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Hey,
A quick warning.
It’s almost “I can’t believe it’s 7:30 p.m. and we’re actually going to finish these last two holes without maxing out the leaderboard nits taking our iPhones out and flipping on the flashlights” SZN.
Make sure you’re dressed for it.
Onto the news.
The PGA Tour: “That other tour is not a meritocracy and is not to be taken seriously in any way shape or form.”
Also the PGA Tour: “Fat Perez and one of the hosts of BustaJack are playing to get into one of our tournaments.”
Professional golf has a problem right now with its regular season rhythms, and that statement is not exclusive to LIV.
The majors? They know what they are. Each organization understands that its purpose is to put on the toughest, fairest test of championship golf at whatever course this year’s edition is at.
We can yell and squabble about whether each organization is actually capable of doing this, but the purpose itself is not really up in the air.
Last week, with one of its stars hollering about how it had fulfilled all of the requirements of the meritocratic OWGR, LIV rolled out a new star who has not hit a professional golf shot since Kevin Durant was on the Thunder and Hideki Matsui was still an active player.
That’s Hideki Matsui, not Hideki Matsuyama.
Not to be outdone, the Tour gave the go ahead for this YouTube tourney with the winner getting a spot in the Myrtle Beach Tour event.
This is obviously different than LIV begging for OWGR points while signing a player who had not earned a spot (that, by the way, the PGA Tour would have happily given several sponsor exemptions to), but it underscores the broader existential problem with regular season golf right now.
As one friend said, I definitely think it’s a good idea! Just not as good of an idea as the tournament not existing.
I have been thinking a lot about incentives recently.
You know where AK wouldn’t have been signed and rolled out or given exemptions to? The NFL. Why? The incentives for each team are (except in exceptional cases) to take each week as seriously as possible. And while the NFL is an outlier when it comes to not needing extra eyeballs on its product, it also has tremendously aligned incentives between players, ownership, management and fans.
Incentives in golf are a total mess.
They are magnificently misaligned. Players are now also owners on both LIV and the PGA Tour, which — as I have pointed out 1.2 million times — sounds like a great idea, but might not actually be a great idea if those same people don’t care about or understand what makes a business work.
Regardless, the YouTube tourney … it’s actually kind of fun, and I am mostly for it. But it highlights the fact that there are so many sponsor exemptions into the best and most competitive tour in the world. Which, I don’t know, the more I think about it the more I struggle with the concept of exemptions into what is supposed to be a pure meritocracy.
The bottom line for me? All golf leagues should be uniformly ordered and stuff like the YouTube tourney to get into an event should exist, but only at the lower levels.* I should be able to follow Grant Horvat’s quest to get into the top 100 in the world by watching him win that tournament to get into Tier 4 league and see if he can play his way into the top 100 and potentially the majors.
I believe there was a documentary series made about this called Welcome to Wrexham. I believe it is compelling.
I also believe regular season golf remains a complete and total mess right now.
*There should also be fewer tournaments throughout, and we should formalize what is already true — that the Honda and the Arnold Palmer are not even close to the same type of competition.
This is more or less what I’m talking about above. What is regular season golf? Is it a meritocracy? Is it an entertainment product that the folks in charge are orchestrating by casting themselves as the stars? What are we doing here?
(this is not an Adam Scott nor Webb Simpson subtweet … both of those guys are awesome on a personal and professional level. It’s more of a “what even is all of this?” look at regular season pro golf right now).
One problem (of many) is that there is only a loose connection between the majors and the regular season. A deeper alignment between “regular season” and “postseason” implies a serious, purely meritocratic regular season. Or a complete untethering of the two would imply that the regular season (i.e. PGA Tour golf) is pure entertainment. Go crazy, have all the YouTube wildcards you want.
Instead, everybody is hung up in between serious and silly, and nobody seems to really know what the non-major championship product is supposed to look like.
• Incessant yelling about the rankings system.
• Insane oil money running rampant and touching everything in sight.
• A preeminent destination found in north Georgia.
• Deserving candidates being left out of massive year-end event.
• The only goal is for your rival fan base to be more miserable than you are.
Pro golf is the new college football.
This is a fun question that I sometimes use with friend groups or at dinners. It’s silly and ridiculous but gets people thinking.
Also amusing to think about asking it 500 years ago: Well, anybody but Jim the cobbler. His shoe tacks suck.
Watching golf this morning and thought of something - if you could have one brand sponsor you for the rest of your life, what would it be (and why)?
Also, you have to wear the brand on your person in every social setting so factor that in.
— Shane Bacon (@shanebacon)
Mar 2, 2024
“I'm definitely hitting the ball well.” -Anthony Kim after shooting 76-76-74 and losing to Joaquin Niemann by 33 shots in King Abdullah Economic City
This made me laugh because … I’ve been there! (We all have!)
Honey, I’m completely flushing it. I shot 99 today with a birdie at the last.
Also because two weeks ago Hideki Matsuyama shot 62 to beat like nine of the best 12 players in the world at Riviera and tried to convince us he couldn’t find the clubface.
The most confusing sport in the world.
The juxtaposition of both quotes reminds me of another great Hideki quote from Memorial last year: “I feel great. You never know, though, tomorrow morning.”
1. It was a quiet week for Normal Sport moments, which means we’ll get C.T. Pan jumping out of the hedges on the 15th hole at Bay Hill to scare Collin Morikawa or something insane this week.
There were two amusing moments I saw at PGA National, the second of which Jason Page illustrated beautifully at the bottom of this newsletter.
Is there any other sport where you can stand out of bounds and hit a ball that’s still in bounds? I guess tennis? Volleyball? I guess I should say it like this: Is there any other sport where the definition of out of bounds is so ambiguous, vague and defined by mesh netting and metal stakes?
2. This one is as normal sport as it gets. A professional athlete in line to potentially win a professional sporting event is not at that event and in fact playing in a different non-professional version of the event at the same time the event is finishing up. Absolutely amazing.
… Lost in the AK sadness, a champion emerged in Florida …
Invasive thoughts about golf ball models is about as infirmary as it gets.
It’s not the number of buttons as much as it is the fact that they run from his Adam’s apple to his belly button.
Speaking of having an egregious number of buttons on your golf shirt during a PGA Tour event … remember when Jim Furyk used to play golf in full button up shirts? I know Phil did it recently, but that felt more like a bit. This was the real deal.
You can get far in life once you realize people just want to talk about themselves. -Greg Isenberg
This Greller meme is so good.
I 100 percent have it in the queue for Augusta.
👉️ I need to do a deeper dive on this Webb Q&A at some point. It’s enlightening, especially if you read between the lines.
👉️ The replies on this post by Antifaldo about how in the world we have a PGA Tour tournament called the Cognizant are hilarious.
👉️ Amazing five-putt here. Been there!
👉️ Andy Lack goes off on the coddled PGA Tour pro and how that ruined The Event At PGA National Formerly Known As The Honda Classic.
👉️ This post from a writer in Japan I follow called Craig Mod on what he’s learned writing books and being an entrepreneur is excellent.
👉️ This Joe Posnanski post on how bad of a defensive shortstop Derek Jeter was is terrific. I’m not sure any writer follows his or her nose better (or more) than Pos.
👉️ I’m not in love with all of Sahil Bloom’s content, but I enjoyed this on what he eats throughout a day. Good, interesting (and aspirational!) content.
… and a two-man playoff in South Africa.
• Did not envision Talor Gooch being wedged into a conversation about Gary Player and Jock Hutchison when the year started.
• So good (and so true).
• They just keep coming.
• I miss Chris Kirk trying to play one off the windshield of a CRV last year.
This idea doesn’t have to be exclusive to podcasts.
Rather, I have found that if you can think of questions that a thoughtful and relatively introspective person has herself (or himself) never considered, you can find some magic. The first example I thought of: KVV’s question to The Cat last year at Riviera that had him in a pretzel (in a good way!).
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