Golf 2014

The Game Room
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The omnibus Tennis seems to work well. Maybe an omnibus Golf thread to be bumped for the Majors can work well too.

Its Masters Time!! Although the TPTB at ANGC have a titch of arrogance and sanctimony, it is my favorite tournament of the year.

Golf 2014 has been fairly dull as the biggest news has been Woods latest injury. He had back surgery the other day and will not be playing the Masters. He had not played well since late Summer so I was not expecting too much from him.

Not only is the Masters wide open but the #1 ranking is going to be wide open. At least three players can overtake the #1 ranking from Tiger next week and if about 10 others win the Masters, they will be in position to get the #1 ranking while Tiger is on the disabled list

Some Handicapping of the top ranked players.

Adam Scott (Ranked #2 as of Mar 31, 2014). Defending Champs usually do not perform well and Adam choked down the stretch at Bay Hill a couple weeks ago.

Henrik Stenson (#3). Has not had a good tournament in 2014.

Jason Day (#4). Won Match Play, but been on the Disabled List with a bad thumb since that win

Phil Mickelson (#5). His health is a concern. Two WDs this year, and suspect 2014 results, but seems to be playing OK in Houston this week. Focusing his attention to the US Open for the Career Slam.

Justin Rose (#6). Been out part of the year with a shoulder injury. I see no reason why he should be a serious contender

Rory McIlroy (#7). The Bookies favorite right now, but IMO, it is because of the process of elimination because no one is stepping up. Has not won a PGA Tournament for 18 months and is not playing particularly well in Houston through 36 holes.

Sergio Garcia (#8). Won a tournament in the Middle East, and leading through 36 holes this week in Houston. Has said that he does not like ANGC course and he is not cut out to win a major.

Zach Johnson (#9). Beside Jason Day, he is the only top 11 player to win on the PGA Tour in 2014. But it was a short field at the Tournament of Champions. Started the year playing very well, but has tailed off

Dustin Johnson (#10). Some good tournaments, Some Bad Tournaments for DJ this year. Shot 80 something in Houston and WD with a stiff back. Won a big event in China last fall and has not had much success at ANGC

Matt Kuchar (#11). Slow start to his year. Bad Final Round in San Antonio last week a tournament that he probably should have won. Not sure if his golf game and ANGC matchup well.

Bubba Watson (#12) Won Los Angeles this year, his first win since winning the Masters since 2012. Shot 80 something in Orlando in Round 1 and WD because of Allergies.

I am taking the Field against the above the players. I don’t think any of them are winning. Some Other players (all Masters Virgins) to look out for.

Jimmy Walker: Three PGA Tour wins in the last 6 months including Hawaii and Pebble Beach and playing

Patrick Reed: Three PGA Tour wins in the last 8 months including the WGC-Cadillac event in Miami

Jordan Spieth: 20 yr old Hot Shot who won a tournament at age 19 last summer and with a bunch of other good results and is ranked in the top 15.

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No interest in the Masters?

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I’m interested, I just don’t know much about golf. Tiger must be particularly annoyed that he cannot compete, given the state of all his main rivals that you have listed! I wonder if this will be the year where a veteran who has not won anything for years has a golden weekend and takes the title, much as Fred Couples and Tom Watson have done recently (except they couldn’t quite close the deal - playing 4 good rounds of golf in a major is hard, and it doesn’t get any easier as you get older).

But really, picking the winner at a golf major at the moment is such a crapshoot (even more so than usual, I mean) - you’re best off being the bookie, not the punter (although that is always true, in general - particularly so at the moment I think).

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The LPGA just finished its first major. Lexi Thompson took plunge, only player with shot at “Super Slam”. (LPGA plays 5 Majors)

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The problem with the “sports needs a dominator” mindset is that this isn’t tennis. Men’s tennis has a number of mechanisms in place, most notably the “win by two” mandate, to make upsets much more unlikely. As a result, there are at most four or five really dominant players at any one time, and often it’s two or even one. (Women’s tennis has it even worse, but that has more to do with the talent disparity…there’s no way in hell any men’s French Open finallist is ever going to get blanked 6-0 in the first two sets.)

A golf tournament is 72 holes, giving underdogs plenty of time to pull off a miracle and big leaders plenty of time to go in the tank. And it can all turn literally on one hole…one bad decision, one moment of hubris, one impossible godly chip-in, one stroke of luck. Heck, how many times have we seen fortunes completely change on the 72nd hole? So it is pretty damn remarkable when anyone goes on a tear like Vijay Singh, like Padraig Harrington did, like Rory McIlroy did, hell, even super-streaky Phil Mickelson was up there for a while. The vast majority of the time, the reality is Ian Baker-Finch, John Daly, David Duval, Sergio Garcia, Mike Weir, Paul Lawrie, guys whose moment of dominant is frustratingly brief or even an outright fluke, and except for occasional flashes of brilliance they never return to the spotlight.

Now, the thing about Tiger Woods is that he’s had this big collapse. He had it pretty early in his career, in fact. But he bounced right back. Then another big collapse…and another big rebound. And another. And another. Most recently, when he went all of 2012 without winning a single tournament and dropping out of the top 50, and just about everyone (including myself) thought that his days at the top were over. We all know how that story ended. This NEVER happens. You don’t plummet into the abyss and then two months later shake it off and become the emperor again. At best you suffer a nagging loss of confidence and regain most of your old form but never quite reach the towering heights you once occupied; at worst your career completely bottoms out. Look what happened to Mike Tyson after his rape conviction. And for Woods to have suffered as many catastrophic blows as he has, to have the success he did in twenty-freaking-thirteen is just about mind-blowing.

So to use Woods as some kind of benchmark, or even an ideal, is ridiculous. The man’s a freak. There will never in a hundred years be another golfer with his kind of regenerative powers, and I will stake my damn life savings on that. It’s reached the point where he’s about to miss a minimum of three months with a bad back, his legs are already a mess, and I flat-out refuse to say that his days of dominance are over, for fear that he’ll go Wolverine and make me look like a fool yet again.

But yeah, there’s absolutely no telling who’ll win the Masters. And I’m cool with that. We’ve reached the point where we need some new blood at the top. McIlroy is looking like a one-hit wonder, Mickelson never scared anyone and he’s not getting any younger, Garcia has never been great. 2014 looks like it’s going to be a big scramble to see who deserves to be #1, and if nothing else, it should be revelatory.

So I’m with most of ESPN.com’s readership. Just watch and enjoy the ride. Dang, it’s been a while since I could do that.

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Nitpick: Woods won 3 times in 2012 (Bay Hill, Memorial, and ATT Nat’l). It was 2011 when he dropped out of the top 50. He lost the #1 ranking in Oct 2010, and dropped out of the top 50 about a year later.

In 2013 he won 5 times, and reclaimed the #1 spot early in the year.

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Good post, DKW - if it was in response to mine, I agree with you. I don’t necessarily want there to be a dominant force in golf, and it makes majors more interesting when there isn’t one. I suppose it just feels unusual, still, not to have a clear favourite after many years of TW dominating fields.

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Totally agree. Although I would like to see Tiger go all golf Terminator again. Even better: I’d like to see someone else make some massive leap and push Tiger to get pathologically crazy about destroying him in a major.

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I have a feeling about Sergio Garcia this week. I know he doesn’t particularly like Augusta, but his game is the right kind for a Masters winner. He is Top 15 in Greens in Regulation and Top 30 in Driving Distance, the two most important stats for playing well there. He is playing well and seems to have matured in recent years. We shall see.

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Oh, and Jason Day, too, although I do not know what he has been doing the last two months after tearing it up to start the year.

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Jason Day has been out with a Bad Left Thumb.

He has not played a tournament since he won the Match Play in Feb. Unless you count the Par 3 tournament today.

I think a bad left thumb is would be worse than a bad right thumb.

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Hey, is there anyplace to pick up the first two rounds other than the Masters.com feed? Wasn’t able to find it on my cable guide, and all Golf Channel has is this “Live at Augusta” talk show thing.

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ESPN has the coverage in Rounds 1 and 2. 3 pm to 7:30 pm EDT.

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Kind of a funny scoreboard anomaly right now:

8 players at E
7 players at -1
6 players at -3

Nobody at -2.

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Just thought I’d share this piece from Rick Reilly.

It’s rare to see him this even-handed. Usually it’s because he has absolutely no choice, and in this case I can’t blame him.

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Great win by Bubba Watson. The course is made for him if he can keep his head on straight.

Wonderful debuts by Jordan Spieth and Jonas Blixt. Tie for 2nds is terrific. Wish I had bought a option on Spieth about a year ago.

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Watched the recording today, and there’s something that really stuck out for me when I saw Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Jack Nicklaus do the ceremonial tee off: Golfers age very gracefully. Palmer, all 84 years of him, looked downright handsome. Player did a freaking kick that probably would’ve left me sprawled out on the grass. We’ve seen a wrestler go nutsoid in his later career and them drop dead while he was taking a walk, and before that another go COMPLETELY nutsoid an murder his family before killing himself. We’ve witness endless horror stories with football players, many of them ending in early death, which is actually preferable to the more common chronic pain or lifelong disability. Tennis players frequently become complete physical wrecks (it was downright hard watching Andre Agassi in his final days), and that’s if they don’t succumb to burnout or emotional trauma. I trust that the less said about boxing or figure skating, the better.

This never happens in golf. You never hear about downward spirals or going off the deep end or anything involving guns or drugs. No one ever got a concussion or tore an ACL from golf; no one ever had to be carted off. You can play for 50 years and look and feel great afterward. That’s pretty remarkable.

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Andre Agassi is alive and well and playing in charity tournaments and appears to be in great shape. I have no idea of who you are thinking of, but it isn’t Andre Agassi. His drug use was during his playing days, but as far as I know he’s been clean and sober for quite a while.

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It was drugs? Yipes. Don’t want to hijack this, so I’ll just say that I’m glad he’s much better now.