The One Word That Could Change Pro Golf

Edition No. 19 | July 19, 2023

Happy Open Championship week.

You know how your parents used to tell you that nothing good happens after midnight?

Yeah, they didn’t have Mike Tirico and the crew piped in from England on something called Peacock with the sound of links golf reverberating in their AirPods and three cups of coffee plus a nerve-wracking Rory round on deck.

Set your alarms (if you need them).

Onto the news.

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. Congressional

We haven’t spoken since the Tour spoke on Capitol Hill, but — other than Josh Hawley going absolutely ham on PGA Tour China — this opening shot was the most surreal moment of the day for me. Imagine showing this photo to somebody during the 2021 Open and having them try to guess what it was about!

Also, good to know that Yasir and Jimmy Dunne communicate exactly like you would imagine two men their age communicate.

2. Defy Gravities

Michael Kim showed off a remarkable text he received from the R&A on Wednesday. Honey, the gravities dropped 4 percent, I think we have a shot this week.

Speaking of Open content creator Michael Kim, he posted this photo of the bunkers at Hoylake with the phrase “really wide teeth rakes,” which is both 1. Unfortunately true for players this week and 2. Incredibly hilarious outside the context of major championship golf.

3. Plastic Container

Remember that amazing Atlanta Falcons schedule video from a few months ago? The R&A social folks should traipse around Liverpool asking random bystanders what’s going on in this photo of a man with a metal stick, a plastic tunnel and a urethane golf ball.

Two bonus hits.

Min Woo Lee had a situation last week at the Scottish Open reminiscent of Anirban Lahiri at the 2021 Players (who could forget?)

And of course we will end with this gem. I don’t know where Rick heard it, who said it or even what the brand was, and to tell you the truth, I don’t even really care all that much.

Question(s) of the Week

Three of them this week.

1. What would Michael Block be ranked in the OWGR if he got to play Rory’s persimmon drives?

2. How on earth is Rickie’s water bottle not sponsored yet?

3. How is the Scottish Open only 41 years old?

Psycho Scorecard of the Week

We have two completely preposterous submissions this week. The first is this one from Meg Adkins where she notes that Charley Hull took 58 strokes over 17 holes … and 10 on the other one.

The second is this one. It’s Rory’s back nine scores from Hoylake in 2014. Look at the third line down, from Saturday afternoon. Zero 4s. He made seventeen 4s on the back nine during the other three days but none on Saturday.

How many times in the history of major championship golf has the eventual winner gone a nine-hole stretch without making a 4? It can’t have ever happened, right?

Idea(s) of the Week

So much time is spent filling up the wide corridors of golf courses with all kinds of conversation. That’s one of the allures of the game, of course, and in the crevices found at the three majors this year, the following three half-baked (possibly quarter-baked) ideas were proposed by either myself or a fellow member of the CGM (Crooked Golf Media) as it pertains to major championship golf.

1. You should only be allowed to talk about majors after Round 2 and Round 4. I don’t see Kenny and Charles out here yelping about Steph’s true shooting percentage after the third quarter of a WCF game!

2. Majors should be one day of media and six days of golf. Is 108 holes of major golf good for the long-term mental health of pros? No. But does everyone want to watch Sepp Straka bat it around for six consecutive rounds? Also no. Would making majors six rounds instead of four add to the mystery of who’s going to win? Absolutely no, the best players would separate even more.

However, all of this is outweighed by the fact that three media days is about two and a half too many, and you would get a far purer champion than under the current format.

Also a reminder: The gold medalist at the 1904 Olympics played 197 holes in six days back when men were men and being one meant you drank moonshine from the Claret Jug and were more enthused to play with stymies than without.

3. The PGA Championship should allow its champion to pick the following year’s venue. This sounds like a fun and cool idea until K.H. Lee ties Walter Hagen’s major record by winning 11 of them in a row at TPC Craig Ranch and Seth Waugh has to intervene.

Flagged

“I can carry on playing at this level because I like hitting the tennis ball.” -Novak Djokovic

One Word

Did you find the single word last week that the future of professional golf hangs upon?

Soly did.

Amid the 267 pages of documents dropped during that senate hearing, he found the three letters that mattered the most.

Following several back-and-forth “see attached” emails (normal sport) between the Tour’s lawyers and the PIF’s lawyers, the Tour threw in a statement that effectively said NewCo (run by the Tour) will determine the future of LIV and will “not be subject to any veto or consent rights of PIF.”

Then PIF came back, turned track changes on and, on page 255 of the document dump, crossed those three letters out.

In other words: “Yeah … we’ll see who determines the future of LIV.”

The final executed document removed the entire “will/will not be subject to any veto or consent rights of PIF” altogether, suggesting that there is a loooooooong way to go and that what the professional game looks like a year or five years or 10 years from now is still very much up in the air.

From the Chronicles

In preparation for this week’s Open, I rewatched the Chronicles of a Champion Golfer on Rory, which is absolutely incredible and a must see if you want to understand him, The Open or just the modern game a little bit better.

It also reminded me of this little bit I wrote about him in Normal Sport I.

There’s a tremendous moment from Rory’s Chronicles of a Champion Golfer on YouTube that you might view as filler or a throwaway but that I think about a lot as it relates to his life now.

It’s a home video of him at Christmas. He’s opening presents with his parents, and he’s just tearing into gift after gift that delights him. The usual stuff men our age now desired at that age then. He’s probably nine years old at the time. A CD player, maybe a Sega game, a Nike box with something in it. For a nine year-old boy in 1998, it might as well have been Blackbeard’s treasure.

And then at the very end of the clip, there’s a moment where he just starts crying and wiping his eyes with his shirt, and then he runs over to hug his dad.

As a dad of kids this age myself, I was struck by how overwhelmed he was. I think at the center of Rory McIlroy there is an enviable tenderheartedness and a well of gratitude that has almost always exceeded his ability to understand it or even his desire to accept it. Life, and especially that life, normally quells all of this, but for some reason -- perhaps even unbeknownst to him -- the flicker remains.

One Thing I Loved

For once I found myself rooting against Rory on a Sunday with him in contention. That’s because the guy he was trying to (and did) beat had just hit the shot of his life to possibly win a tournament that would have meant far more to him than it did to Rory (and it meant a lot to Rory).

Rory will continue to win 2-4 times a year with a major or two or maybe more probably sprinkled in there somewhere. Bobby Mac, though? He’s a good player but perhaps not a great one. He could win a major, but the odds are mostly against him. He will probably have a nice career, but his trajectory is not that of a multiple-time national open winner.

He knows that.

Here’s MacIntyre: “I'll never forget it. I had to take a minute coming off 18. I mean, that's why I play this sport. That's why I'm in the Scottish Open, and if not The Open, the Scottish Open will be up there with the event I want to play for the rest of my life. It's one I've dreamed of winning since I watched at home, and I thought today coming down once I birdied 18, I thought, this might be the one.”

The one. Not the first. Not one of many. The one.

Rory knows it, too.

Two self-aware guys who understand the spots they hold in the golf world and what that meant for what happened last Sunday. There was a lot of oohing and aahing about that searing rocket Rory sent into the 72nd, and rightfully so. But even more powerful than that, to me, was how much Bobby Mac cared about winning his country’s championship and how mindful Rory was of that.

Hopefully they get to play (lose) together on the same team in Rome.

Media Diet

👉️ If you haven’t played Immaculate Grid, it’s incredible. Think Wordle but for idiots like me who grew up on baseball and remember ridiculous things like Albert Belle’s stint with the Orioles at the end of his career. Unsurprisingly, Baseball Reference bought it.

👉️ Rory wanting to roll back everything was a delight.

👉️ Porath had a nice little mini thread of a few wild Phil things that happened the last time The Open went to Liverpool.

👉️ All the focus on Rory’s Sunday 2-iron really took away from one of the greatest-sounding videos in golf history on Saturday. The first two shots here reminded me of what Geoff Ogilvy once said about him: "Rory's shots make the best noise, more flush even than Tiger's at his best."

His words, not mine!

👉️ Enjoyed this from Egg Boy Andy on the lost Dowie hole at Liverpool.

👉️ This video by Cookie Jar Golf on the history of Hoylake and a hole-by-hole breakdown is world class.

👉️ Oh come on. This graph on Scottie by Rick Gehman is absolutely ridiculous.

By the Numbies

5: That’s how many Brooks and Scheffler lead by on the esteemed 2023 Aggregate Major Championship Leaderboard That I Completely Made Up (have to make the cut at the first three to qualify).

It’s a fun game within the game to watch for this week at Hoylake.

T1. Koepka: -18
T1. Scheffler: -18
3. Hovland: -13
4. Rahm: -8
5. Cantlay: -6
6. Xander: -5
7. Cam Smith: -3
8. Morikawa: -2
9. Lowry: -1
10. Fleetwood: E
11. Reed: +3
12. Theegala: +3
13. Hideki: +6
14. Hatton: +7
15. Ryan Fox (!): +8
16. DJ: +14
17. Finau: +18
18. Mitchell: +25

 Meme of the Week

There have already been so many that dropped this week, including whatever Phil was trying to talk Rahm into and whatever Brooks was trying to talk ZJ into.

But the best one came when I asked what this fellow does for a living.

I pulled just a handful of the responses, and they are incredible. Professional dog show handler made me howl out loud.

 The Kid

It’s wild to look back at the videos of Rory winning Hoylake in 2014. He was a kid, a fully-formed phenom. He played golf the way only a 25-year-old wunderkind can play golf, without fear, without relent, without really giving much thought to, “… but what happens if I don’t.”

He is very much not that person or that player anymore, and the irony is that he’s far better at both than he ever was before, even if he doesn’t have the trophies to prove it.

That’s the infuriating thing about golf. It often rewards calculated ignorance. You can’t be a moron with the way you play, but you almost necessarily must be at least a facsimile of one when it comes to reflecting on and thinking about the way you play.

Balancing the caring with the not caring that leads to winning majors becomes very difficult for earnest men who did their trophy raising as buoyant boys.

I got an email last week from a reader named Shawn, who wrote beautifully about some of this, and he graciously said I could share a snippet.

I think that is what makes golf prodigies so relatable. They play with the fearlessness and joy of boys and then the heartbreaks of young and older men. We get to mark our lives parallel to their competitive experiences, feeling known as they, like us, are the combination of who we thought we'd be and who we actually are.

You can almost see Rory trying to will himself to a place where he cares about the present — only about the next shot — but not about the future. It’s the toughest place for him to get to mentally, and this major could swing on whether or not he does.

How is This App Free?

This 100 percent got me during the hearing last week.

This felt 100 percent true.

I asked for biggest takeaways after the hearing, and Dylan nailed it.

These next two are related. Tron calling for Rory to play every open in the world, and Paul E. declaring the ones he’s already racked up as the Commonwealth Slam.

I think I’m in on this.

This is tough to read but also hilarious because it’s true.

The margins are thinner than they seem.

I wrote recently about how good the last 10 years of majors have been with a Very Serious Caption for each one, and of course Anti had a great rebuttal.

Chef’s kiss here.

Porter Family Draft

Final Porter family draft of the year went down on Monday night. There was an incident with the No. 2 pick that nearly ended in fisticuffs. Sadie (3) tried to pick Rory because Hannah (10) talked her into it, knowing it would anger Jude (9) who desperately wanted him with the third pick.

Mom and dad (me) intervened after only a few tears, and Sadie settled on the only guy who beat him at LACC.

Jack (6) remains an agent of chaos. Name a more random collection of five golfers. You won’t because you can’t.

Love Your Work

See that bit on the single word Soly found above.

That’s what it takes.

Digging through 270 pages of documents to see what shifted with track changes turned on. Come on. You know who doesn’t have to do that and certainly doesn’t have time to do it? The guy running the biggest golf podcast in the world.

And yet, caring, being obsessed, going through every word of every document and every press conference is part of maintaining a competitive advantage. It’s part of being great.

It’s easy to say, Well those guys just made a bunch of stupid jokes, had good timing, people liked them and now Titleist gives them a bunch of money. But that’s not really true, is it.

Because being the best means caring enough to go through every page of that document dump just to unearth a nugget or two that might be helpful.

It’s a reminder that becoming the best isn’t the difficult part. It’s finding the motivation and will to stay there that remains even more impressive.