Chris Lewis's Golf Blog

A One-Word Fix for the FedEx Cup

Sorry to have been away so long. Had such a bad case of that FedEx Cup fever that I completely forgot about golf for four full days.

Well, almost. A couple of stray Tour-related thoughts did beset me. The first, actually, was pretty much the same one the Boston Globe's Jim McCabe had a few days ago: that the word "playoffs" didn't seem quite right for what we're being sold right now.

Then another thought flitted through my head: that much carping and quibbling could be avoided if we simply replaced it with the word "series."

Think about it. You get together a few dozen players at the end of the year and play a little four-tournament series. No claim to be bigger than any other four tournaments-- just something a little different. What adds a little spice is that, for a change, what happens in one tournament has some bearing on another, which in golf normally never happens. To make things interesting, you have a bonus prize for the overall winner. In the words of Bob Ryan (the one from Entourage, not the one from the Boston Globe): Is that something that you might be interested in?

Problems, of course, would only arise if you rechristened our series "playoffs." "Playoffs" denotes a summarizing event. Using that word would suggest our series established a season champion. Also, "playoffs" would have to be exclusionary-- meaning that if you didn't win at least once during the season (or, okay, at least play pretty damn well), you shouldn't stand a chance of getting invited. And "playoffs" would mean that every participant (absent a bye system) has to show up.

It's pretty clear that golf militates against the idea of playoffs. For about a half-century success in the sport has been defined by the four majors. "Playoffs," by definition, subsumes lesser events, dwarfs them in importance. If golf were to have playoffs, they'd have to be more significant than any four regular season events combined.

That being the case, it would be crazy to call our series "playoffs," right? If you did anyway, and programmed the hype machine to cram it down fans' throats, that would only make matters worse. Who would ever try such a thing? It would take a cynical executive indeed to suggest that the ticket-buyers and TV watchers couldn't tell rubies from rocks.

But what if you set up a season-ending series and-- humbly, unassumingly-- simply let it be called a series? (Every playoff is a series, but not every series is a playoff.) Our "series" would concede that the majors are more important. As for participants, since it's not a playoff, and only a series, it really doesn't matter how many players are included. But purely to make things interesting, we would use previous events' performance to limit the field, using the series, say, as an independent compliment to the season, as opposed to a definitive conclusion to the season. Absenteeism? Well, it's only a series-- not playoffs-- so if you think a week of rest will do you good, have an ice pack on us.

Even if we got a big-time sponsor for this series, we wouldn't want to oversell it before it even began, because that would like our saying it's more imporant than anything else, which it obviously isn't. (And nobody likes false advertising.) Yeah, I know-- placing the series at the end of the season would suggest it's some kind of finale. But if someone wanted to interpret it that way, that would be his problem. No one would suggest that Labor Day is more important than the Fourth of July just because it comes at the end of the summer.

(Of course, NASCAR uses the word "series" to describe its regular season, and "playoffs" for its 10-race climax, the Chase for the Cup. And of course, it is not unheard of for another sport to go to NASCAR to steal ideas. But even if the NASCAR thing works for them, who's to say we have to abide by their nomenclature? If the flame-retardant suits want to call their season a "series," their Chase a "playoff," and Chase winner Ricky Bobby their season "champion," well, then, shake and bake! What's good for the goose isn't necessarily good for the gorilla.)

So whaddya think? This series (not playoff) idea sounds pretty good, right?

Okay, I know. The die is already cast. But all we need to fix this mess is a little rebranding! An offer to the Tour brass: I could fly down to Ponte Vedra tomorrow, flesh out the above ideas, help rejigger some sponsorship contracts, and we could be all set to relaunch this thing next week in Chicago. Is that something you might be interested in?

So, Was That, Like, The Play-In Game?

Quoth Feherty: "What a finish, from two of the least demonstrative guys you'll ever see."

That pretty much says it. We await a long magazine profile of Stricker (teary-eyed, left), hoping it does justice to the apathy as well as the swing ills in his recent past. And we're not holding our breath until Choi wins again. But the two main things we take away from this week have nothing to do with the two top finishers.

First, it appears that sometimes I am so eager to see a good young player fully blossom that I get, how should I say, a little ahead of myself. With today having sobered me up, I'm now not so sure Hunter Mahan is ready for prime-time. As Kostis rightly pointed out, Hunter has this tendency to follow good or great rounds with bad ones (Atlanta: R2 69, R3 78; D.C. R1 70, R2 74; Canadian R1 62, R2 74; Akron R1 67, R2 73; yesterday 62, today 76). Everybody on Tour can go low. The kid's got to get more consistent, and maybe chew up a few more Jay Williamsons at lesser events, before I'll tout him again on a big stage.

Second, it looks like Tiger's week on the shelf didn't hurt him too badly. He got passed by three players in the FedEx standings, which was pretty much the under-and-over. The scenario that could have really bit him-- more than three top ten-ranked players having big weeks at the same time-- didn't materialize. (Blame MC'ers Howell and Singh, above all.) (Click the NY Times graphic on the left for the basics on how the points work.) This, after all, is golf: the top guys don't perform well week in and week out (well, except for one). But it could have been a lot worse. A couple of 100+ guys could have had the weeks of their lives, and made everybody-- except Tiger, but especially the Tour brass-- look really silly.

Sunday Morning All-Superhero Blogpost

Looks like the first FedEx Cup playoff event is going to offer an interesting Sunday for golf fans, if not for the average sports fan. With no superstars in the mix the TV numbers will probably be low, but you could do a lot worse than a great comeback story, a star on the rise, and a proven winner who looks ready to become a top 10, or even top 5, player in the world.

Indeed, Choi has been the revelation of this season. It's a shame we don't know him better, because his story is at least as interesting as Angel Cabrera's. As for his golf, we knew he could hit it, but the big surprise has been his game inside 100 yards. Who knew that a guy built like this could have such touch? It's like finding out that the Incredible Hulk makes a great souffle.

You probably remember Steve Stricker's tearful, astoundingly sincere declaration at the U.S. Open that he had to get "tougher on the inside." That moment made it hard not to pull for him, but also hard not to think Choi or Hunter Mahan will overtake him. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Mahan blows by both of them like Speed Racer. By the way, check out Steve Elling's very nice piece on Mahan this morning, complete with great stuff from Mahan's mental coach, Neale Smith, and his caddie, John Wood, who offers this bon mot about his boss: "I hate to say it, but I don't think he's just on a hot streak anymore. I think this is how good he really is."

In my book, every New Orleans resident who had to deal with Katrina is a superhero. That's why I'll be rooting for Michael Thompson at today's U.S. Am final. Will also have to flip over to catch the end of Lorena Ochoa's sixth win of the season. Seems like the dominant-women's-player torch has been passed pretty smoothly.

To ensure we finish on a down note, can't resist mentioning that the highest-profile member of Stanford's class of '11 has missed another cut. Brian Hewitt's is the latest piece to try to figure out what's going on in that tiara-bearing head. That freshman beanie will look much better on it, no? Speaking of fallen prodigies, am I the only one who has lately been beseiged by memories of Jennifer Capriati, c. 1994, getting arrested after a little teenage partying in a motel room?

Superhero P.S.: How on earth do you suppose Geoff Shackelford got into a USGA press room? Maybe he slipped under the door, like Mr. Fantastic?

Twelve Pithy Observations about the FedEx Cup

1. Overpromise, underdeliver. Is that the FedEx way?

2. Here’s the cognitive dissonance: In American pro sports, if it’s the playoffs, you’ve gotta play, unless the structure gives you a bye. You can’t choose sit out. If you can, they’re not playoffs.

3. Again, bigger than the game.

4. STEVE SANDS: Does it feel different this week from another Barclays week because of the playoffs?

VIJAY SINGH: No. Another Barclays tournament.

STEVE SANDS: There’s not more excitement?

VIJAY SINGH: (Shakes head and shrugs.) No.

The only bright side to this entire mess has been the unparalleled surfeit of tour pro honesty. Well, okay, with one or two exceptions. 

5. Tim Finchem's Wednesday press conference was the closest we will come in my lifetime to deep space communication. Clearly, this man lives on another planet:

I went over to the British Open and the first thing on everybody's lips was, "Boy, we love your advertising about the FedExCup, that's great stuff."

At first read I can imagine that sentiment being expressed by some Eton-Oxbridge R&Aer with a crystal goblet in his hand at some prissy pre-Open governing-body strokefest. Then I read it again, and trip over the “boy.” I swear, I will cut off my ears and hand them to Finchem if he can document anyone over there saying those exact words to him.

Then there was this attempt to spin a question about people not understanding the playoff system:

People didn't understand The First Tee and questioned it, and why would you want to go out in inner cities and get kids involved with the game of golf?

Jeepers, Mr. Finchem, what kind of people do you hang around with? Seriously, what kind of backwards, reactionary creep would say something like that?

6. Is it indeed possible to launch a successful golf playoff series in the Tiger Era? Think about it. If he wins the playoffs, they wasted our time by telling us what we already knew. If he doesn't win the playoffs, they failed because they didn't tell us what we know to be true. These events, qua playoffs, are crippled by his dominance. In a Tiger-less world, it would seem pretty alluring to have a series where evenly-matched players (this year, say, the major winners plus Mickelson and Singh and Furyk) duked it out for a big prize. Right now? Not so much.

7. However weird-looking this four-headed monster is, it’s still way more interesting than the last few years' two months of nothing followed by a snooze of a Tour Championship.

8. If the Tour thinks this tournament is as important as a major—or even the Players Championship-- why was there a Wednesday pro-am? No wonder Tiger would rather play the Wachovia.

9. Only 24 of 144 eliminated this week? That doesn’t feel like the playoffs. It feels like something they should have done with a pencil in the car on the way to the airport in Greensboro last Sunday night.

10. To quote a reader over on Shackelford’s site, it's “really going to be a bummer on Sunday at The Tour Championship if the leaders of the FedEx Cup are not the leaders of the actual tournament.” This is an excellent argument for the last tournament being match play (at least in its final two days, maybe with the two previous-week point leaders given a bye until Saturday).

11. Actually, there is one even grimmer scenario: if Tiger (or someone else, for that matter) locks it up in Chicago and doesn’t even play in Atlanta. If there isn’t a clause stating that you can’t win the playoffs if you don’t play Atlanta, well, there should be.

12. Okay, this one isn't brief, because it involves a personal anecdote from my deep, dark past.

When I was in high school, I had season tickets for the New York Rangers (nosebleed tier, obstructed view, section 440, row D, seat 9, $4.50 per game, paid for with my Saturday night job of putting the New York Sunday papers together at the newstand owned by my roller hockey coach). (Bizarrely, Joe LaCava, Fred Couples' longtime caddie, had a seat a couple of sections away.)

My cheap seats, ironically, were on the same level as the luxury boxes. Occasionally, we would see some kind of celeb get out of the elevator on our level to go to the boxes, making for weird little moments of mingling between the high-falutin' and the hoi polloi.

Before the 1979-80 NHL season (boy, this dates me) the league instituted a new playoff structure that gave spots to 16 of the league's 21 teams. It was, in a word, ridiculous. One night during a game, shortly after the new structure was announced (this might have been in early '79), I was on my way to the bathroom or something when I ran into none other than NHL commissioner John Ziegler (pictured, on right). He had been waiting for the elevator and was just stepping into it when our eyes met.

I was a mouthy little brat even at that tender age, so I didn't hesitate to say to him, "Hey, commissioner, what's all this stuff with the playoffs?" (Probably not my exact words. But I don't recall being impolite.)

"What's the matter?" he grinned, with a smug look I'll never forget. "Don't you like the playoffs?"

What he said I remember verbatim. I also recall with absolute certainty that he was still grinning when the elevator doors closed.

Looking back, that moment probably went a long way toward breeding a certain hostility toward authority figures. But what does it have to do with the FedEx Cup?

Well, the appropriate response at that long-ago moment, had I been able to summon it up, would have been something like, "Not as much as you like milking the game for revenue, Mr. Commish." And that repost would make just as much sense now. I mean, none of this is about proving anything competitively (see 6 above). Its baldly about making the players richer, and doing it not on the basis of fan enthusiasm, but corporate support.

That just feels icky to me. I mean, it's already bad enough that the broadcasts are unwatchable live because of the ads, and every one of these guys walks around like a billboard. For years one of the first things I'd see every season was Tiger Woods at his Wednesday presser at the Buick Invitational in the ballroom at the La Jolla Hilton, surrounded by all those GM execs and whatever kind of branding ballyhoo. Invariably I'd think to myself: Does this guy still play golf, or is he just here to sell me a car?

Some people think we're inured to this kind of thing, but I don't think so. The relentless branding may be making the players richer, but it's also hurting the product. It must be one of the factors in the decline in spectatorship numbers. (I would love to see what happened to the Tour's TV numbers if they ran a few events like the Masters.) At any rate, it will be hard for me to watch any of these FedEx Cup events without a niggling feeling that I'm trapped in an infomercial. That’s why I feel like boycotting them and just watching the U.S. Amateur. 

Four Golf Stats We'd Like to See

Earlier this week, while the rest of the golf world was at the Westchester airport watching Tour execs throw rose petals at Phil Mickelson’s feet, I was sitting at my desk thinking, why not take a break from the FedEx hubub and go off-topic for a few paragraphs?

The unhelpfulness of golf statistics has bugged me all year. My irritation began in January, during the Sony, with the Golf Channel’s WinZone stat telling me what a brilliant Sunday closer Charles Howell was, while my memory screamed otherwise. Then came the week when I noticed that the Tour's Total Driving stat was compiled by surprisingly simple process of adding together a player's ranks in Driving Distance and Driving Accuracy. Then there was the spell when the accuracy stats said Tiger was driving the ball wildly, but he himself insisted he was driving it well.

Funny thing is, this was supposed to be the golden age of golf statistics. ShotLink, now about five years old, was supposed to be revolutionary, giving us more numbers than we knew what to do with. Sadly, that prediction was right. We have all the data we could hope for, but we still can't put it to good use.

The problem is that we're not asking the data the right questions. Golf stats, in other words, still await their Einstein (or at least their Bill James), the kind of person who can not only crunch the numbers, but figure out how to make them tell us instructive things about the game.

In the hopes of encouraging golf's first Sabermetrician to step forward, I hereby offer four new golf statistics I’d like to see.

1. Everybody knows that the Tour's putting stats are unreliable. Putts Per Round is compromised by guys who miss a lot of greens but have great short games, and never have anything longer than five feet. Putts Per GIR is greatly affected by how close a player tends to hit it. ShotLink has given us percentages from certain distances, which has been great. Better would be something Peter Kostis (and perhaps others) proposed a long time ago, but only now, with ShotLink, is practical. Let's call it Average Length of Putt Holed (or "ALPH"-- cute, no?). The premise is that better putters tend to hole out from greater distances; poorer putters wind up most often holing out from a foot or two after missing the putt that really mattered. How the stat would work: take the total distance of putts holed, and divide by the number of holes played.

2. ShotLink also ought to make possible a better Total Driving Stat by incorporating its Fairway Proximity numbers (which, through GPS data, measure the distance by which a player misses the fairway when he misses it). Tiger, of course, loves the Fairway Proximity stat-- it allows him to insist that his accuracy off the tee is better than it looks. And he has a point, at least insofar as relative wildness should be part of any measure of who drives the ball best.

How to improve the current stat, however, would make for a long conversation. To begin with, one might start by using ShotLink to compute an average miss from an imaginary fairway centerline (instead of just using hit fairways and missed fairways). It would be crucial, however, to build in a way to reward distance, so that the guy who usually missed the centerline by 2 yards at 305 would be ranked higher than the guy who missed by 2 yards at 285.

(It turns out, by the way, that I'm not the only person unhappy with current Tour Total Driving stat. Three Northeastern University professors recently published their own overhaul. I won't go into it too deeply, but two things trouble me about their alternative stat: (a) its best driver, Charles Warren, is also the current Tour stat's best driver, indicating, say, that the Tour's stat may not be so bad after all; (b) when there are radical differences in rank, they're easily attributable to a dimunition of importance in driving accuracy (Bubba Watson, who hits 55.34% of his fairways, goes from 82nd to 2nd; J.B. Holmes, at 56.37%, goes from 61st to 3rd).)

3. My Sunday Pressure Index (another clever acronym: "SPI"!) would provide the greatest mathematical and creative challenge, but perhaps the greatest reward. If you look closely at the Golf Channel's WinZone statistic (which I'm told is still cited on their Thursday-Friday broadcasts), the first thing you notice (at least if you're me) is that it doesn't make any distinction between performance on different days. To me that makes no sense, if you want an indication of the likelihood someone will win. If you watch any golf at all you know that some of the best players on Tour on Thursday are some of the worst players on Tour on Sunday. How the new stat would work, generally speaking, is this. First, isolate the way a player's leaderboard standing changes over every Sunday he's played on Tour, but only when he's in contention. (This stat shouldn't care if you go from 70th to 50th). Then develop a point system by which you're awarded for upward moves not just on the basis of positions climbed, but also, geometrically, for how high you eventually get. (In this way, a move from 3rd into 1st is rewarded more than a move from 4th into 2nd.) Conversely, you would be punished for moving backward on Sunday, the more so if you're in the last couple of groups. You wouldn't need ShotLink for this, but you would need to dump an awful lot of data from the Tour's record books into your computer.

4. Same thing with the kind of player consistency index I've mentioned here before. A few months ago I tried to illustrate Tiger's consistency at majors with a preliminary "Majors Consistency Index," using standard deviation to show that, at majors, there was less variance in Tiger's day-to-day scores than in Jack Nicklaus's. Now, I'm not sure that stat's worth keeping for every player. (In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not.) Much better would be stats that tracked every player's consistency (a) from round to round, and (b) from week to week. Naturally such stats would judge consistency and what we call streakiness. Also, by indicating especially steady periods, they would also be pointing out for us the periods most representative of a player's true talents (since a thing's nature is best judged when it's at equilibrium).

Plan 9 from Oceania

First of all, thank you for tearing yourself away from the final FedEx Cup point standings for long enough to join me here.

So, this is always how it works, isn't it? The menace always creeps up on us while we're looking the other way. Before long, the Australians will have completely taken over American tournament golf.

When history looks back at this weekend (if it looks back at it at all) it may well judge that its most important development was not Lorena Ochoa's fifth victory of the year, or Brandt Snedeker's final round 63 to win the Wyndham Championship, but Nick Flanagan's 63 to win the Nationwide Tour Xerox Classic. (That's him at left following home the winning putt, his no-fear 30-footer on 18.)

This, his third Nationwide W on the season, earns the 23-year-old Aussie (and 2003 U.S. Amateur champ) a so-called battlefield promotion, enabling him to start playing PGA Tour events as soon as the Tour Championship's over. (You know, at the beginning of the fall finish series card quest, or whatever they're calling it.)

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I've mentioned before in this space that Flanagan is part of a generation of future Aussie stars that will likely eclipse today's Ogilvys and Appelbys.

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After the year he's had, I'm convinced that he (if not Jason Day) is the best of the lot.

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Trust me: Flanagan will have his his first PGA Tour win by the end of 2008, if not 2007.

Sunday Morning Cartoon Blogpost with (the) Big Bird: Is Tiger's Hookey-Playing Defensible?

My initial reaction to Tiger Woods’ skipping next week’s Barclays Classic, the inaugural event of the inaugural FedEx Cup playoffs, was more or less the same as everyone else’s: that it was a public insult to the Tour-- “flipping them the bird,” as one of my media cronies privately described it—and kind of an arrogant way of demonstrating that he’s bigger than the game.

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In the cool, clear light of Sunday morning, however, I’m having second thoughts. And that shouldn’t surprise you. After all, sportswriters like me were flipping the bird at the FedEx Cup playoffs long before Tiger was. I’m not saying that I now think my colleagues are wrong. Far from it. But I am saying that the situation is more complex than it looks, and that there’s more than one villain here.

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Tiger has steadily expressed reservations about this playoff series—its convoluted math, its lack of importance compared to the majors, its deferred payout, and so forth. (I wouldn’t be surprised if he chuckled in assent when Lefty suggested they should throw a bunch of cash on the 18^th green at the Tour Championship, like they do when they get heads up at the World Series of Poker.)

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I’ll bet, however, that his chief dislike is the way the playoff system disregards the regular season. This year Woods won five tournaments, two-and-a-half times as many as anyone else, and nearly $8 million, almost twice as much as Vijay Singh ($4.8 million) or Phil Mickelson ($4.2 million), his two nearest rivals. FedEx points? Woods had 30,574. Vijay Singh, in second, had 19,129.

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Yet the FedEx Cup system obliterates nearly every trace of that dominance. In reseeding the players solely by rank it effectively reduces to a hair how much better he was. As we now stand, Tiger has 100,000 points to Vijay’s 99,000—the same amounts they’d have if Woods and Singh’s regular season records were identical except, say, for Tiger making one more putt. That’s just unfair. If this were pro football, we’d all simply nod and say that Woods deserves his bye week.

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These cockamamie rankings, of course, were set up like this precisely to force the top players to play all four events. Tiger no doubt recognizes that, and took umbrage. This, I think, is for him the big issue here. There’s nothing this guy likes less than being told what to do. Skipping next week is his way of showing it. Woods probably feels that the Tour flipped him the bird first, and he’s just returning the favor.

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(There’s a weird irony here which won’t fully come into view for another week or so. Because the system gives Woods so little credit for having a much better year than everyone else-- enabling any top 50 player who wins next week (and a handful of others) to pass him-- Tiger is much likelier to be chasing than leading when we get to Boston for the second event, and perhaps even in Chicago for the third. Watching him chase will lend these playoffs a kind of interest they might never have had otherwise.)

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I haven’t yet mentioned what seems to be the most popular complaint among my peers about Tiger: that in skipping he’s gone back on his word after having given the playoff schedule “his blessing,” or “signed off on them,” or however you want to put it.

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Sorry, but no matter how much lip service he’s paid to supporting the playoffs, I doubt he ever gave the Tour anything resembling his approval. None of us knows what Tiger actually said to the Tour brass about the playoffs, if he said anything at all. My guess is that he never said much. Tiger’s never been all that interested in discussions about anything policy-related. Phil Mickelson would be the kind of guy to ring the suits and strongly voice a scheduling opinion, but that’s never been Tiger’s style.

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Those who’ve spent time behind closed doors with Woods have always remarked how disengaged he can be from the business going on around him—from talking on the phone or playing videogames during interviews, to chipping golf balls around a Scottsdale hotel room while Earl and his friends were laying out the framework for his foundation. With that in mind, I’m guessing his discussions with Tour execs weren’t all that pointed, even if the Tour wanted them to be.

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Yes, Woods and Tim Finchem sit down from time to time, but it would be a serious mistake to think such meetings were Camp David-like, pact-producing affairs. The last time Finchem and Woods sat down face to face, I believe, was last fall in Akron. The next day Finchem appeared before the press and said there was no need for drug testing. The day after that Tiger stepped before the mikes and slapped the commissioner clear across the sports section, saying testing should begin “tomorrow.” So much for being on the same page on the big issues.

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Tiger doesn’t see himself as working for (or “with” or even “among”) the Tour. I’m quite sure that in his eyes he didn’t bless or sign off on anything. I would be shocked to learn Tiger ever literally told the Tour he would play all four events. Think about it. Would any Tiger Woods you know agree to play seven out of nine weeks (which is what his assent would have amounted to, considering the PGA and WGC-Bridgestone before the series, and the Presidents Cup after it)?

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It’s more likely, I’d think, that the Tour was selectively deaf about any signals he might have sent to the contrary, and scheduled four playoff events simply because they could sell that number of events, hoping that maybe he might play them all. I don’t think they ever really wanted, or ever really solicited, a flat answer from him about whether or not he would play. “Maybe,” after all, is much easier to sell to sponsors than “No.” (That, my friends, may be the single greatest lesson of golf’s growth in the Tiger Woods era).

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Of course there’s been some double-talk involved here—the “I intend to play” nonsense, and so forth—just as there is with any public figure trying to protect his q-rating. But just think about how bad it would have been for everyone if Woods had said earlier on that he wasn’t playing the Barclays. Actually, think about how bad it would have been if he had said it back in February-- which, in all honestly, was probably when he made the decision-- and then refused to do the commercials, and so forth. How horrible for the Tour would that have been? Would it have been preferable to the double-talk? In my view, he did the Tour a favor by not revealing his intentions sooner.

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So yes, I do think Tiger was disingenuous. And I do think he flipped the Tour the bird. But I bet he feels like he had pretty good reasons to do it.

Tiger Lays Off a Playoff

It's official: no Tiger. I include ESPN.com's version of the story because of the comments that follow it. I find this comment particularly interesting, because it's evidently from the kind of person whose first love is not golf, but was supposed to ushered into golf fandom by Mr. Woods:

AaronFan755 (8/17/2007 at 1:40 PM)

... [T]his is a pretty sizable blow to the PGA. You tout a playoff system all year and then your top player, who has owned 2007, decides that the first 25% of the playoffs aren't worthy of his presence. Tough to attach much credibility to this series of events. Will be doubly bad if Mickelson/Furyk have any lingering injury problems and aren't competitive or have to pull out.

... Golf continues to be impossible for those of us who live in the greater NYC area. A major every couple of years, and that's it. No other top events are held within a reasonable distance, and now Woods will be skipping the Barclays. Myself and my fiance purchased tickets to this event, at $106 a pop for a weekly pass. when you consider that she has little golf knowledge, and wants to see TW, coupled with the cost of travel etc, this is a fairly high sum to pay to NOT see the main attraction whom we assumed was going.

Poor guy. Thanks to golf, his best live sports option this summer is Barry Bonds at Shea.

Ten Thoughts for a Slow Week

1. Where is it written in stone that the Tour can’t take a week off in the middle of its regular season? Seriously, there’s no good reason (beside charity, which the Tour could make amends for in other ways) for there to be a tournament this week. And wouldn’t it make sense to slip in a dark week before the big-time, superlatively important playoffs? Sure, skipping a week would be squandering an opportunity to feed its rank-and-file, but at what point do sponsors start to feel fleeced, and weeks like this become damaging to the Tour? This is one Sunday when the sponsor CEO's TV speech may be the most interesting part of the entire event. If he can get any words out from between his clenched teeth.

2. Considering that the world might never again be hungry for Woody Austin anecdotes, let me offer one more-- one that perfectly illustrates that for this man the proverbial glass isn't so much half-full as bone-dry empty. A few years ago, I was doing a little piece on the LASIK trend among Tour players. Woody was one of the last holdouts, and I asked him why. "Look," he told me. "I know that it's highly unlikely that somebody's vision is going to get messed up because of that surgery, but if there's one person in a million who's going to go blind because of it, that one person is going to be me."

3. There was plenty of talk last week about changes in Tiger's swing, most of it vague and puzzling. Leave it to Jaime Diaz to provide some clarity. (The Tiger stuff is on pages 2 and 3, after the Ernie stuff.)

Woods arrived at Firestone for the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational admittedly a bit adrift. His practice with coach Hank Haney was dedicated to reviewing fundamentals, and Haney left after Woods' first-round 68.

But based on their session together, Woods built toward some important fixes. The duo discovered that playing in the wind of Carnoustie had caused Woods to get too low in his posture and swing flatter. When Woods began to stand taller, it allowed him to swing with more freedom and square the club more easily. Woods also remembered to work on letting his head rotate toward the target through impact, an Annika Sorenstam move that Haney favors because it combats Woods' tendency to lower into his downswing and become "ball bound."

More subtly, Woods decided he had gone too far in "holding off" the rotation of the clubhead through the ball -- something he has worked to ingrain under Haney -- to the point that he was hitting far too many blocks to the right....

"He's got his positions so much better in his swing that really all he has to do is relax and let it flow," Haney said Friday from his home in Dallas, where he spent the week caring for his wife, who was ill. It was the first time he has not accompanied Woods at a major since they began officially working together in early 2004.

4. There was also some chatter last week about Hank Haney no longer serving as Woods' swing coach. Its immediate cause, of course, was Haney's not showing up in Tulsa, but that was easy to explain. (As above, family medical matter.) The underlying cause? Good question. I watched Tim Rosaforte's little Golf Channel spot on the matter about six times, but still didn't quite understand it, despite trying as hard as I could to read between the frames. Helpfully, Jaime's article (again, as above) also broached the state of the relationship. Hank told Jaime that "he will be spending more time at home and plans to cut back his days on the road with Woods (which have averaged 120 days a year) in the future." What's happening here, I guess, is that Hank has simply told Tiger that he just can't be that kind of road warrior anymore. (We should underline that the "120 days" is just Tiger-- it doesn't include Haney's other commitments.) I suppose no one has put it in precisely those words-- with Hank dictating terms to Tiger--because no one wants to offend The Boss.

5. Speaking of worthwhile reading: I know this has already been posted on other blogs, but I'd be remiss not to mention Geoff Ogilvy's PGA guest column in the Scotsman on Sunday last week. If I'm not mistaken, this is the second collaboration between Geoff and John Huggan (the first was from Carnoustie). Nice pairing-- keep up the good work, boys. I especially love Geoff calling out Augusta at the end:

Still, the best aspect of this week is my hope that the obvious success of this type of course set up will have a positive effect on the other American majors. My feeling is that Augusta National will have been paying attention to what has been going on. They are a proud club and, while I'm sure they will never admit it, they do listen to the world of golf. They won't like the fact that there is currently such a negative impression of their course, so over the next three or four years I can see them moving the Masters back to what it once was.

6. Despite Phil and Tiger’s declarations that they “intend” to play all the FedEx playoff events (beginning with next week’s Barclays), speculation persists that one or both will take the week off. Tiger reports look increasingly grim; if they're true, can't wait to hear how he frames his explanation. 

As for Phil, well, his taking the week off would provoke much scrutiny. If he suddenly pleads injury, he’s going to look, in retrospect, like he should have taken a few more weeks off earlier this summer. Worse, he’s going to put himself in the same boat (Nooo!) as Michelle Wie, lending credence to conjectures that healing was deprioritized in favor of pleasing sponsors.

(Speaking of Ms. Wie, I was shocked to learn that she’d be playing the Women’s Canadian Open this week—shouldn’t she be out buying school supplies?)

The idea of sponsors influencing playing schedules got a little nod in another excellent Jaime Diaz piece, his analysis of the Wie situation in this month’s Golf Digest. He writes,

Some have speculated that Wie is playing to meet performance benchmarks in her contracts. But Cindy Davis of Nike said, "We never want any of our athletes to play injured, and we have placed no pressure or expectation on Michelle to play." Said Wie spokesman Jesse Derris: "She is not playing to satisfy contracts. She is playing to gain strength in her wrist."

Of course, a couple of form-letter denials hardly settle the matter. But even if they did, the issue of satisfying present contracts is only half the point. Playing when you’re hurt isn't only about the short term. It’s also about setting a precedent by which potential future sponsors will judge you. If you’re perceived to be the kind of person who won’t gut it up, you become a much less attractive endorser.

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Such considerations may not have figured into Mickelson's and Wie's decisions. But I think we can be pretty sure they’ve crossed their minds. Or at very least their agents’.

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Perhaps relatedly, word has it that Lefty will break form this winter in two ways—first, he’ll take the tarp off the sticks and play every once in a while, and second, he’ll play abroad. Why would this relate to sponsorship questions? Well, I’d wager that it’s not just appearance fees drawing him onto foreign soil, but also commitments/ opportunities with new or current or new sponsors. (Traveling for such reasons would definitely be in keeping with Tiger’s Asian m.o.)

7. From our “Never Thought We’d Mention These Two People in the Same Sentence” Department: Don’t look now, but Davis Love-- of all people-- is turning into the Tour’s new ne'er-do-well Bad Boy, its button-down answer to Lindsay Lohan. Lately, every time you turn around, he's gotten himself into trouble with somebody or another: first he skips the Canadian Open, played at a course whose greens he was paid to redo, and then he bails on a tournament where he’s the defending champ. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But you watch. Before you know it, this guy’s going to have a court-ordered blood-alcohol detector strapped to his ankle!

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8. As much as I hate to disagree with my colleagues across the aisle (at least on this issue), I’ve got to differ with John Huggan (and Shackelford, who appears to be of the same mind) about Gary Player picking Mike Weir for the Presidents Cup team. Yeah, I know. By the numbers, it doesn’t make any sense. And the justifications are weak. Yet in life, there are good decisions, bad decisions, and things you do simply because they’re the right thing. The Weir selection falls into the last category.

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9. The only other drama for me in the Presidents Cups picks was wondering whether or not Mr. Nicklaus would drop the ball on Hunter Mahan. It would have been hideous if Mahan hadn't been picked, not only because he's played well recently, but also because he's really the only young American who's given us reason to believe he might evolve into an elite (read: Top Five) player. Glover and Howell are wonderful guys and fine talents, but Hunter has little glimmers of arrogance and more importantly Sunday mercilessness that I really love. I know it wasn't exactly Tiger Woods he beat down the stretch in Hartford, but I get the same kind of feeling about him that I had about Duval about almost a decade ago-- that he might suddenly reel off a string of wins at any given moment. Moreover, I think Mahan might actually believe, in his heart of hearts, that he could stare down Tiger on a Sunday afternoon. And I don't think I can say that about anyone else on Tour right now. Seriously, I'm jonesing on that scenario the way I was jonesing on Tiger-Phil back in May. Do you think we could get Jack and Gary to put aside the whole Presidents Cup thing and instead have Mahan and Woods play 18 holes of match play?

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10. Was I the only person who nearly fell off the couch Wednesday night when the Golf Channel's piece on Robert Trent Jones, Jr. (and new Washington State course Chambers Bay) had Jones advocating the idea of intentionally uneven tee boxes? Jeez. A sidehill lie off the tee? Isn't golf hard enough already? And if it isn't, is that the best you can do to make it more challenging? Since I don't have the oomph in the psychoanalytic community to have this man committed, I hereby vow never to play another RTJ course again. Yes, that includes dad's Spyglass.

Adieu, Sweltering Hills

Geoff Ogilvy said yesterday that one of these days, someone was going to chase Tiger down. And by gum, today was almost the day. (See? Even in the scoring tent he's still looking over his shoulder!) Good on Woody Austin (and I guess Ernie, but especially Woody) for making a run at him. (And on Bill Macatee for correctly diagnosing, after the round, that it happened because Woody "embraced the emotion of the day rather than fighting it." There's a lesson in that.)

The kid, however, was just playing too good (as O'Meara might have put it). Yes, there were some wayward drivers early on-- the foul balls on 2, 3, and 5 were what cracked the door for Woody and Ernie, as Tiger played those holes in let's say one-and-a-half over (5 being a par-five). But the putter and short game were still impeccible, and that absolves a lot of sins. As does keeping the driver in the bag for most of the last two-thirds of the round (although the driver he hit on 15 (left) to set up a key birdie was a beaut).

While we're on the subject of Tiger, a couple of loose ends: left is a screen grab of Tiger's swing that shows his high hands (as discussed in this morning's post); on the right is one taken at a point at which Kostis was stressing that Tiger's arms at impact were "identical to their postion at address" and that, "by getting his arms in front of him, he can be softer through the release." Not quite sure what those last two points mean, except that positions at impact are all caused by something beforehand, and the something beforehand is maybe what would be more interesting to hear about. We await a better, fuller description of Tiger's purported swing tweak, if there really was one ....

Before signing off, some quick kudos:

1. Nick Faldo. Very early in today's broadcast (before the wayward drivers), Nantz solicited some revisionist praise for Tiger, suggesting that some people (like me for instance) were wrong in raising "questions about Tiger's ability to handle this course," with its doglegs and shortage of par-fives. Faldo wasn't having it. He correctly pointed out that the key to Tiger's success this week was "a totally different strategy" than the one he employed in 2001, which, being more conservative, was far more effective.

2. Kerry Haig and the PGA, for leaving enough birdies out on the golf course to make for an interesting Sunday. This is now officially the only major in America that doesn't rely on bogeys for its Sunday drama.

3. The comrades-in-arms who soldiered through this tough week, especially the ones who ventured out onto the golf course and walked some holes. To commemorate their efforts we offer this picture (left; click to enlarge). Along the grandstand are, if I'm not mistaken (left to right, starting with the fellow behind Tiger's putter shaft), Hank Gola of the New York Daily News, Sam Weinman of the Westchester Journal, a guy with a towel on his head who I can't recognize, Lawrence Donegan of the (UK) Guardian (with funny hat), Doug Ferguson and Nancy Armour of the Associated Press, Damon Hack of The New York Times, and, well, sorry, can't place the guy to Damon's right, either. (Hey, drop me a mail with corrections, will you?) Good job, all (especially Nancy, for what I'm pretty sure are the first published Sherrie Daly quotes since she exited the clink early last summer). 

UPDATE, 7:20 AM EDT MONDAY: First correction is in-- that's not Nancy Armour, but Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. Keep 'em coming!

Oh, and on the swing tweak front, no specific questions asked in yesterday's Tiger presser, which I guess means that the scribes give no credence to the notion of a truly significant alteration.