Sunday, January 28, 2024

Weekend Wrap - Bonus Sunday Blogging Edition

I expect that, with Sunday dinner plans, that I'll be finishing watching  the conference championship games Monday morning.  But with Torrey finishing on Saturday, it's win-win, baby!

Vive Le France - So, in the last two weeks we've had an amateur and a Frog win...... which do you think is the rarer occurrence?

Matthieu Pavon took one step closer to qualifying for the Olympics in his home country and made a little history at the same time.

The 31-year-old from Toulouse who now resides in the wine region north of Bordeaux became the first Frenchman to win on the PGA Tour with his victory at the 2024 Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines on Saturday. Pavon shot a 3-under 69 in the final round to finish at 13 under, one shot clear of Nicolai Hojgaard (70). Nate Lashley (67), Jake Knapp (69) and 54-hole leader Stephan Jaeger (72) all finished T-3 at 11 under.

“Yeah, I still can’t believe it. As I said, it feels like there is another round to play tomorrow because we’re only Saturday,” joked Pavon. “That is special. I can’t thank the PGA tour enough to give us the opportunity to come from Europe and compete here in America against the best players in the world. That’s always been the dream for me. I got finally a shot and I took it. I mean, it’s a dream come true and it’s a little bit hard to believe.”

Ranked No. 78 in the world, the victory will move Pavon inside the top 60 in the Official World Golf Ranking and put him in prime position to represent France at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

The Olympics?  Seriously?  

So, every Monday the obvious question is, did the Tour put on a good show?  I've used some of my best ammo below (yeah, one of those time-bending posts), but to this observer it was one of the most embarrassing final rounds I can remember.  Guys like Stephen Jaeger and Tony Finau melting down, and I don't think I have ever seen more short putts missed (yes, I know about poa, but still...). I remain in awe at how many combined short puts were missed by Auberg and Hojgaard, yet they simply couldn't play themselves out of contention.....

Pavon was well on the way to adding his name to the honor roll of French meltdowns, missing that kick-in on No. 17, and missing it quite badly, followed by two horrible swings on the finishing hole.  That said, he certainly showed us something with the wedge from the deep rough and his center-cut birdie putt, but what a dreary, dismal day of golf.

AK, The Reconquista - Why so soon?  I could easily go another decade without him.....but maybe that's just me.

For more than a decade he’s been golf’s Yeti, golf’s most famous recluse, golf’s man of mystery, golf’s greatest “what-if”. As the years have ticked by, stories from his abridged career have been
told and retold with increasing levels of admiration and exaggeration. His cult hero status has continued to grow, even as hopes of his competitive future have dwindled.

But now Anthony Kim is planning his return to professional golf.

Kim has spent the last few months in discussions with the PGA Tour, LIV and potential sponsors as he plots a way back, multiple sources familiar with those discussions told GOLF. He’s been playing more golf. He’s been ramping up workouts. He’s confident in his game. That part, people say, definitely hasn’t changed. Now, it’s just a matter of where he makes his return.

I'll agree that he looked for a moment like a transcendent talent, but the hold he seems to have on folks' imagination seems way out of proportion to the length of time at which he played at a high level.  I also find it strange in light of this decision:

A central issue in negotiations has been an insurance policy from Kim’s playing days, now worth an estimated $10 million, that would be voided if he returned to competition.

Now, I would have thought enough time has passed that he would have collected that insurance payment and it would be at risk if he returned, though this seems to confirm that it's still an issue:

Sources familiar with the LIV negotiations said that the league had not initially expressed much interest nor willingness to pay for Kim to join the league. But as word of Kim’s potential return spread, key figures including Dustin Johnson spoke out about Kim’s potential value. A call from LIV CEO Greg Norman directly to Kim followed and then negotiations began in earnest, including a one-year offer that would cover Kim’s insurance policy — again, in the area of $10 million — while allowing him to earn prize money and sponsor deals on top of that. A LIV spokesperson declined to comment.

His moment in the sun was an eternity ago:

He hasn’t played professional golf in 12 years. The last of his three Tour wins came 13 years ago. He beat Sergio Garcia in singles in the Ryder Cup 15 years ago. People forget Kim was so intensely focused during that match that after he had closed Garcia out, Kim started to walk to the next hole to keep playing. Garcia had to call him back.

They were the first match on the golf course and it was an all-time beatdown....that said, after the passage of so many years, we can only be skeptical of his retention of those skills.  In a rational world we could all sit back and watch him prove his talent the good old-fashioned way, but we all know how this will go.  And if he suddenly finds himself with tee times on LIV, it feels more like a circus sideshow.  Then again, it's a perfect fit, because LIV itself is a circus sideshow...

For those interested in his act, Alan Shipnuck has posted a link to his 2014 Sports Illustrated article on Kim's disappearance.

But I caught this tweet from one of the young golf writers, and I haven't stopped laughing yet:

I'm sorry Danny Boy, but in what actual sense did Anthony Kim "keep it real", a tired, over-used term if ever there were one?  I mean he disappeared without a trace and tried to keep that bit about the insurance payment from coming out.  And apparently he couldn't monetize before social media because people wouldn't pay him for his shirt and hat logos and for using their equipment?  Danny, guys have been making serious bank in golf for decades.... and you're throwing a pity party for a guy that cashed an insurance check for $10 million large.  Maybe the injuries were a shame, but the man made bank.

And LIV is only perfect if, yanno, he can't play....  But don't get me wrong, AK and Yasir are for sure a match made in heaven.

But Max, on the other hand, seems to understand how these discussions will go:

Having already decided to cash a large check instead of playing our game, I just can't imagine which way he might go.  And I only have one small ask of Greg and Yasir.  Please, pretty please, put him on Brooks' team.

In case you've not yet discerned it, this is one of those posts that covers a couple of news cycles.  The above AK stuff was drafted Saturday afternoon, but Sunday morning presents with Eamon Lynch making Dan Rappaport look like a snotty-nosed kid:

Lynch: A second coming of Anthony Kim would mesmerize his cult, but it wouldn’t save LIV Golf or the PGA Tour

Both of them?

As the cockiest among the PGA Tour’s young flat-brimmers back in the noughties, Anthony Kim
has long been venerated by aging millennial bros as the apostolic leader of golf cool, but as with most cults, the enthusiasm for a second coming says less about the promise of the savior than the desperation of those wishing to be saved.

In lieu of results, the cult of Anthony Kim took over. A dozen years of applying Vaseline to the critical lens has obscured the reality that his prime was as brief as it is distant: three wins, three top 10 finishes in 15 major starts, one standout Ryder Cup. Revisiting performance statistics from his injury-free period suggests that Kim’s greatest weapon was his confidence, and how much of that can we reasonably expect now? Discount the messianic cult and you’ve got a 38-year-old with three wins and a bit of moxie.

Is moxie even desirable in a 38-year old?  Certainly not in a 38-year old that's lost his game...

We don't need to know which two guys this is, because they're all Spartacus:

Two things have sustained the Kim cult for a dozen years: an unshakeable belief among a subset of fans that he would have accomplished much more in his career, and the convenient fact that he hasn’t returned to test that belief. Among his peers, mild interest remains. “I’d be interested in watching Anthony Kim play golf for about five minutes,” one Tour veteran wrote in a group text Thursday evening.

“Four more than me,” another player responded.

I'll let Eamon take us out because, while I say things like this all the time, it takes me about three paragraphs, and I greatly respect how he got it into one short sentence:

Signing Jon Rahm signals what LIV Golf aspires to be. Signing Anthony Kim would illustrate what it is.

LIV Stuff - You can blame Luke for us losing the best Polish golfer of all time:

Eight days before LIV Golf’s 2024 season opener and about eight hours after he withdrew from the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open, Adrian Meronk is leaving the PGA Tour for the rival circuit.

According to a report by The Times of London, Meronk, considered the biggest snub from the 2023 European Ryder Cup team, will join LIV Golf in time for the first event of the year in Mexico on Feb. 2-4. He finished second at the Hero Desert Dubai Classic last week. Meronk will reportedly join the Cleeks, captained by Martin Kaymer.

The Times report also states that LIV Golf is continuing its pursuit of England’s Tyrrell Hatton, who earlier Wednesday was announced among the latest commitments to the 2024 WM Phoenix Open. That tournament is set for Super Bowl weekend, as is LIV Golf’s second event of 2024 in Las Vegas from Feb. 7-11.

Not sure if Hatton is going or not, but Golfweek posted a photo gallery as a parting gift, and I certainly wouldn't have recognized him:


 But what really made me laugh was this from one of the No Laying Up guys:

Heh!

This logically should have been paired with Eamon Lynch's item above:

Golf has become a sport without needle-movers

For my money, Shane Ryan is about the most thoughtful guy peddling golf journalism, though admittedly quite the low bar.  But this will have heads exploding in PVB:

Can you see where he's headed (the header was kind of a spoiler)?

1. Beyond Tiger Woods, the perpetual and eternal needle-mover, golf audiences broadly don't care about any specific player. (If your initial reaction here is, "but Rahm isn't like Rory or Spieth," just hang tight a moment.)

2. A good story, rather than any single personality, is what resonates with golf audiences. That story can range from something as complex as "an amateur is about to win a PGA Tour event" to something as simple as "we're playing at a major championship with all its attendant historical import."

From there, you can make a convincing leap to a third conclusion:

3. The LIV defections, like Rahm's, look increasingly absurd if you only tie the dollar sign ($300 million) to the player's actual market value (nowhere even close to $300 million), and only make sense as a ploy to crack golf's foundations as a means of getting in on the organizational level; i.e., you're paying guys like Rahm or Cam Smith to disappear from public view until the PGA Tour capitulates. BUT, despite an appearance of diluting the product, the individual players might matter so little that it's not actually doing any real damage beyond perception, since more people tuned in to watch some kid named Nick Dunlap on a given week than Jon Rahm, even before he left for a league that nobody is watching in the first place.

I've been saying much the same thing, though I've been making the point that the game itself is the needle-mover, but importantly it's only interesting when combined with legitimacy and importance.  Because of its history and venues, the PGA Tour has some of those, though of course not nearly as much as it pretends to.

I think Shane gets way too bogged down in numbers, for instance wonderingly unproductively whether those 2023 AMEX ratings might have been higher had Rahm already won that Masters.  He does understand the importance of stories, as you'll see here:

Speaking of the Canadian Open, you may remember that Nick Taylor, a Canadian, won it with one of the more memorable shots of the entire 2023 season. As it turned out, that final round drew higher ratings than any Canadian Open since 2000, which was won by—you guessed it—Tiger Woods. (It was the only time he won that event.) The important note here, though, is that it did better than Rory McIlroy's win a year earlier. I say it's "important" because another clear line of argument against the conclusions drawn about Rahm above is that Rahm himself may not have moved the needle in 2023, but Rory McIlroy or Jordan Spieth definitely do. Well, not Rory necessarily, at least not in comparison to another low-profile player named Nick who happened to deliver a great story at the perfect time.

Of course, he's ignoring the fact that this story would have been nothing without another Canadian being tackled by security guard (I kid).  He doesn't seem to connect the dots, though, does he?  This was a story because it was the Canadian Open being won by a Canadian (and not only ids that unprecedented, but it was an unlikely Canadian winning in an incredibly unlikely scenario).

But the dot he fails to connect is the extent to which the Tour, pushed by Tiger, Rory and Cantlay, has made it its business to OUTLAW STORIES.  That's right, we're trying to exclude unlikely winners from the fields of the most important events.  Rory says it's because we need to know when guys are playing, though we kind of knew that already.

How's that working out, kids?

Well, here are the the winners of the first four Tour events of the year:

Sentry: Chris Kirk

Sony: Grayson Murray

AMEX: Nick Dunlap (a)

Farmers: Matthieu Pavon

Can you feel the cream rising?  Just to pile on, here's your final Farmers leaderboard:

I don't think any of those guys are formally in the FBI's witness protection program, but they might as well be....

Perhaps the jury is still out on the Signature Events, but the extent to which the Tour his helping the non-signature events commit assisted suicide seems quit obvious.  And, given Chris Kirk's win in an actual Signature Event, I suspect they won't even generate the marquee match-ups they've promised.  Why?  Because golf remains maddingly. well, golf.

UPDATE: So, as if I'm not angry enough with the powers that be, were you aware that there are still sponsors' exemptions into those Signature Events.  And do you still cling to any naive thoughts that this anything more than a reboot of Mean Girls?  Well, get a load of this:

The most important name on that list is probably Peter Malnati, because he's the only one of the five that could remotely be considered a Tour rabbit and therefore likely to represent the interests of the lunch pail set.  He is now thoroughly bought and paid for... Well played, Patrick! 

Appointment Television - You'll want to mark this date in your diary for sure:

Rory McIlroy, Max Homa, Rose Zhang and Lexi Thompson to play in first mixed edition of 'The Match'

It's a quick buck, so we know why they guys might peg it.  It's just hard for me to understand why they think anyone would watch this....

But I can't laughing over the one girl, because this her third event teeing it up against the men, after a year in which she would have, absent some kind of lifetime exemption, lost her LPGA card.  We now live in a Bizarro World where not being good enough for the women's tour is a qualification to play against the best men....

But we're not quite done making fun of Lexi, because while the organizers of The Match don't seem to understand the current state of her game, the equipment industry does:

Lexi Thompson signs with Maxfli for 2024 season

Maxfli?  Seriously?  Was Pinnacle not interested?

Olympic Dreams -  One last laugh for you, but please ensure you have no liquids nearby.  We mentioned the Olympics above, and I can at least understand a guy like Pavon caring given that it's a home game.  But, do the American golfers really acre?  I know Justin Rose and the X-Man want us to treat it as important, but it obviously fills resume holes for them.

I guess whoever qualifies will go, but I do question whether you can get them to wear tis crap:

Have you stopped laughing yet?

I have a small ask....Please let Cantlay qualify and make him wear that shirt pictured....  I am taking way too much joy in that thought, so much so that can even go hatless.

Kids, that's it for now....  You will not see me tomorrow, and perhaps not until Wednesday, depending upon a decision to be made later this morning.  Enjoy the football.

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