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
We won’t get it on Golf Channel this year with several other events on the schedule, but the simulation of the LED lighting package being employed to finish a Ladies European Tour event under the lights looks interesting. Jessica Marksbury with details for Golf.com.
From their Tweet:
Omega Dubai Moonlight Classic 🌓
— Ladies European Tour (@LETgolf) April 29, 2019
First ever day-night event ✅@EmiratesGC May 1-3📍@NickFaldo006 course 👍🏻
World class golf 🏌🏼♀️
Entry is FOC 👀 #ODMC #MadeForGreatness pic.twitter.com/RuKSsYeL0u
While 58 of 72 greens is always an admirable number at historic Wilshire CC, but it was Australia’s Minjee Lee’s precision helped her to hold off a charging Sei Young Kim to win the 2019 Hugel Air Premia LA Open. She moves to the Rolex No. 2 spot with her win in Los Angeles.
Following the leading group during the front, I was whining to anyone who might listen that the final round hole locations would stifle excitement. And then Lee would hit a ball six to eight feet when the pin looked inaccessible. Beth Ann Nichols with Lee’s winning story for Golfweek.
And great news from The Forecaddie, Wilshire is on the schedule for years to come, sponsor permitting.
I posted a few shots on Instagram to give you a sense of how special it is to have great players out there testing shots almost identical to how they played 100 years ago. Norman Macbeth and friends would never believe 100 years later how well the course has aged.
Only three birdies were made at the par-3 18th Sunday, and they all came in the three groups. Lee was the last and most notable:
View this post on InstagramThat winning feeling with @minjee27 @lpga_la.
A post shared by LPGA Tour (@lpga_tour) on
While I certainly agree with my colleague Dan Kilbridge’s view that the two-man team format for the Zurich Classic remains a welcomed addition to the schedule and must be protected, the alternate-shot golf is pretty deadly stuff. Particularly on a Sunday when fans want excitement.
He writes:
Watching the teammate dominos fall is a huge part of the Zurich Classic’s appeal in the days and weeks leading up. Dissecting the pairings and eventually their chosen walk-up music might be more intriguing than the actual golf.
International Presidents Cup team captain Ernie Els even introduced the idea of treating it as a chance to prep for the December matches at Royal Melbourne, with international players staying at the same hotel and bonding after-hours. Jason Day and Adam Scott played together for the first time, but that experiment ended early in a missed cut.
When you need excruciatingly painful exercises like walk-up music—executed better this year, slightly—and December Presidents Cup testing grounds, something is amiss.
I’d start by making the foursomes play modified, with each player hitting a tee shot. Or, if the purity is just that important to someone, then back to Thursday-Saturday rounds. To finish on a Sunday with a format that is about making the fewest mistakes instead of what is the most fun to watch, once again announces to fans that the PGA Tour was not thinking of you. Or if they were, they believed you like watching hard-earned pars being made.
And this…
View this post on InstagramThere was quite the mix of 🎶 on the opening tee on Saturday @Zurich_Classic. 🔉🤠👏
A post shared by PGA TOUR (@pgatour) on
The European Tour’s awful association with the Crown Prince and ensuing cash grab seemed like the worst possible partnership in modern professional sports. Particularly after other sports backed away from events in Saudi Arabia, or if you read about last week’s Saudi government led series of beheadings, including 16 and 17-year-old boys, yet another violation of international law and similar to recent atrocities green lit by the tour’s partner.
Continuing golf’s tone-deaf ways, struggling Ladies European Tour professional Carly Booth briefly launched an endorsement campaign for Saudi Arabia’s “different” place, to which she said she was honored (the posts have since been taken down after a brutal reaction).
Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch scolds Booth but highlights the even greater concern: what kind of representative would subject their player to this kind of endorsement and feel it’s the right move to make?
One can mount a defense for Booth, but it’s unflattering: devotion to her craft leaves little time to study geopolitics and human rights; women golfers, and particularly those in Europe, subsist on vapors so deals aren’t easily rejected, no matter how morally questionable the source.
But no exculpatory defense exists for the fatuous pillocks on her management team, who devised the deal, who displayed a mesmerizing disregard for the risk to her reputation, who presumably helped author the social posts, who thoroughly failed at their most basic function: they left their client looking like both a fool and a jerk.
Too often players are put in odd positions by those taking 10%, but this one takes the cake for bad advice topped off by terrible timing.
Edoardo Molinari, former US Amateur champion, European Tour golfer and brother of The Open champion, has taken taken the slow play debate up a few notches while helping us figure out who should not play the Slow Play Masters.
He first posted this after his 5:30 minute round in the Trophy Hussan in Morocco:
It’s time that professional golf does something serious for slow play...5h30min to play 18 holes on a golf course without rough is just too long...way too long! #stopslowplay
— Edoardo Molinari (@DodoMolinari) April 26, 2019
Encouraged by his Twitter followers, he posted these “bad times” and the (very few) fines that ensued. These are European Tour times but obviously included the Masters given the names that popped up.
As promised...list of timings as of April 22nd. Next updates list will come out at the end of June!
— Edoardo Molinari (@DodoMolinari) April 27, 2019
There are a few usual suspects and a few surprises.
Please retweet and share to speed things up!#stopslowplay pic.twitter.com/VpR65M4Xrb
When asked about the effort, Graeme McDowell reiterated what most players and tour officials tend to say about slow play discussions: old news, we play for a lot of money, deal with it.
From Brentley Romine’s GolfChannel.com report:
“It’s not a dead horse, but it’s pretty dead. What do you want to do? We can’t get around there much quicker. Is 20 minutes going to change his life? Listen, I like Edoardo, nice kid, but I think he’s just frustrated.”
McDowell pointed out that he feels like the pace-of-play policy on the European Tour is more stringent than the PGA Tour’s policy, though he said even that is “getting tougher and tougher.”
“Listen, golf courses are long, golf courses are hard, we’re playing for a lot of money, it’s a big business, it is what it is,” McDowell said. “There’s just no way to speed the game up really. You can try these small percentiles, but at the end of the day it’s very hard to get around a 7,600-yard golf course with tucked pins with a three-ball in less than 4:45, 5 hours. You can’t do it.”
He is correct that getting around such a big course at modern speeds is becoming all but impossible, particularly given the back-ups on par-5s and drivable par-4s.
Of course, there could be remedies to this…
Only once in his career has Tiger Woods gone from major to major without a known injury or death in the family. That makes his decision to pass up next week’s Quail Hollow PGA Tour stop a bit jarring since he’s now going straight from his Masters win to the next major. This year, it’s the first-ever May PGA Championship.
No one expects him to add the PGA’s preceding AT&T Byron Nelson for a litany of obvious reasons, meaning he will turn up at Bethpage having gone 31 days between competitive rounds.
“The Masters took a lot out of him,” agent Mark Steinberg told ESPN.com’s Bob Harig. “He’s still digesting and appreciating what happened.”
Since Tiger has generally played better fresh than in the middle of an extensive run, he’s signaling more than ever that majors are all that matters. This should not be a surprise, nor should it be criticized. He is an all-time great looking to become the all-time greatest, and while the 82-win plateau is a fantastic accomplishment getting a heavy push from the PGA Tour’s marketing arm, 18 is the number he’s looking to surpass.
Tiger is enough of a historian to know that Ben Hogan reached a point after his accident to realize the limitations of his body, mind and desire.
In the first year back from the accident, Hogan played nine times with two starts after winning the U.S. Open that meant nothing: the Palm Beach Round Robin and the Motor City Open.
After 1950 when he pushed himself and was a little unlucky—Hogan had to return to Riviera for an 18-hole playoff a week after the event was scheduled—he cut back significantly. Hogan’s starts after 1950 were severely curtailed to protect his mind and body.
He played four times in 1951, three times in 1952 and eight times in 1953, though two of those starts were the Seminole and Palmetto Pro-Am’s.
Hogan returned to four-start seasons in 1954 and again in 1955, then played even more sporatic schedules after that.
While Woods’s win at the 2018 Tour Championship gave him the confidence to savor most of the off-season and devote his early 2019 to protecting energy levels, he has not forgotten that last year’s grueling playoff run caused him to lose weight and push his body too hard. He signaled with his pass on Quail Hollow that he won’t be making that mistake again.
Tiger will not be cutting back to Hogan levels but if he keeps winning majors, he will keep passing on PGA Tour events.
The PGA Tour’s new condensed schedule requires such an approach for a player at his age, with his track record of playing well off a break. His bank account also allows him to not care about “chasing points” or grinding at Quail Hollow, a course he once liked but but seems to have less affinity for after multiple renovations and tedious walks to new back tees.
Just as Hogan limited his exposure to stress, Woods is managing his 2019 at the expense of regular PGA Tour events with majors in mind. History says he’s making the right move.
Rex Hoggard examines the PGA Tour’s increasingly hostile view of the Official World Golf Ranking and suggests the best way to fix the ranking is to stop using it.
The PGA Championship uses its own points list, a one-year ranking based on official earnings, along with a variety of other criteria. Not included in the qualification for the year’s second major is a player’s position in the world ranking, although officials do historically dovetail special exemptions to those inside the top 100 to assure no one slips through the cracks.
The point remains valid, however. There are now endless ways to identify competitive merit without becoming mired in the world ranking weeds.
Perhaps the game’s best minds can conjure a solution to the current ranking problems, but if we’re being objective the entire analysis is starting to feel like an exercise in diminishing returns. Organizations like the PGA of America and R&A don’t need the world ranking to identify the best players any longer.
The point is a strong one assuming that any replacement in use to fill a field does attempt to weave in the entire planet. Or else we’ll just end up with a new ranking again.
The new Augusta National Women’s Amateur understandably got way more attention than the LPGA’s first major of the year and while the inaugural year must be taken into account, there is a good chance the chance that attention will continue to lean hard toward the “ANWA”.
It’s unfortunate that organizing reps at IMG are suggesting a move is a 50-50 prospect for this reason and not for the reason the ANA needs to move: it’s on the eve of the Masters.
From Larry Bohannan’s Desert Sun report, quoting IMG’s Chris Garrett:
“If I am a tournament sponsor and I am ANA and looking at coverage that was given to ANWA by Golf Channel and certain media outlets, I can understand their concerns that we are golf’s first major and they are feeling overshadowed by an event in its first year,” Garrett said.
ANA has sponsored the major since 2015 and raised the purse to $3 million this year. The airline signed a three-year extension this year through 2022.
Garrett admits that a date change might not be possible as early as 2020 because of all the moving parts involved in the LPGA schedule and TV contracts.
While moving up seems logical, a move to April after the Masters sounds more attractive to golf fans who are always going to be distracted by the Masters.
We had a good sense he was headed there when GOLFTV’s CEO revealed a likely exhibition match would be played there this fall and Tiger Woods made the news official of an October appearance in Japan.
As Bob Harig notes for ESPN.com, this will be Tiger’s first-ever appearance in a pre-January official PGA Tour event.
The ZOZO Championship will have a $9.75 million purse, with a field of 78 players and no 36-hole cut. Woods last appeared in an official event in Japan at the 2006 Dunlop Phoenix, in which he lost in a playoff to Padraig Harrington.
Mark Steinberg, Woods' agent, told ESPN.com during the Masters two weeks ago that a likely destination for exhibition matches as part of the GolfTV deal was Japan, where Woods would possibly take on another player or invite a series of players for a one-day competition, format to be determined. That would not have any impact on future matches that involve Phil Mickelson.
There’s a load off!
More importantly, Tiger is committed to Japan in October. How about Charlotte in the first week of May? No word yet from the Masters champion. He has until Friday evening to commit.
Fantastic production values as always and, well, wait for it…
Good on Outpost Club co-founder Will Smith and Michael McCartin for building on the many great efforts nationally to restore run-down munis by starting the National Links Trust. Give them a follow on social and check out their excellent website along with the embedded podcast discussion with Andy Johnson.
For the legions who have long wondered how to get a movement going to rejuvenate the muni’s with great bones but little else, they’re looking to build on the Winter Park’s and Save Muni efforts of our golf world. They’re starting with a focus on D.C. area gems but hope to spread the gospel of restoration and architecture “growing the game".
Our first project will focus on the incredible opportunity to improve the facilities of our nation’s capital’s three municipal golf courses, East Potomac, Langston and Rock Creek. Each one of these sites has a rich and storied history, but none of them are currently living up to their potential. The National Park Service will soon be issuing a Request For Proposal (RFP) on a long term lease to operate these facilities. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity and the NLT’s goal is to ensure that the proper course of action is taken to improve and ultimately protect these national treasures.
Here’s the iTunes link or find the Fried Egg podcast wherever fine pods are streamed.
Latest podcast features Michael McCartin and Will Smith founders of The National Links Trust (@links_national) an organization with the ambitious goal of aiding municipal golf. Listen on:
— the fried egg (@the_fried_egg) April 23, 2019
iTunes: https://t.co/fifcRYZvt9
Spotify: https://t.co/B0wnHeLIzW pic.twitter.com/DTpZoyV76c
The Hugel is back!
Actually it’s the Hugel Air Premia LA Open, or, as we will call it going forward, the LA Open.
The LPGA Tour’s breakout venue of 2018 is back and celebrating its centennial and hosting many of the world’s best women in the heart of Los Angeles.
As I noted last year for Golfweek and here on the blog, Norman Macbeth’s design reminded how much a fresh, interesting and well-presented piece of architecture can add to our viewing pleasure. Sitting in the heart of a big city and the energy that pulled in certainly did not hurt.
Some of Andy Johnson’s drone footage will whet your appetite, as well his analysis of Macbeth’s varied group of holes.
Scoring and tee times here, and ticket info can be found here.
Here are the coverage times and notes:
LPGA TOUR
Hugel-Air Premia LA Open
Dates: April 25-28
Venue: Wilshire Country Club, Los Angeles, Calif.
Tournament Airtimes on Golf Channel (Eastern):
Thursday 6:30-9 p.m. (Live)
Friday 6:30-9 p.m. (Live)
Saturday 6-9 p.m. (Live)
Sunday 6-9 p.m. (Live)
Broadcast Notes:
Annie Park to Join Broadcast Booth on Friday: LPGA Tour winner and USC alum Annie Park will join GOLF Channel’s broadcast booth as a guest analyst following her second round of coverage on Friday.
We’re making the world a better place! I mean, Grow the game!
It’s a tired mantra wheeled out to sell just about anything in golf, including, repeatedly by new PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh in lieu of just saying, “we got a great deal to develop a project in Texas that’s aligns perfectly with our organization’s history of partnering on projects and eventually walking away from them.”
I guess that doesn’t quite sing like grow the game and Silicon Valley, assuming he’s referring to the region and not the television show.
Anyway, the new development will have a monster Omni Hotel, offices to process those pricey PGA member dues and will serve as the 2027 PGA Championship host site. Also, a possible 2040 Ryder Cup is headed there, with the task force inevitably penciling in Captain Jordan Spieth in Frisco to play the 7,603 yard Gil Hanse course as the primary venue. The project breaks ground this winter and debuts three years later with the 2023 PGA Senior Championship.
Beau Welling will be doing the second course. (Awkwardly, Hanse recently renovated one of Welling’s biggest projects from the Fazio years, Pinehurst No. 4.)
Art Stricklin for Golf.com, explaining the inspiration for the Hanse design:
The East Course, measuring 7,603 yards from the back tees with a par of 72, has already been tapped to host two PGA Championships, the first in 2027 and another in ’34, along with a tentative Ryder Cup in 2040.
Hanse, who designed the Olympic Golf Course in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has recently redone Pinehurst No. 4 and is currently working on a complete renovation at Oakland Hills GC, outside Detroit. But it was his recent redo of the Maxwell classic at Southern Hills CC in Tulsa, Okla., that motivated him for the PGA Frisco project.
“I think you saw a true restoration of the (original) Maxwell course at Southern Hills and you’ll see a lot of stylistic imports from Maxwell at the PGA course here,” Hanse said Monday a press event for the new PGA of America HQ. “I haven’t been to all the Maxwell courses, but you will see the deep bunkers around the greens and the smaller greens. That’s part of what I hope to see [here].”
This Tweet lists the championships committed to Frisco:
A Tweeted map of the Hanse design:
There will be 2 world class golf courses at #PGAFrisco and we have 2 world class golf course architects designing them – Gil Hanse and Beau Welling. pic.twitter.com/LztJ833fQT
— PGA of America (@PGA) April 22, 2019
They had a diverse group for the big rollout…some men in ties, some not in ties.
It was great to be with many new friends in the @CityOfFriscoTx today!#PGAFrisco pic.twitter.com/TN59nBPsTz
— PGA of America (@PGA) April 23, 2019
I think most of us believe it was Davis Love at Winged Foot but he had already made the switch to metal. I’m sure James Holhauzer would have gotten it right.
The last major, as this unbylined PGA.com story explains, was actually four years prior to when you might think. And you could put one in his hands today and the player in question would probably still shoot 69 and hit 12 of 14 fairways. After a good warm-up session of course.
The contrast and moment is similar to trying to compare Vin Scully and Jack Buck’s calls of Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series home run since one legend was working television and the other legend on radio.
Jim Nantz was in Butler Cabin at that point for CBS while in the 18th hole booth Mike Tirico was working for Westwood One.
We were a little busy in the press building so I didn’t realize how long the CBS team went without saying anything: just over 2 minutes and 30 seconds. That is beyond an eternity in television history, but especially in modern TV.
For perspective, Scully went a minute after “She is gone!” before resurfacing with the brilliant “in a year that has been so improbable the impossible has happened.” Then another thirty seconds. Both eternities but Nantz and Faldo stayed quiet even longer as Tiger greeted his family and friends.
John Ourand interviewed both Nantz and Tirico about their calls and the moment was a blur for both.
“I have a hard time going through it with great detail because nothing was scripted out, and I’m not exactly sure of what I said in that entire scene at the 18th,” Nantz said.
Tirico had almost the same reaction. When I talked to him on Monday following the tournament, he had heard his final call several times from audio clips online. But immediately after the tournament, when he was asked on Golf Channel to describe his call, he couldn’t remember. “I just did it from the top of my head,” he said.
And that’s why we have embeds these days and kudos to the Masters social feed for including the full clip.
Roaring back.#themasters pic.twitter.com/nlTwxWJW8X
— Masters Tournament (@TheMasters) April 14, 2019
Tirico, on the other hand, could not leave Westwood One listeners listening to crowd noise, so he offered this exuberant call:
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
