Ranking the Roses

Edition No. 16 | June 28, 2023

The Real Lede

Hey,

I am currently reading the fifth Harry Potter book (Order of the Phoenix) to my kids on the nights when we aren’t shutting down our neighborhood pool or consumed with the College World Series. The other night, I read a sentence about how, after a students-only meeting at a Delaware hotel a pub called Hog’s Head, the time ended as “in twos and threes the rest of the group took their leave, too…” and all I could think was whether there was inclement weather forecasted at Hogwarts because why else would they be going out in groups of three.

Send help.

Onto the news.

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. Pegging It

It gets normalized (I could start each of these every week with “it gets normalized”), but imagine an athlete in a different sport stripping off articles of clothing not in a celebratory act of achievement but simply because it gave him the opportunity to make an ordinary play in the common flow of competition. And this happens nearly every week.

It also underscores my theory that golf is the most interesting and least normal game because of its association with nature and all the nooks and crannies that she brings to bear. It’s like the difference between playing Mario Kart (football or basketball) and playing Minecraft* (golf). In one, you pretty much know what the journey is going to look like. In the other? Well, you can often (and many do, especially Spieth) choose your own adventure.

*I’ve never played Minecraft and have no clue if this is correct, but it feels correct.

2. So Much Sauce

There is nothing — nothing — saucier than a tour pro rolling in his fourth birdie in a row, having his caddie put the flag back in and then both of them going back and re-reading the putt because the pro didn’t think the ball went in the correct side of the hole based on how he read it.

It would be like LeBron calling a timeout after banking in a running left-handed floater and spending the first half of the timeout staring at the rim with an assistant coach, aghast at the fact that it went backboard —> rim —> net instead of backboard —> net with no rim at all. ESPN would launch a three-week Outside the Lines investigation into what he was staring at the whole time.

Flagged

"I love America, so it's nice and easy. If you want something, it's Amazon Prime right there, you get in a day." -Min Woo Lee King

Idea of the Week

Obviously golf statistics and data have lagged behind so many other sports over the last several years. However, the solution is not just unearthing raw numbers. Instead, the contextualization of performances is important. When you think of, say, the fact that Rickie and Rahm both finished in the top 10 at LACC, the phrase “lies, damned lies and statistics” comes to mind.

Thus, this idea from Nate Carr is a great one.

It is also adjacent to a mini project I did a few years ago where I tried to figure out who had the most real chances at winning majors since 2000, as defined by being within five of the 54-hole lead with fewer than five golfers in front of you, within four with fewer than six in front of you or within three with fewer than seven.

I need to go back and refresh this, and maybe adjust the criteria a bit, because I think it provides terrific context to what we’re watching when we watch Sundays at majors, and it also highlights who has not won majors because of the first three days vs. who has not won them because of the last.

One Thing I Loved

As Keegan Bradley lumbered up the last at TPC River Highlands on Sunday, I thought of Max Homa. I did not think of Max Homa because the two will almost certainly be Ryder Cup teammates in Rome this September; I thought of Max Homa because his win at Riviera a few years ago was perhaps the most convinced I’ve ever been — at least in golf — that place matters. Here’s what I wrote in Normal Sport I.

How often does somebody who’s from somewhere -- truly from somewhere -- go on to win the specific event that formed his life as a kid which also only happens once a year? That’s even more rare than winning a major championship, and that reality was written all over Homa’s face.

Where you’re from is not who you are, but who you are was certainly formed by where you’re from. And in a world that is becoming more enchanted with the disembodiment and displacement of all things in the name of capitalism, it is refreshing when the ground beneath your feet seems to mean as much as the air through which you’re broadcast.

Remember the NBA’s time in the Orlando bubble during Covid? Those games didn’t stink only because there were no fans involved. No, they stunk because they were contended in a vacuum. They were forged in the ether. They may as well have been played on the international space station.

Place provides context, and context (in other words, story) is what we truly care about. Buddy, if the last 18 months of LIV hasn’t convinced you that story (in other words, context) triumphs over the concept of even the purest, most distilled form of competition, then I don’t know that you’ve been paying attention. Mini tangent: this is the biggest problem with throwing money at a problem, for time and history are often the most valuable assets and those — fortunately or unfortunately — are not for sale.

When we say we care about sports, what we are really saying is that we care about story. Every shot, every week, every player is a story. And the more of these mini stories you can amalgamate and enmesh, the better. So when Keegan signs “I love you” to a crowd he grew up participating in, he is signaling so much more than that. He is saying that competition is good and the money is great, but the most valuable thing of all for him is that he now has a story as good as the ones he grew up reading.

There are a thousand ways to make $3.6 million, but there’s only one way to consummate a dream.

Place matters because we are meant to feel the wonder of that which will outlast ourselves, of that whose tapestry we will contribute to but may not know in full. Place matters both because it tells a story, and it gives us stories to tell. That’s one of the beautiful things about sports and specifically in golf. The places we go to matter because of the ways they change our lives. That was true of Keegan when he was 9, watching all his heroes, and it’s even more true now that he’s 37, becoming one himself.

Crooked Media

👉️ This short KVV story on the first time Rory made a 1 is quite wholesome and amusing to consider (spoiler: he was 8).

👉️ Data Golf dives into Rory’s expected major total (more major context!), and it’s probably less than you think. According to their numbers, his performances have netted an expected major win total of 4.3, and (of course) he has won 4 total majors. The encouraging part here if you’re searching for a fifth? His three greatest xWins numbers at majors since 2015 have come in the last seven majors. No. 5, like the Rory meme would suggest, is coming. It’s simply a matter of when.

👉️ More Data Golf with a chart showing why a place like LACC is so good. When you hear the phrase “shot value” It’s referencing the y-axis here. Every shot at LACC had real value compared to a place like Torrey or Oak Hill.

👉️ Ahh so the Saudi takeover is just beginning.

👉️ I’m about halfway through the new Jeff Benedict book on LeBron. It’s very good, although perhaps not for a LeBron devotee (which I am not) who already knows all the stories. Benedict helped write the Tiger Woods book from 2018, and his reporting-writing combination is both insightful and easy to read.

👉️ This story about custom cutting long tees to make them into the size of tee Tiger prefers is extremely amusing.

👉️ I wrote for CBS Sports on Monday about what technology has done to golf, and given what I wrote about Keegan and the meaning of place above, I think it’s worth considering how technology could disrupt the context of PGA Tour golf, which is one of the biggest things it has going in its favor.

The Infirmary

True sicko behavior within the golf community.

If you understand any or all of the following two tweets, please seek help.

By the Numbies

63-63: Got a couple of them today. The first is that 63-63 wouldn’t have gotten you in the final pairing on Saturday at the Travelers. Of course they went out in threes (shoutout Hogwarts) so technically it would have gotten you in the final group. The point remains that 126 strokes through two days at TPC River Highlands was one too many to be in the top two headed to the weekend. Cannot have happened very many times.

53: I was hollering on Sunday about how Jim Furyk only birdied one of his last six holes when he shot 58 on the Travelers, and Josh Culp encouraged me to do a best ball between Furyk and Kevin Streelman from the year (2014) when Streelman birdied the last seven to beat Sergio and K.J. Choi. The result is a best ball 53. Wonder if you still get the $54M from the PIF for that or if they take it down to $53M?

How is This App Free?

ANGC Burner had himself a week. First, he surfaced this fabulous shot of Sungjae’s family with perhaps his biggest fan (I need that shirt, but I need it of the famous* waving Tour Championship illustration from a few years ago instead).

*This cannot possibly be famous, but it is to me.

Then he went on a run with some high-level Denny McCarthy content (a sentence that has surely never been typed). The backstory here is that ANGCB thinks Denny looks like Lee Harvey Oswald (which he does).

Here are a couple of comps.

On Thursday of last week, Denny needed to make this shot from the fairway for 59. He banked it off the side of a hill (you can see where this is going), and it nearly fell for the eagle and magic number.

The caption was almost too easy.

Somebody spotted Chez Reavie at a Cheesecake Factory after his Saturday round watching himself at the bar, which is just astonishing and hilarious behavior. The nicknames, by the way, write themselves.

Nobody crowbars daggers like Porath crowbars daggers.

This is 100 percent Jordan Spieth.

Ranking the Roses

In light of Rose Zhang’s near win at the KPMG Women’s PGA last week, I spent some too much time ranking Roses. Here’s where I landed.

1. Zhang (obviously)

2. Bowl

3. Run for the

4. Derrick

5. Byrne

6. Jalen

7. Team

8. Red

9. Rosé

10. Garden (the White House horticultural area, not the Trailblazers’ previously-named arena)

From the Archives

10 years ago this week … Ken Duke won the Travelers and gave us this classic fist pump. Incredibly, only the second most notable thing he’s done over the last 10 years.

20 years ago this week … Jonathan Kaye won the Buick Classic, which became the Barclays which became the Northern Trust which became the St. Jude Championship, which is technically not the same thing as the St. Jude Classic but is still played in Memphis. Kaye, who is now 52, played in 331 events (including the Puerto Rico Open this year), won twice and made $10.6M.

30 years ago this week … Nick Price beat Dan Forsman and Roger Maltbie at the Greater Hartford Open (now the Travelers) for the seventh of what would eventually be 18 wins in his career. It helped lift him to No. 3 in the world behind Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer.

Love Your Work

I was reading this humorous ranking of the presidents the other day by one of my favorite writers, Tim Urban, and I stumbled across a very compelling truth buried in one of the paragraphs about Lincoln. Here it is.

Lincoln ran for Senate in Illinois in 1858 against Stephen Douglas, engaging in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates on slavery during the campaign. Douglas won the election, but Lincoln had the debates made into a book, which spread throughout the country and won him national support, paving the way to his presidential election two years later.

Power is power (obviously), and winning an election and the platform it provides unlocks that reality. However, ideas are perhaps even more powerful than power, and Lincoln either knew this or fell into it, thus vaulting him beyond the man who had just defeated him.

An encouragement: If you’re frustrated that your voice isn’t bigger or more widely heard, remember that though platforms are meaningful and important, we are and (hopefully) always will be a society in which the most meaningful currency is ideas that spread, take root and transform. That has never been more true than it is right now. I don’t know if this is the chief benefit of living at the intersection of free speech and the speed and ubiquity of the internet, but it’s way, way up there for me.