Thursday Themes - Where Ya Been Edition

Sick, is the simple answer.  Oh, some scheduling bits as well, but got whacked last week with what at first appeared to be merely a nasty head cold, but evolved into something far more impressive....No fun at all.

I did actually play yesterday, and if I'm well enough to play, I should be well enough to blog.  Not that there's much about which to blog.

Tommy Lad In Full - Recency bias, much?  He's a really good player and one of a dwindling few whose reputation has been enhanced recently, but I can't be the only one thinking he's still the same guy that coughed up all those opportunities.

First, with Tiger's next appearance likely to be on a milk carton, the Tour Confidential panel would logically be hardest hit.  And it's not like they have much to mull over either:

Tommy Fleetwood won the DP World India Championship to earn his second victory in his last four starts (not to mention his Ryder Cup dominance). Now no longer worried about securing his first PGA Tour win (and save for the World No. 1), is there a player primed for a more dominant 2026 than Fleetwood?

Ummmm, unless Scottie Scheffler has retired to spend more time with his family, I'm gonna go with a hard "NO". 

Josh Berhow: The stars certainly seem to be aligning for a Fleetwood breakout. He had a few close calls even before he finally won the Tour Championship, so it’s not like the last few months

have been a fluke. The guy can ball-strike with the best of them, which is a good way to always stay in contention. But it’s also important to remember guys have gotten hot and looked ready to tear up the golf world before, only to disappear. (Viktor Hovland won back-to-back playoff events in August 2023 and didn’t win again for 19 months.) I don’t expect a Scottie-like 2026, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Fleetwood picked off two or even three wins next year.

Alan Bastable: Amazing how wins so often beget more wins. Fleetwood is the latest case in point, and not necessarily because his game is any better than it was a year ago — but more so because he’s leading the Tour in SG: Confidence. We’ll see if that magic stays with him through the offseason. As he said himself on Sunday, “I know form doesn’t last forever, but I’m trying to make myself the most consistent player I can be.” But, yes, to answer the question, he’s incredibly well positioned for 2026. Another guy I’m excited to see in action next year: Cameron Young. Curious if his impressive Ryder Cup will give him a shot of sustained confidence.

Jessica Marksbury: It’s always interesting when players get hot in the fall and winter to see if they can sustain the momentum into the next summer major season. Although, as Josh mentioned, it’s not as though Tommy is coming out of nowhere. He’s been a favorite pick at the majors even before his PGA Tour breakthrough. But Tommy does seem to come on especially strong in Ryder Cup years. So let’s revisit this in 2027! As for next year, I’m looking forward to keeping my eye on another solid European: Alex Noren, who won two DP World Tour titles this year and is projected to earn his PGA Tour card for next season.

Hard to see why they would even hold the Masters, eh?  But that Alan Bastable premise is unfortunately completely unsupported.  It's what we think will happen, but where's the evidence that it does.

What drives this observer more than a little crazy is that which we ignore.  I'll get to East Lake below, but this is the week on that third-tier tour that has sober journalists calling it the Tommy Lad Era:

Fleetwood beat out a handful of stars to win on a narrow Delhi Golf Club, where it was reported that 42 percent of the field played without a driver. Should the PGA Tour visit more courses where players are forced to be more strategic off the tee? And how often?

Berhow: Delhi Golf Club is a pretty extreme example — I don’t want Rory hitting zero drivers! — but it should definitely happen more, as playing sound, strategic golf and hitting clubs the course might call for is a skill, just as much as it is to bomb driver all around the property. It gives more players a chance too. Years ago I remember Kevin Kisner rattling off a list of courses he felt he couldn’t win on simply due to the distance required off the tee. How realistic it is though is another question. Lots of logistics go into picking a Tour venue — a sponsor, the TV production, etc. — and sometimes the type of golf course isn’t always the main focus.

Bastable: Power should be a competitive advantage in golf so, yeah, it would be unfair to suddenly inject the Tour schedule with a bunch more tight and tree-choked sites. Still, this week in New Delhi was a fun reminder that there’s more than one way to test elite players who can hit a driver 330 yards, and some of the players seemed to really dig the challenge. “I like courses like this a lot more because you just hit a variety of different clubs more often,” Ben Griffin said early in the week, “whereas in America we’re so used to hitting maybe drivers and wedges a lot more.”

Marksbury: Playing a round of golf without a driver is something I will never be able to relate to! Years ago, a USGA official told me that the objective for the course setup for the U.S. Open was not necessarily to provide the most tortuous test, but for players to utilize every club in the bag over the course of the tournament. I like that idea, and I am definitely in favor of promoting more courses (or setups) where that’s possible. Six or seven times a year would be nice.

I completely agree.  It must be racist or something to expect that the best players in the world will show actual golf skills in their competitions....  And that doesn't even incorporate the most damning bit buried in the lede sentence of the question, the key word being "handful".

So, sure, win in India against nobody on a golf course too fiddly to hit driver... world dominance logically ensues.

Dylan Dethier had some good bits in his Monday Finish column, though I'm not quite buying this premise:

Fleetwood’s latest accomplishment also completes a fascinating third act of this year in men’s professional golf. Rory McIlroy was the clear star of the first act; he won at Pebble Beach, won the Players and won the Masters to complete the career grand slam. Scottie Scheffler was the clear star of Act II, winning two majors and a half-dozen times in all as he put even more space between himself and the rest of the world. I posed this question during the FedEx Cup playoffs — behind McIlroy and Scheffler, who’s the PGA Tour’s third-biggest star? It wasn’t long before we got our answer. Fleetwood has established himself as the champion of Act III. Soon we’ll put the pressure back on him to win a major, but in the meantime he’s the clear winner of this post-majors season.

Really?  Let's see, the first guy completed the career Grand Slam and that second guy ran off two majors, but the third guy beat 29 guys in Atlanta and four guys we've heard of that had to leave driver in the locker.  Yeah, totally the same thing!

Before we leave Tommy, I do want to include this lovely story from Dylan:

When Tommy Fleetwood won the DP World India Championship on Sunday, he made his son Frankie’s dreams come true.

Recently Frankie mentioned he’s never been able to run onto the green to celebrate one of his father’s wins. Tommy literally wrote his son’s quote down — “You have never won and I’ve run onto the green” — and then, within the week, made that happen. Tommy Fleetwood is a terrific golfer. He’s also apparently an even better dad. What did you do for your kid this weekend?

The only thing I don't like about that bit is the underlying premise that the absence of a win might make him a bad father.... It's not an entitlement.

While I feel compelled to make fun of the underlying assumptions, I do hope I don't sound as if I'm down on Fleetwood.  We're at a juncture where he's one of the few guys left (along with Scottie) to root for, and let me work in this from Dylan:

Along the way he (and his family!) have completed impressive side quests. Frankie delivered the quote of the year at the Masters (his declaration that he was “trying my hardest” was inspiration for everyone, everywhere). Tommy has delivered enough philosophical gems of his own that he could start a cult, or at least a self-help podcast (he described this Sunday as “another opportunity to show a good attitude”). He even stunned in traditional Indian attire at a tournament party this weekend, where he looked like royalty (and further reinforced the idea that Tommy Fleetwood would do well wherever you put him).

My bolding will show which bit got my attention.

I think Tommy had a great summer and he was never better than in the aftermath of Hartford and the other disappointments.  I consider those press comments a Master Class in professionalism, and someone should compare and contrast that to Rory's behavior during the summer.  Tommy has called speaking to the press after coughing up a lead "Part of the job", an attitude that his peer group would do well to internalize.  Rory, are you taking notes?

Tour Faceplants - We're supposed to care about this nonsense?  First they tell us that eight tourneys are so important that we can't have them sullied by actual Tour players (you know, the riffraff that might get in the way of those they think we need to see).  Then come this:

The PGA Tour just canceled its opener. Is there more to the story?

The PGA Tour announced on Wednesday that its 2026 season opener, the Sentry, is canceled.

Curiously, it wasn’t the only Kapalua-related announcement on Wednesday. The Plantation Course — the pride of Maui and longtime host to the first event of the Tour’s calendar season — added a banner to its website trumpeting the fact that it’s now booking tee times after closing the course for two months.

So what on earth is going on?

This is a story of drought, of course conditions and of Hawaiian politics. But it has also become a story about the PGA Tour’s future, about its vision and its strategy and its relationships with markets and sponsors. Let’s talk through a few of the complicating factors together, Q&A-style.

The problem is that we've already spent more in it than out interest in the event justifies....

Wait — why aren’t they having the Sentry at Kapalua like they normally do?

The simplest answer is that water restrictions on Maui (resulting from a combination of drought, infrastructure, streams, ditches, lawsuits, finger-pointing and more) called into question the course’s readiness to host a premier field in January. Tournament officials and PGA Tour representatives deliberated and ultimately decided last month that the Sentry wouldn’t happen as scheduled.

But..... while the Sentry folks seem to be taking the high road, this is something I've been on for quite a while:

Are there other complicating factors?

There are! One is the fact that the Sentry is no longer the only early-January competition on the golf calendar. The DP World Tour’s 2026 Dubai Invitational is scheduled for the week after the Sentry (Jan. 15-18) and has already gotten commitments from Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood; they’re also among the top Europeans expected at the following week’s Hero Dubai Desert Classic (Jan. 22-25).

There’s also TGL, which kicks off in Florida on Sunday, Dec. 28, and then features matches on Monday or Tuesday every week of January — which raised eyebrows when the schedule was released, given it’s tough to combine a Tuesday TGL match with a Thursday tournament tee time in Hawaii.

Once again, the PGA Tour has stuck a shiv in a sponsor's back....why do they take it?

Many of you will understand that, given the unique geography here, it's not just the one sponsor that took it up the back channel:

So … where does the PGA Tour season start?

Technically the first PGA Tour event of the season will be the Sony Open in Hawaii, with balls in the air for the first round on Jan. 15. But it may not feel quite like the full-on PGA Tour will be underway; top pros who typically island-hop from the Sentry to the Sony may not make the trip at all.

It’ll be interesting to see if we get a beefed-up field when the Tour returns to the mainland with the American Express in Palm Springs Jan. 22-25. That’s followed by the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines (Jan. 29-Feb. 1) and the WM Phoenix Open (Feb. 5-8) before, at last, the first Signature Event, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (Feb. 12-15). From there, things will hit warp speed (eight Signature Events plus the Players and all four majors in the next 23 weeks). But it’s an admittedly slower start with the Sentry off the schedule.

 I wonder if they'll even be able to fill out the field.  Sony might have to pay to get guys to Oahu....

Beloved? - Your mileage may vary:

Golf Channel is bringing back a beloved show … with a YouTube twist

I'm sure you'll have guessed....

There is a certain irony in the news that Golf Channel is bringing back The Big Break with help from the YouTube content kings at Good Good.

The irony in question? Primarily that at the time The Big Break was in its Golf Channel heyday, most of the Good Good gang wasn’t old enough to watch it.

Still, the news is good for lifelong fans of the show (or more recent fans of one of YouTube golf’s most prominent brands): The Big Break has been greenlit by Golf Channel executives to return to audiences in late 2026, and Good Good is at the center of the operation.

According to a press release announcing the return, Golf Channel and Good Good will combine to produce a new edition of the longtime reality TV show, with a sponsor’s exemption into next November’s newly announced Good Good Championship (a PGA Tour fall series event) on the line for the winner.

To date, The Big Break remains Golf Channel’s most notable success in the world of original programming — a reality TV series that ran for a record 23 seasons from 2003 to 2015 and helped birth the careers of several notable golf figures, including Tony Finau. The new edition of the reality show will feature a heavy dose of Golf Channel’s content partners at Good Good golf, the 2-million-subscriber YouTube channel and merchandise monolith. Good Good and Golf Channel signed a content partnership in 2024 that has seen a host of new programming come to the network via the YouTube channel, though to date the partnership has focused more on one-off events than recurring series’ like Big Break.

I've got a bit of a personal connection to this show, because during my Willow Ridge days one of the aspiring pros there got a gig on Big Break ate The Greenbrier.  In fact, I was with him when he received the call telling him he was in,.

But I always thought that watching aspiring professional golfers choke up a storm should have been much better television than they made it out to be.  Hopefully the YouTubers can help them make it more appealing.  Honestly, to me this should be of greater interest than the TGL, just because those guys just don't hit enough bad shots.  Well, except for Kevin Kisner.

That will have to do for today, boys and girls.  Still not planning too much blogging, but I will try not to ghost you again as I've done for the last 10-12 days.  No hard feelings?