No wrappage yesterday, because your humble blogger was playing.... well, taking up space on the tee sheet might be more like it, but thanks for your patience and understanding.
We'll start with the most significant event of the week....
There's No "I" In GB&I - OK, I guess technically there's the one, but what a week at Sunningdale, which unfortunately precious few will have seen. And while we understand the Jack-inspired expansion of the Ryder Cup to include Continental Europe, some insufferable purists lament the loss of that GB&I moniker.
Coverage of this event on the major golf sites is somewhere between begrudging and nonexistent, but fortunately Shack has us covered:
Catriona Matthew penciled in her best three players to open Sunday singles and essentially close out the 43rd Curtis Cup before much of America enjoyed a cup of Sunday morning coffee. We should have known better, with this being a Cup event on a grand course and no player appearing to be a drag on their respective rosters.Sure enough, Matthew’s star trio opened Sunday singles with two losses, headlined by USA’s Asterisk Talley cruising to a 3&2 win over Lottie Woad in the opener. With that shocker, only interrupted by sensational Sara Byrne closing out her unforgettable three days by defeating Catherine Park 3&2, the final day thriller would come down to the final matches.A sunny and warm Sunningdale day eventually saw Great Britain and Ireland hold on for a one-point difference and first win for the home side since 2016. The team was boosted by a Curtis Cup record crowd of 16,680 for the matches. They witnessed the 10½-9½ victory on an artfully presented Old Course that undoubtedly contributed to the above-average number of tight back-and-forth contests. The crowds and their furry four-legged friends—who are an added component in Sunningdale’s overwhelming charm—also witnessed history in another regard: Matthew is the first professional golfer to Captain the event, bringing her experience (and army of physios!) as a two-time Solheim Cup-winning leader.However, the Scot reserved all credit for the players.“They're a fantastic team, I'm so proud of them,” Matthew said. “They really dug in every day and in every session. It didn't look as though it was perhaps going our way today but they really toughed it out. It's just been a fantastic experience for me getting to know them and they were great.”
I have nothing against watching nubile young wenches playing first class golf, but the real appeal here was Sunningdale, one of the special places in golf. The Old Course is a Willie Park, Jr. design, but one tweaked extensively by God (and by God I of course mean Harry S. Colt). The course looked as spectacular as I remember from my long-ago day there (thanks, Mark W.), and seemed to be set up perfectly for the ladies.
The photos available are logically of the ladies, but I want to show you how spectacular the courses and club are. This is of the uphill Par-3 fourth:
My guess is that there's more heather on this track than in all of GB&I combined.... though perhaps I'm exaggerating for effect.
Geoff had this one of the galleries on the finishing hole:
The trip home, with the clubhouse in the distance is really special, here's how it looks without the galleries:
The most significant match was the first one out, featuring the best amateur player in the world pitted against a child named after a punctuation mark (I'm old enough to remember when parents gave their children actual names, but that's not important now):
For all of the clutch play Sunday, the opening win by Asterisk Talley might have been theperformance of the week. The 15-year-old made five birdies and eagled the par 5 10th, putting away world number one amateur and Augusta National Women’s Amateur champion Lottie Woad who was fresh off her T10 at the AIG Women’s Open.It was her first defeat in the week’s five matches for Woad.“It was really fun out there today,” Talley said. “I played some great golf. I was just excited to get out there with Lottie and play my best. We (the USA team) had a lot of fun. I felt like we really bonded throughout the week. Even if we lost our matches we still had fun.”
And was it ever fun to watch. Team match play on one of the great golf courses in the world, an idea so crazy it just might work. Give the USGA and R&A due credit, the list of future venues for the Walker and Curtis Cups is a purist's wet dream:
2025 Walker Cup: Cypress Point Club2026 Walker Cup: Lahinch Golf Club2026 Curtis Cup: Bel-Air Country Club2028 Walker Cup: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort2028 Curtis Cup: Royal Dornoch2030 Curtis Cup: National Golf Links of America2032 Walker Cup: Oakmont Country Club2034 Curtis Cup: Pine Valley Golf Club
The least interesting name on that list is Oakmont, which tells us all we need to know. Or, yanno, you can just continue to watch golf from Memphis and East Lake....
Speaking of which..... just another of those effortless segues, my signature move.
Scottie Makes Bank - Remind me again why I should care? I did tune in for a bit of it, including that epic bunker shot on the 8th hole. More on that in a sec, but first the Tour Confidential gang:
1. A couple of weeks after calling the format of the FedEx Cup Playoffs “silly,” World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler took advantage of his head start and cruised at East Lake, finishing 30 under to win by four over Collin Morikawa. It was the third straight year he entered the Tour Championship leading the FedEx Cup standings, but his first win. Did Scheffler’s runaway victory prove the format is anticlimactic and in need of a fix, or did it properly reward him for beginning the tournament with a head start since he was the best player all year?Josh Berhow: I think Scheffler winning this 33.3 percent of the time he’s entered the Tour Championship as the FedEx Cup leader proves it’s random enough to work and the math kind ofchecks out — but that still doesn’t mean it’s a good system. The format remains wonky and unnecessarily complicated. I know the drawback of incorporating match play into it all means some big names could miss out on the weekend and hurt ratings, but would it really be worse than an end-of-the-year event taking place with staggered starts? Final point: Match play is great theater, and golf fans already get too little of it at the pro level.Jack Hirsh: I wrote about the format last year a couple of times and I think we need to look at the champions and ask ourselves, are the right people winning this thing? The answer is 100% yes. There has yet to be an undeserving champion who made the Tour Championship their only win of the year, despite it almost happening a couple of times. Each of the six winners in this format has been a multi-time winner on the season. Last year, Rory McIlroy compared it to how the 73-9 Golden State Warriors team didn’t win the NBA finals. A playoff is a playoff and Josh is right that Scheffler only winning it one of three times holding the two-shot lead makes it random enough to be interesting. But I disagree wholeheartedly that it’s difficult to follow. It’s way better than tracking points down to the fractions in real-time. No one likes math. Match play would be great, but to have a “season-long race” decided by a format not really used all that often in professional golf seems a little wrong.Josh Sens: The current format is much more about appeasing players than it is about pleasing fans. Professional golf already caters plenty to its stars. I am with Berhow. Switch to match play. The staggered start is ridiculous. If match play brings about some perceived ‘unfairness’ or randomness, so be it. The priority should be to provide good entertainment. Not simply to further line the pockets of already very well-compensated players.
I just wish we could impose some logic on the Tour brass, as well as the golf writers. The problem with the format is the Tour's inability to decide between a season-long contest and a shootout, and this is the half-baked result. And how much do I love Jack Hirsh? The right people win this thing, as long as you ignore Billy Horschel, Brandt Snedeker, Justin Rose, Bill Haas and even Viktor, who merely got hot for a couple of weeks at the right time. Sheesh!
2. Scheffler became the first person on Tour to win seven or more times in a season since Tiger Woods did so in 2007 (not counting Scheffler’s gold medal). Woods hit at least seven wins a season several times, but can Scheffler? A decade from now, will something like a seven-win season for him seem more like the norm, or an outlier?Berhow: Saying someone is going to win seven times a season is crazy… but for Scheffler, Idon’t think it will be an outlier. That doesn’t mean I think he’s going to do it six or seven more times, but once or twice? I think he can.Sens: So many factors make these kinds of forecasts tough. Will he stay healthy? Will the putting demons return? But I doubt this will be the last time we’ll see this kind of season from Scheffler. The more important tally, though, will be the majors.Hirsh: We’re going to see a lot of comparisons between Tiger and Scheffler over the next few years (see below question as well), but I’ve yet to see anything that suggests that Schefler can match the sustained level of dominance Tiger did. I’d say maybe once more, but if he does it again next season, I’ll be singing a different tune.
Question for you, kids. Scottie won eight timers including the Olympics. How many of those wins came against full fields? Awfully quiet out there.... Anyone? Bueller?
The answer is ONE. Specifically the Players Championship. but this is the full realization of Patrick Cantlay's dreams. You can win $62 million on the golf course and not have to beat many guys. Is this a great country, or what? Scottie is a great player and one of the few guys out there I still like, but I'd like to see what he could do playing like this in a season of actual golf tournaments. Unfortunately, we no longer have those except for the rabbits.
3. Speaking of Tiger, when Scheffler is at his best, is his skillset the closest thing to Woods we’ve seen over the last two decades?Berhow: Tiger’s 2006 season remains the best SG: tee to green (+2.98) since it was tracked beginning in 2004, but second and third on that list are Scheffler’s last two seasons. Tiger in hisprime was so complete it’s hard to say anyone matched that skillset, and even though we’ve tried to make the comparisons before this might be the most accurate yet, especially when Scottie is putting well. Not sure if Scheffler can ever match his ball-striking or clutch play under pressure, but a good start to earn more Tiger comparisons needs to be winning more majors.Sens: We’ve seen some other dominant stretches that drew comparisons to Tiger– peak Rahm, peak Rory and peak DJ among them. But nothing as prolific or sustained as what we saw from Scheffler this year, who won in so many settings it was hard to keep track, and who tacked on a gold medal to it all. Peak Tiger remains a different animal. But for all-around game, Scheffler definitely takes the prize. What was amazing was how he put himself in the mix so consistently, even when his putter was cold or when he was sent to the cooler for a traffic violation.Hirsh: I think Sens hits the nail on the head here, not only was peak Tiger a different animal, but he was a different animal for longer. All Scheffler was missing last year was the wins, now he’s winning at a similar rate, but let’s see how long he can do that for. We have to remember Tiger did most of his damage between 1996 and 2013. Basically he amassed 79 wins in about 17 seasons, which means he was winning more than four and a half times per year. Scheffler has won four-and-a-third times a year for the last three seasons. If he keeps that up for 10 more years, then we’re on to something.
He beat 27 players this week and lost to two, yet we're measuring him for golf's Mt. Rushmore?
I did like Scotties explanation of the S-word:
Scottie Scheffler talked through his shank on the 8th hole in the most Scottie Scheffler way possible. 😂 pic.twitter.com/nsmcN2Tyc2
— Golf Digest (@GolfDigest) September 2, 2024
Even better was Claire Rogers comparing it to going full Taurean Prince:
Same vibes pic.twitter.com/FwKhYv43uu
— claire rogers (@kclairerogers) September 2, 2024
Thanks, Scottie, but we know from personal experience.
Of courser, most of us don't respond quite like this:
Then Scheffler hit a cold, hard shank with that bunker shot, a shocking miss that sent his ball skittering off the other side of the green. (Consider that Thing 1: World No. 1 can hit a mean bunker shank.) From there he shorted his chip shot and walked off with another bogey, while playing partner Collin Morikawa made birdie to suddenly draw within two.
I'm very familiar with the cold shank, but a cold, hard shank? That sounds really bad, but I'm wondering if there are cold shanks that aren't hard?
But he's Scottie Scheffler, and we're not:
As for his in-round, on-course response? That was downright jaw-dropping. A soaring long-iron at No. 9 from 236 yards to five feet. Birdie. A towering wedge at No. 10 to three feet. Birdie. And a 15-footer for birdie at No. 11 that Scheffler walked in with hardly a reaction, capping off a three-hole stretch that screamed enough screwing around. Then came the door-slamming eagle at No. 14, a reminder that Scheffler isn’t just a talented golfer. He’s the world’s most talented golfer — and he’s an absolute killer, too.
And pretty good at the golf thing as well.
Though I've little sympathy here:
“Yeah, it’s great,” Scheffler said, asked to sum up his seven-win season. But then he paused. “Still don’t understand why the Olympics doesn’t count. That’s a bit weird to me. I think that’s part of the greed that goes on in your brain, is you say seven, I’m like, ‘I won eight.’ I won the Olympics in the middle of the year, and for some reason it doesn’t count as an official PGA Tour win. It counts the same as — no offense to the Hero — but it counts the same as the Hero World Challenge in the grand scheme of things.”
He's right to compare it to the Hero World Challenged, because the strength of field is so comparable.
Dylan spares a moment for Rory McIlroy. Do you remember Rory? He used to be pretty good back in the mid-aughts, but that was ages ago. It's just that Dylan drops a factoid that hadn't crossed my radar, and I'm delighted to hear that we have more linksy goodness on tap:
Rory McIlroy played well but never contended at the Tour Championship, a result that was in some ways fitting for a season that was solid but, by his lofty standards, still disappointing. He described feeling like a “distant third” in the world behind Scheffler and Xander Schauffele and, even though he still has five starts left this fall to make 27 for the year, plans to cut back his schedule for 2025.“I’m usually sort of like a 22 [start] sort of person. But again, that was when I was sort of in my 20s and didn’t have the responsibilities that I do now,” he said. “I’m going to try to cut it back to like 18 or 20 a year going forward, I think.”Whether that’s just end-of-season fatigue talking remains to be seen; in the meantime we’ll look forward to McIlroy at the Horizon Irish Open at the legendary Royal County Down in just two weeks’ time.
That's great, though I especially recommend Thursday-Friday viewing. That's because it's the front nine at RCD that's so off-the-charts spectacular, whereas weekend coverage will be concentrated on their less visually dramatic second nine.
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