It takes awhile, but Adam Scott gets an eagle:
Good thing that Phil Mickelson won and didnít have to endure losing by a stroke. He might have never recovered from this:
Two best videos from The Masters
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Category Archives: Sports – Golf
Shawshank Tiger
It’s Shell Houston Open week
The PGA Tour makes its annual trek to Texas this week for the Shell Houston Open at the Tournament Course at Redstone Golf Club. Itís always a fun event and well worth attending.
After a rocky divorce from The Woodlands and its popular TPC Course, as well as a difficult transition period in which most of the best PGA Tour players avoided the event, the 2009 tournament attracted the best field in the history of the event. The 2010 tournament has followed that up with an arguably an even stronger field as six of the the top 10 players in the World Rankings are playing. As a result, the field is as good as any of the non-major, non-World Golf Championship events on the Tour.
Phil Mickelson (3), Lee Westwood (4), defending SHO champ Paul Casey (5), Martin Kaymer (8), Ernie Els (9) and Padraig Harrington (10) lead the field, while Rory McIlroy (12), Geoff Ogilvy (14), Luke Donald (20), Hunter Mahan (21), Lucas Glover (25), Charl Schwartzel (26), Anthony Kim (27), PGA champ Y.E. Yang (29), Masters champ Angel Cabrera (32) and Vijay Singh (34) are other well-known Tour members in the field. In addition, local fan favorites such as past SHO winners Fred Couples, Adam Scott and Stuart Appleby are playing.
The first Houston Open was in 1922 and the tournament is tied with the Texas Open as the third oldest non-major championship on the PGA Tour behind only only the Western Open (1899) and the Canadian Open (1904). This is the fifth Houston Open to be played on the Tournament Course and the eighth event overall at Redstone, which hosted its first three Houston Opens on the club’s Jacobson-Hardy Course while the Tournament Course was being built.
This is the SHO’s fourth year of being played the week before The Masters and the strong field is further confirmation that the tournamentís move to the week-before-The Masters-date was the right one. The Houston Golf Association continues to do a good job of promoting the tournament with Tour players by grooming the Tournament Course in a manner similar to Augusta National. However, the course is actually a flat-land course that bears little resemblance to the hilly venues of Augusta.
Even with its superior conditioning, the Tournament Course is a not a favorite of either players or spectators. Although is has a decent variety of interesting holes, the routing of the course is an unmitigated disaster, with 16 of the holes separated by a long walk and a drainage ditch from the 1st and 18th holes, the driving range and the clubhouse.
Unfortunately, there is not much the Houston Golf Association can do about that routing problem, so let’s just hope that the course’s superior conditioning and the SHO’s attractive tune-up date for The Masters keeps prompting the top players to overlook the routing problem. Here are a few tips on watching the tournament at Redstone.
Although I’ve had my doubts that the HGA would be able to turnaround the SHO at Redstone, I’m happy to be wrong on that score. Houston has a rich golfing tradition and the HGA is a fine charitable organization. It’s going to be another great week at Redstone, so sit back and enjoy the SHO!
Don’t play this guy
Help for Elk
PGA Tour member and long-time Houstonian Steve Elkington is a Clear Thinkers favorite, so I took notice of this Golf.com article reporting that PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem had raised the ire of several Tour pros by helping Elk gain entry into several PGA Tour events this season. Elk had been fully exempt on the PGA Tour for 23 consecutive years until he finished 183rd on the money list last year and lost his exempt status.
Of course, none of the pros complaining about Finchemís favor to Elk are on this key list voted on by ìwide-ranging surveyî of golfís ìeliteî:
WHO’S THE BEST JOKE-TELLER ON TOUR?
Todd Hamilton: 17%
Steve Elkington: 13%
Harrison Frazar: 8%
Neal Lancaster: 8%
Others receiving votes: Paul Azinger, Rich Beem, Tim Clark, Carlos Franco, Paul Goydos, Peter Jacobsen, Peter Lonard, Nick Price, Chris Riley, Boo Weekley
Given the decidedly unfunny cloud following the PGA Tour around this year, it looks to me as if Finchem has a darn good reason for recommending Elk to tournament sponsors.
Dan Jenkins on Tiger
It was only a matter of time before the best (and crustiest) golf reporter of our time laid the wood to Tiger Woods:
I’ll tell you what Hogan, Palmer and Nicklaus were at their peak.
They were every bit as popular as Tiger, they endured similar demands on their time, but they handled it courteously, often with ease and enjoyment.
They were accessible, likable, knowable, conversant, as gracious in loss as they were in victory, and, above all, amazingly helpful to those of us in the print lodge who covered them.
That was their brand. All the things Tiger never was.
As for Tiger’s brand, boy, did that take a hit.
For all of the Tiger idolaters out there, it must have been like finding out that ice cream sundaes give you gonorrhea. [. . .]
I covered Tiger winning his 14 professional majors, but I can’t say I know him. I knew the smile he put on for TV. I knew the orchestrated remarks he granted us in his press-room interviews. I knew the air he punched when another outrageous putt went in the cup. That’s it.
I once made an effort to get to know the old silicone collector. Tried to arrange dinners with him for a little Q&A, on or off the record, his choice. But the closest I ever got was this word from his agent: "We have nothing to gain."
Now it’s too late.
I’m busy.
Itís a shame that Woods never got around to getting to know Jenkins. He just might have found one of the real friends he needs.
Meanwhile, Golf Digest’s Jaime Diaz — the golf writer who has known Woods the longest and best — provides this more in-depth article on Woods’ life, as well as the expectations and pressures that may have contributed to his secret life.
Different eras, similar swings
Ben Hogan and Anthony Kim.
Winter Golf in The Woodlands
The following are recent photos of the Tournament Course at The Woodlands that I recently took during a brilliant Texas morning in January with my buddies, Jerry Sagehorn and John Stevenson.
The Tournament Course is still known to most Houstonians as “the TPC” from the days when the course was known as the Tournament Players Course at The Woodlands.
Opened as The Woodlands East Course in 1978, the TPC is a wonderful design from the collaboration of Robert Von Hagge and Bruce Devlin from their time together in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
In the mid-1980’s, the Houston Golf Association and the PGA Tour arranged a licensing arrangement with The Woodlands Corporation and The Woodlands Country Club in which the East Course was transformed into a Tournament Players Course with the typical spectator mounds found on such courses. After that, the HGA moved the Houston Open golf tournament to the TPC and, for the following 18 years, the tournament enjoyed its most successful run in its long history. As a result, Shell Oil Corporation decided to become the tournament’s title sponsor, which solidified the Houston Open as one of the top second-tier tournaments on the PGA Tour.
When the HGA decided to move the Houston Open to Redstone in 2002, the license deal with the PGA Tour was terminated and the TPC reverted to The Woodlands Country Club, where it is now one of that club’s three courses and one of the seven courses in The Woodlands. A couple of years ago, the Champions Tour moved its Houston tournament to the TPC, a move that has catapulted that tournament into one of the top Champions Tour events because of the popularity of the TPC among the senior players.
The TPC is a joy to play and one of the best courses in the Houston area. From the men’s tees, it’s a pleasant 6600 yards (131 slope rating; 7000 yards and 138 slope from the tips) and is a great course to walk. It has a wonderful variety of holes, punctuated by the final two holes — 17 (nicknamed “the Devil’s Bathtub”) and 18 – a long par 4 over water – are two of the two finest finishing holes that you will find anywhere.
I love the contrast in the photos between the light brown of the dormant Bermuda grass with the various shades of greens of the trees, winter rye-seeded tee areas and the lightly overseeded greens. Enjoy!
Update: Another slideshow of the course, this time on a cool Autumn morning with the course in full bloom, is here.
On the Tiger Myth
I really didn’t think that I would do more than one post on the Tiger Woods affair, but a couple of recent articles merit taking the topic up one last time.
First, in this weekend op-ed piece, the NY Times’ Frank Rich piously excoriates Woods and his handlers for promoting a myth about Woods that was as fictitious as the pre-collapse myths about Enron (among others).
Of course, Rich fails to comprehend that the mainstream media’s myths about Enron after its demise weren’t any closer to the truth.
Meanwhile, Golf Digest’s Jaime Diaz — the golf writer who has known Woods the longest and best — provides this far more insightful article on Woods’ life, as well as the expectations and pressures that may have contributed to his secret life.
Morality plays are easy to embrace. The truth is usually more nuanced and difficult, but ultimately much more fulfilling to understand.
The Real Tiger Tragedy
Watching the carnage unfold from the Tiger Woods affair is a bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
A train wreck unfolding with hyper-speed commentary from modern social media, that is.
The affair is a tragedy on several levels, from the public humiliation of Woods’ wife to the distinct prospect of job losses in the reeling Woods’ business empire (see also here). We should all have sympathy for those who are caught in this cauldron of insecurity resulting from Woods’ appalling arrogance and irresponsibility.
But in so saying, it is not my purpose to pile on with more harsh criticism of Woods. The only time I have met Woods was back in the mid-1990’s when he was attending Stanford and was in Houston practicing at Lochinvar Golf Club with his then-coach, Butch Harmon, who at that time was the head pro at the club.
When Butch introduced us, Woods could not have been more gracious. He thanked me as a club member for allowing him to practice at such a fine facility. My enduring thought of that brief encounter is that Woods’ parents did a very fine job of raising him.
Frankly, the type of societal ridicule that Woods and his family are enduring always makes me a bit uncomfortable. As noted years ago in connection with the death of Ken Lay, the preoccupation with Woods’ troubles is a palpable reminder of the fragile nature of the individual and civil society. The vulnerability that underlies our innate human insecurity is scary to behold, so we use myths and the related dynamics of scapegoating and resentment to distract us. We rationalize that a wealthy athlete did bad things that we would never do if placed in the same position (yeah, right) and thus, he is deserving of our scorn and ridicule. That the scapegoat is portrayed as arrogant and irresponsible makes the lynch mob even more bloodthirsty as it attempts to purge collectively that which is too shameful for us to confront individually.
In my experience, people in the public eye are often quite different in the context of a personal relationship than they are perceived publicly. That certainly could be the case with Woods, who people close to the PGA Tour tell me gets along quite well with most of his fellow Tour players. The same cannot be said about a number of other top Tour players from previous eras.
Similarly, the public scrutiny that Woods’ private life is currently enduring exceeds anything that a major sports figure has ever had to deal with (the Woods affair has been on the front page of the New York Daily News for the past ten days straight!). Arnold Palmer — a far more charismatic sportsman than Woods who is one of the few to rival Woods’ wealth and business empire — candidly admitted several years ago that, during his early days of success on the Tour, he had been less than completely faithful to his beloved late wife, Winnie. Although Palmer was never as indiscrete or arrogant as Woods has been, Palmer was also never subjected to the type of media scrutiny that Woods has endured. The media simply handled such things differently in Palmer’s heyday.
Moreover, Woods has been unfairly criticized for his behavior since the scandal broke open on the early morning after Thanksgiving. As I noted on Twitter on the Sunday morning after his early Friday morning car wreck, Woods’ silence has been absolutely essential and appropriate to the protection of his family and himself. Although none of us know what really happened leading up to Woods’ car wreck, Woods and his wife clearly faced at least the distinct possibility of serious criminal charges.
Under those circumstances, any competent lawyer would have advised Woods and his wife to refrain from saying anything to the police or publicly, as many public relations "experts" were proposing that they do. The bottom line is that Woods has done — and continues to do — the right thing by remaining silent.
On the other hand, Woods and his business team have their work cut out for them in attempting to stem the damage to the billion dollar Woods business empire resulting from the affair and the societal reaction to it. Woods’ main sponsors have stood by him so far, and I suspect that Nike — his main sponsor from the beginning of his career — will continue to support him.
But that Woods’ sponsors are staying with him now does not mean that they are going to renew their contractual arrangements with him.
You see, Woods has earned most of that billion dollar net worth by parleying his nearly unrivaled record of excellence on the golf course to sponsors who have wanted to associate with that excellence.
What will those sponsors do — particularly in fast-changing and dynamic advertising markets — when excellence they previously associated with has been transformed into a joke?
That, my friends, is literally uncharted territory.
Finally, in one key respect, Woods’ ordeal is similar to the one that former federal district judge Sam Kent endured over the past couple of years.
That is, how did the life of one of the most phenomenal athletes of our time come to this?
Where were Woods’ "friends" who knew about his risky behavior and his thinly-veiled insecurities that were manifested in such behavior?
Why did these "friends" not intervene and help him before it was too late?
The reality is that Tiger Woods
may not have any real friends.
And that might just be the saddest tragedy of this entire sordid affair.