LIV 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.

LIV Golf Tanking Like a Biden Stock Market

February 27, 2023

LIV Golf TV rating for debut on The CW was appallingly bad

If a golf tournament is held on the CW network and nobody watches, does it make a sound?? Ha ha!! The abortion that is the LIV Golf tour teed off at Mayakoba on Friday, and it apparently held as much appeal as a root canal on your birthday. A laughable 0.2 Saturday market share laid bare the fact that the only people that ever tuned in were dipshit millennial yahoos titillated by a promise of “Golf, but louder,” that in the end only produced the sound of a wet fart. If the dismal ratings weren’t enough to paint a picture of gloom and doom, surely the sight of LIV promotional slates during commercial breaks was.

Word on the street is that LIV entered into an agreement with the indiscernible CW network in which their leverage was so weak they weren’t even paid a rights fee, but instead were cuckolded in an ad revenue-sharing deal. Problem was there apparently was very little revenue to share. A majority of the commercial breaks featured LIV slate boards, the type you see on 3am infomercials when there aren’t enough eyeballs for any viable entity to purchase commercial time.

Anyone with an IQ above room temperature saw this coming last year when it was obvious that the only people paying attention were there for anything but the golf. The promise of “big names” breaking from the staid PGA Tour has been swamped by the stark reality that the league is really a compendium of “superstars” mailing it in. All the big names fell flat this week as it becomes obvious that where there’s no incentive, there’s no desire.

Cameron Smith shot a respectable 6-under, but the other sellouts expected to draw the big crowds were virtually invisible. Phil Mickelson was 1-over for the week in what could actually be deemed progress considering his wretched performance last year. The rest of the league stalwarts were equally dreary: Brooks Koepka also was 1-over in what for many surely conjured visions of his epic battle with Mickelson at the PGA Championship in Kiawah less than two years ago. Snort! Meal ticket Dustin Johnson dazzled at 4-over while Patrick Reed took time from suing anyone who could fog a mirror to post a remarkable 5-over. Bubba made his playing debut with a scorching 6-over while perennial small fish in a big pond Lee Westwood joined Louis Oosthuizen at 8-over par. Sihwan Kim brought up the rear at 23-over but still robbed the vault for $120,000. Charles Howell III took home the trophy, making laughable the premise of many online dimwits that the PGA Tour’s opposing event at the Honda Classic didn’t have enough big names on the leaderboard for their tastes.

Oh, well! Such is the reality of guaranteed money. Some learn this ugly truth of life sooner than others; the others live in the gauzy world of mediocrity that they embrace through their support of college tenure, affirmative action, and participation trophies.

There is already speculation that Brooks Koepka is ready to pull the ripcord and bail on the league he smugly joined mere weeks after insisting his loyalty was with the Tour that made him laughably rich and famous. Many of the turncoats cited less play for more money, and more family time as incentive to join Greg Norman’s personal vendetta organization, but suddenly they’re whining for the chance to play the majors and several of the PGA Tour’s more glamorous events. This, on top of LIV’s change from eight to fourteen events this year, many in far-flung corners of the globe, uncovers the truth: obnoxious greed from a pampered collection of below-average wannabes and broken-down has-beens. My fingers are forever crossed hoping Jay Monahan sticks to his guns and slams the door on those that end up groveling to return to the fair meadows they sneered at while they were busy grabbing with both hands.

Justin Suh (Who??) Muddles Along on a Paltry Fortune

February 24, 2023

Greg Norman in a familiar pose (Sports Illustrated)

I couldn’t help but notice, as I checked in on the leaderboard at the Honda Classic today, that the man holding the lead was one of those downtrodden golfers that we’ve been told by LIV dupes for the past year are the bread and butter of the Tour—the players being systematically marginalized and forced to live in cardboard boxes in the clubhouse parking lot as they struggle to make cuts and earn enough soup money to drag themselves to the tee the following day. Friday’s leader, Justin Suh, is hardly destitute, but if you spend a moment in any golf chatroom, you’ll be overwhelmed by the wailing of the “equity” blockheads who insist that the Grayson Murrays of the world should be as well compensated as the Rory McIlroys and Jon Rahms. “These guys show up every week and don’t make any money if they miss the cut,” these simpletons, who can’t even distinguish the PGA from the PGA Tour, say, as they genuflect to LIV Golf for poaching a bunch of PGA Tour has-beens and PGA Tour never-beens like Andy Ogletree. Ogletree, who finished dead-last in LIV’s inaugural event with a flashy 24-over par in three days, earned a cool $120,000 for just showing up. Only 9 of 48 LIV players shot par or better in London that first week, yet Ogletree’s bounty was the lowest sum one could whore for.

Mind you, I care not one whit for the virtue-signaling hypocrite journalists who sermonize about the evil Saudi backers while giving a pass to Rory and others who take blood money from Dubai and other Middle East cutthroats while playing on the DP Tour. These pious scribes will still sip their craft beers at NBA games with complimentary tickets provided by the China-backed Adam Silver (looking at you Eamon Lynch and Brandel Chamblee). My beef with LIV is the simple ingratitude that Phil, Dustin, Brooks, Bryson, Patrick, and Cam have shown toward the PGA Tour which showered them with lavish amounts of money, courtesy cars, free meals, and fawning volunteers at every event, where their every whim is catered to and indulged. Abraham Ancer apparently was offended that he was only able to siphon $15 million for a seven-year career that features one win and 13 missed cuts in 19 events in his rookie year. And, of course, Greg Norman, LIV’s CEO and commissioner, who never met a man he couldn’t be rude to, made a fairly healthy buck pissing away 54-hole leads for 20 years.

But I digress…back to Justin Suh. The 25-year old USC product was a highly successful amateur player and may have a long and storied career ahead of him, but to this point he has made 17 of 37 cuts in the big leagues, and this season alone has earned $352,323 for not making it to the weekend in 4 of 12 starts. His highest finish is T20 and he currently stands 112^th on the FedEx Cup list, but he’s already more than a third of the way to a million, and we’re not even out of February yet. Point being, the Bernie Sanders lick boots who think it’s everyone’s birthright to play golf for a living need to French kiss some facts before decrying the largesse that the PGA Tour has for years showered on a multitude of middling players. I wanted to play centerfield for the Yankees growing up, but it didn’t quite work out. That’s life, and if you’re a pro golfer slamming the trunk every Friday, you shouldn’t be crying for welfare, but instead should be applying for a sales job at the local car dealer.

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.