When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
From the PGA Tour:
Rookie J.B. Holmes set a new one-tournament record for Driving Distance at last week's WGC-Bridgestone Invitational with a 350-yard average off the tee. The old mark was 347.3 by Scott Hend at the 2005 Bank of America Colonial. His eight measured drives were 307-405-338-413-321-364-272 and 380 yards. Holmes finished in a T50.
Imagine what would happen if he actually worked out!
A few fun stories were filed on the U.S. Ryder Cup team's appearance at K Club. First, James Corrigan in the Independent:
Woods certainly looked motivated as he braved a downpour of Noah proportions to finish off the 18th, together with Jim Furyk and JJ Henry as Lehman interestingly put them out in three-balls. "It was fun," he said, his smile daring one to think otherwise. But then, Woods had triumphed the previous night in Ohio in a rain-sodden shoot-out over his team-mate Stewart Cink, and golf tends to be rather enjoyable when you have just won four on the bounce. "We're here to bond," he said, singing from the Americans' well- rehearsed hymn sheet.And the always entertaining Martin Johnson in the Telegraph:
Woods, though, cleared his diary to join the rest of the US team on a specially chartered jumbo 747 on Sunday night, at estimated cost to the PGA of America of £250,000. It was, as you might expect, slightly less painful than it was for those taking a scheduled flight across the Atlantic.
Not only were the players not required to divest themselves of their shoes and trouser belts, they were all offered a pair of complimentary pyjamas before entering a cabin remodelled to resemble a five-star hotel executive floor.
Woods has been trying to live down his perceived insouciance for an event in which America's declining fortunes have largely been put down - hence Lehman's idea for this visit - to a lack of cameraderie.
In particular, his pairing with Mickelson in the last Ryder Cup produced the kind of chemistry more reminiscent of Dr Jekyll's experiment with test tubes than an irresistible blend of the world's No 1 and No 2 golfers, and Woods himself has only won fives times in 16 outings with a partner.
And...
Listening to a succession of American golfers talking on auto-pilot about how good their team spirit was, and how happy they all were to be here, was certainly illuminating, but only if you'd just had a long audience with the Speaking Clock. Woods himself said that in his experience, every Ryder Cup boiled down to "who makes the most putts, and who wins the 18th hole".And Lawrence Donegan in The Guardian...
As competition for the most riveting insight into this year's Ryder Cup, it lagged far behind the news that there will be 40,000 square metres of tent, 300 car park attendants, and the allocation of 9600 toilet rolls to supply one hundred 1,100 litre portable lavatories. Maybe more if it's a tight finish.
What began with a card school at the back of a chartered flight across the Atlantic ended last night with a barbecue and a little fishing on the Liffey as the US Ryder Cup team completed day one of the most enthusiastic team-bonding exercise since Baden Powell was in short trousers.
Indeed if singing in unison was all it takes to win the most famous team event in the sport then Ian Woosnam's European squad might as well stay at home for next month's extravaganza at the K Club.
One can only hope this expression of team spirit was genuine because on this evidence the overnight trip seemed a very long way to come for a glorified group hug. The public was banned from the K Club and journalists' access heavily restricted, but as the US team set off in their buggies very little in the way of serious work appeared to be taking place. Woods, for one, admitted he had hardly bothered to hit any putts - "the greens were soft and they won't be like that at the Ryder Cup" - while Mickelson appeared more interested in taking copious notes.
Instead of playing the game, we're consumed by the math, and unless diagnosed and attended to, the syndrome is murder. I've seen it kill off more good rounds -- including too many of my own, some before my spikes were even laced -- than any flub, foozle, yank, shank, top, yip or worm burner, all of which feed off its toxins.
Bob Rotella, author of "Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect" and an expanding shelf of companion volumes focusing on the delicate balance of the golfing psyche, advocates simply hitting good golf shots -- the rest will take care of itself. "Too many golfers get so bound by results," he says, "that they forget about the reason they're supposedly out there: to enjoy themselves."
Of the myriad choices that confront us whenever we head for the links, none is more important than the one energizing all the others: Why we opt to enter into this self-flagellating venture in the first place. For Tiger, say, the answer is simple -- it's business. Keeping score is like keeping the books. It's concrete.
For the rest of us, the answer may not be as cut and dried. Yet, like Picasso's art, certain enterprises are meant to be appreciated in the abstract, and golf, thrillingly, turns out to be one of them.
When we can get beyond the little boxes on our scorecards, we begin to pick up on golf's bigger picture: the landscapes, the camaraderies, the lovely arc of a well-struck shot. We can still note the numbers, chart progress by marking fairways hit and greens in regulation, tally the skins, collect on the Nassaus, grind through tournaments, maintain handicaps, and hope to improve on them. But is that all we want to take from the game? What about the satisfaction of going out to play golf for no reason other than, well, to go out and play golf? With passion and abandon. Like when we were kids. Getting the lead out of our golfing systems now and then may serve up no tangible proof to bring home of how we're playing; instead, it reminds us why we're playing, and even encourages us to play better.
Golfweek's Alistair Tait points out that Richie Ramsay's U.S. Amateur win would not have happened had the USGA not changed it's rules on funding expenses.
In the past, players have had to pay U.S. Amateur expenses out of their own pocket. Hence the reason so few British Isles players competed.
Do the math. Ramsay is university student who often caddies at his home club of Royal Aberdeen for extra money. It would take a lot of bag dragging to afford the expenses of a transatlantic trip in peak holiday season for British travelers.
The new funding rules mean that the British Golf Unions can finance groups of players to compete in the U.S. Am. Had the old rules been in place, Ramsay would have been in Italy for the European Amateur Championship. He'd have been joined there by fellow Scot Lloyd Saltman, and English Walker Cup teammates Oliver Fisher and Robert Dinwiddie. They also took advantage of the new funding rules to compete in Minnesota.
...my latest Golfdom column is now posted.
From guest contributor Steve Elling comes this note:
Eyeing the updated world rankings today. It says that Tiger has padded his lead over #2 Mickelson to a record margin since the ranking methodology was tweaked a couple of years ago.
Small wonder.
Tiger has seven wins worldwide in 2006 -- matching the total of the rest of the top 10 in the rankings COMBINED.
Scott, Goosen, Els and Garcia (all ranked in the top eight) have contributed zero.
Ogilvy and Phil have two wins apiece.
This unbylined wire story covers the U.S. Ryder Cup team playing K Club today and notes that the players all took carts.
What about the caddies?
Golfonline's Joe Passov reviews his five favorite Robert Trent Jones designs, and notes this about Firestone:
By the late 1980s, Firestone South had run into a wall of criticism. "It's too long. It's too hard. It's too boring." Indeed, most of Firestone's holes run parallel to one another and the majority of greens are elevated and fronted by bunkers, lending a certain sameness to the proceedings. Yet, in 2006, the course isn't outrageously long by modern standards and a new generation of pros has come to appreciate the layout's straightforward virtues.
Hard to imagine that a course deemed "too long" just two decades ago is now the home of mostly driver-wedge par-4s.
Yours truly appears on segments 3 and 4 Sirius Radio's Golfchix radio show with Susan Hunt and Linda Giaciolli (Amy Alcott was off this week).
You can listen to the show by heading here and hitting the "This Week's Show" link on the left. The Golf Channel's Rich Lerner appears in the first two segments.
The PGA Tour driving distance average jumped from 289.1 yards to 289.4 yards after the WGC Bridgestone at Firestone.
Tiger Woods jumped from 305.5 to 308 after Firestone.
The number of 400-yard plus drives for the season rose from 17 to 23, with all 6 coming at Firestone (Cabrera 426, Holmes 413, Holmes 405, Holmes 405, Stenson 402, Stenson 402, Love 400).
David Toms was the only Top 10 finisher at Firestone who did not average over 300 yards for the week.
After struggling over the weekend and winning, Tiger Woods was asked:
Q. Do you feel like you just won a pretty prestigious tournament with your B game?And we didn't get a "right in front of you," just an "in front of you."
TIGER WOODS: Well, I was not hitting it all that well the last two days. I was kind of struggling. I was just trying to piece it together somehow, somehow just piece it together. I was putting well today, but I just couldn't give myself any looks at it. Then when I did, I was missing putts.
But I was just trying to get it around somehow and keep myself in the ballgame. If I got to double digits, I thought I could win it at either 11 or 12, and 10 or 11 would have been a playoff. If I could just get to those numbers somehow, forget what everyone else was doing, just get to those numbers, I'd be all right. I got to 11 and just didn't stay there. 10 ended up being the playoff number.
Q. What is it with Akron and this course that's really been so special?
TIGER WOODS: Well, I love this golf course. As I said earlier, we don't get a chance to play this type of course very often. The new, modern golf courses never look like this. You never have a piece of property where there are no homes on it. It's just a golf course.
So from that standpoint, it's a treat to be able to play a tree lined golf course that's straight forward in front of you, and we saw what happened yesterday when it got hard and fast, that any round that was in the high to mid 60s, you would vault up the board. Most Tour events that's not the case. You shoot low scores just to try and keep pace.
This golf course, if it got hard, dry and fast, nobody would ever be in double digits.
Check out Tiger's stats from Firestone:
Driving Distance Avg 343.4 357.5 334.3 296.9 - 333.0
Fairways Hit 71.4% 57.1% 50.0% 50.0% - 57.1%
Fairway Opportunities 14 14 14 14 - 56
Longest Drive 385 394 393 316 - 394
GIR 77.8% 83.3% 38.9% 72.2% - 68.1%
Thanks to LPGA Fan for the latest warm-fuzzies from Carolyn Bivens, who surely must be finding herself courted by several Fortune 500 companies by now.
Rob Oller writes in The Columbus Dispatch:
Bivens, in just more than one year, has encouraged players and frustrated the Tournament Owners Association with her fresh ideas on what the LPGA business model should be. Her view is that the tour needs to start acting like it belongs with the "big boys" of sports — football, baseball basketball, PGA Tour — and part of the plan includes providing health benefits to the players and increasing their retirement fund.
It also means asking tournaments, such as the Wendy’s Championship for Children, to dig deeper into their pockets to invest in the tour’s growth and also help defray costs that the tour has paid for years. For example, the tour is planning to require tournaments to pay for the electronic scoreboards that dot courses. Currently, the Tour splits those costs (about $30,000 each) with the sites.
"The status quo gets the LPGA less than an acceptable marketing budget," Bivens said yesterday at Tartan Fields Golf Club.
Just think of a world without "These Girls Rock" posters. See why charity must suffer?
Tournament directors who wonder how they will raise the additional money need to look around, Bivens said.
"It’s no different than any other corporation or private citizen," she said. "You figure out your salary is X, your expenses are Y. If you’ve got a mortgage that the interest rate is going up next year, you’ve got to figure out … do you take an extra job? It’s life."
Or maybe death, if you happen to be a tournament organizer.
"I think (Bivens) wants to raise the standard of operating practices, which is great. We should all challenge ourselves to be better," Wendy’s tournament director Kip Eriksen said. "I look at that (issue) a little different from the ($100,000) funding request."
Eriksen, who is a member of the Tournament Owners Association, said the owners want a clearer picture of what Bivens’ proposals will look like and how they will affect their tournaments.
"What is the return for us on the incremental investment," he said. "The tour will get better. What does that mean? How does that translate to the Wendy’s Championship? "
Eriksen also thinks he knows how sponsors will react when tournaments approach them for more money.
"They’re going to say, ‘What do we get in return?’ " he said.
And if Bivens is wrong and is aiming too high?
"If I’m overshooting, then the marketplace won’t replace tournaments. There won’t be more sponsors and there will be a new commissioner," she said.
You? Overshoot? That's hard to fathom.
Meanwhile, Gordon White in The Pilot lumps Bivens in with Maurice Clarett, Duke lacrosse and everything else he sees that is wrong with sports. Now that's positive branding.
With all of the drugs in golf talk, Golf World's John Hawkins makes a courageous admission about taking the prescription drug Adderall and its positive impact on his golf game:
The matter of legality regarding “performance enhancement” depends totally on the sport itself. Do I think pro golf needs some form of drug testing? Absolutely, but not just because it has become a hot-button media topic once again. The game’s governing bodies should feel obligated to examine the concept in a prudent, somewhat urgent manner. In failing to establish suitable policies on equipment in recent years, those two adjectives have been conspicuously lacking.
Stuart Hall writes about Scotland's Richie Ramsay holding off Sunnehanna winner Webb Simpson to reach the U.S. Amateur finals, not only insuring John Huggan a pre-Masters column, but making him arguably the most rules-obtuse player to ever reach such a prestigious position.
Ramsay grounding his club in the creek left of Hazeltine's No. 16 fairway has to rank as one of the most egregious violations ever caught on tape (not to mention the questionable practice swings beforehand).
John Huggan tackles a variety of topics in his Sunday column, including Medinah vs. Royal Liverpool.
Speaking as someone who, even after repeated circuits of the premises, is having a hard time remembering every hole at Medinah, the question remains: was this month's USPGA Championship venue a success or not? In other words, was the year's last major the Greater Hartford Open in disguise? Or did the 'hit-and-stick' stuff on display really double as a highly-entertaining example of modern golf at its tip-top best?And his conclusion...
What really matters is how the scores are compiled. So, while the winning totals at Hoylake and Medinah were similar, it must be said that our Open was much the more interesting to watch and, no doubt, to play. Where most of the holes at Royal Liverpool could be negotiated in as many as three or four different ways, at Medinah there was only one. Give it five out of ten for effort.
Of course, Medinah looks like St. Andrews compared to Firestone, which set up a quality 30 minute nap for me today. Wow is that architecture at its most banal.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
