Greetings From LA, Vol. 3

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greetingsfromLAAnother lovely day at Riviera with flawless weather and light crowds making an already perfect spectator course that much more convenient. Number 10 was its usual delight to watch, though players are finding it almost too easy to drive now. So some of the most interesting decision making is beginning to disappear. But with U-grooves going to V-grooves, that should change everything!

It's also startling to see so many world class players with no one watching.  Friday afternoon's tend to draw decent crowds though. But the weather has been so poor for so many years, that I wonder if the traditional Friday types remember what a festive day it once was.

Or perhaps the crowds were light because of the abysmally slow pace of play and the funeral atmosphere resulting from this death march. Two groups did not finish due to darkness and another three or four groups played in near darkness. It's just not enjoyable to watch with everyone standing around and taking five hours to play in perfect weather with no rough.

Slow play, more than the ball or course setup or drone-like personalities, is killing the pro game as a spectator sport. And the lack of buzz on site translates to television. (Hint to ad people: the 18-34 year olds aren't into watching funerals.)

So here's what I propose. We take away the player bathrooms on the course, allow them to wear those Lisa Nowak astronaut diapers and start dishing out 2-shot penalities to each player in a group that doesn't finish in 4 hours and 30 minutes. And don't give me the nonsense about how it's just a few bad apples. They're all slow because you have to be slow, otherwise a fast player would lose his mind out here.

“For a 4-iron, you’d put it five, six or seven paces from the edge.”

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Damon Hack goes inside the ropes (and gets out to Riviera early) to file a New York Times piece on PGA Tour course setup.

This caught my attention:
With so many technological advances in golf in the last 20 years, placing a pin near a bunker or by a tier on a green is one way to combat golfers’ hitting tee shots that travel 300 yards. But Mutch said the officials try to balance their pin locations. On Riviera’s back nine, he chose four on the left side of the green, four on the right, and one near the center. Not every pin can be in a treacherous, devilish position.

“For wedges, you’d put it three or four paces from the edge of the green,” said Mickey Bradley, a PGA Tour rules official. “For a 4-iron, you’d put it five, six or seven paces from the edge.”
A bit formulaic, no?

Revising Riviera

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230136-678395-thumbnail.jpgGolfobserver.com has posted my 2005 series on the changes to Riviera. Sad to say, the destruction has continued. With the white bunker sand, sterilization and Orlando whale tails added everywhere, it feels more Florida than Pacific Palisades.

Golfonline's Joe Passov takes a look at George Thomas's design work in the area and reviews the remaining public courses that he designed.

"With golf, less meant more."

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In the post International stories, it's interesting to note this first (and inevitable?) look at how the Tiger effect now comes with as many negatives as positives. Bob Harig on ESPN.com:

But the problem with such deals is there is no negotiating when it comes to the $5.3 million purse. The players still get paid the same. And the advertising units assured to be bought on Golf Channel and NBC as part of the network contract with the PGA Tour must still be paid. TV takes no discount. The local tournament organizing committee, a nonprofit organization, still has to pay its bills, but with less money coming in from the title sponsor. So it gets squeezed, making it more difficult to give money to charity.

Sponsoring a regular PGA Tour event costs in the neighborhood of $7 million per year. That money covers a portion of the purse, a television advertising commitment, a fee to the PGA Tour and to the tournament. Spread that out over the six-year length of the network contracts, and you're talking about $42 million or more.

It is a hefty price, especially given the modest television ratings. Those small numbers -- usually in the 2 million-to-3 million range for a weekend network telecast -- were always justified because they were reaching the "right" kind of people … i.e. those with disposable income. With golf, less meant more.

But as the price has kept going up, those company executives began looking at the numbers more closely. And some of them have started to say that enough is enough -- especially if Woods doesn't play.

Greetings From L.A., Volume 2

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greetingsfromLAAnother stellar weather day here at Riviera. Adhering to doctor's orders, I only took in a couple of hours of the pro-am play. I witnessed the usual displays of tepid pace of play, excessive self obsession, garrishly dressed wives and voila, the traditional pro-am headache set in.

The greens appear firm, with dry warm weather the next few days they figure to actually allow Riviera to provide an interesting test.  There is almost no rough, but that's just fine with 27-yard wide landing areas and firm, fast greens.

That said, I had a lively chat with Steve Elkington today. Alongside were Mike Clayton and Jaime Diaz. A variety of topics were discussed, but Elkington was most interesting when talking about the changes to the course.

Naturally, he has taste and has been a longtime Riviera fan (especially as the 1995 PGA) so he finds much of it revolting, and in particular I was pleased to hear someone note the careless green enlargements, which have eliminated so much of the precision necessary for iron play. Brad Faxon made a similar observation, but just as many players love the new sand in the bunkers, and therefore, it's all good.

Inside The...Cables?

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I might actually go down to the Golf Channel set to take in this interactive/it's-all-about-you experiment gone awry: 

Golf Fans to Go “Inside the Ropes” with the GOLF CHANNEL at the Nissan Open
 
 The GOLF CHANNEL will offer golf fans inside the ropes opportunities during the Nissan Open this week at Riviera Country Club. Beginning Thursday, the cable network will give behind-the-scenes access to its news production at the tournament, with live audiences during the broadcasts of its signature news shows – Sprint Pre/Post Game and Golf Central – for the first time.
 
 Situated near the 10th tee at Riviera Country Club, select golf fans will be on the stage to watch the live production of Sprint Pre/Post Game and Golf Central.  In addition, select golf fans will be able to view tournament coverage shot-by-shot in front of the stage throughout the duration of the tournament.

Targets on The Driving Range

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230136-676751-thumbnail.jpg
Riviera's Renovated Range (Click to enlarge)I had an enjoyable chat and stroll around Riviera Tuesday with Mike Clayton and Steve Wenzloff, the PGA Tour's VP of Design Services. Among other topics, I pointed out Riviera's redesign of the driving range landing area. It mostly consisted of taking some nice (albeit in need of freshening) targets, and leveling the landing area into a boring patch of flags and green grass.

Wenzloff said that in his polling of PGA Tour players, the overwhelming majority would rather hit to a flat, boring field than one with really interesting target greens guarded by bunkering.

Am I alone in preferring targets that reflect what you would hit to on the course?

Two More International Post Mortems

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Golf World's John Hawkins first:

The International's demise is a dangerous sign as to the widening chasm between Tiger events and the non-Tigers. Never have the haves and have-nots been so easily defined or so mindlessly categorized by the presence of a single player--it's the frightening downside of Woods' competitive dictatorship. When he doubles the size of a viewing audience in a strong golf economy, the rich get richer. When he does it in lean times, the poor get really poor.

And John Garrity with this in SI:

Did the International have to die? Vickers thought not. But as he turned away from the window, he considered a bleaker landscape than the one outside. "There's a sense of greediness in the air," he said. He was ready to begin the postmortem.

And...

At the press conference Vickers had sprinkled pixie dust on Denver reporters, saying, "Hopefully this is not the end of the International tournament. When time and conditions are right, I think that we'll be back here." Now, however, he conceded that it was probably wishful thinking. "We're here," he said. "The assets are here. But it's not our move." If anything, he saw his tournament as the canary in the coal mine -- the first to fall off the perch, but no different from a dozen other Tour events suffering from Tiger Deficiency Syndrome and low ratings. "I'm trying to be helpful to Tim, who's a good friend," Vickers said, "but if something isn't done, you're not going to have a Tour. Right now it's a one-man show."