"Arguments for a 36-hole final dry up pretty quickly -- especially when this option offers the potential of more compelling, star-studded action deeper into the week."

John Maginnes weighs the pros and cons of the WGC match play's 36-hole final and can't find any good reasons to keep playing two rounds for the finale.

His piece appears on the Mothership's own website, so maybe this idea is gaining momentum? (Or, for conspiracy theorists, the decision has been made and the idea was merely started in Ponte Vedra and NBC...either way, Sunday semi's followed by an 18-hole final match would be a wise switch for everyone involved.)

"In match play Sunday, it's a pairing sheet -- as in singular."

After reading Steve Elling's lament of the match play format and its impact on attendance, the SI guys suggestion of Sunday morning semi's followed by a Sunday afternoon final really is a great idea.

Last year, Woods played in the Accenture final against fellow Ryder Cupper Stewart Cink and the day drew an announced crowd of 7,500 fans. The tour's turnstile count for Sunday's Casey-Ogilvy tilt was 6,270. Setting aside the meaningless consolation match, for fans, it's essentially an all-or-nothing proposition on Sundays. There are only two players to watch over the course of an entire day, whereas a stroke-play format would have 70 or more guys to eyeball on the weekend.

In match play Sunday, it's a pairing sheet -- as in singular.

The 6,000 are clogged up, all walking on the same hole or two, making sightlines more challenging, too. Match play is a square peg on a round golf hole. That's probably why it's best left for quirky events like the Ryder and Presidents cups. Once a year is plenty.

Tiger's Match Play Win In Perspective

It's not easy to say anything fresh about Tiger's dominance, but a few columns managed to do it. Thanks to reader Clive for spotting this Iain Carter piece on Tiger's match play win, that includes two this tidbit that John Huggan noted a few weeks ago:

A couple of weeks ago we could say that the gap between Woods at the top of the rankings and Phil Mickelson in second place was greater than the margin between the number two and the guy ranked at 1000 in the world.

We can’t even do that now. Woods’ point average is 11.12 ahead of Mickelson, who has a rating of 10.12. This means ANY golfer registered on the rankings is closer to Mickelson than Lefty is to Tiger.

Finally, a decent use for the world ranking: quantifying Tiger's complete dominance.

And..

Bookmakers are offering a measly 12-1 for the calendar year Grand Slam of all four majors - 12-1 for something that’s never been done before!

Steve Elling offers some other stats:

In a span encompassing mid-1999 into late 2000, Woods won 17 of 30 (56.7 percent) of his official starts worldwide, a span where he also managed three seconds. That tallies to 20 of 30 (66.7 percent) events with either first or second as his final result. He was outside the top 10 four times and won four majors.

 In his current stretch, Woods has won 16 of his last 29 starts (55.2 percent) dating to his win at the 2006 British Open. He also has five runner-up finishes in that span. So, that's first or second in 21 of his last 29 starts (72.4 percent). He finished outside the top 10 four times and won three majors in that span.

The Boo Files: "I'm like, 'Pick it up?' Honestly, I didn't know"

Steve Elling on Boo Weekley apparently not understanding that you can give putts in match play. Here's the transcript if you don't believe him, or just take Elling's word for it:

Still country to the core, the pride of the rural Florida Panhandle showed up this week having not played in a match-play event as an amateur 12 years ago, which was somewhat embarrassingly reinforced on the first hole of his opening match on Tuesday.

Germany's Martin Kaymer lagged the ball to within a few inches of the hole, and Weekly didn't concede the putt. Several awkward moments passed.

"It wasn't probably eight or nine inches from the hole, and I'm sitting there and I'm putting my ball down, and he's looking at me and I'm looking at him, like, 'Are you going to tap it in?'" Weekley recalled with a laugh.

Weekley's caddie finally told Kaymer to pick it up.

"I'm like, 'Pick it up?' Honestly, I didn't know," Weekley said. "So that's how that started out."

Mark Lamport-Stokes also included this bit from Boo in his story:

"The man that was walking with us was like: 'I'm going to be walking with you today'. And I was like: 'Good, I can ask you if I have a problem?'

"This match play is different, very different," he said. "I kind of like that stroke play better myself."

John Garrity reports that Monty didn't understand the first tee Boos for Boo. Really!

Helen Ross previews Friday's matches, including Boo's head-to-head with Woody Austin. Now that should be fun! 

Nothing A Full Field Can't Fix

SI.com's golf.com's Gary Van Sickle is the latest to weigh in on the sad state of the World Golf Championship events. As it relates to the recent debate over the AT&T National, Van Sickle notes that the WGC's have often been plagued by run-away wins, something easily curable by larger fields:

In a full field, half a dozen players shoot lights-out every day. In a half-field, only two or three do. Golf leaderboards are exciting because they're bunched, and that's a function of the numbers. With a full field, it's going to be more like the Tour de France — no one usually breaks away from the pack without taking a half-dozen pursuers with him. In a half field, well, Tiger or Darren Clarke or someone else can break away from the field and win in a runaway.

The Gallery As A Match Play Venue

Catching up on my reading, I noticed John Hawkins' assessment of The Gallery in the latest Golf World:

The move to Tucson resulted in more than $1 million in ticket sales—attendance was limited to 17,000 per day—but The Gallery-South is an awful walking course, set on a rise of earth known as Dove Mountain and woefully short of decent sightlines. If you didn't have a camel and a pair of binoculars, you were basically out there for the exercise.

Invite The Women

Cameron Morfit says the match play is in need of a lift, so he recommends inviting the LPGA Tour to contest their own match play at the same time.

The Accenture is golf’s version of a tennis tournament: single-elimination, with most everything resting on the quality of the semifinal and final. One of the things tennis has going for it is that men and women play concurrently at the same venue. Right away you double your chances of having at least one star in a final, and of getting at least one compelling match in the prime viewing hours Saturday and Sunday.

Now I don't know about this next point, since I don't believe it's accurate. 

The LPGA, in fact, bettered the PGA Tour with its most recent match play event, the season-ending ADT Championship, won by Paraguayan pixie Julieta Granada, who pocketed $1 million, the largest purse in women’s golf, and promptly bought herself a new Range Rover. (A million bucks still means something on the LPGA.)

It was stroke play wasn't it?

Anyhow, the concept seems interesting since even with a great final match, the WGC Match Play is a dud on television. As much as I love match play, if it's going to be played only at real estate developments willing to pay for the privilege, then they need more, uh, "product" to distract us.

"What are we doing here?"

That's the question AP's Doug Ferguson asks while sitting in the press tent at The Gallery, home to the WGC Match Play.

What might help is taking this tournament to golf courses that could add some sizzle, and not just from the desert sun. The Gallery Golf Club is a nice piece of property, a blend of lush green and desert brown. But it still begs an important question.

What are we doing here?

No doubt the tournament will help sell homes on Dove Mountain. But it won't do the fans much good. The course goes out some 3 miles before making a U-turn, with only about four holes in the middle where fans can hop around and watch more than one match. The only way to get from No. 5 to No. 11 is to follow the routing, or dodge rattlesnakes traversing the desert.

At this point I will spare you my now annual rant that this event would be great at PGA West's Stadium Course because, well, the Golfobserver.com column I wrote about it has disappeared into cyberspace.
 

GolfDigest.com's Ron Whitten reviews The Gallery and, well, reminds us that the PGA Tour still has a long way to go when it comes to mixing architecture with commerce.

But people persist, because there's this theory that some courses make better match-play courses than stroke-play ones. If a course is fraught with obstacles and perils, or better yet, has lots of high-risk/high-reward gambling situations, so the theory goes, it's a terrific venue for match play but a humiliating place on which to keep score. That's a good, logical theory, but one that gets trampled upon by PGA Tour officials when they choose, and then set up, a course for their match-play event.

A prime example is The Gallery, on cactus-dotted slopes of Dove Mountain, a first-class private club with 36 holes that allows non-member play for those who stay overnight in one of its pricey but plush golf cottages. (See the club's website for details.) The Gallery's North Course, opened in 1998, was co-designed by former PGA Tour player John Fought and his then-design partner Tom Lehman and is known primarily for its deep-dish fairway bunkers and its 725-yard par-5 ninth. You would think the PGA Tour would eagerly award a match-play event to a course designed by two Tour players, particularly one with returning nines, 125 bunkers and ponds guarding two greens. But instead, The Accenture will be played on the South Course, five years younger and designed solely by Fought, without Lehman's influence.

Okay, here's the setup part.

But when I played the course last December, alternate fairways on the uphill par-5 10th and 362-yard 12th were both being grown to rough. They'll be taken out of play, converted to bleacher and/or skybox space. So much for match-play options.

What's more, the Tour will play The South in excess of the 7,351 yards listed as the maximum on the scorecard. Fought recently added four new back tees, so the course can now be stretched to 7,550 yards. Yes, it sits at an elevation of 3,000 feet, so it won't play that full distance, but why cater to ball-bashers in a match-play event? Why not set up the course to play around 6,900 yards and give underdogs like Corey Pavin a chance?

Sigh.

"Will you be designing environmentally-friendly golf courses in the future?"

Seems like a dumb question, right? Unfortunately that one was teed up for Tiger Woods and he uncharacteristicaly heel pulled it into the left rough.

But first, other highlights from his sitdown with the laptoppers in Tucson:

Q. I know you're concentrating on this week, but in the buildup to coming over here, I've read a lot in the media about the dialogue or lack of dialogue between you and the commissioner, about the schedule for this year. Can you tell us anything about that?

TIGER WOODS: I've talked to him quite a bit (smiling), so I don't know where that comes from.

Q. Well, there's been talk about given the new sort of format this year that -- is there a situation where you could maybe fall short of the minimum requirements of playing this year and maybe miss out on some of the climax to the FedExCup?

TIGER WOODS: I've just got to play 15 events, right? That's what I did last year.

Gee, what a ringing endorsement for the FedEx Cup and the PGA Tour!

Q. I don't know if you're reading the same stuff as me, but basically they were saying that there is a kind of atmosphere between you and the commissioner.

TIGER WOODS: We talk about once a week, so I don't know where that comes from. He's got my cell phone and we talk. It's funny, we just missed each other skiing. I have no idea where that's coming from.

How sweet, just missed each other on the slopes. Let's hope they don't run into each other.

Which reminds me, this slug for the Lakers Radmanovic slipped in Park City, separated his shoulder and already they're calls for a contract reading to see if he violated a clause by skiing (oh wait, he was in Park City for the great sidewalk shopping, forgive me).

As much as they are paying him, does Nike really let Tiger ski? Guess so. Anyway...

 Q. As a budding golf course architect, when you come to a new venue, come to a new community that has such a historic golfing tradition, do you approach it a little bit differently than when you were just playing, or have you always taken the mindset that, could I come here and design a golf course in place like that?

TIGER WOODS: It's interesting, since I started to get into that part of my life, every golf course I play, I look at the golf course differently now. Why would they construct that? Why would they build this? What were they thinking here? Trying to understand it instead of just plotting my way around the golf course. I do look at golf courses now, and it is kind of fun.

And...

 Q. In your design career and with a new baby on the way, where do you stand in terms of the environmental aspects of golf, and where will you be designing environmentally-friendly golf courses in the future?

TIGER WOODS: That's the whole idea. That's the challenge of it. As an architect, that's what your responsibility is to do, to also provide a wonderful playing environment. That's a task that I think is going to be -- that's been at the forefront for all architects for decades.

Uh, Tiger, they mean are you going to build a wetlands at Al Jambajuicia to mitigate the puddle that you are bulldozing over. Your architecture buddy,
Geoff

Howell and Elk On WGC's

Andrew Both in the Telegraph:

European Tour Order of Merit leader David Howell has joined the growing chorus of condemnation over the Americanisation of the World Golf Championships."There should be at least one event every year somewhere other than America.

And...

"Obviously, the market is huge here but it is a world game and any opportunity to get the best players to other parts of the world is a great way to grow golf. I'm sure lots of corporate sponsors in America would be happy to see a tournament in China, but we're not having one for some reason."

Howell's comments, strong though they were, paled beside the amazing outburst by Steve Elkington, the Houston-based Australian who beat Colin Montgomerie in a play-off at the 1995 US PGA Championship, but who missed the cut here.

"They're not really world events any more. It's just a fancy name for a $10 million event," Elkington said in a blistering attack on the US Tour, who decide when and where WGC events will be played.

"They're killing world golf everywhere else. Next year we're going to be playing the Match Play in Tucson, Arizona. I mean, who's ever been to Tucson?"