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
The Quadrilateral covers the majors and while this is not major majors news, Rickie Fowler getting a PGA Championship spot does not look great.
But the staff worked hard today to round up the deep sleeper theories. For my loyal paying subscribers’ eyes only as there might be some upset executives if this was available to their scions.
This week’s Valspar Championship adds Michael Visacki to the field on the back of his first-ever Monday qualifying. Remember those? They still have them some weeks and dreams do still come true?
Great stuff from the journeyman and his playing partners:
"I made it." ❤️
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) April 26, 2021
Michael Visacki fights back tears as he tells his father that he's reached a lifelong goal of competing on the PGA TOUR.
He successfully Monday-Qualified for the @ValsparChamp. pic.twitter.com/5ci5L1KoLp
I learned a lot about Rye from the latest Cookie Jar mini-doc. Not far from this year’s Open host, it’s high on my list of places to visit and study.
I’ll leave it up to Ron Sirak to give you the context on Brooke Henderson’s first LPGA win in two years, coming from behind and barely holding off Jessica Korda, Jin Young Ko and Hannah Green.
I took in the final round and was taken again by Wilshire’s charm. But also how, even in a year without fans present, the energy was different than so many tournament venues. My latest for The Quadrilateral and why that matters so much.
Let me get this straight. There’s 40 mil in play for the guys on the @pgatour based on social media likes and follows and tweets ?! The only tweets I’ve ever heard make you money are birdie tweet tweets! Good luck with that 🤔🤦♂️🤷
— fredcouplesgolf (@fredcouplesgolf) April 25, 2021
The PIP mocking can’t be going over well down in Ponte Vedra Beach where they kept this secret until Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch exposed this bizarre bonus pool
And especially when it comes from a former Presidents Cup captain and World Golf Hall of Fame member.
For those wondering where things stand on social media, even GOLFTV got into the PIP tracking.
The five most-followed.
— GOLFTV (@GOLFTV) April 25, 2021
Who's your favourite golfer on social media? pic.twitter.com/5RJdafX4WY
The Golf.com Monday morning roundtable also chimed in with plenty of fodder. Just some of the points delivered:
Sens: What do I make of them? They are the inevitable result of a media culture that has turned everything in life into a high school cool-kid contest. It’s depressing, but I get it. I’m not a boomer, after all. Almost, but not quite. And I suppose it could be interesting to see what crazy lengths some players go to get a higher “impact score.”
Bamberger: That’s perfect, Josh. But that doesn’t mean we have to sit here and take it. I think it demeans the PGA Tour.
Dethier: Players were already being rewarded for their popularity and “impact” through ad deals, sponsorships, appearance fees and more. I’ve always seen the PGA Tour’s job as putting on tournaments and paying the winners. It seems off to me, then, for the Tour to pay its most popular players — but I guess the simplest way to think about it is that they’re advertising for themselves and they’re investing where they’ll get the highest return. It can make sense but I don’t have to particularly like it.
Bamberger: I agree with that, too. But do we really need ‘particularly’ in that last sentence? I don’t have to like it and I don’t.
Should this event just be four rounds of alt shot?
— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp) April 25, 2021
Four adults playing their ball and picking up when they’re out of the hole? That should (theoretically) go faster than four grown men playing pure stroke play.
Four-ball is a complete slog of a format with the best male golfers and needs to be eliminated where possible. But since the world’s best rarely are out of a hole and they’re slow as it is, the format produces a death march.
The Ryder Cup will not abandon four-ball matches even though they were not added until 1963. But the Zurich Classic is supposed to be entertaining. Its two best ball rounds drag on forever and produce so little tension.
But foursomes? Straight alternate shot certainly brings a different tension level. Maybe an excess of intensity given that foursomes is a match play format and was never envisioned as a form of stroke play.
As No Laying Up tweeted, four rounds of alternate shot might make the Zurich better. But four days of pure alternate shot would prove too fan-unfriendly over four days. I’d prefer to see the event go to Scotch foursomes (both players hit drives). Maybe play that version for three days and move to straight alternate shot for the final day?
Your thoughts?
With decent-sized galleries and apparently no mask mandate enforcement, the Zurich Classic’s compelling final round duel was occasionally interrupted by various drunken dopes and other dough brains screaming something to get attention.
Sigh.
One of the few upsides to the otherwise grim pandemic now appears destined to return or worse, become more prevalent due to pent-up obnoxiousness.
Otherwise, it was a nice performance for several teams, notably the playoff-winning duo of Marc Leishman and Cameron Smith who edged Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel.
After Smith drove into the water at the short par-4 16th, Leishman chipped in for a key birdie (below). And in other important news, Smith’s mullet may not be going even after he committed to its demise upon winning again (also below).
WOW!@MarcLeish chips in for birdie on No. 16.
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) April 25, 2021
Team Smith/Leishman are now tied for the lead @Zurich_Classic. pic.twitter.com/Y1EQPlRPHT
The mullet is here to stay. pic.twitter.com/FYx7Iexb6m
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) April 25, 2021
Longtime looper and great guy Tom Watson joins us to discuss the perspective from Japan following Hideki Matsuyama’s Masters win.
Then Rod Morri, Mike Clayton, Watson and yours truly discuss the usual issues and one unusual one: the PGA Tour’s no-longer-secret Player Impact Program.
As always, subscribing is free on your favorite app and you can access below or at the State of the Game pag here.
Pro golf’s desperation to lower its viewing demo means some young talents are going to be pushed to grow up fast and come under excessive scrutiny before they might be ready.
No case should be seen as more acute or troubling as Matthew Wolff’s 2021 struggles so soon after near-wins in 2020 majors.
The people who’ve steered him to live in new places and sign up for the stock Tour life should be questioning their judgement. Particularly given that Wolff is a good-natured chap increasingly showing outward signs of general misery.
This time it was the Zurich Classic alongside partner Collin Morikawa. GolfDigest.com’s Brian Wacker documents the latest rough week in a season that’s seen the former NCAA champion battle injury, post two WD’s, a missed cut and a Masters DQ for signing an incorrect card.
There’s also the element adjusting to a lonely life in the lonely world of professional golf. In college, there are myriad support systems for a player. On tour, it’s ultimately every man for himself, no matter the friendships. Some struggle with that transition more than others.
“It’s a different world to travel on your own,” Morikawa said. “Yeah, you have an agent, but you’re out there by yourself in a hotel room. You can’t prep for that. There’s a certain age where some people are more mature than others. I wouldn’t blame it on young age—he’s won and proven he can do it—but he just has to find that little thing in his swing and get over that hurdle.”
A double whammy update on tweaks to his backyard course, spotted without turf recently, and his right leg, injured in a car accident. The PIP points chase is heating up!
GolfDigest.com’s John Feinstein makes several strong points in trying to understand what a secret $40 million pool for players already doing well and to keep them from fleeing to something that “doesn’t even exist at the moment.”
I continue to marvel at the FedExCup ramifications, some positive and some really make you scratch your head. The positive: it looks like a wonderful merit-based competition compared to the “Player Impact Program”, even with points resets.
But as Feinstein writes…
And so the first question: Where is the tour getting the $40 million? At the moment, there’s no corporate sponsor and there’s not likely to be one, if only because Fred Smith, the CEO of FedEx, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the tour dating to 2007, would probably lose his mind if PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan stood up and proudly announced a new multi-million-dollar corporate partnership in order to pay 10 players millions of dollars.
As it is, one wonders how FedEx, whose contract with the tour runs through 2027, is going to react to a new program that rewards players for being popular. Flawed as the FedEx Cup playoff system is, the hundreds of millions the company has invested has gotten the top players to keep playing through the end of the summer after the major championships are over. That was the whole point when then-commissioner Tim Finchem convinced FedEx to sign on in the first place. FedEx and the PGA Tour are now so closely entwined that the FedEx logo is imbedded in the floor of the lobby inside the tour’s new multi-million-dollar headquarters.
The best men’s 2021 Olympic competition this year may be found in the build-up to the Tokyo Games.
Best excuse by a player definitely eligible? And worst.
Best pretzel logic to justify passing?
Best use of family over country?
Best use of a virus or disease to not go?
You get the idea.
Dustin Johnson is the current clubhouse leader with “It’s a long way to travel” and “important for me to feel like I’m focused playing on the PGA Tour.” No chance those hold up for an award.
Adam Scott entered the equation with his inevitable pass, but in a twist the committees must study, Scott’s agent Johan Elliot did the talking. Rex Hoggard with the Australian’s rationale for passing up on the Olympics:
“With the world being the way it is, Adam is gone 4-5 weeks at a time this year during his playing blocks,” Elliot said in a statement to GolfChannel.com. “With three young children at home, this time in the schedule will be devoted to family. It is pretty much the only time up until October when he has a chance to see them for a stretch of time and not only a few days/a week.”
Short version: he’s wants to be with his kids.
Much more fun would have been: he needs to rest after The Open before he makes a 2021 Playoff and Meltwater Mentions push.
In a column titled “TV networks’ lovefest with PGA Tour cheats viewers,” MorningRead.com’s Mike Purkey looks at the increasing chumminess of golf broadcasting, where “the airwaves are thick with collegiality” and “PGA Tour players are called by their first names or nicknames, as if it were the third flight of the club championship.”
He goes deeper into why this is happening and what it means for viewing, and also how the PGA Tour’s control is muting a lot of smart voices. A sampling:
David Feherty’s immense talents are being ignored and wasted. His interview show on Golf Channel was canceled, and he appears to be lying low and trying to stay out of trouble until he retires.
It makes you wonder whether someone told Johnny Miller what was coming so he could get out of television just in time.
If you’ve noticed, it should concern you. If you haven’t noticed, you should. No one ever accused television commentators of being journalists. But there was a time when they at least made an effort to appear objective. No players are critically analyzed. Anything negative is on the penalty side of the white stakes.
Subscribers already have today’s edition in their inbox covering a nice mix this week involving three majors and the Ryder Cup. Though a couple of stories aren’t so nice. Edgy, we’ll call them.
The weekly edition is free but commenting and other exclusive editions are for subscribers. All of that is explained here at The Quadrilateral.golf.
Kiawah is going to provide some good preview content in the coming weeks so join the Quad for the ride.
The socially distanced chatter around the Global Home’s pizza maker must have been lively today.
Yet despite pretty tepid reactions to having $40 million extra to give to stars based on some kooky algorithm (plus the cost to employ all of the metric services), some fascinating reactions were peddled 24 hours later. And knowing the Tour’s expectations of its media partners or wannabe partners, it sure seemed like folks felt extra compelled to spin and amplify odd details in Eamon Lynch’s reveal of a secret bonus pool for the game’s most engaging players.
(Players who, oddly, generally leave their social media to someone else.)
The most aggressive rebuttal to Lynch’s story was penned by…Eamon Lynch! Some could say it’s odd to write such a strong defense of a secret slush pool less than 24 hours after revealing the scheme with an undercurrent of skepticism. Not all, but some.
Anyway, maybe he revealed the secret fund’s existence because the golf fan will want to root their favorite star home to a secret bonus as determined by a special algorithm of several other algorithms. Lynch defends this as just a fancy way to find out who the cool kids are everyone wants to hang with. His words not mine:
For all its charitable endeavors, the PGA Tour is a business and businesses everywhere incentivize those individuals deemed to deliver value. That value isn’t always easy to define and often harder to quantify. Much of the head-scratching about the Impact Fund centers on the metrics used to determine a player’s impact, a waggish assortment of measurements that achieve what any child in a schoolyard can do with the point of a finger: identify the cool kids people want to hang with.
Given the scale of the Tour’s new TV rights deal, $40 million is a small sum. There is ample left to boost purses in the minor leagues, underwrite the European Tour and otherwise gild the lily.
Wow, that’s a lot of money to tell us the list most of us could guess! And oddly, the Tour had to lay off 50 low-paid employees of a particular vintage just over seven months ago while rolling this out. That was a really small sum if $40 million is couch change to these folks.
Anyway, this from Lynch is fun:
Whatever criticisms are aimed at the Player Impact Program, it incentivizes players to engage more with fans, media and sponsors. That might be an awkward exercise for those ill-equipped for socialization, but it’s a worthy goal.
The 2019 players who would have received bonuses according to Lynch’s original reporting: Tiger Woods, Brooks Koepka, Rory McIlroy, Phil Mickelson, Rickie Fowler, Justin Rose, Adam Scott, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson and Justin Thomas.
Let’s just say as a nice way of not suggesting someone else runs their accounts, a lot of people have their passwords. Several of them have publicly made clear they have no use for the same engagement stuff the pool supposedly rewards. We’ve even had high profile resignations from social media in this group when the engagement grew to be too much.
Those are your clubhouse leaders!
At least we have Billy Horschel to tell us all of the above is just nonsense and this was a way to pay Tiger some more money. From Rex Hoggard at GolfChannel.com:
“If we look at over a few years the guys who really drive the Tour, the guys who bring in the money to the PGA Tour, in my opinion, I think we should thank them,” Horschel said. “I look at as we’re thanking them, we’re thanking one guy [Woods] and now multiple guys because of what they’re going to do in the future. We have an amazing TV contract now that is going to be beneficial for all Tour players. If Tour players actually look at this, they’re going to be rewarded in a lot of different ways.”
We’re thanking and placing future bets? And giving TV deal bonus money? Is he saying they’re a non-profit organization is so flush with cash that they have to lose the money somewhere? Huh!
The whole layoff thing kind of messes up the financial fairy tale.
Kyle Porter at CBSSports.com offered seven thoughts defending this as a common sense investment.
The Tour has been (probably unintentionally) taking advantage of the fact that its "franchises" are just individuals who maybe did not think of themselves as revenue-generating entities. However, the power in golf rests not with the PGA Tour but with the Jordan Spieths and Justin Thomases of the world just as it rests with the Lakers, Knicks and Heat in the NBA. The PGL shined a light on that, and now there's a $40 million purse to prove it.
The PGL concept had people praising the Tour’s independent contractor ideal. Yet this no-longer-secret pool will pay people for being famous, with a few conflicts on the side. But that’s the Tour and players business to deal with. The fan should be more saddened by what both the program and the spin job means: the Tour’s vision for growing their product involves marketing morons manufacturing a mirage of meaningless media under the guise of player accounts.
That’s not a worthy goal.
Meanwhile, a man who insists he’s never going to be pool eligible—dream big Billy Horschel!—the hissy-fit thrower himself posted this today:
As a @Zurich ambassador, it's only right that my partner @Samburns66 and I are So Fresh, So Clean this week @ZurichClassic @Outkast pic.twitter.com/4CgRByKBZD
— Billy Horschel (@BillyHo_Golf) April 21, 2021
The “engagement” after the Tweet is superb.
I wonder if the Meltwater Method knows the Jonah Hill throat slash GIF is a negative reply?
Moving along, it seems the big secret reveal did not stop MVPIndex from some Twitter humblebragging: “Our partners, @PGATOUR, are revolutionizing their sport and player compensation based on fan and sponsor engagement. We're excited to announce that MVP's performance ratings will be the social measurement tool for this new Player Impact Program!”
New AND one they didn’t tell the public about.
The company also Tweeted this, captured since the Tour or Golf Channel should issue a take-down notice for lifting copyright video. Heck, it should be deleted merely for “quantifies intangible metrics.”
Lesser known players who are actually the Tour’s authentic social media stars did their thing in reaction to the news, as Coleman Bentley notes here with Twitter evidence.
Gents, good luck getting your intangible humor noticed by the quantifiers.
Finally, Mark Calcaveccia was the rare player willing to go on the record with his views:
Utterly ridiculous! How bout taking that 40 mil and give 20 mil to the @KornFerryTour and the other 20 mil to help grow the game. https://t.co/q9vYvkkojj
— Mark Calcavecchia (@MarkCalc) April 21, 2021
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
