TPC Boston Changes To Look For

Jim Wagner filled me in with a few more specifics about the minor work done at TPC Boston. Most of this won't show up on television, but I can say it makes a huge difference in making the greens feel a bit more naked and giving the golf course an older feel.

• Green surround mounding removed: No. 1, No. 10, No. 18
• Greenside bunker renovated: No. 4 (a feature was added in the left portion of the bunker to make player think a bit before automatically aiming for the hazard)
• New fairway bunker, mound removal: No. 9 fairway
• Bunker renovation, island added: No. 11
• Fairway expansion in first landing area: No. 18
  

It was interesting how many players didn't care for the tee shot options on No. 18 last year, so the expansion should help the shorter hitters a bit.

Here's No. 10 with some of the rear containment mounding that should be gone.

Getting In The Mood For TPC Boston

You may recall that last year at this time I blatantly touted the before/after work of my colleagues Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner and friends at the TPC Boston, with several photos courtesy of superintendent Tom Brodeur.

Now, because I know you're dying to relive all of the before/after photos or some of my posts from the course during last year's epic Deutsche Bank Championship, I remind you that you can go to the TPC Boston journal archive. Or you can visit posts on individual holes here:

1st hole

4th hole

5th hole

7th hole

8th hole

9th hole

10th hole

15th hole

16th hole

17th hole

I understand that they have made some minor changes this year, including a change to the front left bunker on No. 4, as well as many more Palmer Design mounds. Still, 13 of the greens remain left over from the original design in some form. Hopefully some day they'll get the green light to fix the rest, starting with No. 18!

Volatility Verdicts

Alan Shipnuck likes the new playoff points system:

The much-hyped playoff format that sportswriters love to hate is off to a rollicking start. Besides the buzz of Sergio's sudden death, there are Ryder Cup spots up for grabs and the new points system has created a lot more more week-to-week excitement. Bottom line: don't ever bet against Finchem.

Meanwhile John Hawkins levels a verdict in this week's Golf World, and seems to have agreement from a member of the Tour policy board:

When the tour's Policy Board began reviewing the first FedEx Cup finish in late 2007, it came up with two primary objectives: create dramatic movement in the standings and make the superstars play in all four postseason events. Thus, the decision was made to turn up the dials on everything that would encourage volatility.

The problem? Almost everyone ignored the fragility. Singh earned 11,000 points for winning the Barclays -- just eight players reached that total in the entire regular season. You want crazy? A solo third at one of the first three playoff tournaments pays 5,400 points, which is more than Trevor Immelman, Woods, Padraig Harrington (and Harrington again) got for each of their major championship victories earlier this year. Simply making the cut at Ridgewood was worth 2,098, almost 400 points more than Rich Beem got for a solo third a week earlier in Greensboro.

Seriously, folks, you can't make up this stuff. "We went overboard," acknowledged policy board member Joe Ogilvie. "We overcooked it, and I'm sure we'll revise [again], but at least we know we took it too far.

"We were given various [projections], so we fully knew what we were getting into," Ogilvie added. "Mark Wilson [a member of the Player Advisory Council] was the one guy who thought we were going too far. I remember him warning us of what might happen. The problem isn't so much the player who wins as it is the player who finishes 135th, makes two [postseason] cuts and jumps into the top 70. That's not in the spirit of the playoffs, or shouldn't be."

Last year we had to wait to issue a verdict, now we're declaring the points revamping DOA after week one. I love these guys!

Update on 2008-08-28 03:14 by Geoff

Doug Ferguson chimes in and talks to Padraig Harrington, who seems to have the best perspective on the playoff volatility:

"I think it's a fair reflection that I dropped about 20 spots by missing the cut,'' Harrington said. "I think it should be very volatile. That's what a playoff system should be like. You've got to go produce.''

If he could change one thing, Harrington would make it even more combustible by awarding big points to the top 10 finishers in a tournament, minimal points for those barely making the cut.

Either way, he came to one conclusion in Year Two of this system.

"I think the FedEx Cup is working,'' he said. "It's got more players out here playing, more players interested at this time of the year. It's creating a bit of a buzz. If players aren't exactly happy with the system at the moment ... no press is bad press. Something like that. People are talking about it, and that's the main thing.''

"Best golf course we've played all year"

John Hawkins, writing about the popularity of Ridgewood in this week's Golf World:

Although the Barclays is scheduled to return to its old site in what amounts to a 2011 cameo, it won't be a year too late -- Ridgewood was as big a hit as you'll find among 144 guys with $10 million on the line. "Best golf course we've played all year," said Tom Pernice Jr., not the easiest man to please. The old-school look and imaginative medley of holes make this A.W. Tillinghast design a keeper, which doesn't explain why the tour will follow its commercial nose and flee to snazzy-but-raw Liberty National for the 2009 gathering.

"If this one's a 10, that one's a 2," said a veteran who played next year's site last week. But enough on the past and the future, especially when the present packs so much relevance.

"I was hesitant to weight the playoffs this heavily, to be honest"

Boy, you try and tweak to deliver volatility and now they aren't happy!

Steve Elling complains about the new FedEx Cup volatility and finds a soul sister in PGA Tour policy board member Stewart Cink, who has already rendered his verdict.

Now we all have motion sickness. Vijay Singh collected his fourth career Barclays title and jumped from seventh to first in FedEx points, and while that sounds like healthy leapfrogging, it was the absolute least tumult that could have happened given the far-flung scenarios that might have played out at Ridgewood Country Club.

Here's a real after-the-fact kicker. Cink has been a good company man all season and widely espoused the benefits of the new points system, but now that there are some crazy cracks showing and his peers are questioning him about the merits of the details the Policy Board authorized, he has come clean.

"I was hesitant to weight the playoffs this heavily, to be honest," he said.

Because lord knows you are entitled to another year end check for showing up four more times and continuing the mediocrity.

I have to say that for some bigtime free market preachers, some of these PGA Tour dudes sure don't like a little, uh, volatility driven by market forces (in this case, those forces are called playing well.) Imagine if they had a true playoff, or even a modified one and wiped the slate clean at some point. The bitching would epic!

Right now, that list would include Kevin Sutherland, a veteran with one career win, who hadn't been noticed in weeks and lost in a three-way playoff Sunday with Singh and Sergio Garcia. Or winless veteran Mathew Goggin, who hadn't been noticed all season.

"It's more than just about the bonus money," Cink said. "Guys who played well all year are getting knocked out of majors."

Ahhhh....now the truth comes out. Has that really happened yet?

"I think if we don't see a change, we'll be disappointed,"

Steve Elling considers the Barclays' move to Liberty National next year and offers this perspective from Barclays president Bob Diamond:

Last year, when Woods skipped The Barclays, the tournament was whipped in the ratings by the Little League World Series, televised on a cable outlet, ESPN. He acknowledged that was hard to stomach.  

"I think if we don't see a change, we'll be disappointed," Diamond said. "We'll see."

"Meanwhile the FedEx Cup remains a play for relevance via monetization and marketing, which looks especially silly every other year, when top players are more concerned about playing for God and country at the Ryder Cup."

Here I was thinking we had at least another two weeks before the FedEx Cup obituaries started rolling in and Cameron Morfit had to go and pen one before the art department could even come up with a cutesy graphic.

The FedEx Cup is stuck in a major end-of-season traffic jam. All of the individual events anyone cares about are over. In fact, judging from the breathless, parking lot stakeouts of Brett Favre, the press and public tuned out the Tiger-less Tour even during the year's final major. Paddy's PGA was no match for Brett's SUV.

And still the FedEx soldiers on despite the Olympics and an upcoming two-week break after the BMW Championship, necessitated by the Ryder Cup. Ultimately only 30 players will convene for the FedEx finale, the Tour Championship at East Lake outside Atlanta, because the smaller the field, the more "exclusive" (important) it is.

That's the idea, anyway. In reality a limited field holds limited appeal because it increases the likelihood that one hot player will run away with the tournament. It happened last year with Woods, but a mere mortal also could run away and hide with only 29 other guys chasing him. (A total of 315 players started the U.S. Amateur on Monday.)

Of course if there was a true playoff and daily eliminations at East Lake it wouldn't be so dull, would it?

Perhaps the FedEx champion won't be determined until the back nine on Sunday of the Tour Championship. That would be nice, but the rules are complicated. The Tour has arbitrarily narrowed the gap between players to start the playoffs, from 1,000 to 500 points. Every player who makes the cut at the Barclays will get 2,000 more points than he would have last year. This is meant to create more volatility up and down the standings.

The Amateur is simple. Two guys go into a match, and only one lives to play another day, sometimes after a wild momentum swing or five, which is typical of match play.

And if you had daily eliminations you would...oh continue on Cameron:

Meanwhile the FedEx Cup remains a play for relevance via monetization and marketing, which looks especially silly every other year, when top players are more concerned about playing for God and country at the Ryder Cup.

"The 41-year relationship between the PGA Tour and Westchester Country Club was like a good marriage gone bad."

While Bill Pennington celebrates the elegance of Tillinghast's Ridgewood, Sam Weinman files a compelling dissection of the messy decision to leave former Barclay's host Westchester. He writes for golf.com:

The 41-year relationship between the PGA Tour and Westchester Country Club was like a good marriage gone bad. There was the innocent beginning, the complacent middle years and then, finally, when the Tour's wandering eye led it to Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J., the bitter, dish-throwing end.

And this does make any rational soul understand why the Tour had had enough:

Among the membership's longstanding agreements with the Tour was that during tournament week members could still play the adjacent South course, still play tennis on the courts that bordered the par-3 1st hole and still have access to the sports house that included the pros' locker room and a fitness center.

The uneasy coexistence was best encapsulated by an incident at last summer's Barclays, during which Tour player Aaron Baddeley was kicked out of the fitness center by a Westchester member who said Baddeley didn't belong there. (Westchester president Phil Halpern confirmed that an "older member" mistakenly thought the room was for members only.)

"I think what happened is that the Tour and its tournaments evolved, and what was acceptable and overlooked in the 1970s and '80s was no longer the case," says a PGA Tour official who requested anonymity. "Every host venue has evolved or been replaced, but they simply weren't of the mindset to evolve. You won't find another venue on Tour where they play tennis off the 1st hole or play the other course when the tournament's going on. I guarantee you there's not another locker room on Tour shared with members."

The Great Playoff Debate

Via email and not appearing for all the world to see, the PGA Tour's Steve Dennis and I debate the best possible format for the pPlayoffs.

Essentially, I'm arguing for a true playoff that lets someone get hot, get to East Lake and maybe pull off a big upset. Steve wants to protect the season points leaders and crunch numbers right up to the end.

Playoff Eliminations Begin!

I like this new FedEx Cup volatility. We're already down to 136 players and it's only Monday.

Tim Rosaforte reports that playoff fever got the best of Lee Westwood, who listed "holiday" as his reasing for pulling out. And to show just how much the playoffs meant to him, Bob Estes...

who finished 124th in the final FedEx Cup standings, scheduled his wedding for this week and is not on the tee sheet.