Thursday Themes - Big Cat Down Edition

A bit late to the keyboard due to a needy feline, but where to begin?  Oh yeah, kind of gave it away in the header....

El Gato Esta Muerto - The header is a tad curious, though:

Tiger Woods undergoes another surgery, casting doubt over his 2023 status

Anyone that watched the Masters would have been long on doubts already, but whatevs.

The chances of Tiger Woods making an appearance at the PGA Championship at Oak Hill next month, or any other event this year for that matter, just took a major hit.

Woods’ team announced on Twitter Wednesday that he underwent a “subtalar fusion procedure to his post-traumatic arthritis from his previous talus fracture.”

“It was performed by Dr. Martin O’Malley at HSS Sports Medicine Institute in New York City,” the statement reads. “He has determined the surgery to be successful. Tiger is currently recovering and looks forward to beginning his rehabilitation.”

According to the website FootcareMD.org, a subtalar fusion procedure takes the two bones forming the subtalar joint, the talus bone and calcaneus (heel) bone, and fuses them together. The joint allows for side-to-side movement of the foot and ankle, so fusing it means a recovering patient would require getting accustomed to walking on uneven surfaces.

After surgery, the patient’s foot must be non-weight-bearing for six weeks and in a boot or cast for 8-12 weeks.

HSS, eh?  Know it well, as I bought Employee No. 2 two new hips there....

After that Masters, exactly no one thought we'd see him in Rochester, but now The Riv '24 would seem the most likely bet for his next tee time.  Yanno, if there is a next time...

Via Alan Shipnuck, those desirous of a deep dive into a subtalar fusion can geek out in this Twitter thread. 

Dinah Esta Murto - Are they ever barking up the wrong tree:

With the Chevron Championship at its new venue, how will Dinah Shore's legacy continue in Texas?

That's easy, it won't.  The so-called Dinah legacy was very location specific, as I'm sure you can understand that the world's largest Lesbian rave is an awkward fit in Houston.

But what Beth Ann Nichols is implying is that the LPGA is trying to hold onto the history that it just abandoned, but life unfortunately does not work that way.  next thing you know they'll be telling us that there are more than two genders.....What?  With a straight face?  Hmmm...and they think we're the science deniers?

Unlike the big-boy tour, I have sympathy in that the LPGA didn't defenestrate Dinah because they no longer embraced their history.  No, the cause of this is to be found in Augusta GA, so we're trying to be supportive and all, but Dinah is Dead.

Every time Pat Bradley walked by the statue of Dinah Shore next to the 18th green at Mission Hills Country Club, she’d climb up on the little base and put her hand on Dinah’s arm and have a chat. Longtime Desert Sun golf writer Larry Bohannan recalled the scene as he considered the question: How should Shore’s legacy continue in Texas?

Bradley, like so many LPGA greats, was friends with Shore. The Hollywood superstar made such a tremendous impact on the tour in the 1970s and ’80s that they put her in the LPGA Hall of Fame as the only non-playing member.

But as the 52nd Chevron Championship, still known by many as “The Dinah,” leaves the Dinah Shore Tournament Course and heads to The Woodlands near Houston this week, it’s natural to wonder how Shore will fit in.

“You can’t create that,” said Bohannan of Bradley’s ritual, “that has to be something that’s organic.”

Here's a handy guide for you.  When it was the Kraft, we called it the Dinah.  When it was the Colgate, we called it the Dinah.  When it was the ANA......well, you know.  That's because it was still in it's home...  The Chevron?  Yeah, it's the Chevron.

And this bit on which I'm neutral:

Another burning question before this year’s Chevron: Will the champion’s leap, the most significant tradition (one might argue the LPGA’s only noteworthy tradition), carry on?

Tournament organizers told Golfweek there’s no expectation that a player will jump into the lake on the 18th next month at the Nicklaus Course at The Club at Carlton Woods, but should the mood strike, the championship team is making sure it will be safe.

An area of the lake at the 18th green is being dredged and netted to make sure it’s deep enough for a player and her caddie and family to take the plunge. The traditional robe and slippers will also be on standby, if needed.

Netted?  Those are alligator nets, so carpe diem. 

Though one former champ has strong feelings:

“Whoever wins this year needs to jump in and keep it going,” said Brittany Lincicome, a two-time champion at Mission Hills.

Methinks that since they've had to move on, that perhaps they should, yanno, move on....

Masters Detritus -  I know, short attention spans and all, but a couple of interesting bits have crossed my path.  The first is from grizzled vet Mike Bamberger who rarely fails to make us think, though I might have to pick a nit on his lede:

This year’s Masters lingers vividly in my northern reaches. Maybe you’re feeling the same thing. Such a residency is not a given. We are promised a Masters each April, not a memorable one. But this year’s tournament had all manner of plots and subplots through the week and by nightfall on Sunday the tournament had the winner it deserved, Jon Rahm.

Was this a memorable Masters?  I wouldn't think so, unless it's the dodged bullet angle, which I think will fade over time.

Mike has interesting comments about the lineage of Spanish golf that's worth your time, but for me the most interesting comments are about that guy:

Mickelson (as you probably know) is a three-time winner at Augusta. A winner at Augusta is an honorary member of the club. But Mickelson, because of his LIV ties, was dissuaded from playing in or even attending last year’s Masters. All that made his second-place finish this year, with a closing 65 and a birdie-birdie finish, even more remarkable. He wore his LIV Golf team hat into his post-round press conference on Sunday. Mickelson (you may not know) is the captain of the HyFlyers Golf Club. I’ve never seen a player wear a hat inside the press building at Augusta National. It does violate club tradition. But, you know: Phil.

I picked up on that as well.  There's always a green-jacketed attendant at such pressers and I wondered if he was asked and refused to remove his hat.  But, as Mike says, it's not done....

But Mike was just getting warmed up there:

Let’s consider Mickelson first. He won the PGA Championship at 50 in 2021, making him the oldest player to win a major. Now he’s 52. To shoot 8 under at 52 at Augusta is astounding.

Mickelson has been one of the best players in the game for more than 30 years. The longevity alone is mind-bending. For excellence over the years, the only golfers in his class are Snead, Nicklaus and Watson. Mickelson is in the pantheon. There has never been a golfer like him. He has a strong sense of impish fun. In recent years, in his public life, he has had a sort of makeover, from goofy Phil to bad-ass Phil. He was never simple Phil. He’s hard to get a handle on. Nobody can say, Oh, I know someone just like Phil. No such person exists.

But the way he turned his back on the PGA Tour, in the pursuit of a giant and guaranteed payday, it leaves you cold. Maybe I should say, it leaves me cold.

Mickelson owns his talent, his drive, his work ethic. Of course he does. But like all elite golfers, he needed stages to show off all that talent and ability. Enter the Southern California Golf Association, the USGA, the NCAA, the PGA of America, the R&A. Augusta National. The PGA Tour. There’s no way to measure what those institutions did for him. They made his golfing life possible.

I can understand that Mickelson felt frustrated by the piece of the pie he was getting from the PGA Tour’s purses. (You might reasonably ask, “But wasn’t he getting enough?” You have your answer and Phil has his.) I can understand he was frustrated that he felt ignored by various PGA Tour commissioners. But when he signed up for and recruited (per various credible reports) players for a professional golf tour that was a direct threat to the PGA Tour, the tour to which Rahm pledged his “fealty,” he showed, to me, an astonishing lack of gratitude and historical awareness and even I’m-in-the-pantheon responsibility.

People will disagree on that act of signing up for LIV, but there can't be much argument about the recruiting of others.  Not only did he publicly trash the place where he made his fortune (and where his alleged friends make their livings), but actively worked to destroy that entity.  

And Mike isn't moving on from this either:

So that gets us to the events on 15 with the Brooks Koepka-Gary Woodland-Danny Willett threesome during the first round of the 87th Masters. That event, and any others like it, represents a serious threat to the game, both in terms of what happened, and what it implies. I’m surprised the outrage has been so muted.

It seems obvious to me (and to everybody I have asked) that Koepka violated a fundamental rule on the par-5 hole after playing his second shot with a 5-iron.

His caddie, Ricky Elliott, clearly mouthed the word five twice to Gary Woodland’s caddie, Brennan Little, as they crossed paths in the fairway. You could see it on the broadcast. Elliott has almost an aggressive expression on his face as he says it the second time.

It’s disturbing because sharing what club a player hit is the quintessential example of giving advice. And on that shot? With a pond short of the green, a pond over the green and nothing but trouble left of the green? It’s one of the most challenging shots in tournament golf. The more information you have, the better. This is not idle chatter. This is inside information. It tilts the whole beautiful concept of the level playing field.

Whenever there’s a rules debacle in professional golf, look for motivation as you seek to understand it. Look for motivation, and look for opportunity. In this instance, if you give information, you are making a deposit, to get information later. Quid pro quo, tour-style. That is not elite professional golf. It’s revolting.

It doesn’t matter that it was Koepka’s caddie who mouthed five and not Koepka. (As for the five-finger wave from Koepka, to me he looked like he was taking off his glove and nothing more.) Per the rules, the caddie is an extension of the player. It doesn’t matter whether Woodland used the information. Had Little asked for information, that adds to the mess. A player gets two shots for asking and two shots for giving, solicited or unsolicited.

This was a really bad moment for all involved.  And Mike isn't remotely finished taking these guys to the woodshed:

And that is what is so troubling here. The tournament’s rules officials did not impose a two-shot penalty on Koepka. The available evidence shows he should have been penalized. Had there been some credible extenuating circumstance for why Elliott twice mouthed the word five, Augusta National’s rules and media officials would have relayed that information to the millions of fans around the world watching the tournament. They didn’t.

Anybody can make a logical and educated guess as to what happened, and that’s what this is. Despite the video evidence, Elliott and Koepka, when meeting with rules officials after the round, denied giving information. (That is, advice.) The officials, taking their cues from the club’s president in perpetuity, Bobby Jones, accepted their word.

“Following the completion of Brooks Koepka’s round, the committee questioned his caddie and others in the group about a possible incident on number fifteen,” Jim Hyler, the chair of the competition committees, said in a statement after the round. “All involved were adamant that no advice was given or requested. Consequently, the committee determined that there was no breach of the rules.”

But we all saw it!

That’s the challenge modern golf faces, as it starts (unfortunately) to resemble modern life. Traditional golf, Masters golf, was built on a foundation of do-the-right-thing. And, by the way, if you don’t, somebody—the guy you’re playing with, a spectator, a TV viewer–will call you out on it. Or your guilt will eat away at you and you’ll never make another cut, so that fear alone will get you to do the right thing. Players have cited that as a motivator over the years.

But over the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of this message, from player to official, and please pardon the vulgarity: You don’t have the balls to give me two shots, to call me a liar.

Was there an act of cheating?

You saw the clip.

Was there post-round lying? 

You read the statement.

It makes no sense because it makes no sense. 

Koepka also lied about it on camera.  The only actual excuse is that they do it all the time, but does that actually make you feel better?

remember how your humble blogger has ranted about the Tour's failure to disclose disciplinary actions?  Turns out they had good reason to do so....

But the miscreant is apparently still unclear as to what went down:

Brooks Koepka Is Still Pondering What Went Wrong Sunday at the Masters

 I think I could help him here.

"You kind of take some time to digest it all," Koepka said at the Grand, the site of the tournament that begins Friday. "Did a good of that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and just kind of relaxed and tried to think about why it happened, why I played bad on Sunday, or Saturday-Sunday.

"I’m always pretty honest with myself, and normally it goes on what I was thinking what I was doing. It was nice to get to the bottom of it.

"Look, you tell anybody you’re going to finish second in a major, especially where I was six months ago, a year ago, I’m not sure there, so I would have taken that, so it’s tough to really argue with it.

"Then reality, expectations and all that stuff gets thrown in there. But it was a good, solid week and I can’t really complain. Gave myself a chance to win, and that’s all you can ask for every time you tee it up."

Gee, if only there were a golf tour where you could get used to having to play that fourth round...

Though maybe the better question is whether he's figured ut what went wrong at Kiawah.

Webs, Tangled -  Did someone mention miscreants?  Remember PReed's burner Twitter account, the infamous UseGolfFacts account that popped up in Paris 2018 and at other times when you-know-who was under assault?

No sport on earth does worst-kept secrets quite like golf. The NBA gives it a run for its money and God only knows what happens in professional curling, but nothing breeds whispers, rumor and hearsay quite like a sport where you literally have to whisper. Of all of golf’s unspoken certainties, however, none has been more obvious (or hilarious) in recent years than the identity of the infamous @useGolfFACTS Twitter admin.

Our big brothers at Golf Digest have dug deep into the suspiciously pro-Patrick Reed Twitter account in the past, and while no official conclusions were reached (Pat doesn’t need another lawsuit on his hands, let’s be honest), the overwhelming consensus is that the mastermind behind @useGolfFACTS is none other than Reed's wife Justine.

This has been neither confirmed nor denied by the Reeds, but in the wee hours of Monday morning we got the closest thing to an admission yet when a joke about Justine’s, um, specific taste in sporting-event seating prompted this instantly iconic reply: 

These look like nice seats to me! pic.twitter.com/l0hO5GDbrH

— GolfFACTS (@useGolfFACTS) April 17, 2023

While I'm not exactly sure why this is incriminating, I also don't think control of the account was ever in doubt.  But here's the background:

The tweet by No Laying Up’s Tron Carter specifically references Justine Reed’s outburst following a 2018 Boston Red Sox game, in which she characterized their premium baseline seats as the “line-drive section” and slammed the PGA Tour for providing the tickets (for the record, all 30 MLB teams instituted netting in 2018). With Patrick Reed seen taking in an Australian rules football game ahead of LIV Golf’s Adelaide stop this week, the waters were ripe for fishing and @useGolfFACTS—either unthinkingly or simply because they do not care anymore—gobbled up the bait.

Is Justine controlling that Twitter account?  Probably.  Are these two entitled jerks that we're well rid of?  Certainly!

I've got more of everything but time, including a Shipnuck mailbag of juicy takes.  I'll try to force myself to the keyboard tomorrow.