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
Brendan Prunty reports that the Donald was approached about hosting the LPGA Championship but turned the LPGA Tour when they wanted more than a one-year deal.
"They came here, they wanted to be here and I turned them down," the real estate mogul said at his Bedminster golf club. "They wanted it for more than one year and I didn't want to commit the course for more than one year."
I just wish he would stop being so humble!
John Huggan on the possibility that the PGA Tour won't adopt the groove rule change:
When it comes to the rules, the book says it is the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and the United States Golf Association. But you have to wonder sometimes.
Take the recent news that the PGA Tour, urged on by equipment manufacturers, is unlikely to adopt the new regulations for grooves on wedges come 1 January. The likes of Titleist, TaylorMade and Callaway are claiming they can't make clubs and balls the leading players will be happy with in time to meet the deadline. Aye right.
Verdict: Meet golf's real supremo, Wally Uihlein, chairman and CEO of Titleist.
Mark Herrmann reports that the radio voice of golf is a marked man for daring to correctly pick Lucas Glover to win the U.S. Open. What'd disturbing is how many Irishmen listened!
Paddy Power, a legal betting firm, lost the equivalent of $1.6 million because Bubka's prediction had set off "a betting frenzy," according to the Irish Times and other media outlets in Ireland.
The odds on Glover, 29, who had won one PGA Tour event and never had made the cut in a U.S. Open, had been 175-1 before Bubka appeared on Newstalk radio Wednesday night, June 17. After he mentioned Glover as the favorite, the odds had dropped to 11-8 by Monday, June 22, the final day of the Open.
This is beautiful...
A spokesman for Paddy Power told Ireland's TalkSport radio, "We're hoping Bob gets a bad case of laryngitis the week before the British Open and keeps his mouth shut."
Bubka does not have a favorite yet for the British Open. But he did say he had picked Angel Cabrera to win the Masters this year, too.
Larry Dorman helms a New York Times 30-second Q&A with David Fay following the U.S. Open at Bethpage.
Q. It rains a lot in the Northeast in June. West Coast Open venues looking better?
A. After a week like the last one? Sure, dry clothes and clean shoes are a plus. But while you may not deal with rain and thunderstorms on the West Coast, fog can gum things up. And there’s that little thing called earthquakes. I like the idea of the Open and all our championships being movable feasts.
I'm always fascinated by the earthquake excuse for hosting fewer majors in the west...wait, that's a new one!
Seriously, the Open has outgrown many courses for a variety of reasons. Is it so big now that maybe it's outgrown places where the weather is less predictable?
I did enjoy his answer on this. And because of our little economic downturn, it's starting to happen more and more.
Q. You have been designated the golf god, and whatever you say goes. Speak.
A. American golfers expect the doors of private clubs to fly open when they travel to the U.K. and, by and large and thankfully, that’s what happens. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of our great clubs had the same approach? The golf course doesn’t ask your income or your status. Treat the course with respect, play quickly, and replace all divots and tidy up the bunkers. Oh yeah, and pay your guest green fee. Simple, eh?
Alex Miceli reports that three members of the four-man PGA Tour Policy Board are leaning toward a vote to delay 2010's condition of competition change requiring the use of new grooves.
But with the start date looming ever closer, numerous PGA Tour players have expressed concern that they don’t have sufficient time to test clubs with the new grooves – nor to fully comprehend the impact they’ll have on their games.
It's June. That means they've had five more months, no?
Now, if the players are questioning the USGA's research or the tiered implementation or the backdoor bifurcation, I've long wondered why they and their affliliated manufacturers weren't more skeptical. What took them so long?
Some equipment manufacturers also have complained about the hardship they’ll incur, especially during a challenging economy, to meet the original deadline. They say there are significant costs associated with the new grooves, including more expensive manufacturing processes.
I understand that most of the people who will be required to play the new grooves get their clubs free. Therefore the companies won't recoup costs to make these new clubs. But who lobbied for the right to give out free stuff to anyone with a pulse?
And if there is a massive increase in the cost of manufacturing, then isn't a mere postponement only going to make this an issue again in 2011?
But other companies such as Ping say they already have made the necessary business changes and insist it would be unfair to delay the rule change.
Nice irony, eh?
Cink declined to discuss how he would vote, but Faxon and Johnson told Golfweek they were leaning toward delaying the groove change. Toms could not be reached for comment.
The positions taken by the player directors historically have had significant influence on policy board decisions. But it is possible the five other members, including PGA of America president Jim Remy, could overrule a player-voting bloc.
I don't believe that's ever happened? First time for everything!
...And a whole lot of money.
Mark Garrod reports that the demanding, inten$ive and wide-reaching $earch to find an appropriate 2018 Ryder Cup venue has begun. And bidders, please make sure that 9th comes somewhere close to the clubhouse.
Six countries - France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden - have announced their intention to bid for the 2018 Ryder Cup.
The deadline for the submission of bids is the end of April next year, with the announcement expected in 2011.
Celtic Manor in Wales plays host next year, and the 2014 contest is at Gleneagles in Scotland. But when both were selected it was decided that after that the European home match would return to the continent if suitable venues could be found.
No Dubai? Perhaps the pushback on that little floated idea wasn't what they hoped for?
Just to show you how current I am, here's Jeff Silverman and John Garrity's SI preview piece on the WPA and Bethpage. I just read it again and couldn't get over this FDR anecdote.
Whitten better add this to the next Architects of Golf!
"He loved playing golf more than just about anything else," says H.W. Brands, author of Roosevelt, Traitor to His Class. FDR even kept an old golf ball on his desk in the Oval Office. "I believe that his inability to play made the game even more important to him, and he liked the idea that the government could make it possible for ordinary people to play."
No ordinary man himself, Roosevelt gained deep insight into the sufferings of others through his own transformative struggle with polio — the humbling midlife counterpoint to the ease and privilege into which he was born. He was eight when his father had a six-hole course built on the family's Hyde Park, N.Y., estate, and by his early teens Franklin was shooting in the low 80s. In 1899, as secretary-treasurer of the nine-hole club on Campobello, the island playground for the wealthy off the coast of Maine, he designed and supervised the enlargement of tees and greens. Fresh out of Harvard in 1904, he won the club championship. No golfing president can top that.
I haven't seen it written anywhere--not that I've read everything posted on the 2009 U.S. Open--but reader Ace noticed that Lucas Glover never managed to hit a greenside bunker last week. And of course he double bogeyed his first hole of the week. Bizzarre.
Bob Verdi writes:
It was a good Monday to rob a bank in New York, if indeed there are any banks left in New York. But it was an even better day for golf as thousands of deep throats converged on Bethpage Black, although not specifically to be heard supporting Lucas Glover.
Tim Rosaforte on Ricky Barnes' rebirth and the role Dean Reinmuth played.
Scott Michaux on Glover's caddie, Don Cooper.
What were Glover's first words to his 44-year-old caddie during that embrace after his par putt dropped and the U.S. Open was his?
"You owe me a Corvette."
It's an old joke between them, dating back to when Cooper told Glover after his first PGA Tour victory at Disney in 2005 that the next time they win a tournament he was going to buy Glover a Corvette. That was before General Motors went bankrupt, and the caddie is considering renegotiating.
"I'll leave that to him," Glover said. "I'm not going to hold him to it unless he just wants to. But it was the first thing that popped into my head after that putt went in. I saw Coop standing there and said. 'You owe me, pal.' "
One of the main PGA Tour/manufacturer gripes with the USGA/R&A groove rule change--now endangered for 2010 implementation--deals with the assertion that the USGA fell behind in getting manufacturers an appropriate measuring tool to determine if irons are conforming.
I know this isn't the sexiest topic, but it is important to understand how this process played out so that should the PGA Tour delay the groove condition of competition due to manufacturer concerns, we at least know how much time they had to prepare. So I asked Dick Rugge of the USGA for his response to the claim of not enough time:
1. The August 5, 2008 Notice to Manufacturers regarding the new groove rule implementation included a detailed explanation of how grooves would be measured.
2. The August 5, 2008 Notice to Manufactures also included the following information: “Measurement of grooves for cross sectional area and groove edge radius can be made with the same tracing equipment that the USGA has used for a number of years. The USGA may also make use of additional measuring equipment for this purpose in the future. A field test to enable groove measurements on-site has been developed. The protocol for this field test will be published in the near future.”
3. The ContourReader (that’s the “tracing equipment that the USGA has used for a number of years”) groove measurement procedure has been made available to those requesting it.
4. Both the USGA and the R&A have purchased a device from the Alicona company that utilizes a very sophisticated microscope to measure grooves. This has been considered our “gold standard” measurement device. That company has offered their equipment for sale to club manufacturers. The cost is high, so there will likely be a limited number of these in use.
5 We have developed a field test device which uses a flat-bed scanner to accurately record the groove cross-sectional shape. This device has been reviewed by PGA Tour rules official John Mutch, who is pleased with its function. This device will soon be made available to the Tours, and to other appropriate organizations, including manufacturers.
Darren Rovell reports:
The professional golfer was one of three people who offered to sign for a portion of the financier's bail, his attorney said in court in Houston on Thursday, according to CNBC's Scott Cohn.
Cohn said Singh would have been on the hook for $500,000 if Stanford fled, but he was not allowed to help with bail because he is not a citizen of the United States.
And...
"Vijay's opinion is that Stanford has yet to be proven guility and until then has chosen to act supportively," said Dave Haggith, spokesman for IMG, the management company that counts Singh as a client.
Haggith continued, we wanted to help out as well, we're still waiting for our 10% and it wouldn't make sense at this time.
In light of Sonia Sotomayer's recent club resignation, the WSJ's Nathan Koppel looks at the state of restricted clubs and how courts view their right to discriminate.
And in one sense, they are right. Ironically, the more selective a club is, the more it is considered to be truly private and thus protected against antidiscrimination laws. In other words, a small, all-male group of stamp collectors who meet in a private home aren't unlawfully discriminating by not accepting women.
But clubs that presume they are private frequently turn out not to be in the eyes of the law in some states.
"Over the last 20 years, societal pressures have led to a steady narrowing of what qualifies as a private organization, free from antidiscrimination laws," says Robert Duston, a Washington attorney who specializes in defending discrimination cases.
GolfDigest.com blogging duo Bethpage and Garden City kick around the power struggle over a groove rule condition of competition and ultimately determine that the USGA has handed over power to the PGA Tour and that the uncertainty over 2010 implementation has the USGA acting as a follower instead of a leader.
I can tell you this, though: The rule as currently written will not be a hardship for the playing of the game by average golfers in any meaningful way, shape or form. Not now, not in 2014, not in 2024, not ever. The rule as currently written does present the possibility for uncertainty in the minds of the best players in the game, however. Uncertainty (or as most of us know it, outright fear), I think, makes for a better game at the elite level.
Unfortunately, the only uncertainty in the game right now lies with who's in charge of it.
Now I can sleep...
PGA TOUR, Eurosport announce UK television rights agreement for remainder of 2009 season
Telecasts to reach more than 10 million UK homes
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, FL JUNE 25, 2009
The PGA TOUR and Eurosport today jointly announced an agreement in which Eurosport has secured the PGA TOUR television rights in UK for the remainder of the 2009 TOUR season, beginning tonight, Thursday, June 25, with live coverage from the Travelers Championship in Cromwell, Connecticut.
Action from the remaining 2009 TOUR events will now be accessible in more than 10 million UK homes on British Eurosport and British Eurosport 2, through Sky and Virgin Media platforms.
“We are pleased to announce this agreement with Eurosport, which ensures that PGA TOUR coverage will continue to be made available, live, every week to golf fans throughout the United Kingdom,” said PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem.
“We are delighted to welcome the US PGA TOUR to the Eurosport platform in the UK,” said Eurosport Chairman Laurent Eric Le Lay. “British golf fans can now see the world’s best players competing live as the 2009 season unfolds. We can give the US PGA TOUR’s iconic tournaments excellent coverage across our two UK TV channels, and fans can follow regular news and results at Eurosport’s leading sports website.”
The PGA TOUR telecasts will also be available to UK fans in simulcast through Eurosport’s online subscription service, Eurosport Player.
Vindication! Yes, as predicted, those savvy, super wonderful New York fans had the nuanced course setup stuff fly over their thick skulls! Mark Herrmann reports. Love this about No. 18 Sunday:
"They made it choke-proof," he said. "I have 10-handicappers who I'd trust with a two-shot lead on that hole." Cowan said his students on the lesson tee Tuesday morning shared his opinion. Of the USGA's setup, he said, "It was a local disgrace."
The best fans in the world! Uninformed, unenlightened and yet so graceful delivering their insights!
Lawrence Donegan was left uninspired by Bethpage Black.
John Hopkins focuses on the best's of the week.
John Huggan wasn't so taken by the vaunted New York fans.
Well, maybe some of them are some of the time. But you do have to wonder when an inoffensive and genuinely pleasant individual like Wisconsin native Steve Stricker is greeted with an unprovoked obscenity: "Hey Stricker, f--- your mother!" Memo to PGA of America: never, ever think of bringing a Ryder Cup to the public face of golf in New York.
And Derek Lawrenson left with newfound respect for Phil Mickelson after watching him host a late night autograph session.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
