Apparently, in an effort to compete with Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, the PGA Tour has conceived and is rolling out its Face Plant Tour. It's gonna be HUUUGE!
Revenge of Crosby Weather - In all the commentary I've seen, nobody has characterized it as the revenge of Der Bingle....
The grim news:
The 2024 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is already over.Despite initially postponing the final round of the $20 million Signature Event to Monday due to inclement weather, the PGA Tour made an about-face late Sunday night and said “out of an abundance of caution for the safety of all constituents” play would be canceled Monday. The tournament results through 54 holes are now final.The Pebble Beach area is under Shelter in Place order by Monterey County until early Monday and after consulting with county emergency authorities, the PGA Tour announced the cancelation of the final round in a statement Sunday night.
They didn't have any good options, but in many ways the Tour had this coming, if only Karmically. Why? Well, this is the Tour's explanation of its Signature Events:
PGA TOUR Signature Events are limited-field events offering increased purses and FedExCup points. The fields, which will range from roughly 70-80 players in size
OK, that's at least transparent. But your humble blogger has been known to fixate on obscure details, and I've noticed a prevalence of bits like this:
These circumstances have brought us to Pebble Beach, where the best players in the world are gathered for the first full-field Signature Event of the 2024 season, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
Sloppy journalists, or has the Tour quietly suggested that usage to its sycophantic, jock-sniffing scribes. Personally, under these circumstances, I'll embrace the healing power of the ampersand....
Have we featured this guy ever?
“Irony is wasted on the stupid”
― Oscar Wilde
How perfect that, as the Tour is trying to present eighty players as a full field, that they're precluded from playing the full complement of golf. One of initial confusions from the LIV mess was that, at first, there was no disparagement of the LIV events as "Exhibitions", (excluding, of course, these pages). Then the light bulb went off over my head, as I realized that the Tour's top players were jealous of those LIV field sizes....
The Tour Confidential panel has hardly distinguished itself recently, and it's another odd week in that regard. For instance, this:
5. Although this year’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was only 54 holes, there were some big changes as the historic stop after it received Signature Event status this year. That meant one less course, less amateurs and only two rounds of the pro-am portion. Was the new format an improvement?Wall: Count me as a fan of the changes. The previous Pro-Am format was a slog that kept fans from watching until the final round. Being forced to watch a bunch of amateurs hack it around for three days was excessive. I think two rounds makes everyone happy and keeps the focus on the improved field and venue. Now if only we could see more golf shots…Melton: Definitely an improvement from years past. There’s nothing better than getting the best of the best together on one of golf’s premier courses. I’m certainly a fan of how things played out.Berhow: It was an improvement. Despite the rich history of the pro-am, previous editions felt more like a silly-season event. I liked it.
There's quite a bit going on here, so shall we parse it? Wall and the others are quite right that the full-field Pro-Am has degenerated into six-hour rounds and many players therefore gave it a pass, rendering it a mid-level Tour event, buoyed mostly by the venues and the star power. Anyone remember this (and Peter Jacobson's recounting of Lemon's next shot was certainly something I didn't remember):
That time @JakeTrout once formed a human chain with Clint Eastwood and Jack Lemmon. He couldn't help Jack keep the ball out of the ocean! pic.twitter.com/nUsXj49sN8
— Golf Today (@GCGolfToday) January 19, 2021
What's gone sideways for this event? The unforced error was removing Cypress Point from the rota. Who cares if the rounds take seven hours, if those hours are spent on Cypress. The obvious second point to make is this event was conceived for Bing and the Rat Pack, and stars such as Clint Eastwood and Jack Lemon sustained it. Ray Romano? Yeah, not so much, and the Tour further erred in allowing CBS to co-opt the event to plug its lame sitcom stars. Can't blame the Tour, though, for starts not being what they used to be....
Interestingly, none of the writers mentioned one of the more substantial changes made this year, which is the defenestration of high-handicap amateurs. If you thought professional athletes from other sports were the only amateurs invited, you weren't far off. You lose something of the history of this event in that manner, but there were those inevitable six-hour rounds...
But, while Zephyr is agog at getting the best of the best together, this was the final leaderboard:
They're not exactly producing those head-to-head duels among the top players, are they? Why? because golf stubbornly remains golf, so all they've accomplished is to create a series of exhibitions of dubious merit.
But the bigger issue is this new bifurcation of events. AT&T obviously had the resources to compete, though let's not forget that they walked away from sponsorship of the Byron Nelson. Pebble got the cool kids to show up, but the ramifications will be felt at other events, witness the dreadfully weak field at Torrey last week.
The TC gang also weighed in on this conundrum:
4. Wyndham Clark set a Pebble Beach course record with a 12-under 60 on Saturday,which vaulted him atop the leaderboard after three rounds (and was good enough for the win, after the event was deemed final after 54 holes). One debate that broke out on social media, however, was about how “official” the record should be since soggy conditions meant the field played “lift, clean and place,” when in the short stuff. What say you? Should there be an asterisk here?Wall: Normally I’d say it should have an asterisk, but the guy set a ShotLink record with 150-plus feet of made putts over 9 holes on Saturday. It’s not like he was hitting everything to tap-in range with lift, clean and place. It’s still an impressive round no matter how you look at it.
This from gearhead Jonathan Wall might be one of the stupidest comments we've featured. Shockingly, a guy shooting 60 made miles of putts. Geez, who coulda seen that coming? Problem is, without lift, clean and cheat in place, he might have had to make 300 feet of putts to shoot 60.
Melton: The rest of the field had the benefit of preferred lies, too, and no one else came within three shots of matching Wyndham’s feat. It’s hard to frame his round as anything other than a historic round at a historic track.
Let me see if I follow your logic. The 60 is legit because no one else shot better than 63? I'm old enough to remember when 63 was a pretty good day....
Berhow: It should 100 percent stand as the course record at Pebble Beach, but I also don’t necessarily think it takes anything away from it by simply stating, as a fact, that it was played using preferred lies. That’s just context, people. As Zephyr said, he wasn’t the only one who played by those rules. And it’s not like you get to fluff up your ball if you hit it 40 yards offline in the rough — you still need to hit the shots. Interestingly, I knew the PGA Tour counted lift, clean and place scores as records, but was unaware the DP World Tour does not. (Across the pond, the game’s inventors thumb their nose at the elements.)
There is no good answer here, though it's amusing that folks seem to feel they need to assert that it was a hell of a good round. Yeah, I'll go way out on a limb and opine that a sixty will never hurt you. The question is, how do you compare it to a 61 or 62 where that other guy isn't allowed to touch his ball?
What seems to get lost in the shuffle is an understanding of the conditions that require L,C&C. We're talking wet, soft golf course, and soft conditions are exactly when these guy light it up. Now soft conditions usually result in wet golf balls or mudballs, but then we take those offsetting conditions off the table..... It's just a completely different test, so I don't know what you do with it if you're hung up on records.
Geoff had some interesting stuff on this, including these metrics for Clark's round:
- Clark hit 9/14 fairways. Hit 16/18 greens. Hit 23 putts. Averaged 289.7 yards on all drives and 308.7 on the two measuring holes. Did I mention the balls were hitting and bouncing backwards?
- Three of his nine birdies were made on holes where Clark missed the fairway.
- Breaks the Pebble Beach course record by two with a 12-under 60 (62: Matthias Schwab/2022, Patrick Cantlay/2021, David Duval/1997, Tom Kite/1983).
- Clark’s left dead-center putts just short at the 16th, 17th and 18th. He was within inches of a 57. With a bogey on the card.
- It’s the 54th 60 in PGA Tour history, just two weeks after Nick Dunlap shot the same score at La Quinta CC.
- Clark’s opening 28 tied the lowest score held by three others for Pebble Beach’s front nine and at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
- He made 189 feet, 9 inches of putts. His previous career best was 156 feet, 6 inches at the Shriner’s.
- The likely record—Shotlink unconfirmed—for length of putts in a round belongs to Cameron Smith at the 2022 Open Championship. Smith’s 255 feet of putts to Clark’s 190 feet Saturday came at the Old Course. Its double greens average over 22,000 square feet. Pebble Beach’s 18 putting surfaces average just 3,500 square feet.
With weather shortening the 2024 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Wyndham Clark’s decision to cautiously strike his 18th hole eagle putt looks pretty brilliant. Even if eagle would have meant a 59, an excessively-aggressive three-putt would have meant a tie with Ludvig Aberg.
Alright, alright I’ve put it off long enough: the 60 came on a day when preferred lies were in place. As with Al Geiberger’s historic 59, lift, clean and place produces an inevitable debate.
There were 28 rounds shot in the 60s that fateful Friday, when temperatures inched up near 100 degrees and a parking-lot fire burned up a handful of cars. Raymond Floyd's 65 was the next best thing to the magic conjured up by Geiberger, the 1966 PGA champion. Preferred lies were in effect at Colonial owing to a rough winter and drought, but Geiberger has always maintained that lift, clean and place had little to do with his record score.
FWIW, he beat the next best score by six shots.... Take that, Zephyr.
I'll segue out with this video of No. 18 yesterday morning:
This is 18 at Pebble this morning just after sunrise. pic.twitter.com/Ys4aJfErVd
— Todd Lewis (@ToddLewisGC) February 4, 2024
You're gonna want to play your second out to the right side of the fairway, just to avoid the tsunami....
Wither Professional Golf? - Another fine mess you've gotten us into, Ollie. Jerry Tarde has been around our game forever, and takes a shot at how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. But the part I liked most was this involving rose-colored glasses:
Ever since World War II, pro golf built its foundation on five principles: (1) The top players like Arnie and Jack always put the game above themselves. (2) Golfers are accountable to their performance—nothing's guaranteed. (3) The pro tours are kept in check and balance by the four independent governing bodies controlling the major championships and acting in the best interests of the game. (4) Pro golf is underpinned by charity; that's why hundreds of volunteers show up every week to help run the tournaments. (5) The game’s leaders—not always, but generally—have used the time-honored Masters strategy of leaving money on the table in exchange for control and sustainability.
OK, thanks for the trip back to the 1960's, but I regret to inform you that Arnie has left the building....
But I'm a fan of unexpected appeals to authority:
The PGA Tour and the LIV Golf League fell into what historians have called Thucydides Trap. "It was the rise of Athens and the fear it instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable," wrote the Ancient Greek general Thucydides. When a newcomer threatens authority, war is only averted with deft statecraft. Curiously given the short-game touch of its stars, the PGA Tour doesn’t do deft.
We're more into the mass beheading stage of life.....
The entire piece is worth your time, though not because Jerry delivers on his header:
Pro golf is broken. How are we going to put it back together?
In fact, this is as close as Jerry gets, and can you say hopeless naivete?
The view here then is that the amateurs will help bail out the pros. The new tour can expect years of disruption, but the five original principles that guided the professional game since WWII will prevail. I think it was Churchill who said, “You can always count on golfers to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
I totally trust Phil to do the right thing, as long as he's paid a king's ransom to do so.... I mean, has Jerry been paying attention the last two years?
What else is going on? Well, there's a debate raging on those LIV defectors:
PGA Tour players divided on LIV defectors' punishments should PIF deal work out
Useful idiot Rory McIlroy kicked this off:
The burning question, of course, is this: Just how accepting are players who have remained loyal to the PGA Tour to the idea of welcoming back LIV defectors? Rory McIlroy made it a point on Tuesday to say he’s had a change of heart and LIV defectors should be allowed to return to the tour without repercussions, financial or otherwise.
I'm working towards my favorite story of the day, one in which Rory further beclowns himself. But pushback ensued:
Rickie begs to differ:
“I’m probably not in the same spot that Rory is,” Rickie Fowler said. “Maybe we started in asimilar area, but I think there's been a little rollercoaster ride on his part. … Yeah, as far as decisions to go elsewhere and just welcome [LIV players] back, I don't think it's a direct road. They made decisions and there has to be something for it. Whether how small or big, that's not up to me.”
And Adam Scott, a man with some influence as one of five player-directors, wants to have it both ways:
“That’s probably not where I’d be starting,” Scott, another member of the policy board, said. “My first reaction is not that. It’s very complicated. We could throw around ideas here forever and not get to a really good outcome. The first thing I think of when I hear, ‘Just bring them all back,’ is well, they want to play on LIV. They don't want to play here. Or if they don't want to come back and play, so what happens then? So it's very hard to know exactly how that all pans out.”
Gee, thanks for clarifying....
What's missing in these admittedly fragmented responses is any sense of what loading the LIVsters back in would do to our Tour Rabbit class, already excluded from those Signature Events Money Grabs.
But perhaps the most interesting comment came from Jordan Spieth, another guy with a vote (amusingly, Rory's vote):
Jordan Spieth, a member of the PGA Tour Policy Board that approved the agreement with SSG,flatly said on Wednesday at Pebble Beach Golf Links, “I don’t think that it’s needed,” referring to a deal with PIF.“I think the positive [of a deal with PIF] would be a unification [of PGA Tour and LIV players], but I just think it's something that is almost not even worth talking about right this second,” said Spieth, who assumed a seat on the board vacated late last year by Rory McIlroy. “The idea is that we have a strategic partner that allows the PGA Tour to go forward the way that it's operating right now without anything else.”
Take that, Yasir!
But here's what has your humble blogger chuckling. Not only did Rory get himself played by Jay et. al., but apparently he's undergone a deathbed conversion and is now all-in on the Saudis. Not only that, but he's also incredibly thin-skinned, featuring rabbit ears that put to shame Colin Montgomerie's best in class status:
It is understood that McIlroy removed himself from a WhatsApp group involving several PGA Tour players soon after Policy Board member Spieth’s comments were published, prompting his fellow former world No.1 to phone him for a clear-the-air chat.
He's like a college student that thinks he can get through life without a dissenting opinion being heard.... Rory, please go away, you've effed this up enough already.
Apparently Jordan tried to do the right thing:
Rory McIlroy has revealed he and Jordan Spieth had a “tense” conversation on the phone last week after comments made by the latter about Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.“I talked to him about his comments and we had a pretty frank discussion,” the Irishman told Sports Illustrated.
Yeah, I'll bet it was.... But Rory seems especially clueless these days:
“They are still sitting out there with hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, that they’re gonna pour it into sport. And I know what Jordan was saying, I absolutely know what he was saying and what he was trying to say. But if I were PIF and I was hearing that coming from here, the day after doing this SSG deal, it wouldn’t have made me too happy, I guess?”McIlroy, once LIV Golf’s biggest critic, added: “Having PIF as your partner as opposed to not having them as your partner, I don’t think is an option for the game of golf.“I think they’re committed to investing in golf and in the wider world of sport and if you can get them to invest their money the right way to unify the game of golf.”
Where was Rory when Phil and Jay were pissing at each other over leverage.... I don't know if Jordan is expressing his won thoughts, but it also may be that telegraphing the message that you don't need them is helpful in the difficult discussions with the recalcitrant Saudis....
But the man who first spoke of his concern about the source of the money, is now all in on the bonecutters... He accomplished the impossible, tying himself to the loathsome Wahabis without actually cashing their check. Well played!
On Equity - Giving players equity in their Tour is one of those things that sounds good, but is actually somewhere between silly and counter-productive, calcifying a moment in time. Brandel Chamblee is about the only guy I saw try to take this issue on:
The idea of paying current players for their loyalty and giving them equity is, in my opinion, blind to what the PGA Tour is. It is an entity that is the sum of the toil of players, executives, sponsors and volunteers over the course of more than a century. Each one was a part of something that predated their participation and it was their responsibility to try to make it better and pass it on. Paying current players for their loyalty and giving them equity ignores the very legacy the PGA Tour claims to want to protect and in essence gives false credit for the creation of something today’s players merely contributed to.
The Saudis in their ignorance have merely bought a moment in time, but the tour has something they cannot buy, a pipeline of players that will replace those poached. Just the ones who’ve come out in the last year can likely beat 9/10ths of the LIV tour. The PGA Tour needs to stop playing the Saudis game of buying players and get back to playing their game of producing great players and stories. The PGA Tour may not be able to compete when it comes to buying players (although the SSG could mitigate this in creative ways) but the Saudis can’t even come close to producing them.
Yeah! It calcifies the Tour, just like the limited fields in the money grabs do, to the benefit of a handful of historically insignificant players. But Brandel left good stuff on the table, because while extolling the development of the next generation of players, he fails to connect the dots to those limited fields, which impedes the development of young players by denying access. The Tour was its own cycle of life, with older players fading into the sunset and new talent emerging. Now we've stopped the music, and all the PGA Tour cares about is satisfyingly the insatiable demands of six guys.....
And Rory, who just ironically received the Arnie Award, is now determined to be the anti-Arnie, and he's going to get his.
I said at the beginning of this that we would end up hating them all..... Did I nail it or what?
That's all for today. I won't be able to blog tomorrow, but would expect to see your shining faces on Wednesday.
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