"Great Game's Long Goodbye"

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It took way too long for John Huggan to weigh in on the Tour's '07 concept and the state of the game.

Oh but it was worth the wait.

A season-long points series will lead to a play-off-style Fed-Ex Cup involving leading qualifiers that will, it is hoped, identify the biggest draws in the game. Otherwise, America's ever-diminishing attention span, and its desire to satisfy an out-of-control gambling habit, may switch from fades to football even earlier than it does now.

Ah he was just warming up.

As always when the PGA Tour is involved, this proposed change to a long-established status quo has nothing to do with what may or may not be good for the game. To the surprise of no-one, this is all to do with money. Instead of taking a long, hard look at an increasingly one-dimensional product involving the use of driver, wedge and putter, Finchem and his army of sycophantic minions have gone for what appears to be a short-term fix: dazzling disgruntled networks with big names and numbers in advance of imminent negotiations for the renewal of television contracts.

Oh heck, why am I interrupting?

Such a move, you won't be shocked to hear, is shortsighted, and pays no attention to recent history and the demise of tennis as a participation/spectator sport in the US. As bigger racquets and hi-tech materials removed entertaining 'feel' players, such as John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase, from the upper echelons, tennis became more and more a power game dominated by big-serving behemoths. And not surprisingly, the public rejected that tedium. From a peak of 34 million in 1975, it is estimated that only 13 million Americans play tennis and only rarely does it make it onto network TV.

Golf is going the same way. The numbers are not pretty, yet administrators on both sides of the Atlantic do nothing to stop the game becoming more about grunts than guile.

Oh I'll stop here because he goes into that tedious USGA/R&A Statement of Principles stuff which you know all too well from the last week. And the various stats also thrown in your face here and here this week.

Demo Day at East Lake

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An interesting item I missed (thanks to reader Peter for alerting me), came from Doug Ferguson's Tour Championship notes:

GLORY DAYS: For those who believe the golf ball is solely responsible for distance gains, the pro-am at the Chrysler Championship showed other factors at work. The wooden driver, for example.

As the PGA Tour reached a conclusion to its "Drive to a Billion" charity campaign, it had five persimmons drivers available on the first tee and asked players to give it a crack, then use their titanium drivers for the shot that counted on their pro-am scorecard.

Adam Scott hit it pure, a majestic ball flight with a slight draw to the middle of the fairway. Out came his Titleist titanium driver - same golf ball, by the way - and another beautiful swing. Stepping it off, it was 32 yards longer.

Davis Love III also ripped the wooden driver. His modern driver sent the ball 40 yards longer.

Guess the ball is overrated? Might as well just buy some run-of-the-mill Callaways since the clubs are doing all the work, eh?

Or maybe there is a unique ball-club synergy that allows players to exceed the Overall Distance Standard, and someone ought to test for that?

Phony Finish

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Add Peter Kostis to the list of those underwhelmed by Tim Finchem's announced intentions to fix the Tour schedule. He raises several points not addressed in other columns and offers this extreme idea, sounds much closer to something the Tour should consider to make this so-called "playoff" dramatic instead of a rich-get-rich pyramid scheme:

...if you really want to create some excitement, play the FedEx Cup finale tournaments with a $10 million purse—winner takes all.

You have to figure that if the Tour can't convince players to do something semi-radical at The International (daily cuts, start from scratch Sunday), it's going to be tough to convince the players that FedEx Cup will only work with something bold and brash. And this is why the FedEx Cup concept will continue to receive nothing but yawns and "why?"

Hawkins on Tour TV Deal

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Golf World's John Hawkins weighs in on the proposed 2007 concept for the Tour. He's mostly celebratory, so much so that the Commish will want to order reprints. But the story is loaded with mini-bombshells and interesting anecdotes may infuriate the rank-and-file player while creating new questions about how the framework of the schedule was put together.

With considerable help from the title sponsor, the FedEx Cup will offer a whopping $38 million payoff to the 30 players who make it to the Tour Championship, a source told Golf World. About 25 percent of that will go to the winner -- unofficial money likely to come in the form of a contribution to the players' retirement funds.

Hawkins will get a wine and cheese basket from the Commissioner for this line:

Though it may never rival the major championships in terms of relevance or do much to determine a Player of the Year, the four-week playoff series should resolve the tours late-season issues and bolster Finchem's bargaining power when he meets with the networks to negotiate the upcoming television contract, a process that is expected to begin this week.

Here's the part that may have the rank and file asking more questions:

It's hard to imagine a scenario where fewer than the top 70 would advance into the playoffs. Although the tour has developed a reputation in recent years for disregarding the best interests of its middle class, the FedEx Cup series will market opportunity -- the idea that No. 78 in the standings could get hot, play great golf under immense pressure and walk off with the $10 million. In a manner of speaking, he'll have earned it. "It will probably be like NASCAR, where it's hard to move up [in the Nextel Cup]," Woods surmised. "The research says 80 percent of the time, the winner comes out of the top five [in the standings]."

And this really caught my eye:

"There are going to be two sides to this," said IMG's Mark Steinberg, Woods' agent and a key player in the shaping of the tour's revisions. "A player who has a dominant year may get passed because of the reset. Having said that, a player who had a good year but not a great one will have a chance to make it great in the final month."

Tiger's agent was a "key player" in shaping the revisions? Hmmm. He also, amazingly, was complimentary:

In that sense, Finchem didn't exactly pull a rabbit out of his hat, but he didn't produce a goat, either. "I think Tim and Ed [tour executive VP Moorhouse] have done a hell of a job in creating a new system," Steinberg said. "They've done a great job of salvaging what could have been a very difficult situation."

Uh, they haven't inked any deals yet.

The television networks may be very willing to fork over a dollar total close to (or more than) the nearly $1 billion it paid to telecast the tour four years ago, but the long-term relationship between pro golf and TV could be irreparably harmed if Finchem doesn't deliver a series of tournaments that feature all the game's top-ranked players.
"It's a step in the right direction," ESPN's Wildhack said. "Player participation is what drives ratings. The three guys that make the ratings are Woods, Mickelson and John Daly."

Then Hawkins drops this, which doesn't exactly make the ESPN guy look too good.

Last month's WGC-American Express Championship featured a near-perfect competitive scenario on Sunday afternoon: Woods vs. Daly in a playoff televised by ABC, whose parent company, Disney, also owns ESPN and has an endorsement deal with Woods. Despite a marquee leader board (Sergio Garcia and Colin Montgomerie also were in contention), the WGC emblem and the Woods-Daly showdown, the final round ranked 21st in sports programming shown on national TV that weekend.

Ferguson On Augusta Changes

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masterslogo.jpegDid I miss a media day? Now AP's Doug Ferguson weighs in from Augusta (these guys must know a lot of members!) and reports on the "attempt to restore the rhythm and shot value the way Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie designed it."

Rhythm?

Ferguson employed the Bobby Jones quote describing what the greatest of them all expected players to hit into No. 4 from then until eternity.

Jones gave Sports Illustrated a hole-by-hole description in 1959 and said of the par-3 fourth, ''The shot is usually a strong iron, or even a 4- or 3-wood.''

Here's what Jones wrote:

This hole can be varied a great deal, depending on the use of the back tee or the rear portion of the forward tee. From the back tee the shot is usually a strong iron or even a four or three wood.

In other words, he expected both tees to be used to create the day-to-day variety that he loved in St. Andrews (and wrote about extensively). Hopefully the committee will do the same this year.

Regarding the first hole, Ferguson writes: 

The tee box has been moved back about 20 yards to make the hole play 455 yards, although change at Augusta National is not all about length.

The eye-opener is that cavernous bunker down the right side, where a finger of turf now dips into the sand and creates the appearance of a double bunker. Balls rarely will be in the middle of the sand, allowing for a routine escape; now there will be steep lips in the way.

Here's what Jones wrote about No. 1:

This hole can be played straight away from tee to green, although the fairway does expand on the right as it approaches the green. Ordinarily, the fairway bunker on the right presents no problem for the tournament player. With a heavy wind against, however, as often happens, a half-hit tee shot may catch this bunker.

He went on to write mostly about the strategy of the green complex, which thankfully retains its brilliance today (until Tom Fazio convinces Hootie he can reproduce it 10 yards back and 30 to the right.

But no mention from Jones of teeing off from Butler Cabin if necessary to get the bunker in play. And nothing about adding bunker tongues to discourage those heroic recovery shots. In fact, in the chapter on Augusta he noted:

...the elimination of purely punitive hazards provides an opportunity for the player to retrieve his situation by an exceptional second shot. A course which is constructed with these principles in view must be interesting, because it will offer problems which a man may attempt, according to his ability.

Those democratic golf values are so last century Bobby!

Ferguson lets Dow Finsterwald sum up what the changes are really about.

Augusta National is longer and harder than ever. Players hit the ball longer and better than ever.

''Their ability is so marvelous,'' [Dow] Finsterwald said. ''It's not that they're so much longer, they're straighter. And there are more good putters than there were. So I don't think the test has changed. But players have risen to the changes. But the scores stay pretty much in the ballpark, don't they?''

Two More '07 Skeptics

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The normally jovial Kraig Kann sounds skeptical in posing ten questions about the proposed 2007 Tour concept.

And Seth Soffian reports that Greg Norman says what a lot of writers have come close to saying:

"The PGA Tour plays things close to the chest," said Norman, taking a not-so-veiled shot at Finchem, who offered only a framework for the proposed schedule changes last week after a year of speculation.

"You don't really know what's going on until Finchem decides to say something, and then when he says something, he really doesn't tell you anyway. If you're going to make an announcement, make an announcement and tell the world what's going on."
But see Greg, if you make an announcement without really saying anything, and no one likes the sound of the announcment,  then you can say you never really made such an announcement!

Floggers Rule?

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FlogGolf2.jpgOh no, not more stats! Sorry, but it's fun to see how flogging is the way to play the PGA Tour. (For you newcomers to this site's rantings, flogging is the bomb it out there and worry about the consequences later. You can read more about it here and here.)

Flogging has become such a big part of the sport that the graphics department here at gs.com developed a logo.

Anyhow, here is a list of the top 30 money winners, with their driving distance rank followed by their driving accuracy rank. I've included where Padraig Harrington would have ranked if he had enough rounds to qualify for the final statistic lists.

Rank    Player      Dist       Acc
1        Tiger Woods          1              188
2        Vijay Singh            16            147
3        Phil Mickelson        26            161
4        Jim Furyk             170            31
5        David Toms           107            54
6        Kenny Perry             9             88
7        Chris DiMarco         164          122

8        Retief Goosen         44           157
9        Bart Bryant            147            6
10      Sergio Garcia          10           153
11      Fred Funk              197             2
12      Justin Leonard       128            74
13      Davis Love III            8           165
14      P. Harrington          54*          188*
15      Adam Scott             23           175
16      Scott Verplank         59            9
17      Luke Donald           135           75
18      Sean O'Hair             23           127
19      Ben Crane               61           182
20      Chad Campbell        52           122
21      Tim Clark               140          58
22      Billy Mayfair            103          21
23      Stuart Appleby         19           155
24      Ted Purdy                45           88
25      Mark Calcavecchia    91           49
26      Olin Browne             173          4
27      Brandt Jobe              11          178
28      Tim Herron              65           122
29      Charles Howell III     56          170
30      Lucas Glover            12           138

Top 30 Average:  70th in Distance, 105th in Accuracy

Top 10 Average:  69th in Distance,  111th in Accuracy

Tiger in China

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Sounds like Tiger had a lot of people taking pictures of him today.

Q. There were a lot of cameras going off on the course; how big of a distraction was that to you?

TIGER WOODS: It was a little bit of a distraction certainly, but hey, you know, golf they are not used to seeing golf here, so we can understand it. But they are pretty respectful. They felt bad. They don't know when to take the pictures and once you learn, they get better.

 

Haven't these people seen what Stevie will do to a camera?

They should just hand out a little leaflet at the entrance with a picture of Stevie chucking (gosh I miss that word) a Nikon into a lake. That'll teach them to leave their cameras at home.