Tag: PGA Tour

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)

 

Bones feels the burn
(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 3rd-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.

A Good Crawl Spoiled

March 13, 2023

Spieth and caddie ponder the mysteries of a 100-yd wedge shot
(Business Insider)

“Golf is a good walk spoiled,” Mark Twain may or may not have said, but someone said it, and just as cancel culture has demanded bowdlerization of many Twain classics, so too should this phrase be amended.  “Golf is a good crawl spoiled” now seems far more apt in consideration of the six and seven hour slogs now deemed normal on the PGA Tour.

Scottie Scheffler picked up another convincing win Sunday at a Tournament Players Championship beset by ponderously slow play, that in the end, worked to his benefit.  This week’s tournament marked the fifth consecutive time that Friday’s second round had to be completed over the weekend before a cut line could be established.  In a rapidly changing sports landscape where brevity is desired (or so they say) and even the glacial pace of baseball is being cattle-prodded with a pitch clock, the PGA Tour continues to look the other way while players and caddies hold ten-minute symposiums on each and every shot, and groups on the green resemble garden snails on a lazy afternoon, casually lining up putts without a care in the world.

Scheffler played in the afternoon group on Friday and was only able to complete 10 holes as high winds and hard greens seemingly ossified the best players in the world.  Play was suspended at 4:27 EST and Scheffler teed off at 12:56—it took him 3 hours and 31 minutes to play 10 holes!  That translates to a six-hour and twenty minute round.  And since he started on the front nine, he never came close to having to deal with the treacherous 17th-hole island green, or the equally treacherous water looming along the left side of the 18th hole.  These holes are the most difficult on the course and balls were finding water all afternoon as if they were divining rods, but almost 40 players never had to play them with the super windy conditions, and with greens baked dry by the afternoon sun.  Instead, Scheffler and a slew of others got to go home for the night, have a nice meal, a nice slumber, and then tackle these holes Saturday morning in windless conditions with soft pristine greens.  Notions of competitive imbalance created by the stoppages were conveniently not discussed.

Media darling Jordan Spieth is one of the worst offenders.  He and caddie Michael Greller are likeable fellows and Spieth’s wizardry around the greens is special to watch, but the two of them talk over every shot as if they’re splitting the atom.  No detail is too small, and the two navel-gaze over every decision like the fate of the world is at stake.  These tedious interactions are then followed by an endless series of practice swings before Jordan finally settles in to take a swipe at the ball.  Then a post-analysis follows as Jordan waves his hands and complains about the wind direction or his club selection before finally moving up the fairway.  Jordan is also part of the forever-growing “stroll club” whose members find it perfectly fine to walk all the way up to the green and back on 130-yard shots to assess their landing spots. They never make these strolls hastily either; it’s all about me.

Jordan’s good pal Justin Thomas plays like molasses as well.  He and caddie Bones Mackay have afternoon tea before every move as they breezily discuss routine shots.  My weekend foursome makes it around in 4 to 4 ½ hours and we’re hitting it all over the lot, but three PGA Tour players in a group can’t get finished in over six hours.  It’s ludicrous, and it should stop.  The PGA Tour pooh-bahs are in the process of bastardizing the game to fend off the LIV Tour encroachment, but they fail to address a simple issue that has been a problem for years and that is making the game insufferable for many viewers, not to mention the bettors the Tour now heartily engenders, who are left twisting in the wind (joke intended) with the fuzzy demarcation of rounds carrying over to the next day.

With the Tour now bending over backwards to embrace ideas they scoffed at a year ago when LIV introduced them, they might be wise to consider the shotgun starts of the rival tour.  I hate the idea, but in the absence of any penalties for slow play, I fear many of the peach-faced golfers we see teeing it up in the morning may be sporting full beards by the time they make it back to the clubhouse.

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 112th 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.

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 2nd place finish, two 3rd 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.