golfweloveit

Photo of the week from top LPGA pro Michelle Wie who is taking away a Callaway promotional cardboard cut out of Phil Mickelson, who looks frankly petrified. Michelle is a woman after my own heart. Years ago there used to be a fantastic shop called Bob “Mr Golf” Daw’s Aladdin’s Cave Of Golf and I used to be back and forward to Uxbridge just to go there because they had everything. One thing really caught my eye. It was a Munsingwear cardboard cut out of my favourite American golfer. I begged Mr Bob for it and eventually, being a good businessman, he sold it to me for a couple of pounds, saying he’d get a new one from the manufacturers. I was in heaven but it must have looked an odd sight me having a 6 foot grinning man tucked underneath my arm while waiting for the Green Line coach home. This post brought back that happy memory.

Anyone like a cut out Rickie Fowler to take away? Thought not.

I always play music when I’m practicing and this week I downloaded the Hamilton Mix Tape from the hit Broadway and London show Hamilton. Probably not a good choice because all that rap music seemed to make my swing jerky.

For the real fans Cafe Press has these balls to carry Hamilton with you – and tickets to see the show will cost more than a monthly subscription.

It was 86 years ago today, on Friday January 13 1933 that Augusta National was opened. There was a parade and then Bobby Jones played an exhibition of the course in which he went round in 69 shots. The opening was attended by friends near and far and he made the announcement that The Masters tournament would be played for the first time in 1934 every second week in April.

Here’s a film by a local journalist from the Augusta Chronicle which explains the layout and what happens in you are lucky enough to attend The Masters.

In 1932 Gene Sarazen arrived at Princes Golf Club in Kent to contest the Open Championship, which he was to go on and win.

He was to bring with him a new club which was to cause an explosion in golf. He had been working for a year on the problems of bunker play and at that Open he tested out his method of exploding the ball from the sand.

Sarazen came up with the idea when he began taking flying lessons with his friend Howard Hughes, A thought flashed through his mind as he pulled back the joystick and the aircraft’s tail went up and the nose went up. The idea was that his niblick club should be lowered at the back.

He got a bundle of niblicks from Wilson Sporting Goods and began to reshape the clubs with a solder, putting a flange on the back of the club so that the flange hit the sand first. Until this point players used to chip cleanly out of bunkers otherwise the sharp edge became buried in the sand. At the time too many shots were being lost playing out of bunkers as the shot was being played to get out of the hazard, not nearer the hole.

Sarazen was consistently getting up and down in two at Princes and he won by five shots. When the concave wedge that was fashionable to use in bunkers was banned when it was proved it caused a double hit, Sarazen’s wedge took over.In later years Byron Nelson called his sand wedge Half-Nelson, because, like a wrestler, he always strangled the opposition with it… Sarazen he got little financial reward out of his invention because his equipment company claimed the rights. He should have called the lawyers!

For Rory McIlroy, the answer would be yes. He’s in a quandry about qualifying for the Ryder Cup every year and if there’s a World Tour there would probably be no more Ryder Cup, the third most watched sporting event after the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup.

It answers everything for Rory, who openly says “I’m in it for me”. He wants to play for the maximum prize fund and World Ranking points against the best players in the world. And it looks as though PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan and European Tour Chief Executive Keith Pelley are focussing on the top too, because where the top players go, the sponsors will supply the cash. It’s like an airline Chief Executive stating “we are a premium airline, that is our main product.If you want to travel cheaply don’t expect good service”.

Although we know that Monahan and Pelley have had “conceptual talks” about merger, there is resistance to the idea amongst European Tour members. There are strong feelings that the European Tour should never lose its independence. 75% of the players would have to vote in favour of merger.

The Times newspaper reported last month a more disturbing angle to the story, that there may be financial reasons behind the need for the conversation. The Times have analysed the European Tour’s accounts with surprising results. Apparently the tour had an operating loss of £9.5 million after tax with cash reserves of £9.6 million. And working capital of only £424,000 – in 2015, when Keith Pelley took over running the tour it had £15 million available. Although the 2018 Ryder Cup was the most profitable in history and its revenue will apparently bring the tour close to breaking even, there are huge financial obligations to be met. Keith Pelley’s remumeration package is four times higher than that of his predecessor George O’Grady and staffing costs were up by £2 million. The Tour has underwitten the £3 million cost of establishing the Golf Sixes event. The relaunch of the Tour website cost another £1 million. There have been a couple of costly legal actions. This is all cause for concern.

The question Does Golf Want Or Need a World Tour? first appeared in the press in the 1990s when Greg Norman made loud noises about it all, but had done a lot of thinking about it and came up with some ideas which, although well thought out, were never adopted.

Currently many European Tour events rank low in World Ranking points, prize money and quality of fields. But its outreach to the wider game is enormous, visiting 30 countries and generating interest in the sport locally where people can see golf played in person. And that was one of the reasons why professional golf was established, not just to make the top players very rich, although Rory McIlroy has said that he is interested in his own progress, not in growing the game.

I can see a merged tour killing the growth of the sport for people who play and it becoming just a spectator sport. And the new players honing their skills, or former top players, like Martin Kaymer, battling their way back, where will they have opportunities to play? I have always felt, for decades, that a merger in the mens game would not be in the best interests of the sport. Another thing it would be bland and monotonous, the diversity of the courses and cultures is the colour and attraction of golf outside the United States. And when there is something different, combined with a large purse, such as the new Saudi International, of course the top players will get up and travel. But a merger would be very detrimental to players at the middle and beginning levels on tour trying to make a living. It would make it all very pressurised and cut throat.

But there is something in golf which needs a World Tour now, and that is the women’s professional game. Let’s get that established first before tampering with the mens professional circuits. The Ladies European Tour has been in crisis for years and is surely at the point of no return, just like the Ladies Golf Union was at amateur level, and that had to merge with the men at the R&A. But the LET have been incredibly stubborn about maintaining their independence, “they’re in denial” one of their professionals told me. It is time for a merger there, with the LPGA, because the number of tournaments and purses in Europe make a playing career not financially viable any more unless a golfer is supported by a lot of sponsors, and why would the sponsors invest when there is little television coverage? Let’s get a global tour sorted out for the women first, that’s appropriate and needed. But as for merging the mens tours, I still have very strong doubts that its the right thing to do.

I never really had an all time hero golfer. My hero was the writer Peter Dobereiner, gone by the time I discovered him. Here’s one of my favourite pieces of his work

I wish that he was still here, because no one can ever write about golf as well as him, Here is one of his pieces.

“How do you feel when you hear a professional golfer announce that he simply must take a break for a month or so because he has played for three straight weeks?

“I can scarce forebear to burst into tears of sympathy for the poor chap.How incredibly sad in this age of enlightenment that any human being should have to endure three solid weeks of living in five star hotels, being ferried about in courtesy limousines, playing a leisurely eighteen holes a day and getting paid obscenely extravagant amounts of money for it all.

“Just imagine the scene 2,000 feet below ground in the Welsh valleys where Taffy Jones, cramped in a two foot seam, is hacking at the coal face with his pick, soaked in his own sweat in the foetid heat.

”Why are you sobbing, Taff?”

”I was just thinking about those poor bloody golfers having to play three, even four weeks in a row before they can take off for a month’s fishing. It’s the sheer inhumanity of it. I can’t help myself crying when I think about the affront to the dignity of man to have to earn a living in those appalling conditions”.

”Yes, yes I know that it is the mental strain of playing top level competitive golf that makes it necessary for the superstars to take off for Barbados at frequent intervals. The reason I know is that I was present for the press interview when a top golfer railed at the assembled company that we did not know, that we could never know, the pressures involved in championship golf.

“I glanced around the room and identified among my colleagues a commando who had survived the Normandy beaches, two wartime pilots, one RAF one Navy, a guardsman who had been right through the desert campaign in World War II and a retired professional boxing champion. The irony of the situation prompted a moment of idle speculation about whether the historian Sir Walter Simpson, might not have had a point when he wrote that excessive golfing dwarfs the intellect.

“He went further and suggested that a stunted intellect was a prerequisite for good golf, saying in The Art Of Golf published in 1892 that”the more fatuously vacant the mind is, the better for play. It has been observed that absolute idiots play steadiest. An uphill game does not make them press, nor victory within their grasp render them careless. Alas! We cannot all be idiots. Next to the idiotic, the dull, unimaginative mind is best for golf. In a professional competition I would prefer to back the sallow, dull looking fellow player than any more eager looking fellow.

”I would take issue with Sir Walter when he bemoans the fact that we cannot all be idiots. For myself I have no problems at all in turning into a raving halfwit on the golf course . And I have observed that many great statesmen have this same faculty. Indeed what sets the professional apart from the amateur, far more than any disparity in skill, is the pro’s ability to retain his sanity while playing this daft game.

”But is it true that the golfer who is as thick as two planks has an advantage over rivals who are less intellectually challenged? The evidence is by no means conclusive.

Bobby Jones was an intellectual giant as well as being my nominee for the greatest golfer of all time. Furthermore he had a highly imaginative and creative mind, thereby challenge another of Simpson’s conclusions “the poetic temperament is the worst for golf.

Peter Thomson could have succeeded at whatever he set his mind to, hence the pressure put upon him to go into politics. The fact that he did not endorses the high intelligence of the man. Tom Watson, who tied Thomson’s five Open championships probably equals him in weight and quality of grey matter.

Jack Nicklaus would wince and snort with indignation if you described him as an intellectual, but the reason he became the most successful golfer in the history if the game owed as much, or more  to a well-disciplined as a good swing.

No doubt there are plenty of golfers in the current top 100 of the world  rankings who do not have to be reminded by their caddies to put up their umberellas when it rains, But there are some players today who think PR simply represents the first two letters in prat, who clearly believes that they do not need the media any more.

That is a rash assumption. And those who have declared war against the communicators should think again, because they are embarked on a suicide mission. Anyone who thinks he can win such a war simply proves Sir Walter’s point.

Bold statement to American broadcaster ESPN from Hank Haney who coached Tiger Woods from 2004-2010. He said, after Jordan Spieth missed the cut in this week’s Sony Open

“He’s got to get his putting figured out. He has to. I think it has spilled over into the rest of the game.

“When I watch him putt he visibly has the yips. There is a tremor in the short putts.His hands were shaking in the Ryder Cup. He has missed more short putts than anyone on tour”.

I think there is a vulnerability in the way Spieth starts his putts as shown in this clip, the way he moves the putter away from the line before he makes the putt, it’s a nervy move.

After missing the cut by one shot – he had rounds of 73,66 – he admitted on Friday ” I put a really bad stroke on a par putt on 6 today. I had been thinking about my stroke on every putt I had hit from yesterday until that hole. I just told myself to point and shoot and stop thinking”.

Spieth, who married fiance Annie Verret on November 24 last year, took time off for a long honeymoon and said “I knew coming in that my game was off and I needed to kind of fine tune. I’m in a good space given what happened”. Spieth’s putting statistics for last season were tied 123rd.

Having seen a professional golfer – Bernhard Langer – play through one of the worst cases of the yips imaginable in the 1980s, it was painful to watch but he survived to go onto huge, and long sustained success. No doubt Jordan Spieth’s mentor, in my opinion the best putter of all time, Ben Crenshaw, will be on hand to help him overcome this.