The first ever NBA Awardsincluded fan votes, glamor, fashion, star power, some mild disagreement and plenty of season highlights.
Naturally this made John Feinstein and I agree that a season-ending awards for golf--with all major tours involved--would be a good thing. If nothing else it might tell us when the golf season begins and ends, but more importantly as tacky as awards shows can be, this would be a grand way to recall great moments from the season. Such shows also allow the stars to convene, talk shop and look good.
A big atmosphere comes from energized, enthusiastic fans. And those fans get their energy from being close to the action, feeding off the noise around them. That starts with being able to see golf without having to squint their eyes.
The lack of major atmosphere was evident at Erin Hills.
It was even worse at Chambers Bay, the public course built out of a sand and gravel pit next to the Puget Sound. On one hole, fans were perched high on a ridge and looked like a row of figurines from down below. The par-5 eighth hole at Chambers Bay didn't have any fans at all.
That's the biggest risk the USGA is taking by going to big, new courses.
The U.S. Open returns to traditional courses with a smaller blueprint over the next decade. Even after a soft, calm year, it should not lose its reputation as the toughest test in golf.
The Aussie Watson’s father was a top-level amateur, a great golf fan.
“My dad watched Tom Watson beat Jack Nicklaus to win The Open at Turnberry in ’77, and he just loved it,” Ryu’s caddie said. “He knew Tom Watson was a special player. I was born eight months later, and my dad just said, ‘Well, screw it, we’re naming him Tom Watson.’ Unfortunately, he made my middle name Jack, after Jack Nicklaus. So, you know, I was always going to have issues.”
Watson’s father was friends with Ian Baker Finch, another Open champion, and Aussie pro Michael Clayton.
“They knew my dad was completely insane naming me Tom Watson,” Watson said.
The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold reports what any visitor to a Trump golf property knows: featured prominently on walls are framed magazine covers featuring the now-President.
What we visitors didn't know, however, is that some of the covers are not real.
The framed copy of Time magazine was hung up in at least five of President Trump’s clubs, from South Florida to Scotland. Filling the entire cover was a photo of Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”
This cover — dated March 1, 2009 — looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.
In a special to GolfDigest.com, New Yorker staff writer and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin considers the Billy Walters insider trading case and concludes that Phil Mickelson escaped more serious prosecution thanks to a legal quirk.
It's a long piece but as with all Toobin stories, a good read.
The key conclusion:
But Mickelson's legal odyssey had a final twist. The Newman case, decided by the Second Circuit in December 2014, effectively prevented a criminal prosecution against Mickelson. But while the criminal prosecution of Walters was pending, the United States Supreme Court took up another case from California, which had limited insider-trading law in a nearly identical way that Newman had done in New York. In a unanimous decision in December 2016, the Supreme Court rejected the Newman rule and held that recipients of inside information could be prosecuted even if they didn't know what the original tipper received. In other words, Mickelson might have been prosecuted if his case had arisen before December 2014 or after December 2016. But because the Newman case was the law in New York when his case came up, Mickelson dodged trouble on either side—just as he did between those two trees at Augusta.
With the KPMG Women's PGA at Olympia Fields, the women's second major would seemingly be a good spot for Lexi Thompson to return to some normalcy after her brutal penalty strokes at the last major.
Instead, Lisa Cornwell reports forGolf Central, Thompson is declining all media requests. This is especially a shame given Thompson's likability, star qualities and age. Hopefully it's a short term situation.
With so much in the news House and I kick around a host of topics in this week's show, including the thrilling Travelers, Rory'sputter lottery, the Phil/Bones split, Malcolm Gladwell'swar on golf and news of House's new food podcast.
As always, you can subscribe on iTunes and or just refresh your device's podcast subscription page. (I'm an Overcast fan, still.)
The PGA Tour got some good news as Jordan Spieth's win at the 2017 Travelers and his overall ability to lure in non-golf fans gave CBS a nice final round rating. This is the second Sunday in a row for CBS to finish up in the numbers (Karp/SBD).
As for the U.S. Open, I've put off a post on the dreary ratings news (3.6 overnight) in part because I hate the reflection it makes on the players who contended.
Now that they've had their moment and we've had time to ponder the golf at Erin Hills, it's apparent that some combination of the telecast length (9.5 hours!), protagonists, venue, Central Time Zone and seemingly reduced marketing budget effort by Fox contributed to the second lowest rating and smallest audience on record.
The combination of stunning visuals, production values and noticeable difference between Fox and other telecasts can't be blamed. I would, however, strongly agree with Martin Kaufmann's Golfweekassessment that on-course reporters were underutilized.
Some context, this "cumulative" number is an all-time low for @usopengolf. Previous low = 28.7 million last year. NBC never under 30 million https://t.co/Ene1kKFC4P
Take your politics and stick 'em in a drawer, as the plan unveiling for a Tiger Woods design at President Barack Obama's presidential library complex has been met with the kind of architectural scrutiny and perspective you'd hope for in a public project. The effort is of note given the role of the Olmsted Brothers in this area and their influence on Woods' lead designer, Beau Welling.
Ed Shermansets up theTGR Design from the Chicago Parks Golf Alliance perspective this way:
The Chicago Parks Golf Alliance and TGR Design representatives unveiled the proposed layout Wednesday night during a public meeting at the South Shore Cultural Center.
Let’s just say 2020, the year of the targeted debut for the course, can’t come soon enough after seeing TGR’s plans. A golfer’s imagination truly is in overdrive in trying to envision the final result.
The Chicago Tribune's Blair Kaminlooks at the proposal from a landscape architecture perspective and questions elements of the merging of two courses. He isn't thrilled from the Olmsted perspective in part because Tiger architect Welling has not yet been in communication with the folks developing the park aspect.
But the planning process for that park, which took on new layers of complexity Wednesday with the unveiling of a design for a $30 million Tiger Woods golf course in the park's southern end, almost surely would have given Olmsted pause.
He believed that all elements of a park should be subordinated to a greater whole. That's what the designers in charge of a Chicago Park District push to draft a new plan for Jackson Park said at a public meeting Wednesday.
Yet such an all-encompassing vision is not yet evident. Latent conflicts between different priorities for the park have not been brought to the surface and thrashed out. The designers of the golf course have yet to talk to the designer of the landscape that will surround the planned Obama Presidential Center. The lack of coordination threatens the promise that the center and golf course will endow Chicago's south lakefront with a park equivalent in quality to Millennium Park or Lincoln Park.
For decades, the south shoreline trailed its North Side counterpart in everything from acreage to amenities, a result of racially discriminatory under-investment by the Park District. A 1999 plan for the south lakefront has helped alter that separate-but-unequal reality. In recent years, the city has poured millions of dollars into Burnham Park south of McCormick Place, including a new harbor and playground at 31st Street as well as a new pedestrian bridge at 35th Street.
• Holes 12-14 will have the million-dollar views, with No. 13 sandwiched by two par-3s. The 13th will play 362 yards for mortals, but if the course gets a BMW Championship (aiming for 2021) or Presidents Cup, players would hit their tee shots over the public beach, stretching the hole to 543 yards.
"We asked ourselves: How can we maximize the experience on the lake?" Welling said. "The holes are going to be absolutely spectacular. (No.) 12 will have a peninsula green, water right, left and long, with a marquee snapshot of downtown Chicago. And it could be windy."
• Lake Michigan should be in view from a half-dozen holes, and others will play along the Jackson Park Harbor. A recontoured lake will swallow balls short of the par-3 eighth green.
The stars are aligning for the venue plagued by protests and other sagas since its inception, and even once thought to be hosting three Scottish Opens. Things changed when now-President Donald Trump made comments on the campaign trail.
Murray notes this as a key reason this may happen:
Martin Gilbert, Aberdeen Asset’s co-founder and chief executive, is close enough to Trump to have attended the president’s inauguration in January. With the Scottish Open broadcast live on the other side of the Atlantic, there is a growing link between the tournament and the United States.
Any such move would, however, be highly controversial. Among those who would need to be happy about it are Rolex, who have included the Scottish Open in their new and enhanced series on the European Tour. The Scottish government is also a partner in the tournament but did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment regarding it being held at Trump International.
It's a partnership that makes obvious sense for Aberdeen Asset, especially if Royal Aberdeen is believed to be lukewarm on hosting again. However, of greater concern is the sheer difficulty of Trump International and how that aligns with former Commissioner George O'Grady's desire to play the Scottish Open on a fun, not-excessively difficult links test the week prior to The Open.
There was much to chew on with Jordan Spieth's sporadic final round capped off by another memorable hole-out in sudden death over Daniel Berger. The Tiger comparisons are rolling in because we are already (amazingly) left to consider Spieth's 10th PGA Tour win (and with two majors he's a HOF lock).
This is not a comparison to Woods, who had 15 wins by age 24, as much as it as an appreciation for Spieth’s achievement, and the memorable moments that he has compiled along the way. It started at the 2013 John Deere Classic, where he holed a bunker shot on the 72nd hole to reach a three-way playoff that he eventually won on the fifth extra hole, and concluded with his holed-out birdie bunker shot in a playoff to cap his latest wire-to-wire victory. In between came Spieth’s impressive 2015 season, in which he got nearly three-quarters of the way to the calendar Grand Slam.
“I am not comparing Jordan to Tiger at all, zero,” said good friend Ryan Palmer, who watched the finish in the clubhouse at TPC River Highlands and then from behind the 18th green as he waited to hitch a ride back to Dallas with the eventual champion. “But he has that mentality to do that kind of stuff.
Jeff Ritter, digital development editor, Sports Illustrated Golf Group (@Jeff_Ritter): Tiger absolutely shattered the scale by which all current Tour careers are measured. Spieth may not be on a Tiger-like winning pace, but as I learned today on Twitter, his career arc so far is Mickelsonian. And Phil never had a 73rd-hole celebration like Jordan on Sunday. Not too shabby.
Michael Bamberger, senior writer, Sports Illustrated: Tiger's personality added to his career to create an aura of Worldwide Golfing Dominance. Plus, Tiger won with a power game. It just looked more dominating. But 10 is 10—incredible, really.
The Travelers is always fun at TPC River Highlands, but the combination of leaderboard, field and venue's ability to create excitement made today a long overdue reward for some of the hardest working folks in tournament golf. Couple in how great the latest renovation looked along with the golden natives contrasting with green turf, and it was off-the-charts visual eye candy.
And Spieth, like Tiger, brings out a certain adrenaline in observers. Still, I thought some of the comparisons to Erin Hills were unfair given different pars (70 vs. 72) making it easier to post lower red numbers. Nor would ever discourage anyone from bemoaning the scale of a 7,800 yard course versus the more intimate setting in Connecticut...
There is little question that the scale of this week's venue versus Erin Hills created more realistic golf, better spectating and more energy at the end when fans were on top of the action.
Imagine if the scale were even a little more condensed, just how much more democratic and energetic we could have things? And how many fun courses we could play tournaments at again?
Wonderful reporting here from Tim Rosaforteon family and friends supporting Bruce Lietzke as he battles cancer. One of the game's great natural talents whose ball flighting would be a ball-striking legend in the tracer era, Lietzke is currently on a break from chemo but still has hurdles to climb.
From Rosaforte's report:
Rose was scheduled for a trip to Pensacola, Fla., but Bruce said to her, “Maybe you need to stay here.” On April 12, two CAT scans at the emergency room in Tyler led them to a specialist in Dallas. Five days later, close friends Ben Crenshaw, Jerry Pate and Bill Rogers, along with their wives, spent four hours with Lietzke, telling old stories of their college days and tour life. According to Lietzke, the laughter they were creating in the reception area at the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center was so loud, he thought they would be removed from the hospital.
“We just talked and talked and talked,” Lietzke remembers. “They hung around until I was going into ICU. I said good-bye on the way in. Four hours later they were still there after I came out.”
Royce Thompsonreports onAdam Schenk’s playoff win in the Web.com Tom’s Lincoln Land Charity Championship, but it was the story of 10-year-old Seth Damsgard that got my attention.
Ryan Mahan reports that the little lad not only created the drawings used by players at Panther Creek Country Club, but he's started a business with Precise Yardage Books.
The drawings for all 18 holes of the course are a combined effort. Seth, of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, takes satellite images of courses from Google Earth and graphically designs its layout.
Scott Brady of Precise Yardage Books visits each course in person to walk the entirety of it, measuring things like slopes of greens, depth of bunkers, manhole covers and changes in elevation.
Those measurements are then sent to Seth, who completes the drawings. Then the yardage books are printed.
Before Seth teamed up with Brady, he was making the books for courses he would play in junior golf tournaments.
“I wanted to get tips from another yardage book maker,” Seth said. “We called Scott Brady with Precise Yardage Books. We wanted to get some tips from him. We told him how we did our graphic designing. He was just drawing them by hand, so he hired us.”
To no one's surprise--including those reporting the sight of huge crane's helping to erect new structures at Augusta National, the club is finishing off the final upgrades to the Masters patron entrance area.
First, a close up look at the entrance area from Wheelon's photo shows work on the main entrance area where a new merchandise center is being constructed:
More intriguing is work on the second hole, perhaps drainage related, and the lack of work taking place at the par-4 fifth. Earlier this year, Chairman Billy Payneall but predicted changes were coming to that hole.
A closer view showing the old Berckmans Road still in place which sits where fifth hole expansion might go, also appears to show some minor work at the third hole fairway bunkers:
The full aerial:
Flew over Augusta National, they are doing A LOOOT of construction. Buildings, Course work, and more. Excited cause I know it's 1st class! pic.twitter.com/weeQpJW80n
You'll have to get back to the regular reminders of how little SI's Richard Deitsch likes or cares about golf--we get it Richard!--and he steers the conversation away from the game a bit too often due to that, but there is still plenty to chew on here.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning Drive, is co-host of The Ringer's ShackHouse is the author of eleven books.
