Your Friday Frisson - Getaway Day Edition

OK, I admit it, I've been a lazy blogger.... Oh, there's a deep inventory of excuses, but I have very much needed a break from the grind.  Whether anything will rekindle that elusive enthusiasm is very much TBD....

In terms of schedule, I head West tomorrow morning for an extended stay that will include a long road trip up to British Columbia.  More on that later.

Farmers' Finale - I did watch some of yesterday's coverage, and those cliffs are as breathtaking as ever.  But I caught an amusing instance of a phenomenon we've discussed previously, referring to long-ago iterations of the Torrey Pines event as the Farmers, yanno, long before that insurance company was involved.  It seemed jarring to this observer, knowing that this is the Framers swan song and that next year we will retroactively renaming all prior Andy Williams Pro-Ams to a sponsor to be named later....

It always reminds me of this meme:

Farmers Insurance is about to be cancelled... thanks for playing.

Fun day to watch the boys deal with winds on a golf course designed to frustrate such play:

Professional golfers are finicky creatures.

They want to control every aspect of their games, from the swing to equipment. If a driver is half a degree of loft off, they'll change it. If there's too much or too little tape under their grips, they

notice immediately. Pre-shot routines? Don't expect them to waver, whether playing great or poorly.

That's why Thursday at the 2025 Farmers Insurance Open was something out of the ordinary. Strong Santa Ana winds rushed from the mountains and swallowed Torrey Pines' North and South Courses in La Jolla, California, during the second round, sending golfers scrambling to hit shots between gusts, measure how the wind was affecting putts and question nearly every single swing. The winds were blowing so much so that there was an 86-minute suspension of play, meaning the second round and cut won't come until Friday morning.

The North Course at Torrey Pines played nearly five shots harder Thursday than it did during Wednesday's first round. The South Course played nearly three shots harder.

In their defense, they're playing on a golf course seemingly designed without knowing it was on the bluffs over the Pacific Ocean.  There's a place called GB&I where they know how to build course that can be played in the wind, yanno, utilizing a ground game, but that's not an option here.

The other interesting bit is that there was a rash of withdrawals, surprising given the contraction of field size in those Signature Events money grabs:

But, starting on Sunday, for the tournament that runs Wednesday through Saturday, players began

withdrawing with unusual speed, most citing illness that seemed to have cut a swath through the locker room. World No. 5 Collin Morikawa was among the first four to exit, followed on Monday by three more and then another on Tuesday, bringing the total on the eve of the first round to eight.

Then, in an extreme rarity, two high-profile players, Gary Woodland and Will Zalatoris, withdrew in the hours before teeing off. At that point, the tour was in a bind to fill the field of 156 and wasn’t able to, because most of the alternates had left the area. Ryan Moore was originally listed as a replacement for Zalatoris, and then he said he couldn’t play.

Enter a healthy and competition-starved Garrigus. The 47-year-old played in only two PGA Tour events in 2024—both of them as an alternate—and only cashed $5,000 checks in show-up money because he missed the cuts.

See if you can read this short 'graph without laughing:

Because Zalatoris is among the more popular players on tour, in replacing him Garrigus ended up in one of the featured groupings with Justin Rose and Maverick McNealy, and after nearly two decades on tour, it was far more fun than intimidating.

Yeah, Feature Groups aren't what they used to be, even before the Garrigus switcheroo....But it's more than passing strange that they don't tell us anything more about this mystery illness.

I haven't gotten to the Justin Thomas e-mail yet, but keep that in the back of your mind and also recall that this is supposed to be one of the good guys:

Max Homa apparently had enough of the wind and his own ragged play on Thursday in the Farmers Insurance Open. The champion of the event at Torrey Pines in 2023 withdrew with three holes to play on the North Course after heavy winds forced officials to suspend play.

Homa stood at four over par for his round and nine over for the tournament. He opened the event on Wednesday on the South Course by making a triple bogey on No. 1, followed by a double and two more bogeys on the front, along with a birdie, to shoot 41 on the outward nine. Homa ended the day with a 77—his second-worst score in 25 rounds in the Farmers.

Homa’s withdrawal brought the number of players pulling out before or during the Farmers to 15 as tour officials said illness was the cause for many of the WDs. Shortly after Homa, Emiliano Grillo also withdrew during the delay with only one hole remaining on the North. With one triple bogey and a double on his card, he was eight over for the round and 14 over for the week. Twelve withdrew prior to the first round, and then Nate Lashley (74 in the first round), Hayden Buckley (79), Grillo (78) and Homa went out before completing a second round.

No class.  This is John Daly territory, and leavers his playing partners out there as a two-ball for their remaining holes.... What we see again and again, and JT's letter is on point here, that the players continue to act as if it's all about them.  Rory tells us that we need to know when the best players are playing, but then they also want to be free to not play when they're having a sad....

I'll also remind that Max and Morikawa's WD's were no doubt complicated by trips back East to play in the TGL, which feels like a vulture picking at the desiccated corpse of the Farmers Insurance Open.  Really hard to see why the nice folks at Farmers wouldn't want to let Jay keep effing them....

Simulate This - Full disclosure, I watched none of Tuesday's installment, which featured JT, Billy Ho.  It's still sitting on my DVR, but haven't I suffered enough?

I found this take amusing:

I love sports, and I’ve often wondered if I would watch any sporting event, no matter how trivial, if a network bothered to put it on TV.

I have finally found one that puts this question to the test. Welcome to Tomorrow’s Golf League,

or TGL. I finally caught up with the most recent match this week (play began Jan. 7). It is, in its way, innovative sports TV. It is also surpassingly weird.

The quirk here is that it is indoor golf. There are teams, and they compete at SoFi Stadium at Palm Beach State College, in front of a cheering crowd — think the 16th hole of the Phoenix Open if by some miracle rain had thinned the crowd down to 1,500 people. (Also: from the sound of it, less drunk.)

No, it’s not played in some huge airplane hangar. Players tee off into a huge screen, five stories tall — basically a top-of-the-line golf simulator. On long holes they hit their second shot virtually, as well. The mix of real life and what’s basically a video game sounds like a golf version of “Tron.” It is not that.

Once they get close enough, players chip and putt onto a real green (there are sand traps with real sand), which is a technological marvel. More than 600 hydraulic jacks change the undulation of the green depending on the hole. That’s undeniably cool.

So is probably the best thing about the competition, putting microphones on the players so we can hear them chat, yell, talk trash, whatever.

But why, you may ask, would I watch a show in which golfers, even those among the best in the world, hit balls into a giant screen? The same reason George Mallory gave for climbing Mt. Everest: because it is there.

I get it. You have to really like golf to watch it on TV. I do, and pass no judgement on anyone who does or doesn’t. But you have to be obsessed with it to watch this.

That first bolded phrase grabbed the header, and we assume that surpassingly weird isn't what they were going for.

 But isn't that second bolded word the crux of the issue, the existential matter of who is this for and who will actually watch it.  We've been fed the usual bit about growing the game and drawing non-golfers to watch, but that seems fanciful, no?

This take on viewership seems to be working overtime to put the best spin on it:

Through three weeks, TGL has had an impressive debut.

Not only in the SoFi Center but also on TV.

Tomorrow's Golf League, which was started by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, has averaged 869,000 viewers through its first three weeks. That's a 50 percent jump compared to the same time slot on ESPN in 2024, per Joe Pompliano. And as he points out, this stat is more impressive.

The average age of TGL viewers is 51 years old. That's younger than the NHL (52), F1 (53), NFL (54) and MLB (60).

OK, younger doesn't seem such a surprise to me, given that technology is involved, but why lede with average viewers?

Tuesday's match between Atlanta Drive GC and New York GC was the closest match yet, a 4-0 victory for Atlanta Drive, and 682,000 people tuned in, per Nielsen. That's the lowest number of viewers through three weeks, but a drop-off shouldn't be concerning.

And the basis for that drop-off not being concerning?

I would posit the opposite, but I'll also admit that I didn't see this one coming:

The debut was bound to have a big audience, pulling in 919,000 viewers. The weeks Woods plays, as he did in week 2 with 1,005,000 viewers, are bound to draw eyeballs. Next week against McIlroy and Boston Common could be one of, if not the, biggest audience of the year.

The numbers are vastly better than the PGA Tour's viewership to begin the year, which is a positive for the league. Week 3 was also the best pace thus far, and as matches get more competitive and stakes go up, more fans should tune in to watch.

Egads, this writer isn't exactly the sharpest knife in the draw.  It might seem like good news, but there's no planet on which the TGL's fortunes aren't linked to the PGA Tour, and if those events aren't drawing an audience.... well, you can finish the thought.

The TV numbers for the PGA Tour's 2025 American Express are in … and they're awful

 How bad were they?

There has been a lot of talk recently about TV numbers, more specifically the TGL and its first three weeks on ESPN. However, the viewership for last week's American Express has been released … and it's horrific.

The PGA Tour drew a measly 232,000 viewers for Sepp Straka's win on Sunday, according to Josh Carpenter of Sports Business Journal, down from 534,000 last year for then-amateur Nick Dunlap's win over Xander Schauffele (T-3) and Justin Thomas (T-3). When LIV Golf's Jon Rahm won in 2023, 391,000 tuned in.

Those are LIV numbers.....  They're not putting on a show anyone cares about, so perhaps the PIP program isn't the future of golf.  Just sayin'...

Random Bits - Geoff has grabbed some bits from Seth Waugh's interview with Eamon Lynch that caught my eye, not least this:

On how the Ryder Cup task force grew long in the tooth evolved. “The agent of change, which was the task force, became an agent of non-change because it was the same kind of people. It was Davis [Love III] and then Jim [Furyk] and then Steve [Stricker] and then Zach [Johnson]. They're all the same generation, all sort of the same person. I don’t mean that in a negative way. We put younger people on the Ryder Cup committee, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas, and they said it would be great to have a captain that's more relatable.”

Seth, they didn't use the "same kind of people", they used the same exact people.  Geez, the first thing they did was to give Davis Love a mulligan after his Medina meltdown.  But it was the cool kids, led by Phil, so it did exactly what it was designed to do...

This is odd in that it happened on his watch:

On paying Ryder Cup players a stipend. “If you take any lesson in the last few years, the world is tired of talking about money. Golf was supposed to be playing for a higher purpose. That's what the Ryder Cup signifies, you know? And because we give 20% of our television rights to the PGA Tour already, we are paying the players. We’re paying all the players, not just 12. I don't think it's gonna change their lives because it's not a big enough number to matter to them. They can monetize their participation in a way that blows away whatever you can pay them. And I just think for the players to ask to be paid for it is kind of a bad look.”

On players asking to be paid. “Not really. They asked a lot of questions. A couple of players wanted to understand the finances of Ryder Cup and the PGA of America. Fair enough, there should be transparency there. You know, ‘Why are we growing the game on the back of me?’ kind of thing. Which I understand, but it's on the back of everybody. But no, nobody ever specifically said I want to get paid. There are obviously implications of it. We've been talking about for 25 years about being paid, and now it'll be how much are we getting paid.”

So Seth makes a good point in that first Q&A, but compensating all Tour players is so out-of-touch these days, when we've been reliably assured that the game can only grow if Cantlay gest paid....

As for the second bit, but Seth seems determined to ignore Patrick's hatless protest in Rome....  That to me was a very clear ask, though I'd characterize more as a demand.  Yanno, along the lines of, "Nice Ryder Cup you got there.  Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it".

I'll throw these in as well:

On agent greed. “They're trying to represent their players and some of that is understandable. As a professional athlete, you know you have a limited window and once it's over, it's over. I understand why they want to harvest as much as they can. I don't think they have taken enough perspective on what long-term greed means. Short-term greed is ugly. Long-term greed is smart. What is your brand? How do I perpetuate the game because that's where I'm gonna make my money?

On money talk. “The Tour lost the trust of the players and then the players got selfish because they lost their trusted benefactors.”

On the damage done to pro golf. “I don't think it's been fatal damage. The game will survive, but you gotta bring fans back. Baseball had strikes, lost a lot of fans and never quite got them back. We build a city every year to have the PGA Championship. It's insanely inefficient, right? The only reason that exists is because people watch it. And if you don't take care of that … that's what I meant about private equity. Don't kill the goose. The goose is the fans, it's not a financial model that tells you what you should be doing. That’s just not how it works.”

We've diagnosed greed as the underlying condition, but we're gonna blame it on the agents?  Tiger and Rory sold the larger tour membership down the river, but it's all Steiny's doing?  That's a good one, Seth.

I think we're early to opine on whether the damage is reversible, but the good news for5 Seth is that his two events are only enhanced by the diminished interest in week-to-week tour events.  perhaps that should be former events, since Seth has resigned.

The Norman Conquests - Did you catch Greggy's silly comments about you-know-who?

Officially replaced last week as LIV Golf’s CEO, Norman will linger for one more season before devoting more time to ruining Mother Nature’s handiwork via course design work. Turning 70 in a few weeks, Norman revealed that LIV will be completely free of his “official tenure” on August 31st.

“I will stay involved with LIV in some way, shape or form,” he warned. “I’m going to stay on the board. So there will be that part of my life, but it won’t be as consuming as what it was before.”

con·​sum·​ing (kən-ˈsü-miŋ): strategically standing in the background of a LIV group in order to get screen time whether anyone wants him there or not.

The megalomania really shines through when discussing all he’s done for Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. Saying he “would love to” sit down with the two to absorb their adulation for the millions of dollars they made via the PGA Tour’ Player Impact Program, Norman makes clear he’d win any debate regarding LIV’s arrival. It’s as if Norman believes he helped Woodsilroy cover their December mortgage payments.

“I would love them to recognize the fact that – like Tiger with his PIP money [Player Impact Program] – that only came because of LIV, right?” Norman asked. “So Tiger benefitted from that. Rory’s definitely benefitted from that. I would love to sit down and talk to them about it, no question about it. Because I’m not a judgmental person and you only learn the facts and truth when you hear the other side of it.”

At least this all-important PIP conversation would never devolve into Norman expecting to be told that he was right all along. Never!

He resides in a rich fantasy world, so perhaps we should just let him be, but the best part of Shack's item is the greatest hits photo montage:

Good times!

That will have to be all for today.  I will see you early next week from Western HQ.  Have4 a great weekend.