Weekend Wrap - Lazy Blogger Edition

Sorry, kids, just having an awfully tough time working up enthusiasm for this blogging thing....Low motivation combined with a moribund new cycle leaves the Reader craved for content.

Hard to imagine it'll get much better any time soon.

Old Dog, New Tricks - Remember that old Paul Azinger quote?

“The Old Course at St Andrews, the home of golf, is different, because the course isn’t as long and the greens are pretty easy to putt and don’t have nearly as much slope,” Azinger said. “Augusta’s greens are frightfully fast, and they can stick the pins two paces from the edge.

“Augusta can always be defended. St Andrews is in trouble.”

And by "Old" I mean from way back in 2018.

So, how will the Old Girl be defended in 2027?

The R&A and Links Trust of St Andrews revealed the most significant wave of Old Course modifications in almost two decades.

As a previously announced irrigation system upgrade gets underway this week, the announced architectural work commences next week with the timing of various changes to depend on which holes are closed to play.

The mix of additions, restoration work, and subtle tweaks came about after the R&A and Links Trust commissioned Mackenzie & Ebert to analyze the Old Course in advance of the 2027 Open Championship.

“We believe this work is important in ensuring the Old Course continues to evolve and challenge the world’s best golfers in the years to come while enhancing the experience of local and visiting golfers,” said Mark Darbon, Chief Executive of The R&A. “Working with St Andrews Links Trust we have commissioned Mackenzie & Ebert to carry out a carefully planned programme of work to enhance and restore the challenge of the Old Course in a few key areas.”

Darbon said the “approach is grounded in deep respect for the course’s unparalleled history.” While some of the refinements are correcting the effects of wear, tear, and maintenance, key elements of the work are obviously inspired by how the course plays for Open contestants in the juiced equipment era. We’ll never know if these alterations would have happened had the original plans for a 2026 start to new golf ball regulations had been in place.

A total of 132 yards will be added on six holes, bringing the maximum yardage to 7,445 yards from 7,313.

That's the reimagined 16th fairway above, with the Old Course Hotel providing the background.

It's hard to get worked up over 132 yards, though we've already seen them grab portions of the adjoining golf courses for added yardage.  The 17th tee for Opens just happens to be OB, or is that splitting hairs?

Before ducking behind his paywall, Geoff helpfully provides a summary of the substantive changes:

• The 16th hole will see a “historic playing route” restored to the left of the Principal’s Nose and Deacon Sime bunkers, along with the addition of two bunkers to add risk on the left-hand side of the extended fairway. 

• Added length on six holes: the 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th, 11th, and 16th. 

• Two right-side drive length bunkers will be relocated farther down the second hole “to make them more relevant to the line of play.” 

• New bunkers at 6th and the 10th. 

• The right side approach bunkers at the 9th will be extended slightly toward the line of play, including Boase’s Bunker, which will be restored to its previous size. 

• The championship tee on the 12th will be realigned and improved. 

• The daily play tees at the 14th will be realigned and repositioned. 

• The Road bunker will see some restoration efforts to reduce the surrounding build-up.

I am personally most interested in that first bullet, No. 16 being an underappreciated hole in my humble estimation.  In fact, I still laugh when I think of the starting line my caddie suggested last time we hit the daily ballot, it being most notably....err, how do they put it?  Oh yeah, out of bounds.

Unfortunately, Geoff's dissertation on the 16th is deep behind his paywall, so let's ignore fair use and I'll excerpt his full examination of the changes to the second hole (the only one before that paywall):

Second Hole - Dyke

Two bunkers down the right side will be shifted closer to the play and the existing location filled

in. The Open’s second hole yardage of 452 yards remains thanks to a temporary tee placed out-of-bounds on the Himalayas putting green.

In an ideal world: The fairway down the right would be expanded, and the bunkers would not have to be shifted. But the new positioning will surely bring the deadly Cheapes into play (even more) because of the difficulty lining up from the Open tee. With the New Course first tee down the right, safety concerns appear to have made fairway expansion down the right a no-go.

Takeaway: If 300-yard drives were on the high side for average Open tee shots, the relocated bunkers would be putting a huge premium on starting a tee shot at Cheapes. But with the relocated bunkers a carry of 265 yards or so from the Open tee, they are likely to only become a nuisance into a stiff wind. It would be nice to expand down the right to show off ground features and reward taking on a right side that’s hard to see or hit to from the back tee. It would also get rid of a hideous straight line running down the right.

But this hole more often plays downwind.... Geoff provides these before-and-after visualizations from Makenzie & Ebert:

Hard to discern that difference for sure.  Not sure how far along they'll be by August, but hopefully we'll have better luck with the ballot next year and I can report back.

Before moving on, I'll add this graphic from a Golf.com article on the changes, one showing the effect of the solid core ball and providing context for that Azinger comment:

Nothing to see here.....

This week's Tour Confidential panel was asked about these changes:

The most revered links golf course in the world, St. Andrews’ Old Course, will add bunkers and be lengthened by 132 yards ahead of the 2027 Open Championship, a move R&A chief governance officer Grant Moir said is “appropriate” to “properly” adapt to the way the modern game is played.” Does adding length to a historic course like this worry you?

Berhow: I think there is something jarring about the Old Course making announcements like this. If a 60-something-year-old country club has to lengthen its course due to modern equipment, so be it, but when you hear of some of golf’s greatest cathedrals essentially saying “what we currently have ain’t it,” it gives you pause. We don’t like changing classic things — golf courses, cars, recipes, you get the picture. I’m interested to see how this looks on the property, where there isn’t a ton of room to work with. Makes you wonder if these tees will stay for future post-rollback Opens in St. Andrews.

Zak: It’s just not easy to see where the new tee boxes will be placed on certain holes. The lengthened Old Course starts to eat up space within itself. But ultimately, it’s mostly just for Open Championship week, so we won’t talk about it more than one month every five years.

Schrock: I don’t know if it worries me, but it speaks to the broader issue professional golf is facing with distance and equipment. We want to see the world’s best play meaningful tournaments on historic courses. And we want to see them play the course the way it was meant to be played. When I was at the Truist Championship at Philly Cricket Club this year, the difference in how the course was played on the first day in no conditions compared to the second round when it was raining and windy showed how these golden age courses can still present a challenge when the ball doesn’t fly for miles. We won’t talk about the Old Course changes except for one week every five years, but it speaks to the bigger problem.

First, quite the framing in that question, no?  I would call the Old the most revered golf course in the world, though the Golf.com limit said reverence to only the subset of links courses..... methinks these kids need to get out more.

I don't think the three guys added much to our understanding, especially given that to add prior yardage required them to grab real estate from adjoining links.  but to me the easiest way of understanding the issue is to think through what scoring could look like if they get soft, windless conditions.  When we see a 59 or 58 in an Open, will that get folks' attention?

While we're in the Auld Grey Toon, shall we deal with a tab that's been open for some time, one that may well explain our lack of recent Daily Ballot success:

St Andrews Links Trust lands huge revenue figure as investment plans set out

Golfers playing at St Andrews in 2024 generated £48.5 million in revenue for the Links Trust, resulting in a surplus of £10.8 million.

The surplus has been reported on the back of a total of 281,554 rounds - similar to a post-pandemic high of 2023 - being played on the seven courses that come under the Links Trust umbrella.

The total revenue generated in 2023 was £43.85 million while the surplus for that year was just under £11.5 million.

Too many damn people, for damn sure.

Phil Being Phil - The key bit today is to close browser tabs.  We have a new bit about our old friend Phil. and, since there was unfinished business elsewhere, shall we?

Report alleges Phil Mickelson received inside information on offshore company

Hmmm, Phil and insider information?  It's deja vu all over again.....

A report from the financial publication Hunterbrook alleges Phil Mickelson received inside information on an offshore oil company and distributed that information to a private group of

company shareholders. Mickelson responded on X Friday afternoon, calling the report “slanderous.”

On Friday, Hunterbrook published a story that included a series of private messages allegedly shared by Mickelson with a group of investors for the Houston-based oil startup Sable Offshore. In the messages, Mickelson, according to the report, shared material non-public information gleaned from interactions with Sable Offshore CEO Jim Flores — a decision that could have legal ramifications for Mickelson, the company’s chief executive, or both.

The article centers on the latest actions of the embattled oil company Sable Offshore, which reportedly paid $988 million to assume control of a troubled oil field from Exxon off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., and quickly attracted investors seeking a potential moonshot.

The article does remind us of this from Phil's CV:

Mickelson’s own past with insider trading is well-documented. In 2016, he paid more than $1 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle allegations that he had traded on inside information gleaned from the legendary gambler Billy Walters.

That's a wee bit cryptic for my taste.  To me, there are two aspects worth noting, including that the only reason Phil wasn't prosecuted was that his illegal trades were at a time when legislation made the burden of proof higher than prosecutors could likely meet.  Had he made those trades a year later, we might have had the pleasure of seeing Phil in an orange jumpsuit.

To me the bigger issue is that Billy Walters obviously felt that he needed to share this inside information with Phil to get him to pay his gambling debt.  There are at least three such instances of Phil stiffing his bookies, one in which Callaway paid it off and the third involving the Detroit mob.  Nice guy, eh?

Read the full article for the detailed nature of the allegations, it certainly sounds as if, best case, Phil is flirting with the rules, even if you take him at his word.  And, why would anyone take Phil at his word?

So, those two open tabs...  This we don't need to spend much time on:

Will Phil Mickelson ever be Ryder Cup captain? Analyst says it’s hard to envision

Look, Phil is a jerk, so easy enough to acknowledge that he's persona non grata in such matters.  But my wish would be that his actions in 2014 and thereafter would be reexamined, because his model for the Ryder Cup was always complete BS.  Pods, right, that's the ticket.  In light of U.S. results since 2014, how lame was that Task Force?

This was the more interesting open tab:

Phil Mickelson could have been modern-day Arnold Palmer. He chose another route

It's a Michael Bamberger piece, and I've in the past called Bams the conscience of our game, but not sure this is his best stuff:

When Phil Mickelson won the PGA Championship at age 50 at Kiawah Island in 2021, it was all teed up for him, to be Arnold II. Do you remember the crowds that engulfed him? He had, by dint of his golf, declared an end to the pandemic. You could breathe again. You could take your mask and trash it.

Golf was never going to have a second Arnold. But at 50, Phil Mickelson, with his raised thumbs and marathon autograph sessions and enduring game, was the closest thing the game had to the man.

It didn’t happen. Phil went LIV and that changed everything. He took the PIF money and thereby helped open a door to LIV Golf for Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Cam Smith and others. Phil helped make LIV legit. Along the way, he got himself exiled from the tour he came up on, the tour Arnold did so much to make. The PGA Tour has been weaker for it.

I think where Mike misfires is that, in his core, Phil simply isn't Arnold Palmer.  I used to divide the world into Good Phil and Bad Phil, and the former was the bit that has Mike saying that Phil could have been a elder statesman such as Palmer.

But Mike only notes that left for LIV, eliding the HOW of his leaving He burned with a white hot anger that demanded retribution, somehow discerning disrespect from being the 11th highest compensated athlete in history (notwithstanding that he's not even the eleventh best golfer in that period).

To repeated, he didn't merely take the money, he attempted to damage the tour on which he made tens of millions of dollars.  And he expects the guys that attempted to hurt to still respect him.

No, Mike, he was never going to be Arnie, because he's only about himself.  

Udder Stuff - This week's TC panel isn't much, but it does have the benefit of being easy blogging.  Not that I'm all that interested in their primary focus:

It was recently reported that Dustin Johnson re-signed with LIV Golf, and Bryson

DeChambeau has also been transparent about his contract. While some of the exact contract details of other LIV stars aren’t public, what’s more important for LIV this offseason: keeping current stars, or does it need to make another Jon Rahm-like splash and sign a big name like it last did a couple of years ago?

Josh Berhow: You could argue LIV is due for a big addition. Anthony Kim joined in 2024, and although he hasn’t performed well, it was a surprising and splashy name. I wonder, though, if there are any current, established PGA Tour pros who would leave at this point, like another Rahm-level guy. Part of me thinks allegiances have already been cemented, and luring a big-name guy away would be much more difficult than it sounds. Bringing back some of those key guys should probably be the priority.

Sean Zak: LIV doesn’t need another star. It needs seven more stars. The league simply does not have enough elite player firepower to gain a substantial audience. Joaquin Niemann has been great; Cam Smith has not. Bryson DeChambeau has been great; Brooks Koepka has been up and down. Sergio Garcia has been quite good; Phil Mickelson has not. As I have said for three years now, all the money in the world can buy you big names, but it cannot guarantee they play great, compelling golf.

Josh Schrock: Everyone feels pretty entrenched in their respective sides now. As Zak noted, LIV needs several more stars to move the needle. I’m doubtful that those moves are out there. Their best move is to re-sign their big-name guys. If they lose one of their top guys or two, the air will really start to leave the balloon.

LIV has exactly nothing that works, so adding big names seems futile.  More to the point, given how unhappy Jon Rahm has seemed with his move, who do we think would follow him?

I agree that this guy was an interesting case:

One player who declined a PGA Tour invite and instead joined LIV Golf, Tom McKibbin, earned 2026 Masters and Open Championship invites when he won the Hong Kong Open on Sunday. This comes a couple of months after Augusta National and the R&A announced the winners of six national opens (Scottish, Spanish, Japan, Hong Kong, Australian and South African) would earn spots in those two majors. Still without World Ranking points, are these new exemptions good recruiting bullet points for LIV?

Berhow: They aren’t bad for recruiting, because it does offer additional chances for majors, but it’s directed at the wrong type of players. Yes, LIV can benefit from bringing in young talent, but a bunch of up-and-coming Tom McKibbins isn’t going to be what draws eyeballs. They need established stars; and those guys aren’t probably worried about these extra invites, because ideally they wouldn’t need them.

Zak: Not really. In order to gain major access through those events, you almost always have to win. As in be so good you beat everyone else in a big field. It’s definitely not much of a carrot.

Schrock: It’s better than not having any access, but it’s still so minuscule that it won’t lure the type of players they need to move the needle.

Yeah, if he doesn't win the event, he has no way to get into those majors.  To me, it's just a horrible choice for a young player....

When those exemptions were announced, it came with the caveat that the winners of PGA Tour Fall Series events will no longer receive Masters exemptions. Do you like the change? Or do you prefer fall-event winners earning them?

Berhow: I like this better. Have the fall focus on earning PGA Tour status. Plus, the Masters is more global than ever. This makes sense.

Zak: Doesn’t bother me that Fall Series events don’t get auto berths. I wouldn’t mind Augusta extending more invites via the year-end OWGR ranking, which is a greater representation of skill than a one-week heater in a weaker field.

Schrock: I prefer the invites go to winners of national opens instead of weaker PGA Tour fields. Golf is a global game, and the Masters has prioritized the global nature of the sport in recent years. Keep the FedEx Cup Fall about earning a card, and ask guys who want to earn a trip to Augusta National to play in the national opens.

Those Fall events are so lame now that major invites can't be justified, although the real takeaway ought to be that the Masters needs a substantially enlarged field.

Just one more that will have you laughing:

‘We’re ready’: Senior tour head says they’re prepared for Tiger Woods’ debut

Sure, he'll be out there for the good of the game.  Take as long as you need to stop laughing....

I don't know what he'll do, but I know it will reflect only his own sense of best interests... So, the round belly tour shouldn't get their hopes up.

That will have to keep you satisfied for now.  I'll be back....well, let's just say that I'll be back when I'm back.