Phil Wins at Kiawah!!

I realize that we are now three days after the fact, but The Grandstander cannot let any further time pass without acknowledging the phenomenal performance by Phil Mickelson in winning the 2021 PGA Championship at the Ocean Course in Kiawah Island, SC this past weekend.  As everyone knows by now, at the age of 50 years, 11 months, Phil became the oldest golfer to ever win a Major Championship.  It was remarkable accomplishment by a popular player and was great fun to watch as Phil battled Brooks Koepka in that final pairing on Sunday.

(Little Known Facts:  The Grandstander is very much like Phil Mickelson.  I am a natural right-hander, I play golf left-handed, and I, too, am - ahem - over fifty years of age.  No wonder people are always getting us mixed up.)

This victory by Mickelson, a 3000-1 long shot who was ranked 176th in the world coming into the event, sparked comparisons to Tiger Woods' equally remarkable win at the Masters in 2019, and it reminded us all that both Woods and Mickelson will forever be linked as the greatest golfers of their generation.  One must wonder how truly staggering the wins and wins-in-majors totals for Phil would have been had he not been a playing contemporary of Woods over the last twenty-five years or so.

It is interesting that the two of them, who were never particularly close, and, in fact, may not have even liked each other all that much, have seemed to draw closer as they have aged, in  much the same way that Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus did when their glory years were behind them and they got older.  Think of Phil dressing in red and black on the Champions Tour the weekend after Woods' auto accident earlier this year, and think of Woods tweet saluting Mickelson  (and Phil's response) after the big win on Sunday.  It's kind of cool, really.

And as this Barry Svrluga column in today's Washington Post indicates, the injured and inactive Woods and the fifty year old Philly Mick are still the only gofers that really move the needle among the sporting public.

Two more comments on the PGA Championship. 

The Ocean Course is a gorgeous piece of golf property in a spectacular setting.  Wonderful to look at.  That said, I would have no desire to ever play on it.  I mean, it looks like just about the hardest golf course that I've ever seen.  I can't imagine having a bit of fun slogging through it.

The surging of the crowd onto the fairways after Mickelson and Koepka teed off on 18 can only be classified as an absolute disgrace.

"But that happens all the time at the British Open" I can hear you say, and that's true, but the Brits do it in a much more civilized manner.  What we saw on Sunday was the equivalent of drunken mobs storming a football field.  It's lucky no one was hurt (that we know of) or worse in that melee.  Say what you will about Brooks Koepka, he had every right to be thoroughly pissed off to be swallowed up in that mass while he - in theory - still could have hit shots that would have won the tournament for him.

Let's hope that the stuffed-shirts of the USGA learn from this and does NOT allow this scene to be repeated at the US Open next month.

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.

US Open Thoughts After Three Rounds

There is nothing like a US Open on the west coast to assure that golf fans in the eastern time zone will be glued to their couches and TV sets for four straight days of prime time.  Add the fact that this year's Open is being played at Pebble Beach, probably the most photogenic and beautiful golf course in the world, and, well, that makes for great viewing.

Some random thoughts.....

The coverage on Fox has been outstanding.  Great shots  by the camera folks and, for the most part, pretty good announcing  by the team led by Joe Buck, even though once in awhile he thinks he's doing an NFL game.  The shot track feature is fabulous as are those lines that they superimpose on the greens that tell you how the putts will break.  Wish I could have that on the greens when I'm lining up putts.

One quibble with the announcers.  Advanced metrics statistics, you know, like the ones that are so stultifyingly boring on baseball broadcasts, are beginning to creep into golf telecasts.  When they tell me that Pete McDuffer has 6.57 "Strokes gained putting"....just what in the hell does that mean?  

On the bright side, we don't have to listen to Peter Kostis drone on about this-or-that guy's degree of shoulder turn while looking at the Konika Minolta BizHub Swing Analyzer.

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Speaking of the announcers, it was cool when CBS' Jim Nantz turned up for a brief segment in the Fox booth yesterday with Buck and Paul Azinger.  Nantz lives in Carmel near Pebble Beach, so it was a good thought to allow for a network crossover and have him on.  I was disappointed, though that he didn't greet us with an "Hello, friends."  I also found it interesting that he said that Pebble Beach and St. Andrews are the best and most iconic courses in all of  golf.  That's it, that's the list.  I wonder what the green jacketed Poo-Bahs at Augusta National thought when they heard that little bon mot from CBS' "Voice of The Masters"?  Those dudes have been known to ban announcers from their little tournament for similar sacrileges.

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Maybe the Fox on course microphones are more sensitive or maybe there are just more of them, but from what I am hearing, the galleries at Pebble consist of the biggest bunch of yay-hoos around.  Barely two or three minutes of any portion of the telecasts pass with out hearing some jerk scream out "GET IN THE HOLE" (even on approach shots from 240 yards out).  There are especially hot rooms in Hell reserved for the idiots who scream that out at golf events.

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Speaking of idiots, how do you like that Jordan Speith?  He came upon the scene in 2015 when he won the Masters and the US Open at the age of 22, and was hailed as the future face of golf.  Since then, he has been seen acting out with some of his fellow tour players like a bunch drunken frat boys on a ritzy golf resort, taking forever to line up his shots and hit the ball, regularly rinsing balls on Number 12 at Augusta, and, this week at the Open, for petulantly blaming his caddy when he, Speith, hit back-to-back God-awful shots in the first round.

Swell headed, over-entitled jocks in the NFL and NBA have nothing on Jordan Speith.

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Okay, time for a prediction, but before that, take a look at my long shot bet that I made two weeks ago:

A victory by Tony Finau would have had me me playing on "house money" down at The Rivers Casino for the entire upcoming NFL season, but, alas and alack, Tony failed to make the cut.

As for those that are still playing, here is the top of the leader board going into the fourth round:

Gary Woodland    -11

Justin Rose          -10

Brooks Koepka     -7

Chez Reavie         -7

Louis Oosthuizen  -7

Rory McIlroy          -6

It is from among those final three pairings that the winner will emerge, and, realistically, I believe that only Woodland, Rose, and Koepka will still be in it until the end.  I suppose that a guy from back in the pack, say, Dustin Johnson would be capable of putting up a 65 today, which would get him to  eight under and reasonably close to contention, but that would assume that twenty-two other golfers tied or ahead of him would all stumble and fall back.  Not going to happen.

Who am I rooting for?  That would be Brooks Koepka because in addition to that wager above on Finau, I also dropped a ten spot on Koepka, albeit at much shorter odds, so a third straight Open for Koepka would net me eighty bucks. So there's that.

However, my official prediction for today?  Justin Rose to overtake Woodland and all others and win his second US Open title.

The US Open, Phil, and Brooks

Readers - I think there were two of you out there - have been beseeching The Grandstander for his thoughts on the recently completed US Open, specifically for his thoughts on Phil Mickelson's rules breaking fiasco in the third round.

First, The Phil Cause Celebre....

I won't recount the whole thing.  If you care at all, you know the details.  The Hall of Fame golfer, the second best and most important golfer of the still young 21st century, deliberately broke a rule, took a two stroke penalty, and caused a great deal of harrumphing among those who hold the rules of golf sacrosanct who saw Phil's transgression as equal to someone urinating on the altar at the Vatican.  My thoughts:

• No one in sports, no one, are more self-important than the rules nerds who run the game of golf.  So, when someone of Mickelson's stature sticks his finger in their collective ears, a part of me says "Good for Phil."
• In retrospect, however, Mickelson's actions WERE pretty egregious, and something a little stiffer than a two stroke penalty was no doubt deserved.
• The USGA Blue Blazers, who are the lead harrumphers when it comes to the rules of golf, defecated the bed on this one - AGAIN - by saying that the two stroke penalty was sufficient.  Had some shmoe Open qualifier who was ranked 241st in the world done what Mickelson did, he would undoubtedly have been DQ'ed immediately.  By showing that there IS a double standard when a golfer of Philly Mick's stature is involved, the Blue Blazers put the lie to the very standards that they hold so sacrosanct.
• Oh, and did you notice that three days after the conclusion of the tournament, Mickelson issued an apology for his actions.  Too late, but Phil is a guy who's dodged Insider Trading charges during the course of his life, so I guess this won't bother him all that much.

Second, the pros whine.....

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as the pros whined and bitched about how unfair the set up at Shinnecock Hills was, particularly on Saturday.  As fate would have it, my "Facebook Memories" today showed this post from this date in 2015 following the Open at Chambers Bay in Oregon.  I reproduce it here:

Pro golfers are independent contractors and, as such, are different from most other pro athletes, especially those in team sports. They should be admired for that. However, they take a back seat to NO PRO ATHLETE, not Tom Brady, not LeBron James, not A-Rod, no one, when it comes to - to coin a phrase - primadonnaism. Don't make a noise, don't click a camera, please don't move while I take 120 seconds to line up this putt. The complaints about Chambers Bay that we are hearing are a prime example. Let's bring Rory McIlroy or Jordan Spieth out to Rose Ridge or Saxon and give them a dose of humility in the form of what 99% of the world's golfers have to play on all the time.

Only the date and the location changes.  The guys who never had to play on a public course in their lives continue to cry whenever that can't shoot four rounds in the sixties.

Having said that, however, I also say screw the USGA people who insist that the Open be a "difficult test of golf".  I, for one, do not particularly enjoy watching the best players in the world kick it round the course shooting seven or eight over par in any given round.

Finally, the winner.....

Let's hear it for Brooks Koepka, who has won the Open for the second consecutive year, a feat that had not been accomplished in twenty-nine years.  Between Mickelson and the set up of the golf course, Koepka's considerable accomplishment seemed to be a footnote to the entire weekend, and that's a shame.

US Open Thoughts

As the golfers prepare to tee it up for the final round of the 2017 United States Open at Erin Hills, some thoughts....

You have to go sixteen names deep into the Leaderboard after the third round to find any golfers with a Major Championship to their credit, Louis Oostheizen and Sergio Garcia, who are T-17 with seven other golfers.  The first sixteen names include two top ten golfers (Fowler and Matsuyma) and a bunch of other guys who can be considered journeymen (Snedeker, Haas) or Up-and-Comers (Thomas, Koepka, Harman, Fleetwood).

What does it all mean?  Are guys like Thomas, Koepka, Reed, and Fleetwood truly "up-and-comers" who will share multiple Majors among them over the next ten years or so, or will they be a guy like Brandt Snedeker, a guy who has made a solid living on Tour, picks up a win a year and a bunch of top ten finishes, but never becomes a Star, or will today's winner be a One Hit Wonder, something that the US Open produces with some regularity (Andy North, Steve Jones).  

One thing for sure, none of these guys is "the next Tiger".

My own prediction is that Brooks Koepka will be hoisting that silver trophy come tonight (or tomorrow if a playoff is necessary).

Watch, but don't bet.

Oh, and speaking of Brooks Koepka, do you think he gets his golf shirts specially tailored for the sleeves to fit tight against his biceps to show off those guns of his?