Weekend Wrap

A quick warning thatyou might have to live without those random musings until Thursday.  Seems fair, as a balky back (not my own) denied me all but nine holes this weekend.

Girls Gone Wild - Team match play is da' bomb, as if we needed further evidence.  Throw in a pinch of bad blood, saute for two years, and look what we get:

GLENEAGLES, Scotland – It was a dizzying affair. Momentum shifted back and forth like fescue in a stiff Scottish breeze. Perhaps the closest contest from start to finish of

any Solheim Cup ended with a part-time player, full-time legend draining a 6-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole to give Europe its first victory in six years. 

Everything down the stretch had to go Europe’s way. Bronte Law, an English lioness who sprinted out the tunnel and onto the first tee, walked in a birdie putt on the 16th hole and closed her match against alternate Ally McDonald on the 17th to leave the fate of the Cup in Suzann Pettersen’s hands. They are cut from the same mold, Law and Pettersen. High-octane players who feed off of moments like this, particularly in team competition.

Ron Sirak, a longtime advocate for the ladies' game, had this:

GLENEAGLES, Perthshire, Scotland – Rarely in sports does reality match expectation. More often than not, the happening falls short of the hype. But the 14½-13½ Solheim

Cup victory by Europe over the United States on Sunday at Gleneagles was better than advertised – almost better than imaginable.

You’d have to search far and wide to find a more dramatic finish anywhere in the history of sports. With the last shot of the day, Suzann Pettersen – a controversial captain’s pick – rolled in a 7-foot birdie putt on No. 18 to secure the victory. A miss and the U.S. would have won for the third consecutive time.

“Like the Ryder Cup, this has just grown so hugely,” said Catriona Matthew, the Scottish woman who captained Europe to victory in her homeland. “It came down to the last putt on the last hole. You can’t get more exciting than that.”

What's with those datelines?  The Gleneagles resort is located in the town of Auchterarder, which makes for a far more evocative deteline, no? 

It really could not have been more dramatic, with the Americans getting to 13 1/2 points and futilly searching for that last half point needed to fly home with the cup.  At first, two of the three remaining matches were all-square tied, but Pettersen and Bronte Law took care of business.  Law had some help, but Marina Alex gave Pettersen nothing, and when the Norwegian was forced to punch out on her second...

The Tour Confidential panel avoided deferred their Tiger question to give the ladies the stage, and led with this:

1. Tied 8-8 heading into Sunday singles at the Solheim Cup, Europe charged late and clinched its victory with a Suzann Pettersen birdie on the 18th hole, winning the Cup in dramatic come-from-behind fashion, 14.5-13.5. It was just the sixth win for Europe in 16 meetings and the first since 2013. What went wrong for the Americans, who were heavily favored heading into the matches?

Sean Zak: I can’t really look to anything besides that second-to-last match, when Bronte Law took over. It felt like that was an American point for much of the day, and then she

made some incredible birdies late — three of her last four holes — suffocating a point for the Euros. Momentum. 

Michael Bamberger: Road games are hard in these team competitions, and this was not a strong U.S. team, so it’s not a surprise. As second-guessing is a national sport in these affairs, I don’t know why you’d ever want to split up the Korda sisters. 

Jonathan Wall: Europe rose to the occasion. I don’t think there’s anything you can do in those situations. Sometimes it’s written in the stars. 

Dylan Dethier: Suzann Pettersen is what went wrong for the Americans! That putt on 18 isn’t something I’ll forget soon. There were moments the U.S. team would like to have back — Danielle Kang’s 18th hole, say, or Lexi Thompson’s unfortunate back spasms. But Europe showed it was made of tougher stuff and rallied together at the end.

And this, which is basically the same question:

2. One of the great traditions of Solheim and Ryder Cups is, of course, second-guessing the captains’ decisions. Anything Juli Inkster could’ve-should’ve done differently in skippering the U.S. side? 

Bamberger: Oh, now I see the second question! Please refer to the first answer. Also, you can’t go overseas too early, but there are many practical limitations at play in that. 

Zak: If Inkster thinks it was going to be smart to keep the Korda sisters separate, I 100 percent trust that. That being said, it was hard to see other obvious decisions for her in the pairings, so perhaps she should have just made that obvious one. Thankfully, she doesn’t care about our second-guessing. 

Wall: I like the idea of leaving a stronger player at the back in a competition when there’s a chance it’ll come down to the final few matches. No offense to Morgan Pressel, but I would’ve preferred a more in-form anchor. That’s nitpicking. Overall, I think Juli did one hell of a job on foreign soil. 

Dethier: I know Danielle Kang is a gamer, wanted to go out first in singles and I definitely appreciate Inkster sending her out in that position — but it was a bit of a vulnerable spot for a player who had faced an onslaught of tabloid aggression all week. She might have felt somewhat more comfortable with Americans on either side of her Sunday. (Note: This is rampant speculation, as she easily could have won her match and the storyline would be the opposite.)

There are two things that jump out at this observer, but in no way will this be completely fair.  A team event this close inevitably turns on the smallest of things, and that's by definition arbitrary.

1.  Danielle Kang's 18th hole, slow-motion train wreck.  I love Dylan's passive voice above, as if the tabloids at random picked their target.  I loved her talk of taking souls earlier in the week, but she simply didn't play up to her standards, and I knew with mathematical certainty that allowing Ciganda to win a Par-5 with a par would cost the Yanks the Cup.
2. Lexi - The alarmingly psychologically fragile beast has now added physical fragility to her brand.  I've been Googling for  a few minutes now and I cannot find an answer to the simple question of what would have happened if she couldn't go....  Is it the Steve Pate name in an envelope, or would it be a default?

Here's another curious aspect to it all... From an account of the warm-up:

"We were on the driving range, she went to bend over and tee up a shot, couldn’t even bend down," Benji Thompson said after the round. "It kind of affected her downswing. I think that’s why she hit a few of the right shots today, it came from just being somewhat in pain and couldn’t really fire through the ball.  

So, she can't bend over to tee her ball, and she gets out to a 2-up lead.  Then we hear that the back is loosening up, and she coughs up the match by hitting everything LEFT.  

I eagerly await his mailbag, but for now Alan Shipnuck is grading the participants:

Nelly Korda (3-0-1): A+

The 21-year-old rookie was a rockstar, lifting the Americans with her superb play and buoyant team spirit. It’s not an accident that Nelly was sent out second in singles, and

she put the crucial first point on the board for the U.S. while the other early starters stumbled. She will be a cornerstone for the next couple of decades. 

Jessica Korda (3-0-1): A+ 

She got her kid sis off to a good start by guiding her to a dominating Friday foursomes victory, and Jessica’s veteran leadership never stopped, including a singles win that pushed the U.S. ahead after a sluggish start. Her goofy dancing on the first tee on Saturday morning was symbolic of how Korda set the tone for the Americans who were joyous and loosey-goosey…until the last half hour of singles. 

Brittany Altomare (2-1-1): A 

The birdie machine made a stellar Solheim debut, notably leading a comeback in Friday foursomes to steal a momentum-shifting halve and then making the winning birdie in a taut Saturday four-ball match against Euro powerhouses Pettersen and van Dam. Her blowout win in the ninth singles match was a strong statement.

Altomare was a revelation to me, especially her putting.

 Though here he seems to be grading on a curve:

Lexi Thompson (0-2-2): D 

After three previous star turns at the Cup the U.S.’s most decorated player looked jumpy and jittery all week, especially on the greens. Tweaking her back on the range before her singles match added injury to insult. 

Danielle Kang (1-3-0): F 

Her press conference woofing added a big buzz to the Cup but, rather than embracing the heel turn, she seemed intimidated and overwhelmed by the inevitable blowback. Captain Inkster still showed a lot of confidence in her U.S. Open champ by sending her out first in singles but Kang wilted at the finish in a dispiriting loss.

Given that Lexi was supposed to be this team's leader, it's hard to see where she's let off the hook with a passing grade...

The Euro grades are about what you'd expect, but I'll leave you to peruse them at your leisure.

 Suzann ended the day with this:

Suzann Pettersen is taking the rest of her life off. Can we blame her? 

No. After all, what mountain do you climb after you’ve scaled Mount Everest. 

Pettersen’s ultimate peak came amid Scotland’s Ochil Hills, on the 18th hole at Gleneagles. She holed a seven-foot putt that gave Europe the sweetest of victories and decided she had no more mountains left to scale. 

“I don’t have any plans from tomorrow,” Pettersen said. “I’m closing it down. 

“This is a perfect closure,” she added. “The end for my professional career. It doesn’t get any better.”

That's what the kids call a mic drop. 

Though this from the TC panel seems...well, more hysterical than historical:

4. Suzann Pettersen sounded like she had made up her mind regarding her future following Sunday’s win. “I’m completely done,” she said, announcing her retirement from pro golf. Given Pettersen was less than an hour removed from draining one of the most important birdie putts of her life, was this the greatest golf retirement ever?

Bamberger: Absolutely! The only thing better would have been saying nothing and just walking away. 

Zak: No doubt the greatest. She absolutely purred that putt, just a few minutes after nearly holing out with a wedge from the fairway. Chances are you’ve done that on the 18th before signing your amateur scorecard. There is no greater feeling than playing perfect golf before ending your day, and she did it on one of the biggest stages in the world! Bravo. 

Wall: Of course! It’s nearly impossible to top what I’d consider to be the ultimate mic drop. The only thing that would’ve surpassed it is if Tiger had done something similar after his Masters win.

Geez, Mike, i especially expect more from you.   here's a clue, Google Jones, Bobby... Now, don't you feel silly?

Why I Leave Browser Tabs Open - This one from last week is still open, in which Alex Myers names eleven lads for which we should maintain visual contact, including this guy:

Joaquin Niemann 

Welcome back, young fella! Although not the youngest player on this list, Niemann, who turns 21 in November, is certainly the youngest with a full PGA Tour season under his size-28 belt (we don't know his actual belt size, but the kid is skinny). And it was a solid season at that. After getting off to a slow start to his official rookie campaign (Niemann earned his PGA Tour card through sponsor's exemptions the previous year), the native of Chile found his form once summer rolled around. Starting with back-to-back T-5s at the Travelers Championship and Rocket Mortgage Classic, he finished worse than T-31 only once over his final eight starts while racking up four top-15s.

Nah, he'll never amount to anything...  What?  Oh, that's awkward:

Who won: Joaquin Niemann (six-under 64, 21 under overall) 

How it happened: Niemann got off to somewhat of a slow start on Sunday, making the turn in one under, but he broke away from the pack on the back nine. He birdied the 10th, 12th and 13th, and even a bogey on 15 was followed with a birdie on 16. Suddenly he stood on the par-5 17th tee with a four-shot lead over Tom Hoge and Richy Werenski, but he didn’t falter — not even close. He finished birdie-birdie to beat runner-up Hoge by six. 

Why it matters: It’s the first PGA Tour victory for Niemann, who is still just 20 years old. He also becomes the first player from Chile to win on Tour. Sunday was his 44th pro start. Last year he played in 28 events and recorded four top 10s. He’s off to a good start in the new season.

How can he possibly have 44 starts before being able to buy a legal drink?  Personally, I never doubted the kid, but quite the good call from Alex.

POY POV -  Sometimes stories surprise your humble blogger, and Rory's Player of the Year award is one of those.  Who cares is the obvious reaction, but there's fun to be had.

Alex Miceli has this bit that we'll lede with, which I hadn't heard in all the back-and-forth on who's year you'd rather have had:

McIlroy voted for Koepka, because he disclosed his vote on Twitter, so we know that at least one player voted. That’s about all that we can determine, with that piece of information coming from the winner, not the PGA Tour.

No wonder he looked so surprised when Jack handed him the trophy?  Equally amusing is that Brooks likely couldn't be bothered voting, at least if the prior year was his template.

Josh Berhow contacted the Tour and was given a copy of the ballot sent to eligible voters, and it's pretty much what you'd expect:

You can see what they did there pretty easily....  Rory gets a double dip on the Tour Championship and FedEx Cup, but the Brooks' historic performance in the majors is unworthy of citation.  

Someone named Laura Neal did a phone interview with Josh, and beclowns herself, first explaining their ballot:

The ballot summarizes each candidate’s season with four boilerplate statistics: number of tournaments entered, wins, top-10 finishes and FedEx Cup rank. Notably absent are the players’ results in the majors, including any mention of Koepka’s historic 2019 run (he finished in the top-4 in all four majors, a feat that has been matched only by Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth). Neal explained that the Tour intentionally omits any records or historic achievements from the summaries so as to avoid any appearance of “editorializing or influencing the process.” (For this same reason the ballot did not call out, for example, that McIlroy became the first player in history to win the Players Championship and FedEx Cup.) This means it’s beholden upon the voters to be informed as to what the POY candidates achieved over the past season beyond the four basic statistics that are provided.

Yeah, that's the ticket... Here's a thought, how about listing everything?  Because, yanno,limiting data can be prejudicial as well....

But the funniest part is this from Ms. Neal:

“Feel free to debate whether the PGA Tour membership should have voted Rory or Brooks as Player of the Year,” Neal wrote in an email Friday. “What’s not up for debate is the Tour’s integrity — in this process or otherwise.”

Gee, thanks for your permission to discuss, though perhaps now would a good time to discuss DJ's jet-ski accident?  Yanno, that bit where you participated in a fraud on the public....  Hey, she was the one that added that "otherwise".

Oh, and on this limited matter:

In a phone interview with GOLF.com, Laura Neal, the Tour’s senior vice president of communications, did not say how many players voted in 2019 but she did say that in any given year 45 to 60 percent of players participate.

Really?  How about in this very specific year?  Really, where is that integrity I was just reading about?  Back to Alex Miceli for this rather crude comparison:

Case in point: In the 2018 Russian presidential election, Vladimir Putin won with a popular vote of 56,430,712, or 76.69 percent of ballots cast. The two other candidates’ vote counts were disclosed as well.

Yeah, and I'm pretty sure that he told us the vote tabulations were not up for debate... hack's gonna hack, but next thing they'll tell us that it's not about the money.

The Tiger Reveal - Tiger has been penning blog posts on his Presidents Cup gig for a while, but never did I consider that they might actually convey information.  First, we'll start at the bottom, where his electronic signature might have given away his thought process:

Hmmm....

I assume he wants to play, but it'll be awkward unless he shows us something in Japan.  Well, awkward for sure if they then lose.

But this unintentionally funny:

Funny because Viktor Hovland is not now nor has he ever been an American....

Tiger, perhaps if you read Golf Digest:

Viktor Hovland adds to a great day for Norwegian golf by tying a PGA Tour record with 17th straight round in the 60s

I reached out to the PGA Tour and got this in response from Laura Neal:

“Feel free to debate whether Viktor is American or Norwegain” Neal wrote in an email Friday. “What’s not up for debate is the Tour’s integrity — in this process or otherwise.”

Noted. 

Late-Week Laments

The Solheim Cup is on as background music, and the sun seems to be out in Auchterarder....  That can't last.

Follow The Money - Mike Bamberger was old-school before old-school was cool, and he's got some issues with that Player of the Year voting:

But the Tour players, in voting for McIlroy over Koepka, were shunning history in favor of money. That’s their prerogative. They are professional golfers, after all. “Show me the money” works as well for them as it does for anybody else, if not better. “Follow the

money” does, too, when trying to figure out their motivations. 

The two biggest paydays on the Tour schedule are two Sundays owned by the PGA Tour: the final day of the Players Championship and the final day of the FedEx Cup. McIlroy earned $2.25 million at the former and $15 million at the latter. 

What kind of message would the players be sending if they didn’t put their stamp on all that?

But the Tour players, in voting for McIlroy over Koepka, were shunning history in favor of money. That’s their prerogative. They are professional golfers, after all. “Show me the money” works as well for them as it does for anybody else, if not better. “Follow the money” does, too, when trying to figure out their motivations.

It just so happens that I saw both those movies so, well played, Mike.

He does offer this alternative theory:

There’s one other factor at work, and that’s the popularity contest. Both players are (I imagine) well-liked by their peers, and, in their candor, both are interesting. But when Koepka downplays every other event except the majors, and diminishes the traditional role of The Long Warmup in his Tour routine, he becomes a challenging figure to the players. And the players are creatures of habit. They don’t like their methods to be challenged.

The PGA Tour morphed into Mean Girls so quickly that I barely noticed.

 But while Mike is type cast as the curmudgeonly traditionalist, he can't bring himself to even say out out loud the most cynical possibility of all.  To wit, that the players did no such thing, naturally voting for the guy that played the best.

Remember that quote from way back yesterday?

“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Lots of Tour Suits would have been highly motivated to protect their feed lot. As a wise man said, I hope there are paper ballots....

Lastly on the subject, I think Curmudgeonly James Corrigan gets the better of this exchange:

What he said.

Solheim Stuff - While we shouldn't draw any conclusions from the early results, some of the pre-commencement items will amuse.  For instance, I've long found Lexi Thompson a curious specimen, alarmingly fragile and perhaps the worst putter ever to play the game professionally:

Lexi Thompson doesn’t consider herself to be a leader on the American team. Perhaps it’s time that changed. 

Thompson, of course, is the top-ranked U.S. player. It’s been that way for some time

now. She’s never going to be the most vocal or the one to spearhead group text messaging (that’s Morgan Pressel). 

“We all want to gel as a team as best we can,” said Thompson, “so we don’t want to overpower anybody. It’s all about just coming together as a team and not being an individual focusing just on ourselves.” 

That’s certainly admirable. It is a week of we rather than me.

But captain Juli Inkster is hoping for a little bit more from Thompson, and who can blame her? There are six rookies on the team, and Thompson is one of only three players who have competed on foreign soil. 

“You don’t really need to be vocal,” said Inkster. “I think If she says something at the right time, people will listen.”

Juli Inkster, who wasn't gonna do the pair the vet with the rookie thing, paired Lexi with rookie Brittany Altomare, and they're only four down.  More tellingly, Lexi just gagged on a short par putt, so they'll not be staging any furious comebacks.

Surprisingly, Juli had to be convinced of this rather obvious pairing:

“They actually asked me to play together,” Inkster said. “I wasn’t too keen on it.”

Initially, Inkster didn’t want to put the sisters together, the thought being that although their games are similar, their personalities are too different.

Jessica, 26, and playing in her second Solheim Cup, told Inkster to see how the sisters played at the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational, a new team LPGA Tour event that took place in July. Inkster said that Jessica offered, ‘If we kill each other, then maybe not put us together. But if we do OK, can you think about putting us together?’ ” 

At the Dow, the Korda sisters finished T-12, shooting two rounds of 68 in foursomes. More important, they didn’t kill each other.

Good thing she relented, because the Sister Act is going medieval on Caroline Masson and Jodi Ewart Shadoff (currently 6-up).

Danielle Kang won't be taking any souls in the morning foursomes session, as Juli left her on the bench.  But the Euros had these clever rejoinders to her trash talk:

Ewart Shadoff was the first to answer. “I think it’s just extra motivation, really, for us,” she said. “I don’t think there will be any tears on our team, just happiness.” 

But then Pettersen closed with quite a kicker. “And we’re just going to step on their necks.”

And how did those remedial etiquette classes go, Suzann?

This seems a tough sell:

Suzann Pettersen shoulders ultimate pressure for Europe at Solheim Cup

 But not good enough to be in the opening session line-up.

Although this might work out for the better:

Suzann Pettersen has lost her voice ahead of the 16th Solheim Cup. She better hope that’s the only issue she’s struggling with this week.

She hasn't played much, and when she has played, it hasn't been great:

The 15-time LPGA winner has played twice since her wild card pick. She finished T59

in the CP Women’s Open and missed the cut in Cambia Portland Classic. It’s hardly the sort of form needed for the cut and thrust of the Solheim Cup. 

“My golf game is in great shape,” Pettersen said. “Being here, it feels like I never left the game, which is kind of nice. I don’t know if it’s the atmosphere, the energy or everything that Solheim is all about that always brings out the best of all of us.”

Perhaps.   

Should be a fun weekend, as the blood is genuinely bad between these teams.

Fave Header Of the Day - It seems that Aussie Marc Leishman is having a bad week:

Marc Leishman's back flares up before he gets hit by errant shot in the pro-am, shoots a 76 and is in last place

Worse yet, he got hit by one of his partners:

Leishman felt his cranky back seizing up on him Wednesday morning before playing in the pro-am for the PGA Tour season opener, A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier. That was bad enough. Then, on the fifth hole of the pro-am, one of his playing partners inadvertently nailed him in the right side of his lower back with an errant approach shot. 

Apparently, the accident was a result of a miscommunication. Leishman thought the player had picked up after several strokes on the short par-4 hole. But he hadn't. Leishman still wasn't quite in the line of play when a ball came whizzing at him from about 100 yards away.

 How many is several?  God they must hate the ProAms,

Eamon in Full - Eamon Lynch is an Ulsterman with strong opinions on pretty much everything in our game.  Most you'll agree with, but all are worth considering...  Here are a couple, first this comparison with that other major individual sport:

At the U.S. Open, Rafa Nadal was serving 5-2 in the fifth and final set when the chair umpire hit him with a penalty for taking too much time before serving. 

Think about that: The United States Tennis Association was willing to enforce pace-of-play rules against one of the biggest stars in its sport, at a crucial moment in a huge event. 

Remember that when the excuse makers try to tell you that golf can’t possibly do the same. 

Pace of play is unsportsmanlike conduct. Penalize it as such. The player alone bears the blame if a penalty proves decisive.

True that.  I'd further add that Rafa took it far more graciously than, say, our Bryson...  Of course The Tour could address this in a nano-second, if they had the desire and the will.  

On a completely unrelated subject, Eamon pens this love letter to great golf courses:

I found myself thinking back to those fence-hopping days last week during a round at National Golf Links on the eastern end of Long Island, New York. The quality of my

golf has scarcely improved in the intervening decades, but the stature of the courses I besmirch has. I’ve been fortunate enough to play 60-odd of the top 100 courses in the world. Many of the old world’s finest layouts contributed DNA to C.B. Macdonald’s creation — he imported inspiration from St. Andrews, Royal St. George’s, North Berwick, Prestwick and Sunningdale — and almost every fine course in the new world traces its DNA back there. America has no better monument to the craft of course architecture. 

National long occupied the top spot on my wish list until I first played it five years ago. That was around the same time my thirst for great courses slackened. The list survives though. Today the top spot belongs to Royal Melbourne. Kingston Heath, less than five miles away, is on there too. Chicago Golf. Fishers Island. Crystal Downs. Cruden Bay. Swinley Forest. Rye. Tara Iti … Like swing theories, no matter how many you’ve experienced, there’s always another.

Best of all, it allows me to remind you that I'm headed back there on the 24th...  But Eamon also settles some scores:

Along the way there have been courses I still see in dreams (Cypress Point, The Old Course), and some in nightmares (Torrey Pines, Trump Aberdeen). There are places where I have intimate recall of every hole (all 85 at Bandon Dunes) and those where I had no lasting memory of any hole by the time I left the zip code (ChampionsGate in Orlando). 

On spectacular clifftops I’ve seen masterpieces (Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand, Shanqin Bay in China) and the odd monstrosity (Old Head in Ireland). Some courses were riotous fun (North Berwick), others were dour slogs (Carnoustie). There have been as many I considered overrated (Tokyo G.C. in Japan, South Korea’s Nine Bridges) as underrated (California Golf Club in San Francisco, Wannamoisett in Providence, Rhode Island).

Torrey isn't the stuff of nightmares, but it's not nearly as good as the property on which it sits.  But there are golf course that make one smile, and others that just beat us up....

Have a great weekend.

Thursday Themes

It's Opening Day on Tour, which we'll do our best to ignore in these parts.  The off-season just seems to fly by...

I Blame The Electoral College - Didn't see this one coming:

In a shocking development, Rory McIlroy was named the PGA Tour Player of the Year on Wednesday. McIlroy, 30, captured the honor over Brooks Koepka, Xander Schauffele and Matt Kuchar. 

The award, which is voted on by PGA Tour members who played in at least 15 FedEx Cup events during the 2018-'19 season, apparently favored McIlroy's consistency over Koepka's performance on the premier stages. 

"I'm very humbled and very honored," McIlroy said. "It validates some of the decisions I made to start the year, and I couldn't be more proud." 

McIlroy racked up a tour-best 14 top-10s in 19 events, highlighted by wins at the RBC Canadian Open, Tour Championship and the tour's flagship event, the Players 

Championship. McIlroy also won the Byron Nelson Award for adjusted scoring average (69.057) for the third time in his career, and his 2.551 strokes gained were the best non-Tiger Woods figure in the statistic's history. This is McIlroy's third Player of the Year award, and his first since 2014.

I think Koepka's failure to campaign in Wisconsin will be cited as the cause of his demise, though Joel Beall captures the zeitgeist in this header:

Rory McIlroy's Player of the Year win raises as many questions as answers

So, who are these geniuses, and do they know anything about golf?

As a refresher, the PGA of America's honor is determined based on a points system. The

PGA Tour, though, relies on player voting, with members who played in at least 15 FedEx Cup events during the 2018-'19 season casting the ballots. That process is handled internally; the tour does not publicly release the results. 

Or, apparently, privately release them either. Given the election's concealment, the Associated Press' Doug Ferguson asked McIlroy during Wednesday's media conference call if he knew how close the race had finished. "I inquired," McIlroy said, "and they are keeping tight-lipped on that." The call, just seven questions deep, was ended.

It would perhaps be helpful at this point to consult a noted expert in electoral democracy, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin:

“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Hmmm...he seems to be suggesting that the Tour might have a vested interest in a split verdict.  

At Golfweek, Shack takes on the "T-word":

Transparency strikes again. 

Cue the Russian bot jokes. 

Throw in a few conspiracy theories. Some outlandish, some not. What you get will be the unfortunate response to what is otherwise a very minor controversy: Rory McIlroy was voted PGA Tour Player of the Year by his peers. 

While McIlroy’s season was almost as spectacular as Brooks Koepka’s, McIlroy took the secret player vote announced Wednesday from somewhere in greater Palm Beach. That’s likely where Commissioner Jay Monahan and the award’s namesake, Jack Nicklaus, presented McIlroy the trophy. 

The PGA Tour Player of the Year voting totals are not published, and even McIlroy said in a conference call with writers that the Tour did not tell him how the voting played out. He also said he was “somewhat surprised” to win and the normally eloquent 30-year-old stumbled through an answer attempting to explain why he was caught off-guard by the news.

Did anyone ask Rory for whom he voted?

Back to Joel who had this little jibe:

For all the things the PGA Tour does well, transparency isn't one of them.

Perhaps you could share with the rest of the class all the things they do well?  

As usual, the last word in these things goes to Twitter:

Pretty lame for sure.  But Rory won the Tour's flagship events, so who wants to file the FOIA request?

Still Crazy After All These Years - They're crazy in California, have you noticed?  I guess they've finished their work in making the state Heaven on Earth.... Pay no attention to the human waste on the streets of San Francisco, we can now turn our attention to...college sports.

In one of the most significant strikes against the National Collegiate Athletic Association's system of amateur athletics, California lawmakers have approved a bill that would allow players in the state to profit off their name, image and likeness. 

The adoption of the bill is likely to set up a battle between California lawmakers and the NCAA as the legislation heads to the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom for his anticipated signature. 

The association fiercely opposed the measure. NCAA President Mark Emmert went so far this summer as to insinuate that California institutions would be excluded from championship games if the bill was approved.

This is an issue for the state, how?  Shockingly, the mini-despots in the State Legislature are acting like children:

Emmert asked California officials in a letter in June to table the bill until an NCAA working group studying athlete compensation delivered its findings to the association

next month. Association officials fear that allowing only athletes in California to be compensated would give colleges in the state a recruitment advantage, as players would be lured there by the prospect of marketing and endorsement deals, Emmert wrote in the letter. He also used the letter to suggest that the state’s colleges and universities could be prohibited from taking part in championship games because of these unfair recruitment benefits.

Officials took offense to the warning. 

“I just want to say, 'NCAA, don't threaten California. Don't threaten us'," Democratic Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove, said before a vote on the Assembly floor, according to USA Today. “Because we have formidable schools. We have formidable alumni. And we have formidable viewership. And we can leverage those things until 2023, when this bill takes effect. I'm sick of being leveraged by the NCAA on the backs of athletes who have the right to their own name and image."

This is obviously a huge issue, and to some extent the NCAA has brought it upon itself.  Here's Geoff's take on it all:

While players now get free clubs, are on a first name basis with tour reps, wear corporate logos in the US Amateur and are committed to agents long before announcing the intent to turn pro, amateur status would seem to be a out the window once a player starts profiting off their likeness. The rules are pretty clear on this front.

However, exceptions for Tony Romo and Lucy Li would seem to open a player profiting off their likeness to point to those cases as amateur status-retaining precedent and therefore maintain access to USGA events or the Masters (should they be so fortunate).

The NCAA’s rebuttal is not expected until next month but given the number of athletes and schools in California, they’ll have a hard time containing this given the bill’s easy victory and support from top athletes. 

It’s a huge mess, but one brought on by the NCAA’s refusal to find a solution as it rakes in millions and pays its head man $4 million a year on the backs of unpaid athletes.

This isn't Geoff's finest hour.  The CEO compensation is a tired bit and, more importantly, the Tony Romo and Lucy Li exceptions are USGA issues.

The CA bill and the underlying arguments all seem to ignore one relevant fact.  The NCAA is structured around the premise that two revenue-producing sports, football and basketball, will support the remainder of NCAA athletic programs.  But the California legislature seems to be deliberately sowing chaos, in their desire to bend the country to their will.  Would be nice to see someone call their bluff, though the NCAA seems an unlikely candidate.

Solheim Stuff - Good news from Auchterarder:

Watch: U.S. Solheim Cupper Angel Yin finally (and hilariously) reunited with her lost clubs

And, presumably, her socks....  Really, let that be a lesson, never fly a European airline to a Ryder or Solheim Cup.   

I though Cap'n. Juli handled the rookie issue well, but the weather?

"The weather will be a huge factor. We're American, so we're fair-weather golfers, we don't like rain and wet. I have a young team and they might have played a British Open once in a while in bad weather, but 36 holes in it? That's a new ballgame. It's going to probably be the toughest weeks of these girls' careers."

I do hope she consulted with Captain Pavin on the rain gear...

Danielle Kang is all-in on the mayhem:

Danielle Kang pumped up the crowd on the first tee two years ago as a rookie in Iowa, encouraging the rowdy U-S-A faithful to shout through her swing. She wanted it loud. She wanted it crazy. 

So how will she handle her first Solheim Cup on foreign soil? 

“I hear that I’m going to be booed at one point,” said, “so bring it on. I’d rather hear loud booing at that point. So I’ll still have them cheer as loud as they can, whoever they want to cheer for, but I still want to hear them.”

Take those souls, Danielle. 

Dame Laura Davies had a few odd comments, first this one in which she shoots the messenger:

British bookmakers haven’t racked up huge profits over the years by getting the odds wrong on sporting events, but Laura Davies thinks the bookies are out of line with this

week’s Solheim Cup. 

Davies feels the home team is outright favorites, not underdogs. Bronte Law agrees.

Bookmakers William Hill and Betfair list the United States as 4/7 favorites, with Europe at 7/4. Ladbrokes quotes odds of 8/15 on the away team winning at Gleneagles, with Europe quoted at 9/5. All three firms offer 12/1 on a draw.

Davies has been known to have the odd bet or six during her career. She’s puzzled by the numbers. She feels European fans should jump on the odds the home team has been quoted at. 

“We’re two-to-one outsiders, which I think is a good bet because I think our squad is really strong,” said Davies, who’s acting as one of Catriona Matthew’s vice-captains this week. “The American team is incredibly good, but I think home soil, it’s possibly a bit chillier, that evens it out a bit.”

Set aside the fact that bookies reflect, as opposed to creating, the placement of wagers on the combatants.  But Dame Laura need a tutorial on how this here game is played.  Everyone wants to be the dog, not the fave...

 And this, in which she seems to support the patriarchy:

European vice captain Laura Davies wants the sun to shine in Scotland. 

“Everyone says we want a bit of rain for the Americans,” said Davies. “No, we want it beautiful weather so the galleries can get out there and enjoy themselves and just cheer us on and be the 13th man out there, because that’s what the home-soil advantage gives you.”

13th man?  Who are the first 12?

It should be good fun, and hopefully the bad blood between the squads will come out at some point...

I'll leave you there..... but just for now.

Midweek Musings

I shan't keep you for too long, as you'll want to enjoy the final day of the PGA Tour's off-season.... It seems to fly by in something like a couple of weeks these days.

Solheim Stuff - Mike Bamberger devotes this weeks Seven Things exclusively to this event, some of which I like very much:

7. Juli! 

The best think about this year’s Solheim Cup — the three-day women’s team event modeled on the Ryder Cup and starting on Friday at Gleneagles in Scotland — is that it gives us a chance to see Juli Inkster in action. Yes, the Hall of Famer is 59 and she’s not playing. She’s the U.S. captain for the third straight time and looking to go 3-0. But she is also one of the most underappreciated major figures in the game. Her TV work for FOX is excellent. (Candid and insightful.) Her swing is a study in repeatable funk. (She was second in last year’s U.S. Senior Women’s Open at Chicago Golf to Laura Davies, finishing 10 shots behind her and almost laughing about it.) And she just brings an incredible pure-jock, California spirit to everything she does. You could hand her a Ryder Cup team to run and she’d do great.

I don't agree with him about her work on Fox, but I have enjoyed her time as Captain of these teams.  I thought she handled things great four years ago when her squad was playing poorly until gimmegate, and I also thought she handle Annika's nonsense well.

Speaking of whom...

6. Memory Lane 

One of the great things about these match-play team competitions is that the players get revealed in ways that they are not during stroke-play events. As Tom Lehman once said, “If we played match play every week, we’d be as bad as the tennis players.” In other words, in match play everything becomes more personal, and in team play you’re playing for something bigger and more important than yourself. The greatest example of this ever comes out of the 2000 Solheim Cup, at Loch Lomond, in Scotland. 

On the last day, in a close competition, Kelly Robbins and Pat Hurst of the U.S. were playing Annika Sorenstam and Janice Moodie, who were one down going to 13. That’s when Annika, at the height of her powers, chipped in from 25-feet, to likely square the match. Except that Robbins, backed by her captain, Pat Bradley (Keegan’s aunt), required Sorenstam to play the shot again, because she had played out of turn. (Per the rules, they could have let it go.) Annika cried. Annika cried! Her mascara ran so much she looked like Gene Simmons in his Kiss prime after a hot show in Dallas, circa 1983. The Americans went on to win that particular match, suggesting that there may not be a god. But the Europeans won the Solheim Cup that year, proving that there is. It would have to be about the best example of poor sportsmanship in golf in history. Annika said then: “The whole team is disgusted. We all ask ourselves: Is this how badly they want to win the Cup?” Beautifully said, and the answer was obvious.

Team Match Play is so epic, it can even bring Annika to tears!

It so happens that there's a piece of Fairview lore related to this.  Ed Pavelle, who only won twenty club championships, had the same happen to him.  He holed a chip shot on the third hole during a Club Championship match, only to find out that he ha inadvertently played out of turn and was required to play it again.  It's Fairview lore because he had a better answer than the cold-blooded Swede, he holed the second one as well...

We've had a brother act in the Ryder Cup, now we've got this:

3. Sister act 

Jessica Korda, 26, and her sister, Nelly, 21, are on the U.S. team together for the first time. They will certainly play together at least once. They might play together four times. Nelly Korda’s swing, for you kids out there, is about as good as a swing could be, a study in up-and-down simplicity, along the lines of what Louis Oosthuizen does, who is far shorter than she, demonstrating that good mechanics are good mechanics, regardless of body type. And she does it with a neutral grip. Mesmerizing.

Only Mike could talk himself into a woodie over a neutral grip.

Remember those girls awaiting their clubs?  Aer Lingus is maximizing their no-bad-publicity week, but I do love this header:

American Solheim Cup player Angel Yin still awaits clubs, socks

Yeah, I'm guessing that one of those is more important than the other.   If I were Juli I'd consider that Aer Lingus might want to get the good press going, and not get her clubs for Friday's kickoff....

And buried deep in the piece is this little slam at the venue:

Because the course is straightforward, Inkster doesn’t believe the delay in play will be particularly bad for Yin’s game, though she will have to know her lines off the tee because of her great distance.

I guess it's all right in front of you, as the kids like to say...

Danielle Kang has become one of the better interviews in our game, and she had this about match play on a recent podcast:

“You’re trying to take souls, you know,” Kang said with a smile. “You’re going there to make people cry at this point, just crush the other team. That’s the fun of it. We don’t ever get to do that. We’re always alone. We’re always by ourselves, playing for us and our caddie and our own little team.

Take souls?  How good is that?

Feel free to start with Suzann.

 Keely Levins focuses on the relatively inexperienced U.S. Team:

With Ally McDonald replacing an injured Stacy Lewis on Tuesday in the American lineup, captain Juli Inkster now has six golfers on her 12-player squad who are playing in their first Solheim Cup. McDonald joins Nelly Korda, Megan Khang, Marina Alex,

Brittany Altomare and Annie Park as newcomers. It’s the largest group of rookies for an American team since the inaugural event in 1990. In 1992 (when Inkster played her first Solheim Cup) and 2002, Team USA has had five rookies. 

In addition, three of the six “veterans” on the U.S. team (Danielle Kang, Jessica Korda and Angel Yin) have only competed in the Solheim Cup when it’s been played stateside. Although not technically rookies, they’re new to a Solheim Cup in Europe, where the majority of the crowds won’t be rooting for them. Since Solheim Cups draw the biggest crowds in women’s golf, that matters.

But Juli is having none of the usual nonsense:

It’s common for captains to pair rookies with veterans to help ease nerves and have a steady voice for advice. Yet Inkster won’t have that luxury. 

“We're not doing a veteran with a rookie. I'm going to send a couple rookies out there together,” Inkster said. “They've got to grow up sometime. Everybody's a rookie once. And I just happen to have six of them. So we're just going to throw them out there.”

 Just put your best players out there, and let 'em play.

Brian Barnes, RIP - Can you remember that which you read 45 seconds ago?  Specifically, Mikey Bams on the subject of team matches making reputations?  Allistair Tait has a wonderful remembrance of a man whose career covered more than just that one magical day:

Aside from the day he dined out on for the rest of his career, Barnes played on five other

Ryder Cup teams. He was a perennial member of the Great Britain & Ireland side between 1969 and 1977, and kept his place in 1979 when Continental Europeans joined the fray. He compiled a 10-14-1 record in those matches. Very respectable considering he was on five losing sides and a member of the 1969 team that halved at Royal Birkdale.

The English born Scot won nine European Tour titles between 1972 and 1981. He also won two Senior British Opens. His 1995 win in that event was quite emotional as it took place on the same course Royal Portrush father-in-law Max Faulkner won the 1951 Open Championship.

And how about that great photo to accompany the piece, which comes from the 1982 Bob Hope Desert Classic.  Amusingly, no further details are deemed necessary... Tait also delves into the darker side:

Not everything was rosy in Barnes life though. He fought alcoholism for years, an addiction he took to the fairways. He was known to fill his water bottle with vodka and orange juice during rounds. He once marked his ball on the 18th green of the 1982 Scottish Professional Championship with a can of beer before putting out to win. 

I was fortunate enough to cover Barnes during the last few years of his career. I remember walking into my hotel for the 1990 Scottish Open at Gleneagles to find an inebriated Barnes behind the bar serving beers. When the barmaid tried to move him from behind the bar, Barnes picked her up around her waist and playfully bounced her up and down.

But it's that one day for which he'll be best remembered:

Brian Barnes will be forever remembered as the man who once beat Jack Nicklaus twice in the 1975 Ryder Cup. Nicklaus asked for it.

Here's the background on how it all came about:

Barnes’s famous Nicklaus double was part of an Arnold Palmer set up. U.S. captain Palmer approached Great Britain & Ireland counterpart Bernard Hunt and asked him to name his best player to play Jack Nicklaus in singles. Hunt picked Barnes and the two

captains arranged for the pair to play in the final morning singles match. Barnes ran out a 4&2 winner. 

The Ryder Cup featured two singles sessions in those days. Barnes was surprised to find himself out against Nicklaus in the final afternoon singles match. He shouldn’t have been. Nicklaus wanted revenge, and had made sure Palmer fixed the draw so he could play the Scotsman again. 

Barnes walked onto the first tee and Nicklaus said: “Well done this morning, Barnesy, but there ain’t no way you’re going to beat me this afternoon.” 

Nicklaus birdied the first two holes, but Barnes fought back to win 2&1 in what would turn out to be the greatest day of his career.

Is this a great game, or what?  RIP.

An Ode To Loopers -  Brad Klein, best known for his writing on architecture and course design, pens an ode to caddies that's worth your time.  To me, the best parts are the historical bits, though I do think he makes the case for looping as a great job for youngsters:

It’s a position I have been keen on since I started looping at a private club on Long Island back as a 14 year old and that subsequently strengthened through engagement as a looper 

The author with his best known client. 

during summers on the PGA Tour. It’s an attitude that has never waned and that comes out even now, decades later, during casual rounds with friends, or even people I have met on the golf course for the first time. I eye their game but also their whole attitude – not just to golf but to how they play and how they handle themselves during a round.

I’ve always thought caddying was more than about earning spending money as a kid. It was about learning how to be an adult and how to handle myself with strangers, occasionally in awkward circumstances. A bad yardage, a lost ball or a botched shot – the stuff of everyday golf provided an occasion for how I handled myself and how I responded to what my player said and did. 

Did he blame me, curse me, accept it as rub of the green? Would I learn from my error, so that next time I'd be more accurate in my distances or track the ball more precisely? 

The beauty of it was that it was only just about golf, with no spillover effect and no major consequences beyond the immediate round. A round as a caddie meant four hours in a laboratory of life skills, honed in a safe environment, to be tested in later life.

About that history...  He shatters the myth of the name coming from a French word:

There is reference to caddies dating back as far as 1691 at St. Andrews. The name of the trade appears to derive from a Scots term for a luggage handler or valet. A far more intriguing derivation traces the lineage of the term to an Anglicized version of the late 

That's Old Tom on the far left.

Medieval French term for military “cadets” – young men training for status as soldiers in the field who carried the weaponry to battle but did not actually engage in combat. That genealogy, while suggestive, remains romantically wistful but unconfirmed if not simply untrue. 

Initially, they were semi-professionals or aspiring to play for a living and earn their money through gambling on the links. Others were seasonal workers, mainly fishermen, looking to supplement their income. Among the 21 registered caddies at St. Andrews on a list that appeared around 1870 were three who would go on to win Open Championships: Thomas Kidd Jr. (1873), Robert Martin (1876, 1885) and Willie Fernie (1893). In between loops at St. Andrews, early caddies would help on the maintenance crews. Among the many jobs that Old Tom Morris held at St. Andrews was that of caddie supervisor.

Brad covers the effect of golf carts on the practice, and extols the revival in caddying programs.  But in doing so, he strangely ignores the biggest threat to them, the desire of the IRS and state taxing authorities to classify caddies as club employees, and to withhold taxes.  

Today in Activation - We don't get a lot of hard data about the economics of the sponsorship of PGA Tour events, so I was hopeful about this header:

What does American Express get for sponsoring a PGA Tour event?

In fact, my default assumption is that golf-mad CEO's are pissing away shareholders' money so that they can play in the Pro-Am with Tiger or Phil, but perhaps Larry Bohannan of the Palm Beach Desert Sun can set me straight:

Activation. That’s the word the PGA Tour uses to describe the benefits that one of its tournaments can provide in return for the millions of dollars a company spends to be a title sponsor. 

It’s how a company uses its sponsorship as a marketing or advertising tool — think of it as the plan a company uses to justify the money it is spending to be part of the PGA Tour.

Wow!  I see now the error of my ways...  I mean, "Activation", that's some serious MBA speak, no?

“We certainly feel that this is a perfect fit for American Express and it’s a perfect fit for us,” said Jeff Sanders, executive director of the tournament that was known last year as The Desert Classic and will now be known as The American Express. “It’s the prefect match, because this is a local, regional, national and even international event. It draws professionals and pro-am players from all around the world. And American Express is certainly one of the biggest companies in the world.” 

It is fair to ask why a company accustomed to sponsoring some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world would be interested in the financial commitment – generally twice the amount of a tournament’s purse — to any regular PGA Tour event. The desert tournament’s purse this year was $5.9 million. Stephen J. Squeri, chairman and CEO of American Express, said in a statement announcing the sponsorship that his company just wants to be associated with golf.

Do we think that they can generate $12 million of value for their shareholders from this sleepy event?  Why do you think they use mind-numbing terms like "Activation"?  If the benefits were tangible, they'd use those to support their case...  

There's more of the same, though no one seems to learn from their mistakes:

Local officials are happy with the new sponsorship because American Express brings financial backing and prestige that surpass the last two title sponsors. American Express is a much larger company than Humana or CareerBuilder, which each struggled at time with activation of the sponsorship. Those struggles included concerns for Humana about spreading a health and wellness message out and changes in the landscape of insurance after passage of the Affordable Care Act. CareerBuilder was concerned the money spent wasn’t helping to grow its business or its name recognition. 

American Express, on the other hand, is closer to the size and worldwide recognition to BNP Paribas, the title sponsor of the internationally renowned tennis tournament in Indian Wells each March. The company had nearly $37 billion in revenue in 2018 and is one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I certainly understand why the Tour is crowing about this...  It's just unclear that it does anything for Amex, a position with which AMEX agreed sixteen years ago.  And which, I'm guessing, they'll come back to in, say, 2021.

I'll leave you here and hope to see you tomorrow. 

Tuesday Trifles

Just a few items for your delectation today....

Don't Leave Home Without It - New life for perhaps the weakest event currently on the Tour's schedule:

Imagine sitting down to lunch and hoping for a nice gourmet hamburger or perhaps a chicken Caesar salad. And instead the waiter brings you a perfectly grilled ribeye steak, baked potato with butter and sour cream, steamed vegetables and apple pie a la mode for dessert. 

That kind of upgrade is what desert golf fans are receiving with news that American Express, one of the world’s most recognizable corporations, will be taking over as title sponsor of the desert’s PGA Tour event, known in 2019 as the Desert Classic.

Fair enough, though now I'm hungry....

 Though this might be asking a lot of the Company:

--Worldwide recognition: American Express will do more with the tournament than just advertise during tournament week. Expect to see ads during other PGA Tour events and even other sporting events mentioning that American Express is the title sponsor in the desert. 

--A push for membership perks: They call it experiential marketing, the idea that through sponsoring an event, a company can give its own employees or clients special

treatment. For American Express, which has sponsored the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup in the past and is a U.S. Open sponsor for the past 13 years, that can mean a special hospitality tent open only to American Express card holders, for instance, or perhaps special card member parties during tournament week. It’s an elevated concept for fans who might be tempted to travel to the tournament from outside the area.

--New life for the event’s pro-am: Yes, there are golfers who don’t come to the desert event because it requires them to play side-by-side with amateurs during competitive rounds. Some have even lobbied for the end of the pro-am, which began with the tournament in 1960. But American Express can use that pro-am to reward customers and clients across the country with a trip to the Coachella Valley in January to play golf with six different PGA Tour professionals over three courses on three days. The pro-am isn’t going anywhere now. 

--A better field: Okay, this is a bit of a stretch. After all, players will do what players want to do. But American Express is one of the biggest companies in the world. Can the PGA Tour and American Express flex a little influential muscle and get even one or two more top-name players to commit to the desert event? Players like Phil Mickelson and Jon Rahm seem certain for the field. One or two more names like that couldn’t hurt.

OK, but what's in it for AMEX?  It's a backwater event these days, with coverage confined to Golf Channel.   This, to me, is the relevant part:

Make no mistake, what Humana and CareerBuilder did for the desert’s PGA Tour event in the last decade was important. Humana stepped in as a sponsor for 2012 when the very existence of the event was in question after three unsponsored years. When Humana left four years into an eight-year deal, citing among other things how the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – had changed the way the company needed to promote itself, CareerBuilder stepped in to maintain the event’s course.

The PGA Tour would have allowed the Desert Classic to be played in 2020 without a sponsor, but that probably would have been the end of the tour’s million-dollar commitment to the event. The old Bob Hope Classic needed a sponsor, and instead they found a blue-chip mega-company to put its name on the tournament.

Good call to elide the event's brief dalliance with the Clinton Global Initiative.  But can AMEX make it work when others couldn't?  Do they have a keen eye for value, or is it just another case of a golf-mad CEO wasting his shareholders' money?

A Solheim Primer - Hey, it's team match play.... what more do you need to know?  A Golf.com primer here:

What is the Solheim Cup? 

The Solheim Cup is a biennial event between the best female pros in the world from America and Europe — the women’s equivalent of the Ryder Cup. This year it’s held at

Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland. Players on each team qualify via a points system throughout the season and the 12-player rosters are completed with captain’s picks. 

Solheim Cup format

 The Solheim Cup has changed its format several times, but it’s been consistent since 2002 (and is the same as the Ryder Cup). The first two days consist of four foursomes and four four-ball matches (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) while the final day is 12 singles matches.

And the rosters:

Solheim Cup rosters 

U.S. PLAYER, OVERALL RECORD

Juli Inkster (team captain)

Lexi Thompson, 5-2-4

Nelly Korda, N/A

Danielle Kang, 3-1-0

Lizette Salas, 4-4-2

Jessica Korda, 1-2-1

Megan Khang, N/A

Marina Alex, N/A

Brittany Altomare, N/A

Angel Yin, 1-1-1

Annie Park, N/A 

Morgan Pressel, 10-7-2 (Captain’s pick)

Stacy Lewis, 5-10-1 (Captain’s pick)

EUROPEAN PLAYER, OVERALL RECORD

Catriona Matthew (team captain)

Carlota Ciganda, 5-4-2

Anne van Dam, N/A

Caroline Hedwall, 7-3-1

Charley Hull, 7-3-1

Georgia Hall, 2-3-0

Azahara Munoz, 4-6-1

Caroline Masson, 3-6-2

Anna Nordqvist, 11-7-2

Bronte Law, N/A (Captain’s pick)

Celine Boutier, N/A (Captain’s pick)

Jodi Ewart Shadoff, 3-4-0 (Captain’s pick)

Suzann Pettersen, 16-11-6 (Captain’s pick)

Sorry, Blogger is being weird with the formatting above, and I'm out of patience in trying to fix it.  But of greatest importance is that both of the protagonists of gimmegate, the clueless Charlie Hull and the villainous Suzann Pettersen, are with us this week.

A couple of unfortunate news items from early in the week.  First, this inevitable (it seems) aspect of the ladies' lives:

As if preparing to play in the Solheim Cup didn't come with some inherent nervousness,

imagine how European team member Jodi Ewart Shadoff is feeling after arriving on site to compete in the biennial matches for the third time in her career, only for her golf clubs not to have accompanied her? 

As was the case earlier this summer when when Ryann O'Toole's clubs were lost before the Evian Championship, Shadoff flew a commercial flight to Scotland and checked her clubs with the airline. 

Shadoff's husband, Adam, told Golf Digest that Shadoff flew Aer Lingus from Orlando to Dublin, then Dublin to Edinburgh. “She looked out the window in Dublin and saw that her golf clubs weren’t getting loaded onto the plane,” Adam said via Instagram direct messaging. “She told the flight attendant and they assured her that they’d be loaded.”

How did Lexi manage it this time?

But at least things even out:

Amazingly, though, Shadoff isn't the only golfer competing in the Solheim Cup facing the same unsettling situation. Angel Yin, a member of the American team, had at least two bags go missing from her Aer Lingus flight, including her clubs, en route to Scotland. LPGA officials say that a clothing bag has since arrived, but that Yin's clubs have not.

So, a good week for Aer Lingus, since I've been reliably informed that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

This is unfortunate as well:

On Tuesday morning, United States captain Juli Inkster announced that Stacy Lewis would not play for the American Solheim Cup team at Gleneagles. Lewis, who Inkster

had chosen as a captain's pick, suffered a back injury a the week prior to the competition. After attempting to manage the injury while traveling to Scotland, Lewis was forced to make the decision to sit out what would have been her fifth Solheim Cup.

When Solheim Cup captains make their captain's picks, they also choose an alternate. The alternates only become known if someone on the team cannot play. This happened in 2017, when Jessica Korda's forearm injury forced her to withdraw. She was replaced by Paula Creamer. This year, Inkster's alternate pick was Ally McDonald. McDonald is onsite in Scotland, and now officially a member of the American team.

Good thing she didn't fly Aer Lingus...

Less Is More, Except When It Isn't -  Shane Ryan takes us on a spin on this interesting subject:

Should golf's majors matter less?

In which he uses a couple of quotes from Rory to...well, make the case for Rory:

Joel Beall already made the case for Rory’s candidacy, so I won’t repeat his good work, but I’ll just lay my cards on the table: To me, Rory was the best golfer on the PGA Tour in 2019, and the numbers don’t leave much room for interpretation. The PGA of America already gave its year-end award to Koepka, which seems understandable since he won the association’s flagship event. But I believe it would be more than fair for the PGA Tour to make this the first year since 1990 with a split decision, since Rory won both of the tour’s flagship events, including the year-end title.

Although Shane can't be bothered with the little detail of the meaning of "on the PGA Tour."  If you define it narrowly as only those events owned and controlled by the Tour, sure...  The problem is that if you look at the Tour's own schedule, it includes those four pesky events Shane wishes to minimize, and his horse came up lame in those...

The whole piece suffers from this muddled thinking, such as this graph:

The major championships are the major championships because of age and circumstance—they’ve either been around the longest under the umbrella of some very old and powerful organizations or, in the case of the Masters, they were really good at marketing. Yet suspend belief for a moment and consider these events without thinking about their names. Their fields are strong, because everybody wants to win, but they’re not that strong. Koepka himself is the first person to express a surprising take, which is that in some ways, for some players, majors might be the easiest tournaments to win. From a pure degree-of-difficulty perspective, Rory’s win at the Players Championship was more impressive than Tiger’s at the Masters. Without the pre-baked conceit of what these events are supposed to be, would they really be the four tournaments by which you’d judge immortality? Would any four?

A lot to unpack there, beginning with his assessment of The Masters.  Does he really view it as merely a marketing gimmick?  Is no credit due Jones and Roberts from creating the club and event that became the most popular event in golf?  I've often made the same point as Shane about the Masters being surprisingly easy to  win, because of the small field, can he not admit that Rory's FedEx Cup suffers from the same defect?

It's a strange column, as he seems to be making a case that the greater availability of data should change how we view the majors... I don't get his point there, but he keeps using baseball analogies that he similarly misinterprets:

Winning a major comes down to many factors, two of which are luck and timing. To use one more baseball parallel, modern analytics birthed a statistic called “batting average on balls in play (BABIP)” that looks at how often a player gets a base hit when a batted ball goes into the field (i.e., it’s not a strikeout, walk or home run). What they found is that this average, for almost every player, is just a measure of luck, and both high and low BABIPs tend to regress to the mean no matter how skilled the player might otherwise be. This stunned many experts and helped change how we think about batting average.

They're only a matter of luck when you're dealing with small sample sizes.  This is a point he continually trips over... as he does here as well:

Some players, like Adam Scott, take an opposite view of Rory’s recent quotes. “History

has shown that the greatest players have ended up accumulating the most of these [major] tournaments,” he told me in 2014, “and I think it’s probably a fair assessment of who the greatest players over time have been in each decade and each era. So I’m happy with the way everyone sees that.” Coming from someone whose career probably merits more than the one major he’s captured, that carries some weight. 

And it might be true in the case of those like Woods and Nicklaus and Hogan, but I’d argue that it doesn’t hold up on a smaller scale. Who would argue that Andy North and his two majors represent a “better” career than Scott, or Justin Rose, or Sergio Garcia, or Dustin Johnson? That’s an extreme example, but it shows the pitfalls of over-valuing major championships.

He's made quite the compelling case demolishing an argument that exactly no one has ever made.   

Over the long-term, majors define careers.  Not exclusively, but to a great extent....Over the short-term, such as his POY argument, not so much.  But his real argument is that the POY award is relatively meaningless, and finally we've found common ground.

More Stats? - Golfweek continues to dissect 2019 results:

Who made biggest improvement, and drop, in strokes gained approach the green in 2019?

Just yesterday we had the Golf Magazine writers touting Lefty and Jordan as headed for better days in 2019-20.  Not sure I see that happening, but at least we can be clear on how they got where they are:

On the other side of the ledger, the players on the bottom of the chart saw their performance from the fairway drop. Among them is Phil Mickelson, who went from being a strong iron player with an average of 0.555 to a player who gave away shots and

averaged -0.065. Lefty made the second-largest drop in strokes gained approach the green last season (-0.62). Only Tyler Duncan’s drop of -0.628 was worse. 

Jordan Spieth struggled nearly as much as Mickelson, finishing the year down -0.607. He ended the year ranked 145th in strokes gained approach the green and for the first time since he has played enough to have official year-end stats, Spieth finished with a negative average. 

Other well-known players who experienced drops in strokes gained approach the green last season were Brendan Steele (-0.559), Dustin Johnson (-0.541), Patton Kizzire (-0.513) and Rickie Fowler (-0.336).

Come to think of it, one of those guys was plugging Rickie as well.... At least this spotlights what to look for early next year.