Friday, September 8, 2023

Your Friday Frisson - Dead Season Edition

Not much going on in our little fishbowl, so we'll just amuse ourselves with a handful of bits, then I'll allow you to get your weekend started.

Ryder Cup Jaw-Jaw - Three weeks from today you'll awaken to balls in the air at Marco Simone, so still one more cup before the biggie.  Padraig Harrington is one of those guys born without a filter, so what's he got to say?

European Ryder Cup team is ‘back,’ Padraig Harrington proclaims. He didn’t stop there

Why, Paddy, where had it gone?  Not to Whistling Straits, obviously.... This was a thing, though not really much of one:

The Ryder Cup is always about that, too — looking forward by looking back. It’s why Harrington has been such an interesting figure in 2023. He was concurrently the most recent European captain, offering advice to this year’s man in charge, Luke Donald, but also a legitimate contender for a captain’s pick at the ripe old age of 52.

It was fun to speculate upon, but was never going to actually happen, as it would have been quite the capitulation.

For starters, he thinks Team Europe is back. Back from wherever they were two years ago. “I think we’re back,” Harrington said at this week’s Irish Open. “I believe we’re back to the ’80s, the ’70s
where our top players are actually the best players in the world. So I think the team is very strong. I think they’re very much in form.”

He’s not wrong about that. It doesn’t matter which ranking system you fancy — five of the 10 or 12 best players on the planet will wear the blue and yellow for Europe later this month. Then there’s Matt Fitzpatrick and Justin Rose, who would be just on the outskirts of the world top 10. Looking back, Harrington would go on to say, it seemed like Europe was on a “turndown” and Team USA, in that moment, was on the upswing. There’s ebb and flow to these RC teams, Harrington thinks. And he really likes where Europe is at.

I get the renewed optimism, as their team certainly looks far stronger than we could have imagined just a few months ago.  However, Sean Zak's citation of five is a bit suspect, especially since he seems to excluded Matt Fitzpatrick who is somehow still the 8th ranked player in the world despite having done virtually nothing since The Country Club (or is it that he's done exactly nothing except AT The Country Club).

What Europe does have is three studs currently sitting at Nos. 2-4 in the OWGR, though one of those is as soft as a marshmallow.   Then you get the next tier, Matt, Tommy Lad and Tyrell Hatton, and certainly there's reason to take those guys seriously in this event, resulting in a prototypically top-heavy team.  

What's missing are the depth pieces, the grizzled veterans of middling capability that don capes and play out of their gourds.  I'm thinking here of Westwood, Poulter and Garcia, guys that struggle with their putters on a week-to-week basis, yet show up every other year and putt like Bobby Locke in this event.

I guess we could put Shane Lowry and Justin Rose in that category, but we'll have the pleasure of seeing how guys like Robert McIntyre, Sepp Straka and (most intriguingly) Ludvig Aberg respond to this unique pressure (and how Luke uses them).

Playing the role of Fred Couple, Paddy defends a pick that could determine Luke Donald's legacy:

He also thinks any consternation around Shane Lowry’s involvement is misplaced.

“It’s strange seeing some of the part-time people who aren’t in the know saying maybe somebody else should have gotten picked, and they might have been named Shane,” Harrington said. “I’m going, ‘It’s not even close.’ If we were playing a small tournament in the middle of nowhere, maybe Shane wouldn’t be the right pick, but when it comes to the Ryder Cup, I definitely can trust in him.

“He is very good with the rest of the team. There’s no doubt about it. He can partner up. He can play foursomes and four-ball. In order to play foursomes and four-ball, you need to be a good ball striker, and that’s what Shane is.”

Is or was?  Portrush was four years ago and he's not done much since then (currently 37th in the OWGR), but they seem to make these picks work, especially in their home games.

Of course, there's the risk of Paddy over-interpreting the fact that Shane was one of the few guys that showed for his Captain:

Lowry was one of the few bright lights that shined during that fateful captaincy for Harrington at Whistling Straits. His record that week reads 1-2-0, but it was his putt on the 18th hole that flipped a match late Saturday afternoon and gave the Euros some sense of optimism. That is, of course, to say nothing of the wicked animated reaction he gave when his match-winning putt dropped.

Shane, Come Back! 

This guy had a Tweet up wishing the European team well, though his reactions are easy enough to understand:

The surprise is in that he admits to being angry, as the Euro team is good at the message discipline side of things....

Dylan Dethier doesn't go into the details of how frustrating this was for Meronk, because up until last weekend's Euro event he was poised to automatically qualify on the European Points List.  With a high finish, Mathew Fitzpatrick moved past him for the last spot, freeing Donald to take Ludvig Aberg and one of the twins:

The final three picks likely earned their stripes via recent form.

Sepp Straka won the John Deere Classic, flew to England and finished T2 at the Open.

Ludvig Aberg’s talent is undeniable but given he was playing college golf just a few months ago his prospects of making the team were uncertain — at least until a few weeks ago. He finished T14 at the Wyndham Championship, T4 at the Czech Masters and then, if anyone else needed convincing, won the Omega European Masters.

Finally there was Nicolai Højgaard, the Danish 22-year-old with a stellar DP World Tour resume and enough success on the PGA Tour to turn heads. His spot was hardly secure, either. But then he followed Aberg’s path with a T14 at the Wyndham, a third-place finish at the Czech Masters and a T5 result in Switzerland.

That left Meronk on the outside looking in.

Despite a win and second in the last two Italian Opens played at Marco Simone.....  When you leave yourself needing that last Captain's pick, you can't really whine when it doesn't come through.  Just ask Keegan....

But there's a laugh to be found:

Meronk added that from what he can tell, Polish fans “didn’t take it well.” Some had already bought tickets to watch their countryman represent them in Rome.

“They probably are going to go regardless, but, yeah, they were not happy,” he added. There was a resignation in those final words; it must be tough knowing that despite his omission, the Ryder Cup will go on.

Polish golf fans?  I assume he's speaking of both of them....

There's some interesting background on the young man here, but the header is quite silly:

This pro could play for either Ryder Cup team. Here’s why he chose Europe

Yeah, that's quite the mystery, isn't it?

And not particularly fair to him, because he's been consistent in his affiliation.  But first, the background on how this came about:

Straka wasn’t born in Aiken or Auburn or Atlanta but roughly 5,000 miles away in Austria, in the capital city of Vienna. His mother, Mary, who hails from Valdosta, Ga., had moved to the land of
Mozart several years earlier to be close to her boyfriend, according to a first-person account Straka provided Golf Digest. When that relationship ended, Mary, who loved golf, stayed in Vienna and landed a job at a golf-course pro shop. One day, in walked a golf-course architect named Peter Straka, looking for a new golf glove. As the story goes, he also found the woman who would become his wife and, on May 1, 1993, the mother of their fraternal twin boys, Josef and Sam.

Josef, who went by Sepp, and Sam took to golf and quickly shot up the Austrian junior ranks, earning a place on the Austrian national junior team. Sam showed more promise but both boys could play. Over time, though, Mary longed for home and her American family. When Sepp and Sam were 14, she and her sons moved back to Valdosta, a town of 50,000 about 20 miles north of the Florida border. Sepp and Sam became stars on the Lowndes High School golf team, and, in 2010, signed letters of intent to play at the University of Georgia. Sam was the real prize for the Bulldogs but Sepp was a nice bonus.

So, glove at first sight?

But let's not be lumping him in with this bad boy:

The allegiance banter was all in good fun, but it does raise an interesting question: Could Straka, if he felt so inclined, shift his loyalty to the U.S. with the hopes of playing on the U.S. Ryder Cup team? The short answer is yes — because his mother is American, he carries a U.S. passport and has U.S. citizenship, which means he would be eligible for the U.S. team — but if he had wanted to make a run at Zach Johnson’s squad, Straka would have needed to start the process long before this year.

Under the International Golf Federation’s nationality policy, if a player represents a county in an international competition, he or she must wait a minimum of four years to play in another international event under a different flag, a DP World Tour spokesperson confirmed to GOLF.com. The spokesperson added: “The best example of that was Rory Sabbatini who represented South Africa in team competition (World Cup/Presidents Cup) in years gone by, but then, because he hadn’t played in them for so long, was able to represent Slovakia in the 2020 Olympics.” (Sabbatini won silver for the Slovaks.)

Greatest Slovakian golfer ever.....

My quibble wit header I assume to be obvious to all.  While Straka could change his affiliation and qualify for the U.S. team in the future, there's no way he could have played for the U.S. team, still being Sepp Straka.  He's currently the 23rd ranked player in the OWGR, so he's not that far off and could still be a factor in Rome, but the U.S. is simply too deep fr him to have garnered any consideration.

LIV/PIF Jaw-Jaw -  Very quite on that front, which one expects to continue through the Ryder Cup.  This I don't take very seriously:

The United States Senate will host another public hearing regarding the PGA Tour’s proposed deal with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

The meeting, announced Wednesday and scheduled for Sept. 13, comes after PIF governor Yasir
Al-Rumayyan’s repeated evasions to testify before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The hearing is expected to focus on PIF’s investments in the United States.

In a letter made public last month, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal of the PSI pushed back on Al-Rumayyan’s claim that he qualifies as an “inappropriate witness.” According to Blumenthal, Al-Rumayyan and his counsel have argued he is a “minister bound by the Kingdom’s laws regarding the confidentiality of certain information” and that the subcommittee’s request for documents from PIF raises significant legal considerations due to diplomatic immunity. However, as Blumenthal notes, this is the same argument that Al-Rumayyan unsuccessfully made in the PGA Tour’s countersuit against LIV Golf. In February, federal magistrate judge Susan van Keulen rejected LIV’s arguments that the PIF and Al-Rumayyan were protected by sovereign immunity laws because Al-Rumayan’s conduct “falls within the commercial activity exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.”

Al-Rumayyan is part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s inner circle and considered the mastermind of the Golf Saudi and LIV Golf projects. It was Al-Rumayyan who brokered a framework agreement with PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and board members Jimmy Dunne and Ed Herlihy, a deal that paused a contentious year-long battle in the professional game and ended litigation between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour. He also appeared with Monahan on CNBC in a televised interview to announce the proposed deal.

The Senate can't do much more than hold hearings, and I doubt they can compel Al-Rumayyan's appearance.  Though it is interesting to see this being pushed by a Democrat, as the politics of it all have certainly been scrambled.

Any governmental action would, i think, have to come from the Justice Department, which fortunately hasn't been politicized in the last few years....  Take a moment to mop up that spit take.  I tend towards the cynical, so I assume that any need for relief on oil prices heading into the 2024 election will result in an extremely conciliatory Justice Department, but time will tell.

If there's one guy who might want to stay away from this subject, it's the world's foremost useful idiot, yet here he goes blathering on again:

Rory McIlroy sees a clear difference between Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and its golf investment, LIV Golf. He is no fan of the latter, but acknowledges the former’s foray into major sports around the world—and its desire to be further involved in pro golf via a framework deal with the PGA Tour.

That was the takeaway from a chat the Northern Irish star had with Golf Weekly’s Off The Ball podcast this week at the Irish Open at the K Club. 

I'm old enough to remember when Rory was uncomfortable with the source of the money, which is, checking notes, is and has always been that PIF.

Here he makes a fine argument, one I expected to hear back in 2022:

The four-time major winner said he felt the PIF had been collaborative with sports it has backed, notably in soccer. The PIF also has invested in the famed English Premier League club Newcastle United, as well as starting the Saudi Pro League that has signed megastars Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Karim Benzema. PIF also has ties with Formula 1 and mixed martial arts.

“The only thing I would say about the PIF investments in other sports is that they went in and played with the ecosystems of those other sports,” McIlroy said. “They didn’t try to buy F1, they didn’t try to buy the [English] Premier League. Yes, they bought a Premier League football club in Newcastle, and it’s worked out really well for them.”


McIlroy said the hoped a similar structure would be part of the framework agreement being negotiated between the PGA Tour and the PIF. The framework agreement proposes the PIF be a minority investment in a new, for-profit entity that the PGA Tour would control operationally. The two sides have under Dec. 31 to work out a more permanent arrangement

“The way I’ve looked at it is if the PIF are really interested in golf and they want to get in the system, at least if we provide them with a pathway to play within the system where they are not taking over the sport,” McIlroy said.

Except that that isn't the deal being structured.... The actual deal (notwithstanding that term sheet bereft of terms) is one that gives them a pathway to "taking over the sport", and your leadership is being completely disingenuous as to the inevitable consequences of such a deal.

More importantly, you speak of the golf ecosystem, but ignore that the problem is that your peeps and you won't play for the paltry sums said ecosystem can support.... So, thanks for nothing.

One last sound bite:

“It neutralizes any threat of LIV becoming something that it hopefully shouldn’t become. And they play within the boundaries that are set within our sport, and we all go from there.”

Have you spoken to Jay Monahan lately?  Because Rory and I seem to be the last two people on the planet who don't the Saudis to take over our, but only one of us seems to understand what's happening.

Rory's thoughts are no longer of much interest.  But, when the PIF funds a massive endowment for those terrific peni that stayed loyal to the PGA Tour, will Rory cash his check?   

This isn't a perfect fit, but this Q&A from Monday's Tour Confidential panel abuts this subject, as you'll see:

6. This weekend marked the first time we haven’t had a PGA Tour event in, well, a long time. Now that we’ve had some time to digest the 2022-23 season, what was your most memorable moment? And what specific moment didn’t receive as much credit as it should have at the time?

Zak: Most memorable moment will be the morning of Tuesday at the Canadian Open, when CNBC reported a merger between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Rarely have we ever seen breaking news that was so shocking and kept so well under wraps. And thanks to investigations and senate hearings and still pending lawsuits, we continue to learn more and more about it.

The specific moment that will never be appreciated as much as it should have was the half of an hour late in the afternoon Sunday at the Masters where we had to seriously consider Phil Mickelson as the clubhouse leader who might have to get ready for a playoff. That final round 65 he shot this year at Augusta was one of the most underrated rounds of the entire golf year. How many shots do you remember from it?

Sens: That merger announcement, no doubt. An about-face so stunning, a lot of people mistook it at first for a spoof. If it weren’t for the congressional inquiries it has triggered, I might still think it was an Onion headline.

Phil’s Augusta round is a great call. I might also add the revival of Brooks Koepka. For all the press it got, it’s still hard to overstate what a dramatic turnabout that was. His competitive obituary had essentially been written. Conventional wisdom was that he was done. He’d cashed in with Saudis and given up his claim to alpha bad-boy status. Those themes were all further underscored by the Full Swing documentary, which presented Koepka as something of a sad-sack, nursing his injuries and regrets, resigned to the fact that he could no longer compete at the highest level. Then came the Masters and the PGA.

Marksbury: Wow, those are some great calls. Tough to top. I’ll throw my hat in the ring with a storyline: Rickie’s resurgence. After he ended his slump with a win at the Rocket Mortgage and then co-led the U.S. Open through three rounds, I truly thought it was his time. I think every golf fan wants to see Rickie win a major. And when he didn’t, he displayed the same amount of graciousness that he always does, answering questions and signing autographs, despite what must have been a searing disappointment. That stuck with me.

Yeah!  If I were Jay, I'd have avoided D-Day for that bombshell....

Shall we lighten the mood a bit?

Don't Know Much About History -  Years ago I predicted that this event would flounder once its namesake passed:

There are complications, as the event has been played at some iffy venues and competes with Colonial in a market, Fort Worth, that doesn't require two events.  Glad to see them keep Lord Byron in the event name for now, but how long do we think that will last?

World's Weirdest Bad Luck - Imagine you're grinding away on the Ladies European Tour and you get yourself into a playoff.  A huge opportunity, then this happens:

Yowzer!  In some ways it was even worse than just that: 

Anne Van Dam is maybe the longest hitter amongst the women, and gave herself a good eagle look on that Par-5 playoff hole, so at least this didn't actually cost her the playoff.

As a rules issue, a playoff is considered a separate round, so she could change anything and everything in her bag.  But maybe the bigger issue is that a professional golfer that ships her bad with the airline without removing her driver head might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Say It Ain't So, Viktor - Your humble blogger was a little shocked by this revelation:

Viktor is on Tinder?  Egads, that seems profoundly unwise.....

That the profile is cute should come as little surprise, after all Viktor oozes cuteness:

Another sees Hovland hoisting the BMW International trophy aloft, following his 2021 history-making victory which saw him become the first Norwegian player to win on the European Tour.

Hovland also includes a brief, notably understated description - in Norwegian - calling himself 'a simple boy from Ekeberg', and the verified blue tick that suggests the profile isn't an imposter chancing their arm.

I'm not the right tour guide for social media and dating apps, but isn't Tinder just for, yanno, hook-ups?

Tinder users were mainly singles looking to find more casual. And while that's definitely still the case, Tinder isn't just for hooking up anymore. You can also find plenty of people looking for serious relationships.

I stand corrected.  Tinder isn't exclusively for hook-ups, just mainly for hook-ups.   Viktor seems very likeable, I just hope he's being careful out there.

I'll wish you a great weekend and we'll probably catch up on Monday, assuming there's something to muse upon. 

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