Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Midweek Musings - Screwing The Gooch Edition

For those concerned, no frostbite was incurred yesterday.  It was certainly cold and windy, though nothing near as low as the forecasts cited.  As for the freshies, they were plentiful as my quads could attest.  Things will now return to normal, and I'll be back to skiing with the old guys.

I wasn't planning to blog today, but then Golf Twitter melted down.  

Tinker, Talor - The gift that keeps on giving.... At one point I deemed Goochie the most insufferable of the LIVsters, an extremely competitive category when you include Phil, Sergio, PReed, Pat Perez and the other varied and sundry malcontents.  This eruption bears more than a passing resemblance to my personal favorite in which he compared LIV's team format to the Ryder Cup.... The comedy gold coming from the fact that the speaker's best chance of experiencing a Ryder Cup was to apply to be a standard bearer.  

So, here's the bit where the foot is inserted deep into mouth:

If Talor Gooch were still a member of the PGA Tour, he’d likely be in the running for one of the top spots in the Player Impact Program.

He has a knack for stirring up social media, and his latest remarks went viral after taking a shot at Rory McIlroy and the Masters, specifically.

“If Rory McIlroy goes and completes his (career) Grand Slam without some of the best players in the world, there’s just going to be an asterisk. It’s just the reality,” Gooch told Australian Golf Digest. “I think everybody wins whenever the majors figure out a way to get the best players in the world there.”

That sound you hear is Roger Maris spinning in his grave.  Of course, that original sports-related asterisk was to protect the legacy of Babe Ruth, whereas this is merely a whine from a guy without an invite.  Though The babe and Talor are just as comparable as LIV's team competition and the Ryder Cup, so he's got that going for him.

At the risk of taking the Goochster seriously, who are these "best players" not in the Masters?  Well....

Pretty much.

You'll be shocked to know that Golf Twitter reacted rather harshly, unlike the reasoned approach we feature here at Unplayable Lies.  To be fair, the Masters field is woefully small (and you know how your humble blogger feels about field size), but this guy is the least of the victims:

One might assume that, to render such a bold assertion, that Gooch would have a strong record in majors, but there's a funny thing about assumptions:

It’s unclear why Gooch called out McIlroy specifically, or if McIlroy was perhaps brought up in the question given this April he’ll again chase the career grand slam, which he can achieve if he wins the Masters and will no doubt again be one of the tournament’s key storylines. It’s also unclear if Gooch was talking about himself, or other players he feels are being left out. (Gooch has played in 11 majors in his career. He’s missed four cuts and has yet to record a top 10.)

But does Gooch not realize the logic of his assertion?  I mean what follows is laugh-out-loud funny, limited only by the low degree of difficulty:

And of far greater consequences:

Hey, take your asterisk with a little grace, Mister.

Did Talor not see this coming:

What do you mean by maybe?

Dunking on the guy is good fun, but isn't this really the issue?

Which highlights the larger issue for our hero, which is that those three LIV wins are the only thing he's ever accomplished in golf.  And, unlike Niemann, he's not prepared to actually earn it.

It also provides an opportunity to revisit this amusing bit:

I might have forgotten that story, but no doubt the Green Jackets haven't.... Speaking of which, have you seen the redesign:

In the interest of fair play, I'll include this:

In both incidents cited, there's a wanton cluelessness about the game, and his own position therein.  It of course also reeks of entitlement and a refusal to bear the consequences of his own decisions, so that bit about him being a genuinely nice guy might bear reexamination.

But the mots important bit is how easy it makes blogging....

Point- Counter-Point - A split verdict on The Match, first from our old friend Michael Bamberger (and the buried lede here is that he seems to have moved back from The Fire Pit Collective to Golf Magazine): 

The coolest thing about the moonlit Match IX wasn’t its star power

Thank God, because that star power was fairly marginal.... I hate to be a doggy downer, but on the distaff side the two participants include a woman barely holding onto her LPGA card and a youngster with all of one win...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Maybe the coolest thing was that the golf was played under the light of a February moon, one tick past full, aided and abetted by a hundred floodlights. Monday
Night Golf, people, Match IX, live on TNT Sports, 12 holes of holiday golf featuring (no surnames needed!) Max and Rory and Lexi and Rose. Golf at night. We need more golf at night.

Or was the coolest thing the venue, the old West Palm Beach public course, now rebranded as The Park? There’s the centerpiece, the 18-hole public course, a giant playfield of semi-flat, firm turf where you can play line-drive golf from start to finish and never lose a ball. But wait, there’s more public fun to come! The Park also has a spectacular, free-to-all public practice putting green, heaving and vast, that is hugely fun. And an open-to-the-public driving range. And an open-to-the public lighted par-3 course. Count ‘em up people: six sentences, one public per sentence. We need more public golf.

Or maybe the coolest thing was Charles Barkley’s old-school, itty-bitty lined yellow pad that he scribbled on while working the gig for TNT, alongside Christina Kim, Trevor Immelman and Ernie Johnson? From what I could observe, Sir Charles was taking his assignment semi-seriously, but you’ll have to tell me. I could see him. I couldn’t hear him. I know he takes his golf seriously. Have you seen his swing lately? It’s no longer a chapter book.

I guess he liked it.  But as much as I like Mike (I've called him the conscience of our game on occasion), I'm a little unclear as to the rest of his thoughts.  I get that he was amused, and there's no problem with that.  But it all seems to go a bit far:

The old Honda event, now called the Cognizant, is being played this week up the road at PGA National. This Monday, the annual pro-member will be played at Seminole, and if you had a dime
for every Seminole logo you saw at Match IX, you would have made way more than Homa received for his caddying duties. The conversion of the West Palm Beach muni into The Park was a beloved pet project for a wide range of prominent civic-minded South Florida golf people, many of whom have visited the Seminole pro shop. The golf analyst Dory Faxon, wife of Brad, made the best early-evening observation, while standing on the practice putting green: “Being here is like being under the tree at Augusta.”

Yes, except at Augusta, play is not halted when a freight train is coming through. Augusta is not hard by I-95. You can’t roll up to Augusta and play its par-3 course.

Augusta is some course and the Masters is some tournament and golf is lucky to have both. As the saying goes, the road to Augusta begins at the Cognizant!

I'm old enough to remember when that road started at Doral, but this made-for-TV entertainment product has precious little to do with our game.

But public golf (as the man once sang) is where it’s at. The Delray Beach muni, down the road from here, is getting a makeover. So is the Augusta muni, aka The Patch. Ditto for Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia and courses in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and anywhere else you throw a dart.

“Golf needs more of this,” Homa said at the end of the night. He wasn’t talking about his scoreboard total or his souped-up cart. He was talking about the thing that makes the game the game. A course, and a path to it. That’s what Match IX was all about. Lighting up a course, and the path to it. The coolest thing of all.

The actual support of public golf, long a theme of Mike's work, is truly great, and to the extent this event furthered that, all to the good.  But does golf need more nights like that?  Maybe, but only as long as the entertainment product actually entertains....  It's taken them nine installments to get to here, and even this one wasn't quite the home run Mike saw.  

Having watched only the early portion of the festivities, I suspect this is more useful feedback:


We have to start here. There were simply too many cooks in the kitchen on Monday night.

Ernie Johnson was the studio host and was joined by Trevor Immelman, Christina Kim and Charles Barkley. Kathryn Tappen was the on-course reporter while DJ Khaled and Paul Bissonnette provided special contributions (that weren’t so special after all). That’s seven people on top of the four players who were also mic’d up, and more than half of them don’t need to return next time around.

Christina Kim provided some analysis but dropped way too many cringe-worthy lines to get an invite back. Bissonnette is a wild character who didn’t get a fair shake to show his fun personality, largely because he was always paired with DJ Khaled, who didn’t provide anything of substance to the broadcast and frankly took away from it.

There's quite a bit of advise contained in the piece, much of it good:

Simply put, fans are watching for the players. You don’t need a side-show of personalities and interviews with PGA of America President Seth Waugh and LPGA Commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan. Let the players carry the conversation. They’re the stars of the show.

That's why that fast forward button is so important.

Bring back team golf

The individual skins format worked and provided some drama after three straight pushes (and a late $500,000 contribution) made the 12th hole worth a whopping $1.6 million. That said, fans see individual play every week. Bring back team golf.

Not only would a team element speed up pace of play, which Monday night desperately needed, but it may even spring some more trash talk between the players. All four players were complimentary of one another, and they also needled each other. As seen in past editions, the team format provides a different element of competition that can only help.

I don't necessarily disagree, but equating a skins game to individual competition is an odd way to frame it.  

But it does get a bit odd here:

 But look where he starts from:

Seeing Tiger and Phil go head-to-head was fun. Brooks and Bryson settling their beef was cool. Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Peyton Manning, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson made for interesting moments, but we see enough NFL and MLB players at Lake Tahoe and Pebble Beach. The mixed-event model was well past due and proved it deserves to be featured heavily in future editions.

Seeing Tiger and Phil go head-to-head should have been fun, but the reality was far drearier, in large part because Tiger himself isn't all that interesting mic'ed up.  But most of these events were dreadfully boring, so this one certainly was a step in the right direction.

But no clue how he gets here:

And yeah, I’ll say it, let’s get some of the LIV guys back in the fold. Lefty is showing his personality again and could slot in well as a player or analyst. Say what you will about Koepka and DeChambeau, but both are either loved or hated by fans, and those kinds of polarizing personalities work in made-for-TV hit and giggles like The Match.

Yeah, that's the ticket.  I'm not sure where to find these guys that love Brooksie and Bryson, but their cage match was amongst the worst of the lot.  Of course the only interesting moments in the entire oeuvre came from Phil, principally his intense coaching of Barkley that one time.  

But it's passing strange that he would posit that, given that it was Tiger and Phil that owned and started this thing, but our Phil has acquired some baggage since then.  In fact, so much baggage that he was defenestrated from the sponsorship group, and Tiger hates him with a passion.  So, no, Phil is not an option for future installments.

One of Life's Enduring Mysteries - Do we really need an explanation here?

How the PGA Tour’s new billion-dollar equity plan could help prevent player defections

Kind of blindingly obvious, no?  Give those top ten players a billion dollars and perhaps they'll hang around.  Go figure.

 The gist of this piece is about the equity component:

However, how does that investment really work for the players—who stand to collect more than $1.5 billion in equity—in the near and long-term? According to experts in venture capital and sports entrepreneurship, the playbook appears to look a lot more like Silicon Valley than Pine Valley.

The new entity—PGA Tour Enterprises—built an equity distribution plan that looks similar to something tech companies use to protect themselves from losing their most valuable contributors to deep-pocketed competitors. "The whole idea behind restricted stock units [RSUs] is to motivate employees to stay and create more value for the business," says Matt Erley, who before founding golf start-up fund Old Tom Ventures was the head of growth at beverage-delivery startup Drizly when it was acquired by Uber. "You're acting like an owner."

In broad terms, RSUs work in two phases: how they're allocated and triggered, and how and when they vest. At a tech start-up backed by a venture capital firm, the leadership team will usually assign a certain amount of equity to be distributed each year to contributors for a variety of reasons—from simply being a member of the team to achieving a performance milestone. The rules about how and when contributors get access to the equity they've been awarded are set with strategic goals in mind.

But you'll be shocked to know who's grabbing the lion's share of the kitty:

Confirmed details about the PGA Tour's new equity plan are still murky, but we know there will be four broad categories of players earning equity stakes in this initial round: A handful of superstars like Tiger Woods will share $750 million. A second group of 64 players will share $75 million based on their past three years of performance. The third group—mostly the remaining fully-exempt current players—will share $30 million, and a group of 36 designated "founding" players will share $75 million for their historical contributions. Another $600 million will be distributed in the future through recurring grants based on factors like on-course performance and Player Impact Program finish.

I totally get that the only way to grow the game is to pay Patrick, and I'm totally on board.

I don't have the time to go too deep into this, but employee ownership has a long history in the private sector.  The tech references are to be expected, where stock ownership has created millionaires out of receptionists.  But those were created largely through the public markets, which we won't see here.  The real underlying issue will be profitability, which will require a dramatic increase in the revenue base, about which we have mostly happy talk.

I need to get moving.  I'll see you as time and golf news permit.

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