Tuesday Tidbits - Ryder Cup Preview Edition

As noted yesterday, with three of the four majors in the can, perhaps it's a felicitous time to take a look at those projected Ryder Cup rosters....

Team USA - Analyzing the U.S. roster is a relatively straight-forward undertaking:

It doesn't take a genius to see that the U.S. Ryder Cup squad will be loaded, at least loaded with guys that are good at the medal play variant of our game.

Surprises?  I certainly didn't expect Xander to be sitting quite so pretty, and the same about Max Homa, based on their recent form.  But I'm most surprised to see JT even hanging in the top twelve, given that I expected to see him next on a milk carton.

In terms of guys that can still claw their way into consideration, Rickie (currently No. 16), Tony Finau (18) and Sahith Theegala (20) come to mind, though that last one I can't imagine having an available chair when the music stops.

For those viewing this through a LIV-infused prism, the options there are to be found lodged in the 32nd and 33rd place, Phil and DJ, respectively.  The former will be the star witness at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, but won't be a factor in these discussions unless he does something miraculous at Hoylake.  DJ is an interesting case and his 2021 record will be cited, but odds are quite lengthy at this point and the Open Championship is setting up as his last best chance.

Perhaps the most interesting name on that list to me is Denny McCarthy.  He's not a guy that's been in a lot of Ryder Cup discussions and isn't up to the standards of those he'll be vying with for a Captain's pick, and yet....  History says that Captain Donald will set the course up the negate the American length advantage, and Denny is simply the best putter on Tour..... A useful skill I would think.  Further down the list is Brian Harmon who offers a similar skill set, though there's exactly a zero probability that Zach Johnson would be able to opt for both of those guys.

The roster will be loaded, as it almost always is.  But it's easy enough to see that those top guys aren't exactly bullet proof.  Scottie is putting like one of Jerry's kids and Xander and Max had pretty dreadful weeks in L.A. so I'd eschew the cockiness.

Team Euro Trash - Always a more complicated process because of its binary nature, but one begins with the Euro points list:

Kind of a dramatic fall-off in talent after that second guy, though it means very little in reality.  They now only take three from the Euro points list, and I would assume that by the time it matters that Yannick Paul will have regressed to his mean.  We used to get a couple of weak links from their utilization of the Euro points list, but that's unlikely to be the case this year.

That Euro team comes into clearer focus from the World points list:

I meant to take that down to 15th place, but my cropping skills have failed me.  There you'll find names like Alex Noren and Thomas Detry that could well play their way into a pick, and do not sell Adrian Meronk short.

It's not a roster tat will scare anyone, strong at the top, although only perhaps until you look at Rory's recent Ryder Cup results.  The key will probably be that middle tier of veterans not exactly killing it, names like Hatton, Rose and Lowry.  Feels like a movie we've seen before, where Justin Rose putts like Bobby Locke and the rest of us sit and wonder, "Who are these guys?".

Obviously, given how things played out in Europe, there's not a LIVster to be found, though it's equally unclear whether any of those octogenarians would be helpful.   We'll certainly revisit this after te Open Championship.

Today In Happy Talk - I guess we know more, although the specific language doesn't seem to add anything to our understanding of the Kabuki theater presentation ahead.  But it's amusing to see how this is played in the press.  For instance, this is the header at Golfweek:

Framework agreement leaks for PGA Tour partnership with DP World Tour, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund

Hmmmm, they've kept this pretty close to their chest, so who would do such a nasty to our heroes?  ESPN explains:

The five-page agreement signed by PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, DP World Tour CEO Keith Pelley and Public Investment Fund governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan to form a new entity that will align men's professional golf gives the PGA Tour "full decision-making authority with respect to all strategic and operational matters related to competition."

The "framework agreement" was signed May 30 and sent, along with other documents, to a Senate subcommittee looking into the alliance Monday ahead of a July 11 hearing in Washington.

OK, that's a little different....  They quite obviously want us to see this at this juncture, and here's the bit that they want repeated ad nauseum:

Under terms of the framework agreement, the PGA Tour will control the majority interest in the new entity, regardless of the size of PIF's investment. PIF will make an initial investment into NewCo and have the right of first refusal to make additional ones.

"The PGA Tour will at all times maintain a controlling voting interest, not withstanding any incremental investment by PIF or exercise of its rights of first refusal," the agreement says. "The PGA Tour parent organization will retain its current level of regulatory oversight of the game of golf with respect to the assets contributed by the PGA Tour where applicable (e.g., sanctioning of events, setting of competition rules and managing inside the ropes) but will conduct its commercial businesses through NewCo. PIF and the PGA Tour will cooperate in good faith and agree on the economics, valuation and governance terms for NewCo and PIF's investment in NewCo."

What could go wrong?  After all, we're dealing with stand-up people that settle their disputes in traditional ways, though said traditions date back to at least 1263....  the reference to good faith is, well, ironic, given that it's their faith that led fifteen of their citizens to book a one-way trip to the World Trade Center.

Care for some opaque leagalese?

PIF will contribute their golf-related investments and assets, including LIV, to NewCo along with a cash investment, in exchange for the issuance to PIF of an equity ownership interest in NewCo at a fair value mutually agreed by the parties. Following the contribution of assets into NewCo, NewCo shall assume all of the liabilities and obligations of the contributed assets, provided that each Party’s contributed businesses will be valued in their totality, taking into account all liabilities, commitments, contributions and obligations made or incurred by the respective prior owners, including in respect of player contracts and other working capital and operating expenses. In addition, the PIF will make a cash investment in NewCo for an incremental ownership in order to fund the growth of NewCo which will include a right of first refusal on capital raised by NewCo, provided that, for the avoidance of doubt, the PGA Tour will at all times maintain a controlling voting interest in NewCo and PIF will continue to hold a non-controlling voting interest, notwithstanding any incremental investment by PIF or exercise of its right of first refusal.

And what exactly compels Saudi Arabia to keep funding without additional equity?  Oh, Gee, I guess we'll just have to rely on that good faith....

They're being quite disingenuous on these related subjects:

LIV Golf’s future will be decided by the new entity’s board that will be controlled by a Tour majority.

Players will be returning to the various Tours, but it’s still unclear what must happen before they are once again eligible.

They may genuinely not know the answer to this, but it's also a red herring.  The first question you have to ask yourself is this.  Do we think the parties will ensure that DJ and Brooks have a place to play in 2024?  Given a DOJ antitrust review of the deal (and remember that the deal doesn't even yet exist, so no review can commence), I can't imagine anything happening this year, meaning that there's two alternatives for 2024:

1. LIV operates a full schedule of events, or;
2. The LIV defectors are welcomed back to the PGA Tour before a deal is finalized and approved by the Justice Department.

Do we care which?  Rory has told us that there will have to be penalties to the guys that left, though you might have noticed that Rory hasn't exactly had his finder on the pulse of these negotiations, so I suspect he'll cash a large Saudi check and shut the eff up.

 

If it weren't so depressing it would be pretty comical, presenting a "negotiated" deal and ignoring the quite obvious leverage being handed to the Saudis.  There is simply no way to ensure the continued flow of Saudi cash, and making themselves wholly dependent upon it almost ensures that these arrangements will be restructured down the road, presumably as Jay retires to sandy roads.

So, one last bit from yesterday's Tour Confidential, in which the writers contemplate Where's Waldo?

3. In an open letter that clocked in at more than 1,000 words, eight-time major winner Tom Watson had harsh words for the PGA Tour-Saudi merger. Watson is among a few legends of the game who have chimed in on golf’s mega-merger, so it begs the question: Why hasn’t Tiger Woods done so yet? Should he feel compelled to do so?

Zak: At first, I wondered the same thing. But now, no one looks smarter than Tiger for not talking. It’s mostly conjecture at this point. Even Jimmy Dunne looks a bit frantic for talking compared to, say, Ed Herlihy, who hasn’t muttered a word on the record. Tiger’s voice will come with plenty of weight when he does speak, but why speak when there’s still so much to be decided?

Sean, you ignorant slut!  Everything that matters has already been decided, apparently in Tiger's absence (we're at least left to presume that).  Whether that's because he was irrelevant or because he would have opposed it is just a silly guessing game.....

Sens: True that it’s too early for him to comment on the details of the merger, but not too early for him to ask pointed questions about it, or offer suggestions as to how he’d like to see it go. Also not too early for him to criticize the backroom nature of the negotiations. But his silence so far is also entirely on-brand. When it comes to weighing in on polemical issues, Woods has always been more of a follower than a bold-voiced leader. His voice carries weight when he does speak, but it’s rarely the first voice we hear.

Dethier: To Sens’ point, I don’t think Woods has ever really done much to suggest he’d speak out publicly on this issue from home right now. I know we’ve been eager to make sense of his role in the game once his playing career officially winds down, but he has never really said he wants to be involved in any public-facing day-to-day leadership of the PGA Tour. I have no doubt that he’d like the PGA Tour to survive, to strengthen, to remain the preeminent golf tour in the world. But until he sees clear value in speaking out I doubt he’ll feel any obligation to do so. Woods answers questions at press conferences when he’s playing or hosting golf tournaments. Outside of that, it’ll be interesting to see where he uses his voice going forward.

Like Rory, at this point the best spin you can put on Tiger's involvement is that he's a useful idiot, not some moral authority whe speaks from on high.  His contributions seem limited to selling out the Tour's rank-and-file and cashing large PIP checks, so we've got that going for us... Tiger takes care of Tiger, anything else is others projecting their beliefs onto him.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of - Typically attributed to Bogey in the Maltese Falcon, the origin is actually Shakespeare, which predates The Lido by centuries.  But the Keisers have recreated The Lido, and there's a fascinating interview up with Peter Flory, a man with quite the interesting hobby:

One of the most anticipated courses openings of recent years didn’t start with a golf architect’s vision or a developer’s financial plan. This project started with a video game created by a Chicago-based financial consultant and eager golf historian who dabbles at length in no-longer-existing golf courses as a hobby.

Peter Flory (@nle_golf on Twitter, with the handle standing for no-longer-existing courses) has never built a golf course, but he’s played plenty – his list of courses played is enough to send even a golf travel writer into fits of envy.

More importantly, he dreams of playing historically significant courses that have been lost over the decades, plowed under for redevelopment or, occasionally, simply abandoned. Flory is also one of the best hickory golfers in the country, collecting and often utilizing a vast store of antique clubs so that he can appreciate how classic courses played in the era in which they were built.

The 12th (foreground) and 4th greens.

There's many interesting lost courses, though likely none that were considered the best course in the world by credible sources such as Bernard Darwin. but that it started as a video game is just a priceless detail....

If this kind of thing is of interest, then you'll want to read the full interview.  As we've discussed previously, Mike Keiser the Elder had considered doing the recreation on what became Old Macdonald, but was talked out of it by Tom Doak because that sire actually offered enough interesting landforms, a decision with which I completely agree.  As much as we revere naturalism, The Lido was an entirely acritical construct, as an enormous amount of sand was moved in its construction.

This to me is the interesting stuff, though your mileage may vary:

How did you conduct your historical research?

This was primarily an old-fashioned research project, but it couldn’t have happened before the internet age. When I began the process, I decided to post my progress online on golfclubatlas.com (a forum for golf architecture). Doing so led to a lot of great discussion and critique on what I was doing, but it also triggered a barrage of inbound information from dozens of people who had unpublished photos, diagrams and other information on the original Lido.

I carefully mined every digitized golf periodical from 1914 to 1942, every newspaper article, and put in inquiries with historical societies and other archives. There were only a handful of publicly available images when I began, but by the end I had over 100 photos of the course including aerials, oblique aerials and ground-level photographs.

One of the most important developments was when Craig Disher (a golf and military photo historian) sent me something called an anaglyph, which is a stereoscopic image that can be viewed with traditional 3D glasses. He went to the National Archives and took high-resolution scans of overlapping aerial photographs of the Lido from a 1940 survey flight. By combining the images and color coding them, the resulting image allowed me to see the original course as if I were hovering 100 feet above it.

So, back to the importance of those video games:

What other technology was involved?

Aside from the research, the other key to this project was having a tool to translate the research into a model. I not only needed something that would allow me to accurately lay the course out in 2D using aerials, but that would also let me sculpt the contours of the golf course and add the visual elements – grasses, sand, pins, buildings, et cetera.

Strangely, the most effective program for doing this was a video game that contained a golf design component. The real benefit to building a digital 3D model was that I could perform calculations and triangulate features. It even allowed me to identify several ground-level photographs of the course by aligning background landmarks, like the giant LIDO sign that was next to the property. The final stage of the digital modeling process was to match the digital course to every known photograph by panning to the same angle and tweaking each contour until the model looked identical.

 

Once the digital model was complete, there was an additional technical challenge, and more technology that proved useful. The digital model looked good, but it was trapped in a program that wasn’t designed to output grading plans. Brian Zager, a local tech ninja and golf nut, figured out a way to extract the data from the program by automating the measurement tool in the game to take a measurement every few inches and record the height. That process produced the grading plans that Tom Doak and his team needed to get started.

That same data was also used to program GPS bulldozers, which essentially 3D-printed a rough draft of the golf course onto the ground at the site before the finer shaping was conducted. Brian Zager proved so useful in the process that he is now working for Tom Doak.

 

The Par-3 8th is in the foreground.

The biggest remaining question is when your humble blogger gets his butt out there.

I'll see you later in the week.