Rackham Update: Detroit's Ross Muni Still Going

Longtime readers know the plight of Detroit’s Donald Ross-designed muni, Rackham, has been watched since 2006 when there were signs the city might close it. The course was subsequently sold and last year we learned of this amazing woman trying to ensure its future as an important big city, affordable public course.

So it was great to see Golf.com’s Sean Zak using the website’s Muni Monday as an excuse to visit the place and highlight its amazing history with Joe Louis and in Detroit golf.

Several Elite Clubs And Pro Tournament Hosts Score Significant PPP Funds

Outside The Cut highlighted top clubs and resorts taking significant workforce employment funds.

In recent days there has been national scrutiny over who received what, including some potential conflicts of interest as noted here by CNBC. In the golf sector, Outside the Cut Tweeted a list of the top golf operations securing SBA loans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Besides several hosts of recent PGA Tour events (Colonial, Harbour Town) or upcoming events (Muirfield Village Golf Club), there is Riviera Country Club securing funds between $2-5 million earmarked to help “businesses keep their workforce employed during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis.”

The club is home to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who disclosed his membership there and at Sebonack on Long Island as part of his Senate confirmation process.

The full PPP list can be accessed here.

Over 1500 golf related businesses applied and received funds over $150,000, with just over half receiving less than $350,000. (Businesses receiving less than $150,000 were not disclosed).

However, at the top end’s $2-5 million level, several names stand out given their small workforces. In California there is Bighorn, Steele Canyon and Riviera, Bay Hill (TBHC) and Grey Oaks CC in Florida, New Jersey’s Fiddler’s Elbow, Nevada’s Edgewood Tahoe and Horshoe Bay in Texas.

Muirfield Village, home to the next two weeks of PGA Tour golf, was part of a Columbus Dispatch story on the loans.

Shack Show: Bryson's Unsettling Style, The Need To Save Imaginative Golf

On the latest Shack Show I take a few unmistakable forces in golf convering this week to highlight the issues surrounding Bryson DeChambeau’s use of power and the dreary lack of imagination in presenting two tournaments at Muirfield Village. And producer Tim Parotchka, big fan of the distance game then joins me to discuss the joys of the power game (that he passed up watching).

The Apple Podcast link.

And the iHeart embed option below, or subscription page here:

"Of the many positive things he’s accomplished for the good of Scottish golf over the years, Paul Lawrie’s latest venture has to be the best of the lot. "

Move Paul Lawrie high up the list of pros who have stepped up during the COVID-19 pandemic to help out the sport’s aspiring players.

As Martin Dempster writes, the 1999 Open Champion may be doing his best work yet for Scotland’s up and coming players, with some tremendous courses stepping in to assist as well: Royal Dornoch, Carnoustie and St Andrews where the New and Jubilee courses will be used. As will Devenick Course at Lawrie’s golf center (for a Par 3 Championship).

Six 36-hole events on the Tartan Pro Tour will offer a place for male and female pros to compete while travel restrictions and cancelled events reduce opportunities in the Home of Golf.

Dempster writes:

Scottish golf owes another debt to one of its favourite sons.

Of the many positive things he’s accomplished for the good of Scottish golf over the years, Paul Lawrie’s latest venture has to be the best of the lot.

Put it this way, the new Tartan Pro Tour, a series of six 36-hole events around the country in August and September, could make the difference between a Scottish-based pro going on to blossom in the game as opposed to being lost to the sport forever.

What Might Have Been: The Workday Charity Open Provide A Chance To Try Something Different

Now that spectators have been ruled out for The Memorial, the back-to-back weeks at Muirfield Village will be delineated by contrasting course setups (Rex Hoggard reported on this three weeks ago).

Get ready to hear a lot about Stimpmeter speeds and rough heights. Oh, that’ll lure in the young people.

Also, the field for this week’s Workday Charity Open will consist of 156 compared to 120 for next week’s Memorial. 72-holes of stroke play for both. Scintillating.

The Workday provided an opportunity to inject something fresh onto the schedule while retaining the Memorial’s luster. Remember all the pre-pandemic talk about the need to slip in more variety on the schedule and offer alternatives to 72-holes of stroke play? I know, seems like decades ago.

Here are some options that would undoubtedly have required too many Zoom meetings and players inevitably offering their buzzkilling two cents.

—Reverse the nines. If we’re going to watch the same course for two weeks, why not use the spectator-free situation to use the less-seen, more confined front nine as the incoming set to differentiate the two weeks. This would have also protected The Memorial’s aura. Now, after two weeks of seeing the back nine, it’s likely to grow tiresome for fans.

—54 Holes. The Premier Golf League is proposing to play 54 hole tournaments with 18-hole shotguns the first two rounds. The Workday’s field size precluded the shotgun option, but a tournament shortened by a day and maybe played with a tighter pace policy would have been a solid experiment. It might have encouraged a few more players to play both tournament weeks.

—Stableford scoring. With several world class risk-reward holes at Muirfield Village, the scoring format used at July’s Barracuda Championship, combined with the less severe course setup planned, could have led to more contrast between the weeks.

—10 Club Limit. Imagine the pre-tournament talk: We tweaked some lofts and lies to fill in a mid-iron gap with the help of my partners at (Ricky Bobby/Bryson-style corporate plug goes here). We’d see some shotmaking, some tougher decisions for players who have to create something out of a reduced set of options and we might see creativity rewarded. With less to carry, Tour caddies might even be less surly for a week.

—12-Hole Rounds. With just a bit of creativity, Muirfield Village could have been reconfigured into a 12-hole layout as a salute to alternative round lengths, Prestwick and Jack Nicklaus’s view that the sport would have been better at a dozen holes. One option, screen-grabbed from Google Earth and posted above: holes 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. This would have taken the finishing four holes off of television to preserve some of the Memorial’s cache and conclude the Workday on the courses four most dynamite holes. If Bryson were playing, the last two would have been drivable fours!

—Almost All Of The Above. Let’s just go off the rails for total fun: 12 hole rounds, three days (36 holes total), Stableford scoring, 10-club limit. Let the whining begin!

"He won’t often have to hit mid-irons, ever."

From this week’s Golf.com Confidential, caddie and contributor John Wood on Bryson DeChambeau’s game following the Rocket Mortgage Classic win:

John Wood, PGA Tour caddie for Matt Kuchar (@Johnwould): Bryson seems to have broken the code for Bryson. And I think he has transferred what has been done at the long driving competitions for a while now to highly competitive golf. I couldn’t be more impressed. I was watching today and thought how economical this type of game is to practice. You practice drivers, wedges, chips and putting. He won’t often have to hit mid-irons, ever. Maybe a couple a day to par-5s. But for the most part, playing the game like he is playing it, and how courses are allowing him to play it through setup, why would you spend the time on fairway woods and hybrids and long/mid-irons when they will be used so seldom.

Will Gray at GolfChannel.com featured several of DeChambeau’s comments and summed up the whirlwind week at Detroit Golf Club, including this.

To that end, he’s looking to parse every possible advantage in a game where each player starts the week with the same score from the same teeing ground.

“I think the most important thing is that I’ve shown people that there’s another way to do it, and there’s going to be other people trying to come up and do it that way,” DeChambeau said. “For me, I think there are going to be people trying to hit it a little harder, some of them, but at the end of the day, it’s going to take a generation for all this to evolve into something different.”

The Amazing Numbers And Thorny Questions Prompted By Bryson's Distance-Fueled Rocket Mortgage Win

One of several CBS graphics highlighting DeChambeau’s dominant driving

The numbers are eye-popping and impressive. So is the dedication and precision displayed by Bryson DeChambeau in winning the 2020 Rocket Mortgage Classic.

Not so great: his mood on Saturday and the resulting brand hit in whining about protecting his privacy.

He finishes a four-week run 67 under par and will leave the golf world debating about what we just saw.

A few stats of note:

• First player in the 16 years of ShotLink and “Strokes Gained” to lead a field in both driving and putting.

• Averaged 350.6 on the eight measuring holes, compared to a field average of 301.5.

• He averaged 329.8 on all drives at tree-lined Detroit Golf Club, compared to the field’s 297.6 average.

• DeChambeau reached 23-under-par to win by three strokes over Matthew Wolff, who started the day three ahead. Wolff hit five more fairways for the week, if that means anything (38/56 to Bryson’s 33/56).

• According to CBS’s Jim Nantz, DeChambeau’s drives Sunday ended up 423 yards longer than playing partner Troy Merritt’s. And 143 yards longer than Wolff’s tee shots on the non-par-3s.

There are, of course, issues that come with all of this madness. In no particular order:

• I get more questions asking if there is drug testing instead of equipment or COVID-19 testing.

• Half of most social media posts regarding DeChambeau descend into unfair character assassination about the naturalness of the weight and strength gain without any evidence this is something other than just hard work and an excessive diet.

• There are undoubtedly kids and parents watching and sending junior to the gym instead of our to play or practice golf. This has always been a risk of allowing golf to become a long drive contest, and now we have an extreme example to inspire a movement.

• Even with CBS having their best production yet, highlighted by some excellent storytelling around the DeChambeau dominance, the sight of driver-wedge golf and 8-irons into par-5s lacks any significant give-and-take between player and course. I’m not saying it’s boring, but there is less satisfaction in watching a course unable to call on a variety of skills.

The obvious question of such a dominant and shocking performance: where do we go from here on the distance debate?

Focusing on one player will only backfire for the governing bodies who have, for the moment, suspended the next steps of their Distance Insights Study and follow-up stages. The USGA and R&A will only take heat for singling him out, no matter how many unattractive episodes he has with people just doing their job.

So after rightfully praising DeChambeau for his work ethic and execution, it is not out of line to ask if this is the way golf should be played at the highest level?

Besides the well-documented issues of outdating classic courses and eliminating once-essential skills needed to succeed, DeChambeau’s success highlights a notion long mocked as a non-issue: is a weight-gain focused push for speed a good thing?

Do the leaders of golf believe it is sustainable, wise and merely human progress playing out before our eyes? Or, might a tweak to the aerodynamics of the ball retain the essential characteristics that helped golf thrive and survive for centuries?

If he stays healthy, DeChambeau will succeed in the sport no matter what actions are taken because he will adapt. His template for success should only serve as a reminder that there needs to be more than one way to get the ball in the hole, and more than one type of physique that can excel at golf.

State Of The Game 105: Geoff Ogilvy, The Bryson Debate And More

After a short hiatus, Rod Morri, Mike Clayton and yours truly discussed a nice array of topics with the 2006 U.S. Open Champion.

The should be available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can listen below.

The Apple podcast show link.

This Dimpleless Titleist Experiment Could Be On To Something

With Titleist asking a few pros to hit shots with a dimple-free demonstration ball—video below—Golf.com’s Jonathan Wall says it reminds us how important those little indentations are to the modern ball.

So the next time you hammer a drive and watch the ball soar downrange, take a minute to tip your cap to the ball designer working diligently on the dimples. Without them, you’d need to be Iron Byron to keep it on the map.

Maybe we take just a few off for the pros-15 or so?-make it spin just a little more and see who really hits on the sweet spot? Or who knows how to use the spin to shape a shot? Think of the tracer fun!

Again, just a thought…

Scoring Records Fall At The Travelers...

Heading into the Travelers final at TPC River Highlands, Brendon Todd (-18) leads Dustin Johnson (-16) by two.

Now, we know the players eating all those brussel sprouts, listening to their teams and planking for ten minutes at a time explains their distance gains. But whenever folks try to downplay actual distance numbers, we hear how scoring has not budged.

Yet one interesting twist of this “Return to Golf”, with its oversized fields, is the difficulty to protecting par. With bloated fields and warmer weather, we’ve seen softer conditions and easier setups to move players around.

The result: absurd distances (mostly carry) and low scoring. Through 54 at TPC River Highlands and courtesy of the PGA Tour:

• Brendon Todd seeks to become the first three-time winner this season

• Todd’s 192 54-hole total marks his career-best on TOUR and a Travelers Championship tournament record

• Todd records his lowest 18-hole score in his PGA TOUR career (539 rounds)

• Dustin Johnson records his lowest 18-hole score in his PGA TOUR career (918 rounds)

Come On Bryson, Distract Us By Driving TPC Cromwell's 420-Yard 17th!

…and in a charming, expedite-the-freak-show exposure of regulatory ineptitude as we wonder how much longer American tournament golf can be played without quarantining half the Tour.

Obviously, it is CLEARLY the better way to play the TPC River Highlands’ 17th by flailing away on a spectator-free course. I mean, who would play to that tiny water-guarded fairway when they could bomb away? Bryson? We need you in this time.

Luke Kerr-Dineen first posted this after DeChambeau’s practice round at the Travelers Championship.

Bryson tried driving the 420-yard 17th green during his practice round today. Reached 198 mph ball speed on the drive (!) and stayed dry, but says it's too risky to try in the tournament.

Was tempted to try and drive a few holes last week, but ended up "playing smart" pic.twitter.com/quAysDTpVb

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) June 23, 2020

But he has so far, decided not to do it, Brentley Romine notes here:

What Bryson said afterward: "On 17, I just thought I'd give it a go and give it a rip, and I was able to get it over after like three or four tries. But it's not worth it. ... I'd have to achieve 200- to 205-mph ball speed every time to be able to hit it over with that wind." https://t.co/UgKtmQtU0v

— Brentley Romine (@BrentleyGC) June 23, 2020

DeChambeau tees off with Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson the first two rounds, starting Thursday at 7:35 a.m. ET (No. 10) and Friday at 12:50 a.m. ET (No. 1).

** Round one tee shot. :(

National Park Service To Begin Negotiating With National Links Trust To Restore DC Munis

Nice work here by Andy Johnson at TheFriedEgg.com to explain the next big step for the National Links Trust’s effort to save some architectural gems.

National Links Trust (NLT), a non-profit headed by Michael McCartin and Will Smith, plans to make a multi-year, multi-million-dollar investment in the East Potomac, Rock Creek Park, and Langston golf properties.

As The Fried Egg previously reported, NLT has partnered with management company Troon Golf, developer Mike Keiser, and a trio of leading design firms. Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design hopes to restore Walter Travis’s reversible layout at East Potomac; Hanse Golf Course Design has agreed to improve Rock Creek Park, a William Flynn design; and Beau Welling, a senior design consultant for Tiger Woods’s TGR Design, looks to renovate Langston.

Kudos to all involved fr putting in the time and effort.

A few of Andy’s past contributions to highlighting this cause:

• The Fried Egg Podcast, Episode 112: Michael McCartin and East Potomac Golf Course (November 25, 2018)

• “The High Stakes of Municipal Design” (January 2, 2019)

• “A Brief History of Municipal Golf in D.C.” (January 8, 2019)

• The Fried Egg Podcast, Episode 132: Introducing the National Links Trust (April 23, 2019)

• “Doak and Hanse Come on Board in D.C.” (September 3, 2019)

A little history

When it opened in 1921, East Potomac Golf Course set out to be “the model public playground.” The reversible nine-hole Walter Travis design was an immediate hit among Washington, D.C., residents and led to a surge in enthusiasm for golf. The East Potomac facility quickly expanded from nine to 18 reversible Travis holes in 1925. Still unable to meet demand, the facility added yet another nine—this one designed by William Flynn—in 1927. In its first year of operation as a 27-hole facility, East Potomac logged over 157,000 nine-hole rounds. East Potomac was so well-regarded that President Warren Harding would often play it instead of his home club at Chevy Chase.

"Watching what Bryson has done, I can only imagine the impact it will have on the young players"

Bryson DeChambeau’s physical transformation and continued ability to play at a high level is a sight to behold. And something totally unimaginable. Except to the distanistas (guilty!) who have long feared that a day would come where distance was so clearly the primary tool, that we’d see players transforming their bodies to take advantage of the remarkable technological advances.

So we will keep seeing the progression to this modified World Long Drive with the potential for an array of health issues, no sign it’s adding fans to the pro game and worst of all, telling aspiring young golfers trying to find speed to play high level golf (and possibly before their bodies are ready).

Then there are all of the absurd side effects on courses, cost, length of round, and the general cancer such an evolution would be on the game. The governing bodies have never taken these notions seriously in relentlessly passing the buck over the years.

Longtime PGA Tour caddie John Wood noted this other overlooked wrinkle by the governing bodies following the Bryson show at Colonial (below). From this week’s Golf.com roundtable:

3. Bryson DeChambeau’s bulked-up physique and booming tee shots (he hit 11 drives 340 yards or longer) were the talk of the tournament. If DeChambeau’s fine play continues, are we destined to see a wave of beefy bombers descending on PGA Tour tee boxes?

Wood: Yes. I think there is quite a bit of shock at how much his size, his clubhead speed and his ball speed have increased in such a short amount of time, all the while seeming to maintain his flexibility, his feel and accuracy. On Thursday and Friday, we played behind a group that included Brooks, Rory and Rahm. There was a long wait on the 15th hole, and we were there when Brooks got ready to play his tee shot. We were standing behind him, and I remarked to Matt: “You know, looking at him, if this was 10 years ago, you would have thought you were watching a long drive contest.” It just wasn’t believable that a body that big and strong would be conducive to playing great golf. We were wrong. And now, watching what Bryson has done, I can only imagine the impact it will have on the young players we know, and the younger players we don’t know yet. You better get your head out of the sand fast and come up with a long-term plan, USGA and R&A – the ball is going to get longer and longer and longer and longer.

The numbers are just astounding, particularly on a fairly confined course with few so driver holes":

Longest drives this week for @B_DeChambeau:

367 yards
365 yards
361 yards
357 yards
355 yards
354 yards
354 yards
353 yards
349 yards
340 yards
340 yards
337 yards
335 yards
335 yards
334 yards
333 yards
330 yards
330 yards
330 yards

He's 1 back of the lead @CSChallengeFW. pic.twitter.com/rylVNdm3Cd

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) June 14, 2020

How Health Experts Rank Golf With 36 "American activities based on risk"

Adriana Belmonte reports for Yahoo on the classifications of activities in the COVID-19 era. Looks like golf needs to get some of the public experts polled to a golf course when things quiet down. Because equating golf with a museum trip, a hotel stay or even standing in line for groceries seems, well, absurd.

Thanks to reader Steve for sending this, which also included this sobering comment on large gatherings.

Bars, large music concerts, and packed sports stadiums are the riskiest places, according to experts, because of large groups of people congregating together with little room to keep at least six feet apart. 

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, former special advisor for health policy under the Obama administration, previously stated that he doesn’t see larger gatherings – like concerts, conferences, and sporting events — returning until “fall 2021 at the earliest.”

Collaboration In A Time Of Pandemic: European Tour Chief Is The Lone Dissenting Vote In Ranking Restart

On this week’s McKellar golf podcast, European Tour Chief Keith Pelley talked about the remarkable and unprecedented levels of collaboration between his circuit and others in these trying times.

Yet as John Huggan reports, Pelley issued a memo to players suggesting he voted against the proposed (and approved) structure of the Official World Golf Ranking’s restart next week at Colonial as his tour remains shut down by the global pandemic.

Pelley supported a start, but offered an unsuccessful counter-proposal to protect his Tour.

“We agreed with the proposal that the ranking should restart alongside the resumption of the PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour next week on the understanding that dispensation was made for the European Tour and the Challenge Tour—and indeed many other tours around the world—whose players will be disadvantaged by not being able to play at this time,” Pelley wrote in the memo. “Our proposal to correct this imbalance was either freezing the current average points of all European Tour members unable to play tournament golf until we restart our season or increasing the overall OWGR points available at our tournaments when we do restart.

“Without either of those adjustments, the consequences are negative for the majority of our membership, who will lose points through no fault of their own, when they are unable to play.”

Both proposals, however, were rejected, according to Pelley. And, as a result, he voted against the ranking restart proposal. According to his memo, his was the only dissenting voice.

As a result of the OWGR’s vote, Pelley has frozen the Ryder Cup world points list for selecting the European team until play resumes in Europe.

Some players spoke out on social media about the OWGR’s action.