All those PGA Tour players who have folded like limp dish rags while paired with Tiger Woods over the years will be a bit skeptical of the conclusions of this recent study (H/T to Tim Harford):

This paper uses the random assignment of playing partners in professional golf tournaments to test for peer effects in the workplace. We find no evidence that the ability of playing partners affects the performance of professional golfers, contrary to recent evidence on peer effects in the workplace from laboratory experiments, grocery scanners, and soft-fruit pickers. . . . We offer several explanations for our contrasting findings: that workers seek to avoid responding to social incentives when financial incentives are strong; that there is heterogeneity in how susceptible individuals are to social effects and that those who are able to avoid them are more likely to advance to elite professional labor markets; and that workers learn with professional experience not to be affected by social forces.

In other words, PGA Tour pros do not generally suffer from peer effects. Except while playing with Tiger Woods, that is. ;^)

Regular readers of this blog know about the rich Texas legacy in golf (for example, see here, here, here, here, and here). However, it doesn’t look as if Texas Governor Rick Perry is doing much to facilitate that grand heritage. Seems that Governor Perry played golf last week in the PGA Tour’s Frys.com Open in Las Vegas, where he was the amateur partner of John Daly during the first round. Apparently, “Long John” was not particularly pleased with the pairing:

Daly favors the softer Maxfli Fire but says he has been receiving a much harder ball, which he attributed to a first-round 3-over-par 74 at TPC at The Canyons.
(It was either that or the fact Daly continued losing focus waiting for amateur Rick Perry to reach the green in a timely fashion on most holes. I’m pretty convinced Texas today is by far our nation’s most efficiently run state, because it’s impossible to believe its governor spends much time playing golf.
Perry did, however, bring along a security contingent complete with those Secret Service-type ear pieces, which would have been interesting if it wasn’t so laughable given the only thing most knew about him was that he was the guy you backed up 20 yards from each time he addressed a shot.)

Ouch! H/t to Bogey McDuff.

This earlier post noted how the PGA Tour has forsaken the four Texas Tour events that contribute more to charity than virtually any other Tour events. Just to reaffirm that trend, get a load of the following update on the field for this week’s Valero Texas Open at the Westin LaCantera Resort in San Antonio:

By the 5 p.m. deadline for players to officially commit to next week’s PGA Tour event, they saw one of today’s headline attractions, Presidents Cup representative K.J. Choi, withdraw from the field.[. . .]
The exit of Choi, the world’s 10th-ranked player, for undisclosed reasons leaves [Stephen] Ames, the 2006 Players Championship titlist, as the highest-rated player in the field. At No. 42, he will be the only top-50 competitor on hand.

One top-50 player? The venerable Texas Open — one of the oldest Tour events — has been relegated to a glorified Nationwide Tour event.

In case the start of the NFL season distracted you, the remarkable Tiger Woods shot a closing round 63 at Cog Hill in Chicago to win another PGA Tour tournament over the weekend, the 60th professional tournament title of his storied career. ESPN.com’s Bob Harig puts Wood’s accomplishment in perspective:

Woods matched the tournament 18-hole record by shooting an 8-under 63 at Cog Hill Golf & Country Club, becoming the first player to do so twice. He posted the lowest four-day total (262) in 104 years of tournament competition — which beat the previous mark by 5 strokes. He won the tournament that used to be known as the Western Open for the fifth time, just one behind Walter Hagen.
Woods has won five times at Cog Hill.
And he joined Sam Snead (82), Jack Nicklaus (73), Ben Hogan (64) and Arnold Palmer (62) among those with 60 or more victories in PGA Tour events.
All at age 31. [. . .]
He has won six or more times in a season five times. This year, four of his six wins have come at the biggest tournaments — a major (PGA Championship), two World Golf Championship events (CA Championship and Bridgestone Invitational) and now a playoff event.
And his other two victories came at two of the more popular regular tour events, the Buick Invitational and Wachovia Championship.
Perhaps just as remarkable as his number of victories is the speed with which he got there. Nicklaus was 36 years old when he won his 60th title in 1976. Palmer was 41 in 1971 when he won for the 60th time. Woods could take the next five years off and still be on pace to surpass Nicklaus, Hogan and Palmer.
Or, as Justin Rose put it, “I’d have to win 15 times a year for the next four years to get there by the time I’m 31.”

Meanwhile, last weekend’s tournament gave us yet another entertaining professional golfer-caddy snit (previous snit posts here and here), which gives me the opportunity to pass along this classic Caddyshack clip (which happens to be one of Tiger Woods’ favorite movies) in which Bill Murray’s legendary Carl Spackler explains how he successfully resolved a similar snit with while caddying for the the Dalai Lama:

I don’t think that PGA Tour officials had the following in mind when they devised the new season-ending series of tournaments called the Fed Ex Cup:

Before the FedEx Cup can run with the big guns at the NFL and major league baseball, it’s going to first have to crawl better than Little Leaguers.
On both Saturday and Sunday, the Woods-free Barclays on CBS was beaten by the Little League World Series on ABC. The World Series final Sunday between Georgia and Japan drew a 3.5 overnight rating, while the golf got a 2.1. On Saturday, both the International (1.8) and U.S. (2.2) finals bested The Barclays (1.7).
The Barclays did fare better than a tournament of few stars the week before, the Wyndham Championship. The Wyndham drew a 1.0 on Saturday and 1.3 on Sunday.

Chronicle golf columnist Steve Campbell reports that the Fed Ex Cup — the PGA Tour’s new series of tournaments intended to breath life into the lifeless end of the golf season — has entered the dreaded Tiger Chasm even before the first tournament of the new series has commenced:

They haven’t yet hit a shot that counts in the FedEx Cup playoff series, and the whole thing is beginning to look like the kind of idea that got Ishtar, Gigli and The Adventures of Pluto Nash on the big screen.
Woods doomed the FedEx Cup, which was a risky proposition in the first place, to irrelevancy by opting to skip the first round of the so-called playoffs. At a time when the PGA Tour desperately needs to drum up interest in a radical overhaul of its season structure, Woods invited massive disinterest by passing on this week’s The Barclays at Westchester Country Club. Not so fresh off victories at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational and the PGA Championship, Woods insists he needs another week of rest and relaxation. [. . .]
. . . what kind of playoff system allows a competitor to duck either an opponent or a site and still win the championship? Answer: not a legitimate one. The tour is damned if Woods wins the Cup, because it exposes the playoff system in place as a sham. The tour is damned if Woods doesn’t win the Cup, or at least stay in contention until the very end, because he’s head, shoulders, knees and toes above the rest of the players in accomplishments and fan appeal.

Meanwhile, PGA Tour member Jeff Maggert of The Woodlands lays the blame for the Fed Ex mess squarely on PGA Tour headquarters and Commissioner Tim Finchem:

Maggert . . . says none of the touring pros are enthusiastic about the tour’s playoff.
“Probably half the players out here couldn’t care less about [the FedEx Cup],” he told Hardin. “The other half are indifferent.”
Maggert said tour commissioner Tim Finchem should take the blame for the indifference in the clubhouse.
“I hear a lot being written, but I don’t see anybody writing anything about Finchem,” Maggert said. “I mean, this was his idea. He really didn’t consult any of the players. He kind of shoved it down our throats and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.'”

But dispositive confirmation that the Fed Ex Cup is in serious trouble is the fact that The Onion is already making fun of the concept. Note the following statement at the end of this article spoofing that Tiger Woods was annoyed that his three month old daughter was “looking the other way when he won” the recent PGA Championship:

Woods later stated, however, that he couldn’t find fault with his daughter’s apathetic feelings towards the upcoming FedEx Cup events, saying that he himself thinks of it as a forced and unoriginal attempt to inject excitement into the final part of the golf season.

The Scotsman.com’s John Huggan tackles a question about women professional golfers that has perplexed me for a long time:

. . . [W]omen, typically, own short games that simply do not bear close comparison with their male counterparts. Whether pitching, chipping, blasting from bunkers or putting, the ladies are markedly inferior.
Which is odd, when you think about it. In the areas of the game where innate touch and feel should have obvious advantages over pure strength, men still manage to make the women look inadequate.[ . . .]
Look at the stats. A 29 putts per round average barely gets you into the top 100 on the PGA Tour; on the LPGA Tour, that number has you in the top 30.

As Huggan notes, practice makes perfect and, for some reason, the women pros don’t like practicing the short game as much as other areas of the game. Who’d a thunk it?

Gee, I thought the fields for the Shell Houston Open Golf Tournament had slipped badly over the past several years. But those depleted fields are nothing compared to the experience of this week’s Greater Greensboro Open (now called the “Wyndham” or some such thing). The PGA Tour’s final tournament before the season-ending series of “playoff” tournaments known as the Fed Ex Cup is having a bit of a problem getting any leading Tour player to show up:

The Wyndham is the final regular-season tournament of the PGA Tourís FedEx Cup, and only the top 144 players in the points race advance to the playoffs, which will start next week.
There is no shortage of players hovering around the 144th spot on the points list, but those already secure for the playoffs are taking the week off. Only two of the top 50 in the updated world rankings are in the field – Davis Love III, the defending champion and ranked 43rd, and Carl Pettersson, ranked 48th. Pettersson, a former player at N.C. State, lives near Raleigh and played his high-school golf at Greensboro Grimlsey.

And after publication of the foregoing, Love withdrew from the tournament to undergo a medical procedure for kidney stones. The Tiger Chasm widens.