Snakes on a Drain

Edition No. 14 | May 12, 2023

Earlier this week, I attended Shrek the Musical in which two of my kids were performers. I’m not going to say I became disinterested at any point because [gestures at son and daughter dressed in adorable costumes, performing in a musical], but I will say Patrick Cantlay isn’t the only one with a pace of play problem these days.

Onto the news.

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. Snakes on a Drain

Imagine throwing on PGA Tour Live one morning to see what your lineup is doi…holy crap, is that Snake Handlin’ Rickie Fowler using his gap wedge to pull a monster out of a creek?!

If this happened in the soft NBA to Klay or the soft MLB to Bryce Harper, it would lead SportsCenter for three straight weeks!

2. Sixty*

Seung Yul Noh shot 60 with a cracked driver, which I presume is tantamount to hitting three home runs with a split bat. The best part? He was forced to play with the driver cracked for several holes because, according to the tournament referee, “There needed to be some more subsequent damage other than just a hairline crack.”

It’s true that your driver is broken, but it’s also true that it’s not broken enough.

Eventually it was. The referee noted, “There was definitely separation in the metal on the face, and there was clear concavity in the face. Concavity renders a club face non-conforming. So the club at that point was unfit for play.”

Clear concavity in the face is I believe how Rip Hamilton ended up winning a title in a mask.

What a sport.

Question of the Week

This one about speeding up pace of play got far more engagement than I ever thought it would. Currently nearly 900 responses (turns out, people have some absolute takes about improving the product).

One surprise: Many people mentioned wanting to see more storylines outside of the stars. On paper, this sounds fine and great. In reality, when you’re getting 25 minutes of Alex Smalley’s 66 as JT and Scheffler are playing together in the final pairing, I’m not sure it works. “Play the hits” is a phrase for a reason, and the reason is because it’s what makes the entire enterprise function. What I do think is that at the non-designated events you could roll Ryan French out there to drop some insane normal sport “this guy got a 29-stroke penalty for drinking from the wrong water bottle” nuggets. That, or something like that, would be additive to the experience.

One not surprise: People want fewer commercials. I don’t know what the ROI is for companies who throw their logo on the corner of the screen during commercial-free time in other sports like soccer, but I will wear a foam finger with your brand’s logo on it for the rest of my life if you do this for golf (thank you, Callaway, for doing it at Kapalua). I could do an entire newsletter on solves for showing more golf, but that seems like the easiest and most straightforward (though again seemingly not the most lucrative).

One strange troll: One person said they wanted to replace any golf media person who was so concerned about the product. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right, everything that’s not the product is super important and should get a ton of attention oh you mean not obsessing over the product is the very thing that leads companies to become defunct and insolvent huh well how about that.

The product — especially as it relates to television-heavy businesses — is the only thing that matters.

One Thing I Didn’t Love

And speaking of the product … Shane Ryan, who (all the caveats here) is much smarter than I am as well as a better writer and reporter, wrote about slow play for Golf Digest last week. He walked around with the Tour’s senior VP of Rules at Quail Hollow, and the piece he wrote got a ton of praise.

And while it was well researched, terrifically written and quite interesting, I also thought the general premise everyone reached — that slow play is a lot more complicated to solve than we think — is … wrong.

One quote in particular from Gary Young, the VP of Rules, bothered me: “People say that we have a pace-of-play problem. No, we don’t. We don’t. We’re just maximizing the opportunities for our membership right now.”

I mean, yeah, that’s one way to frame a pace of play problem.

The solve for pace of play is simple but it’s not easy because players won’t go for it: Reduce the number of players in events by 20-30 and slightly reduce time par across the board. These would not lead to perfect outcomes because there would still be rules issues that led to pace problems, but they would certainly help.

However, the Tour is more or less run by its membership, and the Tour’s executives are incentivized to provide that membership as many playing opportunities as possible for that membership, which means you get overflowing tournaments that create pace of play issues.

This obviously leads to all kinds of other problems beyond pace of play as well — like having 900 tournaments a year, which dilutes the product (again, the only thing that matters) but pleases the membership (which matters, but not if there’s nobody there to watch it!)

So of course membership doesn’t want fewer players in events or for those players to be forced to play more quickly because they (like the Tour’s leadership) are not incentivized to do so. It would be like MLB players voting in favor of the new shot clock. Oh, they voted against such a thing? I am shocked!

All of this gets at something Talor Gooch tweeted a few weeks ago in which he complained about the USGA shutting him out of the U.S. Open (this is not a sentiment unique to Gooch): When do we ask the players [who should be in the field] instead of the amateur organizations?

Players are good at playing. Very few of them are good at product, marketing and administration. And while you could argue that the Tour hasn’t been very good at that over the years either (and I wouldn’t argue against you!), the actual problem is that nobody’s incentives at the Tour (players or executives) align with you the fan or the customer. Gooch thinks players should be making more decisions, but the real way to improve all of this is for them to be making fewer.

All organizations — golf or otherwise — should make decisions based only on what is going to be improve the product for consumers. That is, the Tour should not care that players want to take their time with shots they’re playing for millions of dollars. It should care very much, however, about how much time fans want to take to watch players hit these shots. Great players (and their opinions) come and go (even Tiger), but the business must endure.

Media Diet

👉️ This 15-minute Oak Hill preview from TFE is excellent. Will help you get appreciate the restoration of a Ross and get excited for next week’s PGA. Bonus: This Derek Duncan story on Oak Hill for Digest is equally good.

Here’s the best quote from Jeff Sluman: “I think Oak Hill is an all-time driver’s golf course … You really have to drive the ball straight, even though off the tee there’s more room now to swing a ball left to right or right to left.”

Kinda sounds like you maybe don’t have to drive it straight (see: Winged Foot 2020).

👉️ The PhD student/violinist teeing it up at the Nelson is truly a great story. Unfortunately he shot 79 in the first round.

👉️ Two books I read on vacation. Both were great for different reasons. The Silent Patient was a terrific, fun fiction read with good writing and requisite twists. Three-Ring Circus on the Kobe/Shaq Lakers by Jeff Pearlman was tremendous. Great stories, great quotes. What a weird franchise and time. A question I left with: How often do I let petulance get in the way of my own success and not even realize I’m doing it?

👉️ This pod with Founders host David Senra about the magic of podcasts and how you can build million dollar businesses with them is really good. Lot of f-bombs but a good pod.

👉️ Michael Kim dropped some thoughts on his first designated event. Really good and interesting, especially with the context that he won the Deere in 2018 and then didn’t have another top 10 on the Tour until the 2022 Barbasol.

👉️ Max Homa is correct, the swag here is off the charts.

👉️ Want to feel great about your golf swing? Watch this 9 year old flush driver.

👉️ This clip from an interview with Dax Shepard is pretty unbelievable. You should go watch the entire thing, but I transcribed most of it here.

“They’re paying me a ton of money. People recognize me at the airport. I’m doing everything I had dreamt of doing for 30 years. It all came true. And I am the least happy I’ve ever been in my life. I’m the closest to not wanting to be alive as I’ve ever been, and I have every single thing on paper that I wanted. I feel grateful for this because I was able to say, ‘Oh, something much more profound is broken.’ Those are illusions that most people don’t get to find out are illusions, and I got to find out it’s an illusion.”

The Infirmary

True sicko behavior within the golf community.

Not to brag, but I was at a resort in Mexico last week celebrating my wife’s 40th. Just the perfect setup with friends. All the food and drinks you could want, a great beach volleyball situation, excursions, tennis and pickleball, a coffee and pastry shop, a lazy river and tons of entertainment.

So where do I find myself on Day 2 of the trip? Hiding out in the gym listening to Shane Bacon and Andy Johnson’s all-flushers podcast while texting them about shots they missed out on from the 2014 Open at Hoylake.

🆘

Great pod by the way.

By the Numbies

2.22: Last year, Scottie Scheffler — who won four times and became the No. 1 player in the world for the majority of the year — gained 2.21 strokes for the year according to Data Golf. An extraordinary year.

In 2006, Tiger Woods gained 2.22 … on approach play … alone … just that category. Tiger was better with his irons in 2006 than Scottie was throughout his bag in 2022.

Tiger won 10 times overall that year, including his last seven.

This is art.

From the Archives

From the “I think about this all the time” files, let’s take it back to the 2021 PGA Championship, which happened 10 two years ago and at which Phil Mickelson tweeted at me on the morning of his first round about crypto schemes.

He went on to shoot 70-69-70-73 over the next four days to win his sixth major.

How far away does that feel from this (which has since been deleted)?

Other than “You too Whan” entering the Golf Twitter Meme Lexicon, what’s incredible about this tweet is that the PGA — as Porath recently pointed out — actually prioritized at least on LIV guy over some Tour players who are ranked higher in the OWGR!

Crypto-Joke-Making Phil has given way to Cherry-Picking Phil, and though the flip has been interesting to think and talk about, I certainly prefer one to the other.

 Meme of the Week

Me after trying for 18 minutes in 101-degree weather to get the car seat locked in and the straps as tight at humanly possible to the point that a world strongman competitor couldn’t get them any tighter.

How is This App Free?

Very cool that NLU will be on the alternate broadcast for both the PGA and U.S. Open, and this one got me good.

JRay is the goat, and this was an all-timer.