Tour Should Bring Majors To New Orleans!?

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Dan Daly, writing about the need for major sports to give New Orleans a chance, writes:

Memo to Tim Finchem: Would it kill you to hold a major golf championship somewhere in the New Orleans area? For goodness sakes, the PGA was once held in French Lick, Ind. (In 1924, to be exact. Walter Hagen beat Jim Barnes, 2-up, for the title.) How about cutting the Crescent City a break?

Shouldn't a Fox/Washington Times sports columnist know that the PGA Tour does not control the major championships.

Golf World: Troubles At Torrey Pines

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gw20060526_cover.jpgJohn Strege pens this week's excellent Golf World cover story on Torrey Pines (but only found at ESPN.com!?) and wins this month's prize for best lead (because I know how much he'll appreciate it, he will be getting a year-long subscription to Mother Jones Psychotic.).

Anyway, the lead:

Where to begin in this sordid saga of politics and passion that has provoked an uncivil war in San Diego and is sucking the euphoria from Torrey Pines GC's imminent appointment with history? The South Course renovation? Fait accompli. The North Course redesign? Tabled. A new clubhouse? A tournament support building? Expensive minutiae.

So let's begin with the strip club.
Strege ably covers the entire saga, but these comments from David Fay left me wondering something:
The sunny disposition that the city's claim largely is based on has taken its leave in the wake of this growing rift. "I won't say it's a Hatfield and McCoy situation," says USGA executive director David Fay, who has rejected overtures to enter the fray. "It hasn't gotten that bad. But it's definitely a family feud. I think there's a compromise position. What that is, I don't know."

And...

"Being a resident of New Jersey," Fay says, "I'm no stranger to squabbles involving municipalities. This is a San Diego issue that not only elected and appointed officials have to sort through, but also the citizens. I can't control the perception. It would not surprise me that some might look at the 2008 Open and wish it weren't being played at Torrey Pines, but that's not unique, either. It happens at every club, every championship we go to, even Winged Foot [site of the 2006 Open]. We had that at Bethpage, too. But it's definitely a minority."

Now, he says this is something for the people of San Diego and for the USGA not to involve itself in. As with many things the Executive Director says, he makes great sense...on the surface. But when you dig deeper...

The erosion of trust had begun and inevitably rumors followed. The Friends of Torrey Pines was said to be behind the North redesign, that to entice the USGA to return with, say, a U.S. Amateur, a strong 36 holes would be required. "I heard that," says Jay Rains, who heads the Friends of Torrey Pines and later became a member of the USGA Executive Committee. "The Friends of Torrey Pines is dedicated only to the U.S. Open in 2008."

My understanding is that the Friends of Torrey Pines continues to include Jay Rains, who is still also on the USGA Executive Commitee.

So wouldn't the USGA have an interest to get involved with someone so involved in both organizations? Or is it an obligation to get involved? Especially considering the millions it will rake in at the 2008 Open? Is that enough rhetorical questions?

It's Going To Be The Athleticism...

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Brad Faxon, in an interview with Jason Sobel of ESPN.com:

Q: Should golf's governing bodies develop a scaled-back, uniform golf ball?

A: No. There's no way. The ball gets too much blame. There's a lot of other factors. Any gain you see in distance over the next few years is going to be athleticism more than technology.

 

I guess I didn't change Brad's mind at that little SI roundtable we did a year ago last week! I tried!  

Sideways Golf Trip

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rec01.jpgRex Pickett, author of the fun novel Sideways, writes about how the film adaption of his book changed his life and the fortunes of central California's wine country.

He also provides tips on where to play and stay in this lengthy TL Golf story..

The novel has much more golf in it than the film, including some pretty detailed (and accurate) scenes at La Purisma. I posted an Amazon link in the lefthand column if you want to read more.

Texting Mike Davis...

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In Tim Rosaforte's story about the Winged Foot rough harvest, he noted that USGA President Walter Driver impersonated a green chairman-gone-mad by text messaging new course setup man Mike Davis with concerns about the new tiered rough.

Well, it turns out there were several messages sent to Davis as Driver played Winged Foot in a charity event Monday. Thanks to my Blackberry monitoring friends at the NSA, I have obtained Driver's messages to Davis. 

02:22:12 PM EST   Driver here. Lost a ball already in the third cut on #1.  Bad caddy but still…get this taken down ASAP so XC doesn’t have to play this in advance scouting rounds week before Open.  And the intermediate cut is too low.  Have Greynook raise it ¼ of an inch, because I advanced several balls with spin. Must be the grooves ruining game. But still, get on this right away. That is, the height of the intermediate cut, not the grooves. Rugge is handling that for me.
02:31:45 PM EST   Driver here again. Just four-putted #1. Why didn’t you have Fazio soften this green?

03:11:01 PM EST   Driver here again. Just birdied 4 from rough. But that's not why I'm writing. Lost Blackberry reception on 4 green. Please look into this. Can't have this during Open.

03:55:50  PM EST   Driver here again.  Just played #6. Fairway too wide. Paced it off at 21 yards. And I’m not sure about eliminating intermediate cut on the short holes. That was DBFay’s idea right?  Please advise ASAP. Tom Rostafort is hanging around, wanting quotes. I have to make sure blame is properly attributed.

05:45:23 PM EST   Okay, you must be in a meeting and that’s why you haven’t responded to these messages. Driver here yet again. We are at almost 6 hours through 16 holes, big wait on 17 tee. Call pro shop and tell them I have the Citation prepped and waiting over at KHPN (Westchester County Airport for those of you who still fly coach). I don’t want to keep the plane and my guests from Goldman Sachs waiting. We have to be at Pine Valley for a breakfast meeting and golf to analyze possible 2021 Walker Cup.

Woosnam: "You've got to be more like anywhere from five foot ten to six foot four to play this game now"

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Ian Woosnam at the BMW Championship, with help from the assembled inkslingers:
Q. What do you think of the modern obsession with fitness regimes, diets, coaches, all the stuff that goes on, head coaches?

IAN WOOSNAM: I think obviously once you see some players doing it and if you want to get to that standard, and they are successful at doing it, everybody has got to go along with it.

I think obviously these times and days, professional golf, it's a highly, highly tuned sport and very physical now. If you want to hit the ball a long way, you've got to be very, very fit. I think most probably in the modern time of golf now, being my size is probably gone. You've got to be more like anywhere from five foot ten to six foot four to play this game now I think. I just don't think you can generate the speed. You could look at maybe there will be an exceptional small player, but I think the taller player with the golf clubs are going to hit the ball a lot further now.

Q. Is it a much more interesting game, though?

IAN WOOSNAM: I think with the modern equipment you sort of aim straight and hope it goes straight. When we used to play the game, you used to sort of try to fade it, draw it; there was more a variety of shots. It was more like tee to green and then hope you 2 putted. But now there's such a variety in the game, really.

Q. Do you think you've had more fun than the guys have now?

IAN WOOSNAM: Yeah, definitely. Oh, yeah. You go in the gym for two hours before you go off, play your game of golf, do a bit of practice and then a couple more hours in the gym, I don't think that was for me. (Laughter) I don't think I would have been making it.

Q. You've been on the Tour for a long time, what do you think in historic sense of the standard of golf now, is it as good as it was or better than it was?

IAN WOOSNAM: I think you can look at it two different ways. The equipment has changed such a lot, everybody is working out. As you say, it's a different game all together. I think you've got to look at the way the game is played now and what it was played before. You know, if you watch any of the histories or videos or anything, there has been time where equipment has changed the game completely and we're going through a phase now where the game has just been completely changed.

Q. What do you think about the standard of golf on the Tour today, is it better than when you won the Masters?

IAN WOOSNAM: Well, I wouldn't say so, no. What I would say is that there's more people got a chance of winning these days than what there used to be.

Q. Because of the equipment?

IAN WOOSNAM: Don't get me into that one.

Q. Because of the equipment or because of the new attitude?

IAN WOOSNAM: I think the equipment is so good. With a wooden driver and bladed clubs and other kind of golf balls, it was very difficult to get the ball in the air. Even a wooden club, you get the ball in the air, you would hit it a long way. I think that's why I hit it a long way was because I managed to get the ball in the air and it went a long way with a strong driver. Nowadays the clubs are so big, the clubs just automatically get the ball in the air for you. Everybody has a better chance of scoring better really.

The Harvest at (Gulp) The Foot

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In the May 26 Golf World (not yet online), Tim Rosaforte writes about Donald Trump, who he says is a "golf guy with a business sense and now the credibility that comes with a USGA stamp of approval."

He also writes about going to "The Foot" on Monday to test out the rough they are harvesting at yes, Winged Foot. (Branding it The Foot is part of his effort to come up with the cheesiest, least original golf course knicknames possible.)

Anyway, good news from, uh, The Foot. The rough is growing and everyone is so, so happy! 

Rosaforte writes that he'd like to have the ball concession when superintendent Eric "Greypok" cuts the grass after the Open. Well, when Eric Greytok cuts it, we'll let Rosaforte go for that concession too.

Online at GolfDigest.com, he offers a lengthier, more painful version of his rough harvest observations.

Walter Driver, president of the U.S. Golf Association and the man in charge of the upcoming U.S. Open, stood on the 10th tee of the West Course at Winged Foot Golf Club on Tuesday, and instead of doing what Ben Hogan said\ -- aim to hit it through the bedroom window of the house behind the green of the 188-yard par 3 -- Driver, a legitimate 2-handicap, struck a rare poor shot, flaring the ball out to the right, where it disappeared in a nest of grass.

It was fitting that the first shot hit by the man who will take all the heat for the deep rough at this year's Open required a search party and almost all of the allotted five minutes before finding his pellet. From there, the players in his group were given a snapshot of the chain reaction that occurs in an Open when a ball doesn't come to rest in the short grass. This is not like your basic tour stop, where the big boys can play bomb and gouge. This is wet wire-brush, wrist-spraining, ball-gobbling, destroy-your-mind vegetation, and so the clubface of Driver's wedge closed down, and the ball squirted back onto the closely mowed grass. From there he chipped on and two-putted for a double-bogey five.

Oh, joy! All of this rough is going to make the U.S. Open all about us, the USGA!  They're going to talk about us, and notice, and admire us for putting these Tour boys in their rightful place, which most definitely had better not be 350 yards off the tee!

The early scouting report: Better bring your straight ball. The nitrates, as Walter pointed out, have been working on Winged Foot's lawn. Mix the fertilizer with a wet spring, and a tree-removal program that gives the grass plenty of air and sunlight, and 7,264-yard Winged Foot West is in shape for another massacre.

It's been 22 years, but there is not an Open course that looks more like an Open Course than The Foot, and you can't believe how good the West course looks, how beautiful the green complexes are now that the tree huggers have lost their battle, and how terrorizing it's going to be that third week in June, when the contestants can't take a newspaper double and move with a smile to the next tee.

"Hitting the fairway is recommended here," said Driver at the driveable par-4 sixth.

Ha, ha! Bang fist on table! Such wit!

Halfway through the round, Driver got on his Blackberry and sent a text message to Mike Davis, the USGA's new director of competitions. He had driven into a clump of broccoli on the first hole and couldn't get a club on his ball. After moving it two feet, he expressed to Davis that the second cut was a little too lenient and the third cut a bit too penal. That will be tweaked in time for the opening round on June 15. After Shinnecock in 2004, the president doesn't want this one getting out of hand.

Shinnecock? Something went wrong there?

Crenshaw's Shot

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Ben Crenshaw pens an SI Golf Plus My Shot on Ben Hogan and Colonial:
Mr. Hogan wasn't one to hold back his opinions, even if they hurt your feelings. Back then I had a driver that I loved, and one day he asked to look at it. He held it up at an angle and examined it on all sides. Finally he said, "That's the worst driver I've ever seen." Man, that killed me, but that was the way he was.

Monty Loves Turkey

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From Reuters:

[Colin] Montgomerie has agreed to join forces with Papillon Hotels to build a facility on the coastal resort of Belek, Antalya which will include an 18-hole championship golf course, a 600-bed hotel and between 25 and 40 holiday villas.

"I am delighted to be associated with this Papillon Hotels golf course at Antalya and building what we hope will be yet another good tournament venue," the 42-year-old Briton told reporters at the BMW Championship on Tuesday.

"You never know, one day on our ever-expanding European Tour we might have a Turkish Open played on this course."
Oh they'll be rushing to sign up for that one.
Montgomerie also designed the Carton House venue used for last week's Irish Open at Maynooth, County Kildare.

"I have got 12 to 15 courses in place and another half a dozen or so more in the design and construction phase," he said.

"I just wish there was more than 24 hours in a day. I'm very, very busy trying to play tournament golf and having a business side to my life."

The Scot said the new course, which is due to open late next year, would be similar to his previous designs.
 
"Most of my courses have a unique feature in that they have challenging hazards, meaning bunkers, and this will be no different," said Montgomerie.

Is that sort of a dumbed-down version of "challenging for the pro but still playable for the high handicapper?"

R&A vs. USGA Operating Budget

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In Mike Aitken's story on the R&A netting £9.1 million last year, he writes:

The running costs of the R&A itself in 2005 were £2.41 million, while support for events such as the Amateur, the Walker Cup and the Senior British Open reached a total of £1.12 million.

With the USGA at $120 million, that £2.41 million combined with the £1.12 million sounds rather low, doesn't it?

I know the USGA's travel budget is a bit more generous, but that's still a big difference. 

What am I missing here?

Furyk: Limit the Ball

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Looks like we've got another wacky, liberal, biased, anti-America, anti-golf ball technology man in Jim Furyk. He's joining The List after comments (below) at a teleconference to plug the Western.

But first, on the lack of shotmaking in today's game:

One of the things we get criticized for in our generation is a lack of shot making, and I think that some of the modern architecture has actually called for a lot of shot making. It calls for hitting the ball far, hit with a lot of spin, and it doesn't really matter which way you work the ball, right to left or left to right.  I think sometimes my era or my era of player basically gets criticized a little unfairly with the style we need to play, when really the courses that we play -- we play what the courses call for, if that makes sense.

No argument there. Could mention the lousy setups too. But, hey, why be picky when he says stuff like this:

 Q. One of the things that's been kind of operating under the radar is the USGA has asked some of the equipment manufacturers, the ball manufacturers, to come up with a ball that doesn't travel as far as what we have today, and of course golf is the only sport that doesn't have a uniform ball. Where do you stand on that? Is there something there that needs to be fixed or should it be left alone?

JIM FURYK: What do you mean by uniform ball? I have a very strong opinion, but I need you to clarify uniform ball.

Q. You show up at a tournament site, like what Jack Nicklaus has talked about, and when you're checked in you're given five boxes of balls and that's what you're playing with.

Of course Jack Nicklaus has never advocated the idea of everyone playing one manufacturers ball, but we'll let the scribbler slide because at least he or she is asking about the issue, a rarity:

JIM FURYK: With all due respect to my idol, who I really respect Jack Nicklaus, one of my two favorite people in the game of golf along with Byron Nelson, I strongly disagree with that theory. The reason I say that is what ball would we use?

We as players have the opportunity to play different styles of ball, and I'm not talking about the distance; I don't mind that the distance gets reined back. I have no issue with that. Courses with millions of dollars of renovations, they don't always go over real well. I would say more often than not when you renovate a golf course, the changes aren't liked rather than liked, if that makes sense.

I wouldn't mind seeing the golf ball getting reined back or pulled back a percentage. But when you make every player play with one ball, I think you're treading a thin line there.

What I mean by that is -- I'll pick two players out. Tiger Woods, probably the ball that he plays on the PGA TOUR is probably the softest ball played on Tour. I had an opportunity to hit it at the Presidents Cup. I heard what other players said about it and how they felt it flew, and it's very soft and very spinny. He has a lot of power, generates a lot of club head speed and he wants a soft ball because he feels he can control the ball better with a lot of spin on it.
And...
I don't mind, and I know our commissioner has worked with the USGA and has worked with some of the governing bodies to try and come up with plans for the future so that if the world of golf feels like we need to limit the golf ball, they're trying to put a plan in place so we can do that down the road, if needed. I think that's what the USGA is doing right now with some of the manufacturing companies, and I am all for that.

But I'd like to see the companies have a little leeway what they can do with the balls as far as making them softer, harder, spin rates, up, down to try to fit golf balls to players. It's one of the reasons I'm with the company I'm with right now, Srixon, is they can make a ball for me that I'm comfortable with.

You hear Tiger talk about it. When I hit a shot and I look up in the air, I want to see the ball where I expect it to be on a good golf shot. Companies are good enough now that they can adjust hardness, softness, launch angle, spin rate to give the ball a feel and look of how we want it to look in the air. I think that's very, very important.

Limiting it is fine; one golf ball, I would strongly disagree with.

Love: Minor Advances in Equipment

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From a teleconference to plug something...

Q. Given how well you played that week in '97 and knowing what you do about some of the changes they've made to that golf course, do you imagine that anyone would come close to 11-under par if that golf course is firm the week of the U.S. Open?

DAVIS LOVE III: I doubt -- if you went back and played the same course again, it would be hard to get to that score. I think Justin and I got kind of on a roll there and were pushing each other. It would probably take a similar situation, two guys playing well and leaving the field and focusing on each other, pushing each other. Sometimes you see that, that two guys will separate themselves, feel like they're chasing the rabbit a little bit and getting away.

But I would doubt it. It sounds like the course, from what I've heard from amateurs that have played there in the invitational, is extremely hard. We have to prepare ourselves for that in most majors now, that it just gets harder and harder, gets more difficult. With the minor advances we've gained in equipment, the golf courses are certainly more than making up for that.

Minor?