Weekend Wrap - Time-Lapsed Edition

OK, my bad! I should have warned you that my Monday appointments would impinge upon the blogging schedule.... But we're all together now, which is the important thing.

The Week That Was - In light of my getting here on a delayed basis, I'll just utilize the action summary from Dylan Dethier's Monday Finish column, first from the Middle East:

–Rory McIlroy won the DP World Tour Championship, finishing his rollercoaster 2024 season with an exclamation point. “I’ve been through a lot this year professionally, personally,” he said. “It feels

like the fitting end to 2024.” While McIlroy acknowledged that even he will look back at this season with mixed feelings — the near-miss at the U.S. Open may never really leave him — this was a meaningful way to finish.

“I think I would have been miserable for a few weeks if I hadn’t won today,” McIlroy admitted. “It would have just added to the list of ones that I felt I let get away, and for one to not get away and to get over the line and be the final event of the year, it feels nice.”

He offered a fair appraisal of his year, too, in the context of the best players in the world.

“I know how people are going to view my year and I view my year similarly but at the same time, I still have to remember I won four times and I won a [sixth career] Race to Dubai. I accumulated a lot of big finishes and big performances, and the two guys that had better years than me have had career years. Xander [Schauffele] won two majors, and Scottie [Scheffler] won a Players and a Masters and an Olympic gold medal. They are the only two guys this year that I think that have had better years than me.”

This win was a testament to McIlroy’s longevity. It was also a reminder of what we have to look forward to next year.

Of course he did, because winning the season-long competition on a feeder tour is one of Rory's signature moves, along with his Masters back-door top tens.  But I'll focus you on that photo, first just to note that it's nice to see Rory pictured with his beautiful family, which we can only hope is as happy as they appear here.

What most folks will see as indescribably cute, Poppy holding up six fingers to celebrate his sixth such title, conveys to your humble blogger an age-group defying burn.  Of course, you can here me saying, "That's so great, Poppy, now show me how many Masters Daddy has won."  It's really Dylan that I'm speaking to, because he somehow takes Rory doing what he always does, and sees therein evidence that Rory will be a different guy in 2025.  Dylan, shall we agree to revisit that thought after the second week in April?

The Tour Confidential gang had similar thoughts:

Speaking of McIlroy, he beat Rasmus Hojgaard by two to win the season-ending DP World Tour Championship and clinch his sixth Race to Dubai title. Given his close calls over the past year — U.S. Open, Irish Open — how big was this victory to end the year and how important was it for his mojo heading into 2025: very little, somewhat, or a lot?

Sens: In the grand scheme, very little. McIlroy has won plenty of events during his 10-year major

drought. What he hasn’t won are the individual events he says mean the most to him. Maybe the swing changes he says he’s working on will get him over the hump this coming season. But I don’t expect another Race to Dubai title to get him past the mental-game issues that have pretty clearly been getting in his way in majors.

Colgan: Psychologically, I think it was a pretty big deal. I think his surprisingly emotional interview after the tournament proved as much to be true. But the bigger question — can he defeat the demons that cost him the U.S. Open and nearly cost him the title on Sunday? — remains unanswered heading into ‘25. I think that’s the bigger piece of it.

Melton: I don’t think it does a whole heck of a lot for his psyche considering winning these sorts of titles has never been the issue — it’s been winning in the four big ones. Another shiny trophy to add to the collection, but not the one he wants most. I don’t think this winning experience is gonna be make or break when it comes crunch time in the majors.

Rory has long been the psychological leader in the clubhouse, it's on green grass where he appears so suspect.  Hate to ask, but is Augusta National one of the courses on the TGL simulator?  Can I short the Boston Commons on DraftKings?   

Back to Dylan:

-With her win, Nelly Korda became the first player since 2011 to win seven times in an LPGA season and the first American since 1990. She’ll have one more chance to add to her total at the CME Group Tour Championship next week.

Just the most bizarre season I can recall from a professional golfer, covering the entire gamut of human experience, from dominance to ineptitude, as Dylan sums up here:

And with that, as we neared the conclusion of a year that had already included a half-dozen wins, a major, a horrifying 10, a series of shocking missed cuts, a Solheim Cup signature moment, a neck injury and even a literal dog bite, we saw a side of Korda we hadn’t.

But Charley Hull is here to solve our pace-of play issues:

Charley Hull ripped the LPGA’s woeful pace of play after Saturday’s round had her finishing in the darkness despite no significant delays.

“It was crazy,” Hull said of the third round, which she said took five hours, 40 minutes to complete. “I’m quite ruthless but I said listen, if you get three bad timings, every time it’s a two-shot penalty [and] if you have three of them you lose your tour card instantly. I’m sure that would hurry a lot of people up and they won’t want to lose their tour card.

“That would kill the slow play, but they would never do that.”

Almost six hours on a Florida golf course?  Shameful.

Lastly, despite the Euros and ladies putting up their alpha dogs, this result should be the more significant:

–Rafael Campos won his first PGA Tour event in fairytale fashion. He entered the week a new father; his wife Stephanie gave birth to their daughter Paola on Monday. But he also entered the week at No. 147 in the FedEx Cup and on the brink of losing his card; only the top 125 after next week’s RSM Classic receive full status for 2025.

OK, Rafa, enjoy your moment in the low winter sun, but Tiger and Rory now require you to crawl back under your rock.  It's for the good of the game, but we can't allow new talent to emerge, can we?

The State of Play -  It seems pretty obvious that a deal is coming, as per this from Dylan:

ONE MERGER UPDATE

Trump, Yasir and Jay.

On Friday, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan accepted an invitation to play golf with President-Elect Donald Trump at Trump International in West Palm Beach, Fla.

On Saturday night, Trump was spotted ringside at Madison Square Garden, where he was flanked by…Yasir Al-Rumayyan! The PIF governor and LIV chairman sat directly next to Trump throughout the evening.

What do these meetings, which were first reported by the Washington Post, actually mean? That remains to be seen, and perhaps not a whole lot. But it is a reminder that the next U.S. president is at the center of several Venn Diagrams involving professional golf, Saudi Arabia and U.S. politics.

But does anyone care?  Or have they sucked the joy out of it?

They're so far downstream in turning the PGA Tour into LIV that it may be too late:

Smaller fields, fewer tour cards are among sweeping changes approved by PGA Tour Policy Board

In late October, the PGA Tour Players Advisory Council officially proposed an eye-opening series of changes to the competitive structure of the tour that would shrink tournament field sizes, squeeze the number available tour cards, and diminish paths to the tour membership and participation everywhere from the Korn Ferry Tour to Monday qualifying.

On Monday afternoon, at the official session of the full Policy Board, those changes were approved. There was no indication in the tour's press release of vote totals.

Do women know about shrinkage?

While this guy has much to say of import, it's also a misdiagnosis:

Lucas Glover slams changes being voted on by PGA Tour Policy Board: 'They think we're stupid'

Oh, Lucas, it's so much worse than that.  They don't care whether you're smart or stupid, they've come to the conclusion that you're irrelevant.  So, good luck with that....

“I think it’s terrible,” he said. “And then hiding behind pace of play, I think challenges our intelligence. They think we’re stupid.”

Glover contends that 20 years ago when he was starting out on the Tour, there were no more than a handful of slow players. Now? “We have 50,” he said. “So don’t cut fields because it’s a pace of play issue. Tell us to play faster, or just say you’re trying to appease six guys and make them happy so they don’t go somewhere else and play golf.”

This is a sore subject with Glover, who notes he has been part of the “cool kid meetings and not in the cool kid meetings,” and points out the Tour’s job is to do what’s right for the full membership. “There’s 200 guys that this is their life and their job,” he said.

Gee, can we think of anyone that's driving this process and also plays at a pace slower than paint drying?  Yeah, him.

Eamon Lynch owed the folks at Golfweek an article, it's just a shame he didn't bother to think through his position on the current state of play:

Lynch: The PGA Tour’s board meeting will bring changes, but not yet to player entitlement or fans being shortchanged

 I do, however, like his lede:

Just days after the birth of his first child and on the brink of losing his status, career journeyman

Rafael Campos came up with a ‘Hail Mary’ moment on Sunday, winning the Butterfield Bermuda Championship to safeguard his job and punch his ticket to the Masters. Meanwhile, a yacht spin away at a boardroom in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, decisions were made Monday that ensure people like him will have fewer pathways to the Tour, less opportunity to use any card they earn, and dim prospects of keeping it.

The past 24 hours could hardly have produced a more jarring juxtaposition between the marketing romanticism of the PGA Tour and its modern, miserly reality.

Miserly seems entirely the wrong word, given that last few years have been about directing boatloads of money to certain players.  But guys like Campos have no place in the game according to the cool kids.

Eamon is best at the diagnosis:

Changes in the administration of the Tour — the addition of private investors and the rise of players who fancy themselves such — mean the boardroom is now more likely to revere Warren Buffett than, say, Arnie or Jack. Buffett has often said that price is what you pay and value is what you get, and much of what was being deliberated today focused on whether there’s sufficient value in what they’re paying for. Even if not every constituency is being subjected to the same metrics.

Rank-and-file members didn’t emerge well from this meeting. Beginning in 2026, field sizes will be reduced, the ranks of exempt players will be cut, and the number of Korn Ferry Tour grads and Monday qualifiers will be slashed. The dominant (and wholly defensible) sentiment is that too many guys are paid too much for too scant a contribution to the business, so the herd must be culled. And to be fair, some of the player-directors who made these calls are almost certainly going to find themselves on the wrong side of the cull soon enough.

But here's where Eamon seems to have checked his cynicism.  Because he seems to be calling out Webb Simpson and Peter Malnati, ignoring that those votes were bought with sponsors' exemption, protecting the voters from market realities.  Not a corrupt bargain at all....

And here his ire seems misdirected:

Also on the agenda was tens of millions of dollars of budget cuts, what private equity likes to call “efficiencies.” Addressing bloat and waste is a long overdue exercise in this organization, but many of those who work at the GloHo deserve more defenders than they’ll see when the axe starts swinging. The operations and culture of the Tour — a mix of competence, complacency and conceit, depending on who you’re dealing with — is overdue a shake-up, but people who’ve done a good job will still be hurt. Cuts ought to be with a scalpel to safeguard talent, growth and revenue, but those decisions are now heavily influenced by folks accustomed to using chainsaws, and who have a great deal of experience in sports but none in golf.

I personally am completely prepared to have them take a chainsaw to the layers and layers of suits at the amusingly-named GloHo.....  If this isn't a candidate for "Bild Back Better", then I can't think of one.

Although Eamon might want to see someone about his TDS:

Another cost-versus-value analysis will focus on the Tour’s potential deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. Are player-directors willing to accept things like team golf and no reparations from LIV defectors in return for a smoother pathway to reunifying the game? They must surely grasp that an opportunity now presents itself in the form of a stubby Cheeto thumb eager to tilt the scales of the Department of Justice in favor of whoever is most flattering, though it’s a pity the Tour lacked PIF’s foresight to lob a couple billion bucks into Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners hedge fund.

Eamon, thank you for sharing your unctuous virtue signaling with us, though it's really kind of juvenile.  Yes, a Trump Justice Department will be different from the Biden version thereof, but notice how Eamon skirt the issue of whether there are actual antitrust issues?  He doesn't even know how he would have them react, he just desperately needs to signal that Orange Man Bad!

I'm guessing Eamon will have a tough four years, but it's quite the stretch to see any valid anti-trust issues here.

His cri de cœur is great and will have us all nodding along:

For all the changes approved today, this final Tour board meeting of 2024 won’t address two painful necessities. At some point, the board needs to face down the entitlement of top players, whose compensation seems only to rise even while the stock of their enterprise craters. And they’ll have to get real about serving the constituency that actually gives (fans) rather than just the one that takes.

If they’re confident that their decisions will produce an enhanced product for long-suffering fans, then it’s about time one of them peeked around the boardroom door and began explaining how.

The problem is there isn't the slightest clue from Eamon as to how to achieve wither of his two laudatory objectives.  And those most entitles have been handed the keys, so good luck with it all.

That will have to due for today.  I've got some open browser tabs to blog, so we'll catch up later in the week.