State Of The Game 73: Geoff Ogilvy, Presidents Cup, Etc...

We've put the band back together and talk to Geoff Ogilvy about this recent Presidents Cup gig as an assistant captain along with other issues in the game.

For those wanting to hear Geoff's appearance on Playing With Science alongside Neil degrasse Tyson, it will be here when it is pushed out to devices.

The MP3 version is here and of course the show is available on iTunes.

And here:

Hmmm, Files: Old Course, Carnoustie Course Records Fall During Alfred Dunhill Championship

There will be the usual hysteria after a record falls that something must be done and while I always find that shortsighted and slightly disrespectful to the players involved--but let the hysteria begin!

Ross Fisher had an amazing shot at 59 during the Alfred Dunhill final round over the Old Course, in spite of a glacial round pace caused in part by the pro-am format. But a last hole three-putt from the Valley of Sin left him with 61 and a new record. Victor Dubuisson was on a 59 watch a few groups ahead of Fisher, but settled for 63.

Fisher was gutted to have finished the way he did, but well aware of his accomplishment.

“But to go out and shoot a score like that, with no bogeys, I just saw the lines and was hitting good putts and they were going in and I didn’t want it to end.

“At the home of golf, I wanted to try and give that putt on the last a try for 59 and it just came up a bit shy and then unfortunately I didn’t hit a great (birdie) putt, so unfortunately had to settle for a 61 – but I would definitely have taken it.”

The Fisher scorecard:

A new course record on the oldest course in the world ✍🏻 Congratulations Ross Fisher! #DunhillLinks

A post shared by European Tour (@europeantour) on Oct 8, 2017 at 10:40am PDT

Why should we be hysterical when the distance situation at classic courses has been an issue for nearly two decades ago, with huge leaps since the governing bodies drew a line in the sand (2003)?

Because course records get attention, especially when it's the Home of Golf and especially on a course not using some of the absurd Open Championship tees employed by the R&A to mask distance leaps.

While most of us know modern course conditioning combines with today's instruction technology and brain power, should lead to records falling. And that's just fine. But couple that with players rarely hitting a long iron due to courses being overwhelmed, and these accomplishments should be warning signs that the importance of certain skills has been diminished to the point that such a record may need an asterisk.

Gary Player took to Twitter to remind us that the Old Course is pretty defenseless these days.

This comes on the heels of Tommy Fleetwood shooting 63 at Carnoustie to establish a new course record there.

Fleetwood was honored by the accomplishment, reports The Telegraph's James Corrigan.

“Carnoustie course record holder – it sounds good doesn’t it? It was a good day’s work by any standards,” Fleetwood said. “When you consider all the great players who have played here, in Opens and in this tournament, it is very special to have the lowest score ever recorded on this course. Yeah, I hit it in some places where you probably won’t be able to get able to hitting it when the Open comes back here next year, but I’m still very proud.”

The highlights from that epic round:

Blood Testing (Finally) Comes To The PGA Tour

Rex Hoggard explains for GolfChannel.com how the PGA Tour's new blood testing will impact the players and perceptions of the sport.

 

Hoggard says most players he spoke to felt the time had arrived for this more complete program, an amazing shift compared to a decade ago when Tim Finchem was resisting testing and players generally declared golfers clean and therefore not needing testing of any kind.


This was interesting:

“Why can’t we do hair samples, because then you can actually trace further back?” asked Casey, who is also an amateur cyclist. “There are certain drugs that are flushed out of the system within a day or two days, hair actually holds that drug in the follicle longer.”

Golf’s return to the Olympics last year will ensure the game remains vigilant when it comes to testing and officials haven’t ruled out new tests as the science and doping evolves. But for now, the circuit is content with the new testing methods.
“There is a lot of alternative testing methods, including hair, but the efficiency of these tests is really not at a level that would warrant use in a sport anti-doping program at this time,” Levinson said. “Urine is the most effective method of detecting most of the substances we are looking for.”

NY Times On Joe Louis Barrow And The First Tee

The New York Times' Gary Santaniello profiles The First Tee's retiring and amazingly well-compensated CEO, Joe Louis Barrow, who oversaw the program's growth and subtle transition in recent years to a grow-the game organization overseen by the World Golf Foundation.

He is to be replaced by former Viacom executive Keith Dawkins.

The First Tee’s programs reached 5.3 million young people in 2016; nearly half of the participants in the golf programs are minorities, and 39 percent are girls.

The scope of what the First Tee does has expanded, but, Barrow said, “the mission hasn’t changed.”

That starts with providing its participants with coaches, teachers and mentors. Seeking more than an instructional relationship, the organization seeks to promote lifelong relationships.

Drake Moseley participated in First Tee programs outside Houston for nine years before attending Talladega College in Alabama, from which he graduated in 2016.

The lesson that most sticks with him from the First Tee is his first one. He remembers sitting in a circle with 25 others and being taught how to introduce himself to others, with a firm handshake and the proper exchange of names.

“That was even before we got into the golf,” said Moseley, who attained a full-time position at the First Tee’s headquarters in St. Augustine, Fla., upon graduation. “The first thing you learn is how to carry yourself.”

According to the Dawkins announcement note, Barrow expanded The First Tee to these "capacity" levels.

In recent years, Barrow led The First Tee through an ambitious effort to reach 10 million additional young people between 2011 and 2017, and he built its capacity to reach more than 5 million young people annually through the various programming channels.

PGA Tour Pros Say Golf Is Healthier Than The Ratings Suggest

While Nielsen ratings are by no means a measure of a sports' popularity, I do think it's fascinating to see how much players quoted in this Karen Crouse New York Times piece suggest the game is healthier than flatlining ratings indicate.

“TV ratings are really not a measure of whether golf is popular,” said Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion.

His view is widely held by the pros, who see ratings as a flawed indicator of golf’s reach. Television is the pretty packaging. The substance of golf is the indelible — and wholly organic — image from the end of the P.G.A. Championship, when Jordan Spieth and a handful of other players stuck around long after they were finished so they could be among the first people to congratulate Thomas.

The show of sportsmanship highlighted golf’s capacity for competition and friendship. It made golf look cool and fun, the Tour veteran Charley Hoffman said, adding, “I think it can’t do anything but help the game.”

And...

Topgolf, a booming entertainment franchise with roughly three dozen locations around the country and several more to open soon, is an entryway to golf for adults. It offers a more relaxed approach and easy access to the game.

Do the barefoot man and the woman in stilettos count as golfers? Paul Casey believes so.

“They are still golf fans, they are still absorbing, or taking in — consuming — the game,” he said, adding, “I don’t think the game has any issues whatsoever. I just think it’s changing and it’s organic. I think it’s cool.”

Erin Hills Fallout: Shinnecock Hills To Be Narrowed After Restoration Widening

In light of the recent brouhaha over player comments at TPC Boston's forced layup that caused driver-hugging players to go down another fairway, Jaime Diaz concludes for Golf World that recent distance gains are going to keep leading to more setup and design dramas. He says the big picture of recent course setup issues suggests "a day of reckoning is coming."

Much of that conclusion is based on this disheartening news out of Southampton.

Next year the U.S. Open is going to a Golden Age classic, Shinnecock Hills, artful in the extreme, but also shortish. It’s the kind of venue that is most at risk of being overrun by the modern game.

In the last few years, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw restored the course. The fairways were widened (up to 60 yards), the greens expanded, and trees were removed. Visually, the result was spectacular, and the club’s members have loved the changes.

The USGA, too, initially sang the restoration’s praises, but recently officials have reconsidered their original setup plans at Shinnecock. The fairway width—done to create more strategic angles and options—was deemed too wide (perhaps in the wake of Erin Hills). Native fescue rough is now being planted on the edges of the fairway to narrow them back down. The course won’t be as narrow as it was when it held the championship in 1986, 1995 and 2004, but it will be narrower than what was originally planned on for 2018.

Why? Diaz concludes...

So that the art of Shinnecock can be brought out rather than overrun, the decision was made that long and crooked has to be punished.

In an odd way I wonder if such a high profile change to such a high profile course this late in the game is being implemented with the full knowledge that this reinforces the need for a variable distance ball?

Technophobic Media Is Getting Younger: Millennials Not Buying!

It's a wonderful thing, how these "technophobic" times have changed. The kids are increasingly on board!

As distances have spiked again and rumors of a bifurcation movement looming that might introduce a variable distance ball, our friends in Fairhaven have updated a talking points "stack" they've peddled for years with a summer 2017 update to their case against any kind of golf ball regulation.

(Note: in 50+ pages they never mention the millions spent to change golf courses or to pay for the issues arising from golf balls flying to places never before reached.)

But I can sit back, nurse a cold beverage and watch others do the heavy lifting on an issue that will keep coming up as long as folks keep telling us nothing's happening. Couple this with and increasingly sustainability-focused generation not buying the arguments for sitting still, and there is an air of inevitability to some sort of regulatory action.

Alex Myers at GolfDigest.com considered the driving distances of Champions Tour players this year compared to their PGA Tour averages at age 30 and of course, everyone has gotten longer as their waistlines have expanded, their backs tightened and their clubs have grown more powerful.

Kenny Perry ranks fourth on the PGA Tour Champions in 2017 at 295 yards per poke. In 1990, he had a driving-distance average of just 270.8 yards. That's not bad considering Tom Purtzer led the PGA Tour that season at 279.6 yards (for comparison, Rory McIlroy's 316.4 yards leads this season) but that equates to nearly a 9-percent increase in driving distance from the time Perry was 30 to his current average as a 57-year-old.

The increase is even bigger for Fred Couples, if we use his driving-distance average (a whopping 300.4 yards) from 2015, the last time he played enough rounds on the PGA Tour Champions to have official stats. In 1990, two years before Freddie won the Masters and ascended to No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking, he averaged a measly 272.6 yards on his tee shots. Of the players we looked at, Couples' 10.2-percent increase led the way. (It should be noted that the Callaway Big Bertha was launched in 1991, ushering in a new era where driver heads grew to the size of small microwaves, giving a boost to driving distance stats.)

But Alex, don't discount the two-a-day yoga sessions and bicep curls Fred has been doing following his 9 minute planks!

In the wake of last week's 341-yard clutch drive by Dustin Johnson, many revisited the question of distance and whether the sport is better when a top player can drive that far.  I support the long hitter right to his advantage but as we all know, the sport can't keep expanding venues to accommodate distance gains that are going to keep coming as we replace pre-Trackman, pre-watermelon-sized driver heads with those who have never known anything else but swinging hard.

Tron Carter, another young influencer from the only generation that matters, had some fun exchanges with Twitterers about distance. You can read those by clicking on the tweets at his profile or these two (here and here), which no doubt have earned ihs Twitter account top status on some sort of watch screen in Fairhaven.

Parsing The Issues Raised By DJ's 341-Yard Playoff Drive

I'm both disappointed and elated at the reaction to Dustin Johnson's heroic tee shot in the Northern Trust playoff win over Jordan Spieth.

Elated, because something about it has people thinking about the role of distance in the game and not feeling satisfied even when a player uses his skill to take such a risk and reap a reward.

Disappointed, because the reaction has been to blame the hole or the organizers or so even people who rail against the distance jump in golf.

Michael Bamberger filed a nice account of the day and excitement of having two top players going at it. Their contrasting styles added to the magic. Until, we saw the reaction!

Kyle Porter at CBSSports.com considered all of the issues and posted many of the outraged Tweets for those who want to catch up on the "controversy" here.

Spieth hit a six-iron into 18. Johnson had a 60-degree wedge. It was not a fair fight. Spieth made a 4. Johnson hit the most beautiful spinning, all-grace lob wedge you could imagine and it was nearly a kick-in 3. Set-up by that extra gear. Covering 300 hundred, no problem. The tee shot went 341. Ho-hum.

Spieth was more animated in defeat than Johnson was in victory. Just two totally different people. A reporter asked Johnson if he knew how wild it sounded to the ordinary golfer, that 300 yards was no problem to carry.

The winner kind of tilted his head, did a mini-shrug and said, "No. I mean, I'm used to it."

How nice, for him.

Alan Shipnuck answered reader emails and Tweets that were pretty consumed with the tee shot, though most were more receptive than some of the PGA Tour players who took to Twitter.

The key to understanding the beauty of the play, in my view, is to separate the tee shot number of 341 yards from the line taken, the shocking tracer lines and the huge advantage gained over Spieth. If you just see this as a long hitter taking a risk under pressure and reaping a reward, it's a beautiful thing. Even better is that the hole was part of the playoff and in a mini-match play situation allowed for this risk-taking.

I'm concerned how many players were suggesting a playoff hole should be chosen based on some sort of arbitrary design characteristics. No matter how you feel about the impact of distance gains, I would hope that when the day comes, we all agree that long drivers like Johnson get to continue to enjoy an advantage as long as their drives are accurately placed.

But obviously the 341 number is alarming and has been for some time. If you cut 10% off the drives of Johnson and Spieth, the options would have been different. In the case of many holes, things would be more interesting. It just so happens that in this case, the advantage gained was more significant than we're used to seeing in an era when there are few short hitters. That's an issue to take up with your governing bodies.

NY Times On Sweetens Cove: "The Little Golf Course That Could"

Thanks to reader Jim who sent this wonderful Dylan Dethier New York Times piece a few days ago and I finally got around to reading.

Sweetens Cove is profiled, the low-cost, great fun, model-the-future risk taken by golf architect Rob Collins. It recently cracked Golfweek's Top 100 Modern Courses list and is just the kind of thing we need more of.

You can hear Collins on the latest Shipshow with Harry Arnett and Jeff Neubarth.

Dethier writes:

Collins worked with a skeleton crew for long hours and low pay on an accelerated timeline. Other architects and prospective owners circled like vultures, ready to buy up the property. In sheer desperation, Collins mortgaged everything and took over the lease himself.

The course cost about $1 million to build, while a top design firm would have charged $8 million to $10 million for such a project, Collins said.

“The whole thing just got bootstrapped together; it was a labor of love,” he said. “I had a thousand opportunities to walk away, but, damn it, I believed so much in the project, and I honestly had nowhere to walk away to.”

NY Times Highlights Work Of The Bridge Golf Foundation

Nice work by the NY Times' Paul Rogers highlighting the state of New York's Bridge Golf Foundation in a lengthy Sunday piece (thanks reader BB for sending). Johnny Milano's images accompany the piece.

Designed to be a “model for progressive gentrification” through its work with underprivileged and mostly black adolescent boys, the foundation is the vision of The Bridge Golf Club founder Robert Rubin and former golf writer Farrell Evans.

And it's not all about golf...

Both the Bridge Golf Foundation and the Eagle Academies include character education in their curriculums to encourage students’ social and emotional development. This summer, for example, the Bridge students read “The Pact,” a memoir about three young black men who, while growing up in Newark, promised one another they would become doctors and overcame hardships to fulfill their dream.

NY Times: "You Can Always Get a Tee Time, but Turning a Profit Can Be Tricky"

Paul Sullivan uses his NY Times Wealth Matters column to talk to a nice range of golf course developers, including Warren Stephens at Alotian Club and Paul Schock of Prairie Club. The topic? The costs and perils of buying or building a golf course.

Most of the stories end on a positive note, but not after cautionary tales about spending.

This from Chip Smith, who bought the TPC Myrtle Beach but later sold it to Chinese investors in 2014.

But last year, when he and a partner, Doug Marty, bought a course in Florida, Wellington National, he said he realized just how much money it could cost to turn around a course and make it profitable.

“We went into that one and evaluated the facilities and the golf course,” Mr. Smith said. “It was by far the worst one I’d ever seen in terms of being open and playable but being in awful condition. Doug likes to say we went in with an unlimited budget and exceeded that.”

They shut the club for a year of renovations. It has now reopened and started to attract members. The two partners are betting that it can attract members from the surrounding equestrian community and nearby Palm Beach.

But recouping their investment will take time. The initiation fee is $7,500 and annual dues are $6,750, comparatively modest in an area where $50,000 and $100,000 initiation fees are common

Varner: "For only $100, I was able to purchase this junior membership to Gastonia."

Harold Varner took to The Players Tribune to lament that the golf media asks him a bit too often about his race and not enough about what helped him make the PGA Tour. Though Varner could use a few FedExCup points this week.

The Akron, Ohio born golfer is playing his first WGC Bridgestone this week--and throws out a mean first pitch--but it was a program from his childhood in Gastonia, North Carolina that he wants golf to hear about. Oh sure, he mentions The First Tee but he most appreciates the ability to go to a golf course and bang balls.

Now, you may be thinking these summer playing privileges cost some crazy amount of money — that only rich kids would be able to do something like this. I mean, it’s a good enough deal to think that. But this program wasn’t really expensive at all: For only $100, I was able to purchase this junior membership to Gastonia.

It completely subverted the argument that you need to be rich to play this sport. It made playing golf extremely affordable.

That meant the world to my family. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was an incredible deal, not only for what it did for me then, but also what it’s still doing for me now. Without Gastonia, I would’ve never learned to play golf, would’ve never earned a scholarship to East Carolina University, would’ve never made my way onto the PGA Tour, would’ve never won in Australia last December and would’ve never been in a position to help bring more kids into the game.

Bifurcation: R&A Chief Opens Door To The B-Word

After yesterday's press conference where he acknowledged movements in driving distance averages, R&A Chief Executive Martin Slumbers opened the door to rules bifurcation. Slumbers seems to see the wisdom in letting average golfers enjoy the benefits of technology while making changes to maintain skill in the elite game.

Alex Miceli at MorningRead.com reports:

“When we look at all the options we’ve got, it [bifurcation] will have to be one of the options we look at,” Slumbers said. “Whether that’s the right thing to do, who knows the answer. Up to date, we have had a view of one set of playing rules, one set of equipment rules, and I think that served our game extremely well, but we must make sure we get the skill and technology right, as a balance for the good of the overall game.”

Even considering another set of rules for the elite game is a milestone moment for the R&A. The organization has resisted such a concept, even when the notion was suggested to deal with anchoring.

Couple this with the USGA's Mike Davis suggesting a variable distance ball concept as a possibility and we appear to be on the road to bifurcation.

R&A Chief Concedes "Movements" Seen In '17 Driving Distance

Nice to ask a distance question and not get the usual suggestion that things have leveled off, but maybe R&A Chief Martin Slumbers knew after this year's U.S. Open's driving distances that such a stance would not fly.

From today's R&A press conference at the 146th Open Championship.

Q. Several of the players have noted that they are hitting very few drivers. Some players may not even have driver in their bag. In the context of the statement of principles from 2003 regarding skill, does it concern you that that club is not a factor this week because of the distance the players hit the ball?

MARTIN SLUMBERS: Well, you can look at it two ways, the golf course is set up 17 yards shorter than it was played in '08. The great thing about links golf, as many of you know, if you're as much an aficionado of this game as I am, course management is one of the most important things about links golf. It's pretty firm out there. It's running hard. The rough, if you run out in the wrong direction, can be pretty penal. And certainly the conversations I've had with players is that they are really enjoying the challenge of trying to work at how to get the ball in the right place. And at times that will lead them to hit irons as against drivers or woods. I think Phil was talking yesterday about maybe not putting a driver in the bag, and I think we'll see quite a few irons, especially if the wind stays in the quadrant that it's in in the moment.

The broader question on distance that you raise is we are very -- I spend a lot of my time and the R&A's time looking at distance. We are very focused on setting it up in two ways, one is around transparency, which is what we did two years ago - started to take the PGA data and take the European Tour data, put it together and publish that. Some people don't like that. Others say it's great to have the numbers.

The second thing that I'm looking at and spend probably as much time doing it is this balance between skill and technology, and whether how much the technology and skill, are they in balance, is it good for the recreational game? Is it the same for the elite game? And those two issues are what we are looking at at the moment. And if you look at the data over the last 18 months, we are seeing this year movements, only halfway through the year. We will take a full look at the end of the year, and then come back and make sure we analyse and think about it very carefully.