rahm's comments from Dubai), which I'll get to in a minute, but which casts Tiger in an unflattering, elitist posture.  He seems to think only the very top players matter, which is quite strange given that elsewhere in his comments he articulates the need to allow new talent to emerge....

It's also just bizarre in the context of the LIV threat.  The Tour runs mostly full-field events, and that's an obvious distinction with LIV.  We'll get to the merits in a sec, but why is Tiger arguing on LIVs behalf?  Is a little message consistency too much to expect?  Because the OWGR fight is a two-step process.  I don't think that a Tour featuring 48-player field in 54-hole events should get OWGR points, though I suppose reasonable folks could differ.  But even if the good guys lose on that one, that only raises the secondary issue, which is how their fields should be rated ona relative basis.

I don't know Joseph LaMagna, but he's written the definitive takedown of Tiger and Rahm's position:

Up until a couple of months ago, the system ranked fields mostly based on how many top players were in the field. The system also provided some tournaments with Minimum Point Totals, which boosted the points players received in many tournaments in Asia and in Europe.

Some people didn’t like this system.

They argued that the system was biased towards tours like the European Tour and the Japan Tour. They argued that if a purer system existed, one that thoroughly evaluated the entirety of a field and did not provide points floors to tournaments, the Official World Golf Rankings would more accurately reflect golf performance around the globe. They looked at leaderboards and realized that many non-PGA Tour players, whose world rankings were propped up by playing non-PGA Tour events, tended to finish near the bottom of tournaments like the World Golf Championships.

Yeah, we all kinda noticed that....as well as this:

Rahm voiced his displeasure in advance of last week’s DP World Tour Championship, a 50-person field that included seven of the Top 25 players in the world by OWGR. The PGA Tour’s RSM Classic, on the other hand, had 155 players and included zero of the Top 25 players in the world. Yet, the RSM Classic delegated significantly more points to its winner than the DP World Tour Championship delegated.

While there are some legitimate criticisms with respect to the new OWGR methodology, overall the system is doing a fine job at evaluating performance and assigning points values across tours. The RSM Classic had depth in talent. It bears mentioning that in the DP World Tour Championship, five of the seven aforementioned Top 25 OWGR players finished in the top six of the tournament. And Jon Rahm won. That’s pretty vindicating of the new system.

The new system said, “Hey, this field isn’t very deep and there are only fifty players. Many of these names are not that difficult for a Top 25 ranked player to beat.” And then four days later, the leaderboard agreed.

That's a pretty big tell.

And this one is even bigger:

Because:

If you’re trying to prove you have strong, deep fields, “Mr. Dawson, Dustin Johnson finishes in the Top 5 in all of our tournaments” isn’t a line I would have included!

Anyway, is the new Official World Golf Rankings system good? Depends on what you think the OWGR should represent.

If you think the OWGR should be a strict representation of exactly how each player stacks up globally, then the new system is a dramatic improvement upon the previous system.

There were other howlers in that letter, in which they cite wins and second places in majors without detailing when those occurred.  I know you have King Louis and he's won a major, but that was rather a long time ago and shall we discuss all that he's won since then?  We just did...

The most important realization is how bad the strength of field metrics were and how long it took to change them.  It may be that this revision doesn't get the balance quite right, but at least it's attempting to accommodate the depth of field.

This would also seem to be a subject that Tiger specifically should stay off, given his obvious conflict of interest as relates to the hero.  As a matter of OWGR hygiene. twenty player fields shouldn't ever get OWGR points, for the obvious reason that its' an unconscionable handout to the have of the world:

Let me just post this involving Jordan and JT:

In a tweet posted by @flushingitgolf, it read: "Spieth’s last again at the Hero and will get 2.0886 OWGR points for his effort. Players need to come 3rd in the Indonesian Masters this week to get that many. The new system is going to crush the chances of “international” players getting into majors and it’s completely unfair."

In response, Thomas gave a straight up answer, with the two-time Major winner stating: "An event with 15ish (sorry not sure the exact number) of the top 20 in the world? It’s all about the quality of the field. The new system is hurting events like this more than it does that. Like anything in golf, play well enough in big events and you’ll be rewarded."

As with Tiger's comments, this is both wrong on the merits and wrong in the context of the LIV battle.

the awarding of OWGR points for this exhibition just makes it harder for those slugging it out on the ancillary tours to qualify for those big events.  It's little more than a protection racket for those who already have status, just as the WGCs are.  This is exactly what's wrong with the LIV model, it's just that the Tour's alpha think they're entitles to a LIV-like environment, just one without that pesky Saudi blood money.

It's just not a good look for these guys...

I'll just leave you with this comedy gold.  We've seen Phil and Patrick, among others, hide behind their wives skirts, always quite a manly look.  But what to make of this one?

Just a reminder of Ashley's...well, let's go with Ashley's assets:


To the extent Pat uses Ashley for cover, I wouldn't expect that it's her skirt behind which we'll find him...

That was great, Ashley.  Now do Phil!

This actually might be a tad more significant than my snark implies.  I'm always happy for an excuse to run that photo, but Tiger and Perez go way back in Southern California amateur golf circles.  For Pat to allow her to call out Tiger seems to indicate that everyone is going to the mattresses, so should be fun blogging in 2023.  Because, it's not like she's wrong that there's never been any accounting of that accident...

That'll have to suffice for now.  But we'll have more down the road, especially since I didn't get to The Match preview as intended..

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