When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
And you thought it was bad when he turned 30!
Like obit writers prepared for a celebrity passing, it appears America's finest golf scribes were armed and ready for the birth of Tiger and Elin's daugher. Poor (well...) Sam Woods wasn't even 48 hours old and the preachy, maudlin and utterly meaningless but oh-so-award-hopeful columns have already begun (here, here, here, here, here, here) about Tiger's role as the very first father in the history of the human race.
Ron Sirak hopes that Michelle Wie's decision to pull out of the John Deere Classic is the sign of better career management to come. He also
A defense of giving Wie a free pass into the Deere becomes especially difficult for the PGA Tour when it is hyping the first year of the FedEx Cup, and its points race, and then denies a spot in a tour event to a potential qualifier for the playoffs in favor of a 17-year-old girl who is out of her league against the best players in the world. It may be too conspiratorial to think the tour and Deere were working behind the scenes to get Wie to pull out -- no doubt offering an invitation somewhere down the road -- but there is no question both the tour and the tractor-makers are breathing a sigh of relief.
Too conspiratorial? Well now that I think about it, you are talking about the same people who killed the Western Open. So it's doubtful they were that creative in this case.
Jaime Diaz offers plenty of fresh insights into who exactly Angel Cabrera is and how he won the U.S. Open.
...And Tim Finchem will be gladly paying off all those over-under bets he lost after his "clear to me" July 11 or 12 prediction.
Congratulations to Tiger and Elin on Sam Alexis Woods.
The most interesting player comment out of Oakmont came from 2006 final group contender Kenneth Ferrie, talking to Gary Van Sickle:
"This is the first time I've played a golf course where it didn't rain and the course has gotten softer every round.
"It's mind boggling, really. Thursday and Friday you're trying to bounce the ball up onto the greens. Today, I actually had a few shots hit the green and spin back."
The USGA's Mike Davis gets points for applying water to prevent an all out debacle. And as you may recall, the Masters this year saw borderline firm and fast all week, then applied water to the greens after the committee had gotten in their licks.
But that's the Masters and at least they recognized the need for the traditional Sunday fireworks.
The U.S. Open is a different beast. It should be the most difficult major of the year, but shouldn't that difficulty ideally progress from day one to the finish, with Sunday's "examination" being the culmination of a week's worth of golf?
Personally, I have long respected the USGA history of giggling at the PGA Tour's willingness to play lift, clean and place. You may remember that Tom Meeks noted they would not be playing "lift, clean and cheat" after Wednesday's deluge at the 1996 U.S. Open. ("Commissioner, I have Mr. Meeks on line 1 to apologize...)
The blue coats are big rub 'o the green guys and gals, touting their devotion to playing the ball down no matter what. And firm greens and landing areas have always been priority 1. Play it as it lies.
Yet they now set up courses with such confining width, extreme speeds and different rough heights for different holes that they are having to use water to dictate the way the ball reacts when it hits the ground.
So I'm interested in what everyone thinks of this notion of a tournament course getting softer each day without rain. Were the measures taken at Oakmont a positive direction for the game or will it open the door for all sorts of strange antics (particularly with the advent of Sub-Air systems where a committee could present radical extremes from day to day)?
Greg Stoda in the Palm Beach Post talks to Torrey Pines super Candice Combs who is all excited about inflicting torture on the players next year (uh, how about we establish some turf first!) and asks, "Isn't it all getting to be a little too much?"The USGA simply went too far this time. It packed muscle onto a course already plenty strong enough to defend itself. The organization always indicates its desire - it's "purpose" to use Combs' word - is to identify the best player. Not in the world, necessarily, but for the week of the U.S. Open examination. It's terrific, for my money, when a Cabrera or an Ogilvy or a Michael Campbell (even-par 280 at Pinehurst two years ago) wins the tournament. Anyone who bemoans Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson or some other superstar not winning all the time is missing the point.
Cabrera, by the way, was the only player in the field to break par twice. He beat Woods and Jim Furyk, runners-up a stroke back, three rounds out of four. Who was Oakmont's best player?
But the 10-over-par cut was absurd. And the weekend's treachery was best exemplified by that same 10-over-par finishing score, which at 290 ended up being good enough for a share of seventh place. That's not competition; it's attrition.
Douglas Lowe takes a more shallow approach, celebrating the sadistic pleasures and bellows on about the dreaded "integrity of par."
The integrity of par has taken a beating in recent years, if not decades. In bread-and-butter tournaments, par is nowhere near good enough and David Fay, executive director of the USGA, said: "All we want is for par on any of the 18 holes to mean something."
Wait, I thought he said they are not fixated on par?
The Times' Matthew Syed considers the positioning branding something or other of hot new grand prix driver Lewis Hamilton in the context of Tiger Woods.
Lewis Hamilton will soon become familiar with the rules of this depressing game. Even now the 22-year-old, who was competing to win a second consecutive Formula One grand prix in Indianapolis yesterday, is being schooled in the art of saying nothing. His handlers recognise that by presenting their client as a blank canvas it will be easier to persuade multinationals to emblazon him with their logos. Like Jordan, he will soon become a walking billboard.
Hamilton has been compared with Tiger Woods, but for all the wrong reasons. Many have suggested that his ethnicity — he was the first driver of black heritage to win a grand prix — will inspire a new generation of young black drivers to enter the Formula One paddock in the same way that Woods has transformed the demographics of professional golf. But this is a pipedream — and not just because of the formidable economic barriers to entry in Formula One.
The truth is that Woods has not had anything like the influence on global black consciousness that his cheerleaders suggest. Not one black player has joined the PGA tour since Woods turned professional in 1996 and there has not been a black player in the Ladies Professional Golf Association since 2000. There are today no home players from an ethnic-minority background playing on tour and of the 60 teenagers in the English Golf Union’s elite programme only two come from minorities.
We should not be surprised by any of this. How could Woods become a role model for young people from, say, the ghettos of South Central Los Angeles when his target constituency is across town among those who can afford the mark-up on his red Nike replica shirts?
Woods’s lack of impact on anything other than the marketability of golf has been achieved by virtue of his banality. He has managed to present a public persona of such blandness that few people can remember him taking a stand on anything except the stern of his $20 million yacht. When he was asked to criticise the men-only policies of some private golf clubs he declined, saying that it was a matter for them. His press conferences are a masterclass in insipidness that drain the soul.
Lee Trevino tells the Boston Herald's Joe Gordon:
“I’m real concerned about golf because we’re losing golfers every day,” Trevino said. “Golf has declined since 2000. The PGA, the USGA - no one is doing a damned thing about it. And I’ll tell you what the (problem) is: It’s too expensive to play and the reason is that these courses they’re building are too difficult and the maintenance is too high. People can’t play them, they lose too many balls. It takes too long to play.”
“We’ve got to get back to basics, back to A.W. Tillinghast, to Donald Ross-type courses,” he said. “They’re 7,000 yards long and tight, but without a lot of water or hazards, so people can get around. I want to get into it full time because I’m 67 and I don’t play much any more. I’ve got nothing but time.”
Take that David Stern!
From PGATour.com:
With Tiger Woods back stalking the lead, the U.S. Open's television ratings made a big jump from a year ago.It's down to 735,000 households now for each ratings point? Oh right, the changing media landscape...
Sunday's final round on NBC earned a 7.0 overnight rating and a 17 share, up 37 percent from last year's 5.1/12 after Woods missed the cut. It was the best Sunday overnight rating since a 9.3/21 in 2002, when Woods won at Bethpage.
Overnight ratings measure the 55 largest TV markets in the United States, and each ratings point represents about 735,000 households. The rating is the percentage watching a telecast among homes with televisions, and the share is the percentage tuned into a broadcast among those households with televisions on at the time.
Thomas Bonk takes on the tricky task of pointing out that Angel Cabrera doesn't exactly seem to slip into that all star cast of winners at Oakmont, while getting to the most important question: is this championship about the course and USGA or about the players?Somewhere along the way, the venerable layout, the scene of eight historic U.S. Opens and renowned for a power table of winners, might have lost a little bit of its luster. The list includes Armour, Snead, Hogan, Nicklaus, Miller, to name a few, and now Cabrera. Are we sure it's a proper fit?And...
Next June at Torrey Pines, Woods will be working on a six-year streak since his last U.S. Open title. Mickelson has none, in 17 tries. Yes, Cabrera has more U.S. Open titles than Mickelson.
Maybe that's just the way it is, and even the way it should be. After all, Cabrera didn't do anything wrong, he earned his championship, the only player in the field who had two rounds under par, his opening 69 and his closing 69.
But something just seemed wrong. A total of eight scores under par for four days? Only six players shooting better than 10 over par? A course so brutally difficult that even par doesn't even get a sniff?
At the end of the day, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish the significance of the U.S. Open, certainly if you go by judging the relevance of its recent champions. We've traveled this road before, of course, when Jack Fleck won in 1955 or when Orville Moody won in 1969 or Lou Graham in 1975.Bonk also looks at the state of Ernie Els' game 13 years after winning at Oakmont and concludes his knee isn't fully healed and that Els may never be the player he once was.
These days, more and more, the extreme difficulty of the courses is the dominant factor of the U.S. Open — not the players.
Forget that stat about never coming from behind to win a major on the last day. At the Masters and at Oakmont, he grabbed the lead on Sunday ... and couldn't hold it either time!Larry Stewart reports on Saturday's ratings, which prove the remarkable impact Tiger has...
At the Masters, the par 5s cost him. He was spooked by No. 8 and hit 3-wood off the tee (3-wood?), and then he made a rare poor decision to go for the 15th green in two from a bad lie when he didn't need to (he found the water). At Oakmont, he committed a no-no by bunting it over the third green, biffed his third shot across the green, muffed his next pitch and made an un-Tiger-like double bogey. The Old Tiger makes par from the fairway there 9 out of 10 times, and the 10th time, he doesn't make double.
The biggest concerns of Tiger-watchers? Whatever happened to his tempo? It used to be fluid. Now he seems to be trying to hit everything as hard as he can, like he did when he overpowered Augusta National in 1997. Is it possible to have too much muscle? For once, it was his near-flawless play Saturday that looked like the aberration.
Saturday's third round got a 4.6 overnight rating, compared with a 3.2 for the third round last year. In Los Angeles, Saturday's round got a 4.0 and beat the 3.9 for the Dodgers versus the Angels that day on Channel 11.
The 4.6 overnight was the highest for a U.S. Open third round since a 4.8 in 2004. The final round that year from Shinnecock Hills earned a solid 6.3 national overnight rating. Phil Mickelson three-putted from five feet for a double bogey at the 17th hole, and Retief Goosen won by two shots.
When Woods last won a U.S. Open — at Bethpage in 2002 — the overnight rating for the final round was a 9.3.
Thanks to a media member who got this email release last week, and which probably answers the question of what Jim Furyk turned to last night for uh, reassurance.
Good afternoon, my name is Lauren from Taylor PR in New York. Diageo has created a new event between Johnnie Walker and Jim Furyk. It is the “Johnnie Walker Jim Furyk Sweepstakes.” From July 5- September 15, 2007 golf fans can enter online for a chance win a round of golf with one of the best, PGA Tour Stars, Jim Furyk! For more information go to http://www.johnniewalker.com/PlayWithJim. Golf fans can also feel like a Pro on the course this summer by sipping on Jim Furyk’s own signature Johnnie Walker cocktail. This round is on Jim!
Furyk’s Best Ball
1.5 oz. Johnnie Walker Black Label
1tbsp. honey
3 oz. Unsweetened tea
1 wedge lemon
Preparation: Add Johnnie Walker Black Label, honey and unsweetened tea; stir and serve over ice: garnish with lemon wedge.
And voila! All of those flashbacks about the 17th hole go away.
So, they made Ernie Els an honorary member at Oakmont. When do you think Angel gets his locker?
Anyway, the game stories first.
Doug Ferguson's AP story, with this note: Woods, a runner-up to Johnson at this year's Masters, played the final 32 holes at Oakmont with only one birdie.
Here's Gerry Dulac's filing in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and Mike Dudurich's account in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.
Rick Starr offers a stat breakdown from the Trib Review while there is this collection of quotes on the BBC's web site.
Robert Dvorchak writes about the successful week numbers wise and operationally, with talk of the club's hope of getting another Open soon.
Extensive notes from the Tribune Review can be found here. And notes from the Post Gazette are here, and include what appears to be the most accurate quoting of Geoff Ogilvy on the Oakmont setup and bunkers.
"If you miss a shot by a yard, it's just a one-shot penalty," he said. "I mean, there's just no chance. It's the complete lack of chance for recovery, which is no fun. You should get penalized for missing a shot, but I don't know if it should be as black and white as it is. I'm frustrated, so it's a bad time to interview a player."
As for the setup, a few writers took notice in their final stories. From Lawrence Donegan's Guardian effort:
But in the midst of a spirit-lifting triumph for the underdog there was also something of a travesty for the game itself as once again the organisers of this historic tournament laid out a course that bordered on farce. It takes some doing to engender sympathy for golf's pampered millionaires but the USGA somehow managed to do exactly that.
And John Huggan filing for Golfobserver:
And so it went on. And on. And on. Especially the lurking. Until finally only Cabrera the Argentine was left, the only man who could stagger/reel/lurch (take your pick) back to the clubhouse on less than six over par.
We should have seen him coming, too. The last time a major championship venue was so mindlessly submerged by long grass - at Carnoustie in 1999 - Cabrera finished one shot out of the three-man play-off for the claret jug. Clearly, length has its advantages, even when the fairways are but slivers of short grass amidst a sea of rough. Bomb and gouge lives and, guess what, long grass isn't the answer.
Come to think of it, maybe the USGA should come up with a different way to muzzle the siege guns that are threatening to dominate the game in the 21st century.
Here's an idea. How about we come back to Oakmont next year and play the US Open with no rough at all? None. Take it from me, the winning score won't be much lower if at all - if that is a problem for the USGA. And think of the benefits. There are some delicious angles out there just begging to be used by someone with a bit of imagination and skill.
In other words, let the players decide for themselves where they want to hit their tee-shots rather than dictating to them what is good and what is bad. Make golf at the highest level a test of flair, strategy and decision-making rather than an endless test of execution. Let's put some fun back into the game.
"I hit a couple of good drives today that were a yard off-line," explained defending champion Geoff Ogilvy, who finished in a distant tie for 42nd. "And I made double bogey off both of them. That can't be right, even if that's what we expect when we get here. It's just no fun when we're doing it."
For fun, Scott Michaux floats a similar idea in the Augusta Chronicle.
Now would Oakmont and the U.S. Open be better served the next time this major rolls around if the rough that chokes the strategic genius of the property were significantly thinned as well?
"I don't think there would be any doubts," said 2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy when asked if Oakmont and the tournament would be an even better test without the trademark thick rough that greeted players this week. "There should be rough, but more like the kind they have at Royal Melbourne where you can make a shot out of it. I don't like the automatic one-shot penalty."
That's unfortunately the very nature of U.S. Opens. While the rotation of classic venues is as varied as nationalities of players on the leaderbaord, the USGA inflicts a measure of sameness in all of them. Instead of allowing the unique strategic differences of Pebble Beach or Shinnecock or Oakmont or Pinehurst No. 2 or Winged Foot to establish their own championship tests, the USGA has to make them all conform to its own rigid style.
While eliminating rough altogether would probably be too much of a departure from the USGA course set-up philosophy, toning down the rough would be within reason. The organization has expressed that kind of restraint before at venues such as Pinehurst No. 2 and Shinnecock Hills.
Would the USGA would have the guts to try something so radically different?
"No," said Charles Howell. "They enjoy it way too much. There was a smile on every one of their faces when the leader went over par."
Stuart Hall looks at Tiger's runner-up finish and notes this about the bunker shot on 17:
"I hit a nice bunker shot, but unfortunately when I hit it, I could tell it caught a rock on my wedge," he said. "And I heard a ‘cling.’ And when it came out, I was hoping ‘Please, still have the spin on it.’ But it didn’t and it released on through [the green]."
By the way, did you notice that when Frank Nobilo went out to show us Tiger's bunker shot on 17, the footprints and explosion mark were still there? Nobilo also showed us just how awful that rough was left of 17. Great stuff. The Nobilo reporting, that is. Not the rough.
Kenneth Ferrie tells SI's Gary Van Sickle:
"This is the first time I've played a golf course where it didn't rain and the course has gotten softer every round," Ferrie said. "It was like concrete Thursday and Friday. It was softer yesterday and today it was more so.
"It's mind boggling, really. Thursday and Friday you're trying to bounce the ball up onto the greens. Today, I actually had a few shots hit the green and spin back."
The Guardian's Paul Mahoney is skeptical of swing coaches and in particular the Stack and Tilt concept after Sunday's poor round by Aaron Baddeley.
And unbylined Sporting Life story looks at Jim Furyk's decision to go for 17.
"The play I made was the (right) play," he said
"The no-no is to go left. I haven't hit a ball within 20 yards of where that went, so I was shocked to see how far it went. I didn't realize from the tee box I put myself in that poor a position."
Finally, Nancy Armour's AP notes start off with Geoff Ogilvy's remarks on the bunkers and includes this:
Lions and Tiger and oh, my, that really was a bear. The U.S. Open draws golf fans from the animal kingdom as well as the United Kingdom.
A mother bear and her cub wandered onto No. 7 Sunday morning after play had started, but before any golfers had reached the hole. They roamed around for a few minutes, then jumped back over a fence and disappeared into the woods that line the right side of the par 4.
Courtesy of golf.com...what's he thinking?
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
