Cape Squad

Edition No. 17 | July 6, 2023

The Real Lede

Hey,

Last week, my 10-year-old daughter and I drove from Dallas to Houston to see Wicked for her birthday. It was as amazing as I imagined it would be and, more importantly, a fabulous memory that we got to share together.

On the trip down, we stopped for ice cream, stocked up on to-be-smuggled- candy for the show, listened to most of the Taylor Swift discography and enjoyed an audiobook we’ve been meaning to try for a while called the Princess and the Goblin. It was written in 1872, the same year as the 12th Open Championship. Not the 112th. The 12th.

It’s a great story (so far), but at one point toward the middle of the book, one of the characters is digging a tunnel and makes a severe misstep which greatly affects the outcome of his journey. It’s a very dramatic moment in the narrative and you can feel yourself getting pulled into the story as he considers what has happened to him. The audiobook skips a few beats as he sits there thinking, before he suddenly and loudly declares, “What a stupid I am.”

All I could think about for the next 10 minutes of the trip was Roberto De Vicenzo and the 1968 Masters.

Send help.

Onto the news.

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. Pro, Shop

As one follower noted on Sunday during the final round of the Rocket Mortgage, the longer you stare at this photo, the better it gets.

There was a backup on the second nine in the rain-soaked final 18 holes, which led to two professional golfers — both of whom were in position to win an $8M event — just hanging out in what appears to be a makeshift pro shop with the tournament completely in the balance.

One is eating a sandwich, the other lounging in a chair, and both are surrounded by folks who are attending the tournament as fans. There’s a stroller, a baby taking a dive off his father’s chest, a man in a Hard Rock shirt drinking a Michelob Ultra, and — if you pick the correct red, white and blue shirt-hat combo — a $10 discount waiting for you at checkout.

I guess this could happen in another sport, but it seems like a restraining order would be involved if it did.

2. Literal Caping

LIV has broken my brain to the point where I’m not even sure anymore whether this is ironic, unironic, unironically ironic or ironically unironic.

I also don’t know who owns the shortest odds to win The Open in two weeks, but I do know that the odds that Phil owns stock in the manufacturer of the materials for these capes should be much shorter.

Two other amazing tweets on Phil caping for capes after his full quote from last week: “It's aspirational. It's not for everybody. But it's a cool thing about her team and it's the creativity of my wife Amy and what she brings. We envision a lot of little kids running around the golf course in capes and that's kind of what we're hoping for, and have them dreaming about being a HyFlyer one day.”

What a sport.

Question of the Week

When Rickie and Ludvig were paired together on Saturday at the Rocket Mortgage, I tossed out the thought exercise of who would end their career with more PGA Tour wins. Ludvig was, somewhat overwhelmingly, the consensus choice.

This surprised me.

Not necessarily because I’m not sold on Ludvig (I am) but more so because having five PGA Tour wins (and now six) in hand is a lot of PGA Tour wins.

Rickie’s career gets a bit dismissed by some because the corporate onslaught is so unrelenting that it becomes easy to write off anyone who doesn’t completely meet even the most unfair expectations as almost irrelevant, even if it isn’t true.

Since 2004 — even with his recent dip — the strokes gained neighborhood Rickie (1.26) is hanging out in includes Phil Mickelson (1.38), Jason Day (1.26) and Brooks Koepka (1.13). Combined majors: 12.

Obviously SG doesn’t translate to wins and this is more of a pro-Rickie take than an anti-Ludvig take, but to say that the latter is going to easily surpass the former in career PGA Tour victories is to either 1. Sell Fowler’s resume (Players, Honda, Phoenix, Deutsche Bank, Quail Hollow, Rocket Mortgage) short or 2. Believe that Ludvig is going to be one of the five or eight best Europeans of the last 30 years.

Again, maybe he will be, but just as is true with major championships, it’s easy to start distributing them like a kid makes a Christmas list. With no regard for the finiteness of reality and no consideration that anyone else in the world even exists.

Question of the Week (2)

Is there a Bakers Bay Curse?

Makes you think.

Flagged

“All the credit to, honestly, my wife Wednesday night last week sent me a text that I woke up to Thursday that just kind of, it resonated to me and it really hit home better than anything I've heard.

“Just basically said remember why you love this game and why you play this game and why you're out there, just enjoy that and kind of take it in. It hit home for me. So last week, any kind of challenge I faced, anything good that happened, anything bad that happened, I just kind of remembered this is why I play professional golf and … it's why I'm doing this.” -Justin Thomas at the Rocket Mortgage

We think of players as machines. All athletes really. But the truth is that they’re human beings, and human beings — all of us — struggle with a sometimes-daily roller coaster of joy, despair, frustration, elation, sadness, triumph, melancholy, anger and peacefulness.

This is not to say that JT gets a free pass, but it is to say that we all probably need to be reminded that we root for people and not holographic facsimiles. Tiger — sometimes purposefully — made us forget this, but it’s a good thing to remember, and the sheer humanity of it all is ultimately why golf is so relatable.

Remember when Jordan (Chicago Bulls, not four-time Masters winner) had that ad or poster or whatever it was touting how many game-winners he missed and how much he lost in his career? Yeah dude, you won 66 percent of the games you played in. JT has won 6.5 percent of his OWGR events (move the decimal over), and he’s one of the best players of the last 20 years.

On an individual level, people make a big deal about how Hall-of-Fame success in baseball (at least for hitters) is 30 percent. In golf, it’s 10x less than that, which is why, for the best players, getting your heart shattered is not only part of the process but to be expected.

That’s a difficult deal for pros, but a captivating reality — possibly the captivating reality — for fans. It’s part of the reason, as it relates to the stars, that we all keep coming back for more.

One Thing I Loved

I’ve been thinking about a photo from last weekend’s finish in Detroit, but probably not the one you think I’ve been thinking about. The Sigh is included at the bottom of this newsletter as a fun new meme, which I ended up using as my first Threads post.

But no, the photo I’ve been thinking about is this one.

I’ve been thinking about it because almost nobody carries around the burden of expectation like Rickie does. Strangely, he doesn’t seem to have done all that much to have earned this badge, nor does he do much of anything to push it away. It’s just the right person in the right place at the right time (apparently) wearing the right color.

What’s fascinating about this is that you could argue that Rickie is the least successful of his peers. That is, he’s the worst player out of all the famous, celebrated superstars. He carries around the weight that all the top players carry — media availability, signature seeking and frenetic fanfare galore — but he does so without reaping the same successes (although as I argued above, his successes have been greater than you think).

The point here is that it’s not an easy endeavor to be Rickie Fowler.

And the parts that are easy — the money, the lifestyle, the power tools (Fowler once gave JT an air compressor as a gift) — he eschewed for the sake of grinding his face off to try and reinvent his game.

What was the incentive?

Fowler wants for nothing. He’d had a good career. His family was taking off. The obligations placed on him when he’s out on Tour are certainly not what he’s vying for. So what was the incentive to set aside the existential embarrassment of falling off the planet into that purgatorial place where escaping to LIV starts to look like an attractive golden parachute?

I thought on Sunday after his win about the famous quote by George Leigh Mallory the English climber who died trying to scale Everest in 1924. Here’s an excerpt from a March 1923 edition of the New York Times.

“Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?” This question was asked of George Leigh Mallory, who was with both expeditions toward the summit of the world’s highest mountain, in 1921 and 1922, and who is now in New York. He plans to go again in 1924, and he gave as the reason for persisting in these repeated attempts to reach the top, “Because it’s there.”

Surely Fowler could have exited stage right to the tune of, what, $200M? More? He could have literally sailed into the sunset. But the human experience is such that the self-satisfaction of our work and our accomplishment is far more meaningful than any amount of compensation could ever pretend to be.

So Fowler instead set out to enter more frames like the one above with no guarantee that there would be much of anything in it for him. It has been said that it is good and fitting to “find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils.”

Expectations and payouts be damned, that’s what Rickie did, because it was there. And I find it to be worthy of all the celebration you want to bestow upon it, perhaps with my man in the next section below leading the way.

Ultimate Fan Experience

I want to give a shout out to maybe my favorite fan in all my years of covering this stupid sport. After Rick hit one close in regulation at the end last week, the fellow in the bottom right lived a lifetime in five seconds.

The best part? He was still getting after it when Rickie finished off the victory a hole and a half later as my (other) guy, Bottle Cap Thief, pointed out (quite a pull here).

Overheard on Twitter

"I’m not saying going for a walk will solve all your problems, I’m just saying there’s no problem that’s going to be made worse by going for a walk.”

-Ryan Holiday

Crooked Golf Media

👉️ This Q&A with Peter Malnati by Adam Schupak is very good, although it does come off as if the players believe they have true (and moral) agency over whether the Tour moves forward with this deal when the reality seems to be that the Tour has put its players in a position where there might not be a Tour if they don’t go forward with this deal.

👉️ John Nucci sums up a lot of my thoughts here on how the Tour is exposed right now and doesn’t have a lot of leverage, especially considering the December due date on the new deal (shout out FDR).

👉️ Very much enjoyed reading Meg Adkins and the Fried Egg gang (Meg and the Egg) on Rose, Pebble and the event of the week.

👉️ Haven’t finished yet, but this interview with Nathan Barry on building a $30M email company is great thus far.

👉️ I’m 20 minutes into The Duel, which is The Open’s documentary of the famous Watson-Nicklaus war, and it’s awesome.

The Infirmary

True sicko behavior within the golf community.

We have so many submissions to get to this week.

First up is confirmed sicko Eric Cole, who has played 29 PGA Tour events and made nearly $3M this season, driving 8 hours after the Travelers and playing in something called the Frank B. Fuhrer Jr. Invitational (normal stuff).

Turns out, the tournament had given him a spot back in 2014 when he was a mini tour player, and he won it and the $40K first prize, which kick-started his career so he wanted to honor that by playing in it every year. He donated the $20K first prize this time around, which he won by a “Tiger at Pebble” like margin.

If you immediately understand this reference with no additional context or explanation, you have an illness.

Also, PGA Tour Superstore showing off a combined 24 majors with its new banner here. Legends only.

I honestly don’t know if this is sicko or psycho behavior, but it and the follow-up tweet about a kid griddying through TSA made me howl.

By the Numbies

68: I mentioned after the U.S. Open that Scottie Scheffler had lost to 63 golfers in 2023. After his 15th event — the Travelers — that number is now up to 66, which means the hunt to break 100 in a calendar year is still alive. That’s not the most shocking part, though. The most shocking part is that, as Jamie Kennedy pointed out, Tiger lost to just 68 golfers in 22 events in 2000.

20: That’s how many more millions of dollars Fred VanVleeet — Fred VanVleet! — will make over the next 36 months than Tiger Woods has made over the course of his entire PGA Tour career. Thanks, Phil.

Meme of the Week

Two beauties.

The first will be used on every golfer who is struggling through swing changes over the next five years.

This one is a bit more specific, but please feel free to use it when Hovland is five up on Brooks and Rickie on Sunday at Hoylake.

How is This App Free?

There were some pretty incredible golf and non-golf tweets over the last week.

I disagree with this premise and am very pro-rollback, but this got me.

I’m appreciative of anyone who can poke fun at themselves like Other JT.

Soly is like LeBron. Just 28-9-7 every night, year after year after year.

This destroyed me for some reason.

So did this.

And finally, I never want to overstate any of this stuff, but this is pretty easily going to go down as the greatest tweet of all time and it’s not even close right?