golf – Palm Down

Lick My BagCam

March 20, 2023

So the PGA Tour in its unrelenting effort to debase itself and be exactly what it has mocked and decried the past year by imitating LIV Golf’s small field, no-cut tournament structure has now seized on another shiny thing which has already proven to be as dull and uninspired as its walking interviews with the players as they play their shots. Seems the Tour strong-armed Justin Thomas into using a BagCam at the Valspar Championship last week so TV viewers could suffer another intrusive device that yields nothing of interest, but does alienate the very fans it should be trying to keep.

The PGA Tour just can’t seem to figure out what it wants to be, and so keeps running bad ideas up the flagpole to see which ADHD mouth-breathers will salute. Instead of breaking real ground by…you know…showing actual golf shots, NBC decided to get us “up close” by attaching a camera to J.T.’s bag. The results were fascinating! You can imagine the slack jaws across the country as golf fans were treated to this must-see television. Fans got the real low-down and nitty gritty on exactly what a Justin Thomas headcover looks like. Glorious and resplendent with the Titleist TSR logo and everything, these headcovers were truly a thing of majesty, allowing us to really get the scoop on life inside the ropes.

Headcovers! Riveting television (Golf Channel)

Presumably someone performed a test run on this idea before foisting it on the public, but whoever it was surely reads in Braille. On first inspection it was an utter failure delivering 15 seconds of the aforementioned headcovers and a panoramic view of Thomas’ caddie Bones Mackay stretching it out, but then NBC kept going to the well. Moments later we got a tight shot of J.T. looking at his yardage book (because we simply don’t see enough of golfers poring over their yardage books). Time and time again they went back to the BagCam, and time and time again it was disastrous—the viewer saw nothing of interest but for one moment. The tension was palpable when we got a ground-level look at Bones picking the bag off the ground and walking down the fairway with it. You can imagine my disappointment when Cara Banks failed to interview the headcovers. “Alright, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

While LIV flails about with its “Golf, But Louder” shibboleth that has brought nothing but paltry ratings on its 3^rd-tier network, the PGA Tour keeps seeking the low ground with a slogan of its own. “Golf, But Slower.”

Instead of trying to lure viewers with parlor tricks and insipid mid-round interviews, the Tour needs to do something about Thomas and his glacial pace of play. He draws two clubs from the bag for every shot he takes, and then performs the Labors of Hercules before deciding which to hit. Sadly, in a twosome with his good buddy Jordan Spieth, Thomas is the fast player. Spieth plays a round of golf as a fly would take a swim in a bowl of maple syrup.

The Tour fails to understand that the reason LIV is going down the tubes is because at the end of the day, golf tournaments must attract people who like golf. The bells and whistles can only prop you up for so long, and eventually those who don’t like golf to begin with will move on to other things. The PGA Tour needs to stop trying to be all things to all people, and instead should indulge its base—those that like and follow golf.

It can certainly be no accident that BagCam was introduced at the Valspar, because between Thomas’ languid pace and Spieth’s dawdle up the leaderboard, the tournament was like watching paint dry.

The Obvious Files – Sportswriters are Dim

February 19, 2023

Who is Collin Morikawa? | The US Sun

Allow me some of the fascinating takeaways from Collin Morikawa’s mic’d up session on Saturday at the Genesis Invitational: It’s important to have a good short game if you play professional golf. Noted. Find an aiming point as you tee off. Noted.

One other takeaway: Sports journalists have to be the biggest mouth-breathing, “I like shiny things” morons that inhabit our planet. “All hail the mic’d up golfer as he rehashes information we’ve had network gasbags deliver to us for years,” the sports scribes bray. “Relish the ground-breaking revelation of Morikawa intoning that you’d like to be in the fairway on an upslope as you approach the green.”

Whew! Enough already! My brain simply can’t take it all in! But alas, this cadre of subject-verb disagreement experts, which considers re-tweets viable journalism, is mesmerized by the very thing that is plaguing all sports: too much talk and not enough action. Just as the NFL has become a miasma of huddles and officials reviewing plays with their heads under a blanket, all bookended by mush-mouthed morons like Bill Cowher and Shannon Sharpe butchering our fair language, golf television has, too, allowed itself to be taken over by everything except the game. Golf tv coverage has now morphed into a stream of players blithely strolling about the green for five minutes lining up 4-foot putts, or players and caddies alike poring over their yardage books before air-mailing the green. One wonders if PGA Tour players can take a dump without their yardage books. What is missing from golf telecasts is actual shots; no one in charge seems very concerned with that piffling aspect of the game.

So in an effort to enliven a slow game, let’s show less action and show more blathering. “Bring it on,” cry the Kyle Porters of the world, he a part of a subset of idiots that love having their hands held for everything, and that lack the imagination to intuit for themselves all the pedestrian nuggets Morikawa had to offer. And we won’t even consider the competitive advantage of the mic’d up golfer as he gets to discuss strategy and tactics with the two major winners sitting in the booth.

All in all, the mic’d up golfer adds nothing to the telecast, but for the ADHD viewers who love being spoon-fed the obvious. This is precisely the mentality that spawned LIV Golf, an artificial product germinated by people who hate golf in order to bring more “mashed potatoes”-screaming yahoos to the game they profess to love. And so goes our country, further circling the drain, catering always to the lowest common denominator.

Sports Announcers, Like Their Hard News Brethren, Struggle With the Truth

August 2, 2010

When a witness testifies in a court of law he swears to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” This is because jurists of yore realized long ago that telling partial truths can be, and often is, every bit as much a falsehood as telling a flat-out lie. Saying that someone shot at you without disclosing that you shot at him first may be technically true, but is certainly not the whole truth. This failure to disclose has become standard operating procedure in the world of sports broadcasting. In order to drive ratings, announcers whore the product to ludicrous and sickening lengths.

This weekend, while broadcasting the Greenbrier Classic of the PGA Tour, CBS’s Jim Nantz was the pimp. I used to consider Nantz an able broadcaster and thought of him favorably until a few years ago at the Masters when he told me that it was a lovely day at Augusta and so implored me to “watch with a loved one.” Such saccharine palaver has now become a Nantz staple and this weekend was no exception. Nantz spent so much time sucking on D.A. Points’ shaft it was a wonder this middling golfer was able to pull his clubs out of the bag.

Points flirted with shooting a 59 on Saturday, and the CBS coverage was over-the-top, to say the least. The cameras lingered on Points ad nauseum even after he bogeyed the seventeenth hole to end any hopes he may have had to fire the magical number. Points did his part by playing slower than Jim Furyk on Quaaludes and milking every moment with over-exaggerated gestures for the cameras. Still Nantz and his fellow panderers–including perennial prick turned affable announcer Nick Faldo–gushed about this historic moment. What they downplayed, like all the talking heads on sports talk shows who dared not ruin this special moment with the facts, is that par on the Greenbrier course is 70…not 72, not even 71, but 70!! Thus a 59 is only 11-under…excellent to be sure, but a far cry from the 59’s shot by Al Geiberger, Chip Beck, and David Duval on par-72 courses. Moreover, a 59 on this course, this week, was almost pedestrian. J.B. Holmes had come close earlier in the day by shooting a 60, and indeed, on Sunday, Stuart Appleby would win the tournament by shooting the hallowed 59 number. On short courses softened by rains, PGA Tour players are going to go low and Points’ run at 59 warranted about half the coverage it received.

Once Points was in the clubhouse, Nantz and the CBS team turned all its attentions to the winless Jeff Overton, finally showing a graphic titled “On a Run.” Overton’s “run” included a 2^nd place finish, two 3^rd place finishes and a missed cut in his last six events…he would eventually piss away a three-shot overnight lead…a budding Jack Nicklaus he. They also ignored Overton’s petulant behavior which included a loud “FUCK” after a mis-hit fairway wood and thrown clubs, transgressions that draw condemnation when performed by Tiger Woods, the ONLY current athlete that merits any gushing.

Unfortunately, Nantz isn’t the only offender. While watching a Detroit Tigers-Tampa Bay Rays game last week, the announcers (I’ve successfully forgotten their names) gushed about Miguel Cabrera’s ability and his chance to win the Triple Crown. Never mind that Cabrera was leading only one of the three categories necessary to win the award; the fact that he was at bat was enough for the announcers to wax poetic and show old videos of Carl Yastrzemski, baseball’s last Triple Crown winner. Why bother viewers with pesky facts when you can tailor the facts to fit your storyline??? Later in the broadcast these same buffoons rambled at length about the Hall of Fame prospects of Tiger centerfielder Johnny Damon. Damon, like all players of the era, has grossly inflated numbers due to the confluence of gutless, specialized pitchers, juiced baseballs, and juiced players, but the announcers ticked off Damon’s numbers like they have some relevance in this bastardized era in baseball’s storied history. So you understand, Johnny Damon is by NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO stretch of the imagination a Hall of Famer, but the media machine has to keep the brain-dead, attention-challenged viewing public happy. Oh, by the way, Cabrera and Damon’s Tigers were no-hit that day.

Tiger in the Tank

February 19, 2010

Well, it finally happened. Tiger Woods went down the road of all sniveling cowards this morning when he delivered the “heartfelt” apology that the media has been demanding for the past three months. Up to this point, I, like many others, had been disappointed by the golf great’s marital indiscretions, but I had at least held out hope that Woods would have the courage to continue delivering his hearty middle-finger salute to the media jackals insisting on an apology that NO ONE, outside his family and friends, is entitled to.

That Tiger would lower himself with such a charade is my biggest letdown of this entire tawdry affair. The man whose trademark has always been a confident swagger looked every bit like Sylvester Stallone trying to emote as he faked his way through the orchestrated dog and pony show with all the robotic sincerity of the Manchurian Candidate. Tiger spoke of core beliefs and spiritual awakenings, but there was plenty of time for soul-searching in the three-plus years that he was crossing the globe porking anyone that could fog a mirror. If you believe one of the dime-store sluts he was hooking up with, Woods was slipping the Jimmy to her while his wife was delivering one of their children. Seems like that may have been a good time to rethink his ways, but alas, it appears family wasn’t that important until endorsement contracts started drying up.

Tiger has more money than he will ever know what to do with, and if privacy and family were really his primary concern, he would have continued his silence and eventually returned to the golf course, sans sponsorship, and with the insistence that he would speak to the media only of golf. This morning’s statement looks like nothing more than a desperate act to recapture his adoring corporate sponsors, and for what? I, for one, thought he would at least announce when he would be making a return to golf, but absent that, what was the point? If he thinks the relentless media assault will be any less severe after today, he’s not as smart as we’ve all been giving him credit for. Until he answers questions outside of his controlled cocoon, the media savages will tear him limb to limb, and if, as many say, he is fulfilling some part of a “twelve-step program,” is this not the most insincere manner of doing so? Would it not be more appropriate to meet face-to-face with those he’s hurt and apologize from the heart?

Those who insist that Woods let down his sponsors and fans need to grow up and look in the mirror. A vast majority of the pious hypocrites calling for his hide have committed similar, if not worse, violations of their own marriages, and the argument that Woods marketed himself as a family man while reaping mega-contracts is only valid if we subject everyone to the same standard. Charlie Sheen and serial philanderer Michael Jordan appear in ads together selling underwear, even as Sheen appears in the tabloids seemingly every week for a sundry list of indiscretions including drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic violence, but I have yet to see anyone hold his feet to the fire. The list of bad people shilling products is endless, and it’s utterly despicable that some are holding Tiger to a higher standard than politicians who rape and pillage their constituency, teachers who sleep with their students, and priest who molest little boys.

Tiger committed no crimes (other than a speculative drunk-driving violation on Thanksgiving night), and owes nothing to the Pollyanas who still believe in Santa Claus or the media whores who spent the day gleefully ranking celebrity apologies and fretting that Woods hadn’t debased himself quite enough for their liking. Gloria Allred tried to cash in on the debacle by staging her own press conference this afternoon with her client– a weepy porn star, who insisted she was in love with Woods and was owed an apology–trouble is, I couldn’t tell which one was the whore.

I have always been a Tiger Woods fan, and I won’t pretend that I’m not going to watch him play when he returns, because despite his failings, he is simply beautiful to watch on a golf course. I only wish that he confined his entertainment value to that venue, and not slipped into the reality show miasma of the “celebrity apology.”