Thursday Threads - Kapalua Kickoff Edition

So, how was your offseason?  I can only hope you used the hour-and-a-half profitably....

I have arrived at Unplayable Lies Western HQ without incident, as New Years Day is a good one on which to travel, including a land speed record getting to JFK.  That said, I'm walking into a bit of a mess (that "bit" being an understatement) at the mountain, as the geniuses at Vail have taken a strike of the....wait for it, Ski Patrol.  Yup, the only Vail employees for whom we have any use....  Limited terrain and the last of the holiday crowds with nowhere to go.

The other minor issue is that there remains little to blog.... Obviously we have the 2025 season blasting off later today, though your humble blogger did chuckle at the sequence of events that resulted in the getting big-footed by the college football playoffs.  Wonder which people will choose to watch?

Max's Moment - Suddenly, amidst that content void, all anyone wants to talk about is....checking notes, Max Homa.  Yeah, he didn't exactly light it up last year:

'It's been a weird year': Why Max Homa made a surprise move to Cobra

One of the Tour's biggest names is hoping an equipment change will lead to more fun (and success) on the course as the season kicks off in Hawaii.

Fun?  Fair enough, but does he know our fun now comes from not watching their exhibition matches?

PALM CITY, Fla. — Max Homa has time to kill as another pop-up shower makes its presence known at Floridian National Golf Club. A whirlwind content shoot has been put on hold, allowing

him the opportunity to ponder a question he’ll certainly get from peers and fans alike at PGA Tour’s season-opening The Sentry: Why Cobra Golf?

For more than a decade, Homa’s staff bag was filled with Titleist clubs that helped him go from relative unknown on the Korn Ferry Tour to one of the most marketable names on the PGA Tour. Five tour titles in a two-year stretch reinforced the belief that Homa was more than a social media darling.

Expectations were at an all-time high entering the 2024 season, but results didn’t match the forecast.

Homa failed to win for the first time in three years and missed out on the Tour Championship. In the aftermath, he started to take inventory of the game and noticed a worrying strokes gained/off-the-tee trend. After finishing no worse than 41st in the statistical category the previous two seasons, he struggled to keep it in play and plummeted to 164th.

Has he considered that it might be the Indian, and not the arrows?  And he looks weird in a Cobra hat...

Is it me, or is he perhaps sounding a wee bit needy?

“I drove it poorly for the first time, so I just thought it wasn’t necessarily the golf club that makes the ball go straight,” Homa told Golf Digest. “My caddie [Joe Greiner] said it proves the golf club doesn’t make the ball go straighter every time. You make it go straight. Go find something that can do that. Go through the business process and see what’s what. I think that gave me the confidence to go shop around. So when the time came for the opportunity to look around, I did. It’s been a weird year. Making golf fun can be tricky, and sometimes change is fun.”

With myriad suitors rolling out the red carpet to land one of the biggest draws on tour, Homa opted to take it slow, go through the courting process for the first time in his career and embrace being the cynosure.

“I like to consider myself low maintenance,” he said. “I don’t enjoy being the center of attention. Being truthful, I wanted to experience what that feels like [to be the center of attention]. Feeling wanted is a nice thing. Even in my own family, I’m fourth in line behind the dog. So it feels good to feel that.”

 So, a Sally Field moment?  Or perhaps run a similar process for a new family?

Obviously all the companies make great products, but this has me chuckling:

Their gear more than held its own during head-to-head testing. A smaller, more intimate tour staff that already featured good friends Rickie Fowler and Gary Woodland was also a plus. So, too, was the opportunity to work with Ben Schomin, Cobra’s Tour Operations Manager, in an official capacity.

It didn’t take Schomin long to prove his bona fides after Homa and Cobra came together on a multi-year club agreement. As the duo kicked around ideas for new equipment that would best suit his skill set, the conversation eventually led to the irons, long considered the best part of Homa’s game. Initial testing with Cobra’s King MBs made Homa believe a change could be in the cards, but a few issues persisted. The toe profile, topline width and offset were a noticeable detraction from the Titleist blade profile he’d grown accustomed to seeing for nearly two decades.

Could Schomin and team replicate the old look in a Cobra iron?

Until a few years ago, such a request would have required a herculean effort. According to Schomin, a one-off forged product requires five tools to be made, pushing the turnaround time to anywhere from six to 18 months for an initial prototype. Homa’s timeframe was somewhat shorter at four weeks. It could be debated that no one has embraced 3D printing more than Cobra. When Bryson DeChambeau was on staff, Cobra’s R&D team created countless prototypes using 3D printing technology. Fowler and Woodland have benefitted from the rapid design process as well, along with recreational golfers following the release of Cobra’s Limit3d iron. In other words, the idea-to-creation timeframe wasn’t an impossible ask.

I thinks that's a fun look behind the scenes of equipment fitting an elite player, but it's also plenty curious, methinks.  First, the doctor's diagnosis related to driving, but the irons seem to have garnered more attention (at least from this article).

But amusingly, let's see if I have this right.  An elite player's game deteriorates, and he decides change is the critical ingredient to regaining his moxie.  So he goes through a presumably systematic process with the equipment manufacturers, settling with Cobra but forcing them to change their equipment to mirror his old stuff.  So, in what sense is he changing anything?  Yanno, except for the TLC he's getting as a new recruit....

Though this seems aggressive, or at least early:

The Sentry DFS picks 2025: Why I’m betting on a Max Homa bounceback

With Scottie on the shelf, it's a pretty weak field, but a guy with all new sticks?  By the way, does anybody know what ball he's going to play?  If he's still bitterly clinging to his ProV-1X's, this really may be much ado about nothing....

Doing The Job Bloggers Won't Do - Since I'm unable to provide much content today, this might fill a void:

We asked Golf Digest writers the story they were proudest of in 2024, and why

Not the worst premise for a year-end recycling piece... Some good stuff here, including this nice Nicklaus-Jacklin homage:

The classiest move I’ve ever seen on a golf course

But this one stoked my architectural nerd gene:

Masters 2024: In search of the greatest Augusta National

I haven't read this as closely as I should, but spoiler alerts aside, here's your best ANGC evah:

The ‘Greatest’ Augusta National

Where does that leave the discussion of which Augusta National belongs in the Hall of Fame? The club’s maintenance prowess and ability to control the playing surfaces would bolster an argument that the course has never been better. Conversely, the pure length has put the green jacket out of reach for perhaps half the field, making it improbable that crafty feel players like past champions Ben Crenshaw, Seve Ballesteros, Jose Maria Olazabal or Gary Player could contend. The narrowing of numerous fairways has eliminated an important degree of decision-making that was always critical to scoring well. Crenshaw summed it best in 1986, comparing Augusta’s cerebral calculations to more penal courses like TPC Sawgrass. “At Augusta, it is strategy, strategy, strategy,” he said. “Augusta’s strength is around the greens and the ability to place tee shots according to the pin locations.” Now, on too many holes, the prevailing criteria is to just get the ball in the fairway, exactly Crenshaw’s critique of the TPC.

That places the debate in the mid-to-late 1990s, after the club had begun installing the SubAir systems (1994) and approaching maintenance nirvana, but before the addition of the “second cut” of rough that looked awkward and deviated from Augusta’s heritage. Our choice for Augusta National’s most ideal version is the course of 1995 to 1998. Before the severe lengthening, any type of player might still contend. Surrounding Tiger Woods’ record-setting 18-under-par victory in 1997 were wins by 43-year-old Crenshaw (1995), a 38-year-old Faldo (1996) and 41-year-old O’Meara (1998). Though driving distances were increasing, the architecture remained an apt foil for the spinny, wound golf balls and smaller metalhead drivers of the time, and players still needed to play long irons and woods into the par 5s (and even some par 4s), illustrated by Faldo’s minutes-long deliberation between his 5-wood and 2-iron for the second shot at 13 after he had tracked down Greg Norman in 1996.

Some say that MacKenzie, who died in 1934, wouldn’t recognize Augusta National if he saw it today. He probably wouldn’t with the altered holes, razored bunker edges, imported groves of pine, Perry Maxwell’s greens and the immaculate turf. But if he were transported to 1998, it’s likely he would appreciate the course for rewarding a spectrum of physical and tactical skills, a course that required bravery, guile and experience as much as power. That, at least, was the Augusta National he believed he and Jones had designed.

Can't say I saw that coming, but anything that allows us to relive that 1996 collapse is to be cherished.

2025, Briefly -  I'll blitz through this, but it likely demands an hyperbola warning:

25 burning questions for the 2025 golf

Burning, you say?  The only thing burning right now is my apathy..... 

See if you follow me here, first with this:

3. Did Jordan Spieth just fix … everything?

Sometimes a wrist surgery is more than a wrist surgery. Spieth Nation hopes that’s the case. We haven’t seen Spieth since he bowed out in the second round of the FedEx Cup Playoffs in August — but perhaps this is intermission before a massive Spiethian second act.

Yanno, it's not like he was killing it before the injury....

But juxtapose that with this (even acknowledging he's pimping his podcast):

12. Can Xander Schauffele finish off the career grand slam?

Okay, maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps winning the Masters and the U.S. Open this year isn’t gonna happen. But what if it did?! We unpacked that on this week’s Bold Predictions episode of the Drop Zone, which you can find here:

So, you like Xander's chances to get the two better than Rory or Jordan's chances of getting the one they're missing?  I do as well, although not in 2025.

 He's got all sorts of governance bits as well, including this odd bit:

LEADERSHIP DIVISION

6. Who will the PGA Tour’s new CEO be?

Not just in name but in philosophy — who will Monahan and Co. hire to push the PGA Tour forward? And what does [gestures at entire landscape] all of this mean for Monahan?

It's that "Monahan and Co." that's so odd, because my operative assumption is that Jay will have nothing to do with filling this slot, as he's the irrelevant man, still there only because Tiger and Patrick have found it useful to divert stray voltage.

This one's not exactly keeping me up at night:

22. What’s the story with with LIV’s Fox Sports deal?

That is, where, when and how will we watch LIV? Getting a big-time TV deal is huge for the league’s potential exposure and could be an antidote to its underwhelming ratings. But I’m curious how the media rights were valued and how the product will be televised — how much FS1 we’re getting vs. Fox, whether international events will be live vs. tape-delayed, etc. LIV’s ratings remain an important subplot as various power brokers decide golf’s future.

In what sense is it a burning issue where events are aired that no one will watch?

This I agree might be a burning issue:

23. Will the TGL work?

Color me intrigued. I think this could be sneaky fun and legitimately different; it’ll be fast, the tech seems pretty cool and there’s plenty of star power involved — but there’s also a world where it’s something of a disaster. A directly related question: Will the players buy all the way in?

Is it me or is there precious little hype for this, given that we're five days from its launch?

I shall leave you here and get on with my day.  I would expect to be back Monday to wrap Kapalua, but check back early and often just to be safe.  And a belated Happy New Year to all my precious readers.