Brooks Koepka and the "Average" Golfer

I heard the morning show guys on 93.7 The Fan talking about this today and thought it deserved some attention/discussion.

At a presser preceding the PGA Tour Championship now being contested at East Lake CC in Atlanta, someone asked Brooks Koepka, four time major champion and currently the world's #1 ranked player a question the effect of....If you took an "average guy, an average player" out of the gallery at random, gave him a set of clubs and paired him with you, Brooks Koepka, in this tournament, how many strokes would you, Brooks Koepka, have to give him in order for it to be competitive?

Well, on the sound bite, Koepka at first just laughed and then said, "well, if an average guy is a fifteen handicap, I don't know, maybe 75 strokes over the four rounds of the tournament?"  (Not an exact quote, but that was the gist of it.)

Well, The Fan's Dunlap, Mack and Colony, all agreed that in saying 75 strokes, Koepka was just being diplomatic in answering the question.  That if an average golfer (and by the way, I am guessing that an "average golfer" is nowhere near a fifteen handicap) started a four round tournament on a course set up for PGA Tour players 75 strokes ahead of Brooks Koepka, not only would Koepka win, he would blow the doors off the poor sap who get suckered into thinking that the might be able to compete in such a contest, a contest on a 7,000+ yard course where there is no rolling the ball in the fairway, playing from behind trees and in thick rough and deep sand traps "as it lies", and where even the casual two foot "gimmes" from the Wednesday night league must all be putted out.

Think about it. If Koepka shot even par - which is 70 at East Lake, I believe - in every round, and if Joe Average managed to shoot 90 in each round, which he would be lucky to do, Koepka beats him by five strokes.

I can only imagine Koepka went back into the locker room and said to his fellow Tour players, "you ain't gonna believe what some guy just asked me", and that they all had a good laugh over it.

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Switching from golf to baseball, I have to say that after watching the Pirates lose three of four to the Nationals this week (cumulative score of all four games, 32-6; cumulative score of the three games the Pirates lost, 31-2), I have to say that I am not sure now many more posts you'll be seeing from The Grandstander on the Pirates for the remainder of this season.  I mean what more can possibly be said, and I've run out of synonyms for "lousy", "horrid", and "wretched".

So, perhaps the next post of any length or depth you will see on the Pirates in this space will be at season's end when we see who, if anyone, will be held accountable by Bob Nutting for what has been a total and complete second half collapse (and does "collapse" even begin to describe what we've seen since mid-July?) by this team.