Shipnuck on Tiger's Drop

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With his latest column on who's hot and who's not, Alan Shipnuck joins John Hawkins (here) in calling the Tiger Woods relief-from-the-clubhouse drop ridiculous:

How in the world does a player jack a ball onto the roof of the clubhouse and not incur a penalty? Tiger's sweetheart ruling at Firestone was the most ridiculous thing I've seen on a golf course since -- who else? -- Woods got a dozen of his buddies to roll a boulder, er, loose impediment out of his way in Phoenix in '99.

More importantly, I think we've found the bridge to bring these two talented golf writers together for the future We just can't have them feuding. No, no.

So Much For The Big Five

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From guest contributor Steve Elling comes this note:

Eyeing the updated world rankings today. It says that Tiger has padded his lead over #2 Mickelson to a record margin since the ranking methodology was tweaked a couple of years ago.

Small wonder.

Tiger has seven wins worldwide in 2006 -- matching the total of the rest of the top 10 in the rankings COMBINED.

Scott, Goosen, Els and Garcia (all ranked in the top eight) have contributed zero.

Ogilvy and Phil have two wins apiece.

Tiger On Winning His B Game

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After struggling over the weekend and winning, Tiger Woods was asked:

Q. Do you feel like you just won a pretty prestigious tournament with your B game?

TIGER WOODS: Well, I was not hitting it all that well the last two days. I was kind of struggling. I was just trying to piece it together somehow, somehow just piece it together. I was putting well today, but I just couldn't give myself any looks at it. Then when I did, I was missing putts.

But I was just trying to get it around somehow and keep myself in the ballgame. If I got to double digits, I thought I could win it at either 11 or 12, and 10 or 11 would have been a playoff. If I could just get to those numbers somehow, forget what everyone else was doing, just get to those numbers, I'd be all right. I got to 11 and just didn't stay there. 10 ended up being the playoff number.
And we didn't get a "right in front of you," just an "in front of you."
Q. What is it with Akron and this course that's really been so special?

TIGER WOODS: Well, I love this golf course. As I said earlier, we don't get a chance to play this type of course very often. The new, modern golf courses never look like this. You never have a piece of property where there are no homes on it. It's just a golf course.

So from that standpoint, it's a treat to be able to play a tree lined golf course that's straight forward in front of you, and we saw what happened yesterday when it got hard and fast, that any round that was in the high to mid 60s, you would vault up the board. Most Tour events that's not the case. You shoot low scores just to try and keep pace.

This golf course, if it got hard, dry and fast, nobody would ever be in double digits.

Check out Tiger's stats from Firestone:

Driving Distance Avg       343.4       357.5       334.3       296.9       -    333.0
    Fairways Hit                 71.4%     57.1%     50.0%     50.0%      -     57.1%
    Fairway Opportunities     14         14             14          14           -     56
    Longest Drive                 385       394           393        316         -     394
    GIR                               77.8%     83.3%      38.9%     72.2%     -     68.1%


Hawkins Hits The Roof

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John Hawkins calls Tiger's free loading dock relief drop an embarrassment and asks...

Since when did the clubhouse and parking lot become part of the golf course? I’m no rules aficionado, but I’ve always thought that any shot that leaves the field of play is considered out of bounds.

BTW, did anyone actually see the ball turned over to Steve Williams or Tiger, as Bill Kratzert said on TV?

The Clubhouse Isn't O.B.!?!?

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PGATour.com's Helen Ross has the wild and wacky details of Tiger's 212-yard 9-iron that sailed 45 yards longer than intended, headed for a loading dock, was pocketed by some guy and led to a 35 minute ruling.

Slugger White, Mike Shea and Dillard Pruitt explain their ruling here, while Tiger talks about the weird episode here. The opening exchange:

Q. Did they eventually find the ball?

TIGER WOODS: They found the ball, yeah.

Q. Whereabouts?

TIGER WOODS: In the guy's pocket.

Q. Did they find the guy?

TIGER WOODS: Uh huh.

Q. Do you suspect that might be out of bounds next year?

TIGER WOODS: Probably. It might be out of bounds tomorrow.

Q. If they didn't find the ball, I assume that would have made a difference?

TIGER WOODS: I don't know.

Q. Were you willing to play it off the roof?

TIGER WOODS: I don't know. I mean, I don't know how that works.

Q. The ball landed over the roof and actually went into the loading dock.

TIGER WOODS: Yeah, Steve Sands was saying that they were eating back there, and they said, "is this Tiger's ball?"

Q. Well, the guy found the ball and then some guy came running out and said, That's Tiger's ball?

TIGER WOODS: And then he put it in his pocket.

Q. How far did that 9 iron go?

TIGER WOODS: Stevie thought it went about 212 in the air.

Q. Was the ball returned to you?

TIGER WOODS: Yeah. Evidently I didn't need to have it returned. I don't know.

Q. How far was the 9 iron supposed to go?

TIGER WOODS: I had 167 to the hole.have been hitting his third shot at that point.


Slam Success

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The Orlando Sentinel's Steve Elling published this list of the best players in all four majors.

Here’s one race that Tiger Woods can’t win. For the third consecutive year, the Sentinel has crunched the numbers at golf’s major championships and come up with the collective king of the court for 2006, and since only players who made the cut in all Grand Slam events are eligible, Woods didn’t make the grade. Among the other highly ranked stars who missed the cut in at least one major this year were Sergio Garcia, Retief Goosen, Padraig Harrington and David Howell. Phil Mickelson and Woods won the cumulative titles in 2004 and 2005, respectively, both at 26 under. In our three years of compiling the list, the two Americans to make the chart marks by far the lowest total, down from seven in 2004 and five last year. (Note: Woods was added purely for the purpose of comparison since he didn’t play on the weekend at the U.S. Open, his first missed cut at a major 10 years as a pro).

Player            Masters    U.S. Open    British        PGA    Total
Phil Mickelson        -7        +6                 -5                -6    -12
Geoff Ogilvy           +1        +5                 -6                -9    -9
Jim Furyk               +3        +6                -12               -3    -6
Adam Scott             +4        +12               -9              -12    -5
Mike Weir                -1        +8                 +1              -11    -3
Ernie Els                +4        +13               -13              -6     -2
Robert Allenby        +3        +11               -6               -5    +3    
Luke Donald           +8        +9                  -2             -12    +3
Jose Maria Olazabal -4      +12               +1              +4   +13
Miguel A. Jimenez    -1        +11              -1               +8   +17
Tiger Woods             -4        +12 (MC)     -18              -18    NA

 

Detroit Tiger?

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Vartan Kupelian spent a few too many days in the hot Flint sun last week, because he's proposing that Detroit find a way to build the first ever Tiger Woods design to replace the "too easy" Warwick Hills. Oh and he wants to pair Tiger up with Tom Doak.

Apparently Vartan is trying to make enemies in IMG Design Services, Inc. 

Zinging Zinger

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Bob Wolfley in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel appears to have gotten Paul Azinger in trouble for his WD from Milwaukee to be with his ailing dad to play in the World Series of Poker.
The PGA Tour has a policy that requires a player who withdraws from a tournament after the commitment deadline to provide in writing the reason for the withdrawal. The reason has to be a good one or the player opens himself up to disciplinary action from the Tour.

"I'm not aware about the comment about his dad," said Henry Hughes, chief of operations of the PGA Tour, when he was contacted by a reporter Thursday. "I can certainly look into it. But what happens is at 5 p.m. Eastern time the preceding Friday of the tournament there is the deadline for commitment and withdrawal from a tournament. You are not able to commit after that. If you withdraw after that, it's considered something we look strongly at and we make sure it doesn't happen unless there is an explanation.

"It's subject to disciplinary action, an improper withdrawal. The local organizer is publicizing names and saying who is playing. People are basing their decision whether to come or not perhaps on certain players. We try and protect our tournaments that way. The players have two weeks to respond as to why they had an improper withdrawal or late withdrawal. We have not heard from Paul yet."

Withdrawing from a Tour event to play in a poker tournament would be viewed as improper, Hughes said.

"I did see the note that he was playing later in the week in a poker tournament," Hughes said. "What they do in their off-time is fine, but if he withdrew to play in the tournament, that would be an improper withdrawal."

Hughes said injury and sickness are reasons typically offered by players for late withdrawal.

The Associated Press story from the Buick Open said Azinger was asked Thursday if he would have withdrawn from that tournament had he been able to keep playing poker.

"Are you kidding?" Azinger said, laughing. "For a shot at $11.8 million? You're darn right I would have dropped out."
Considering PGATour.com ran a huge front page photo and story on Azinger's appearance, I think it's safe to say he'll soon be hearing from the VP for Fines and Other Brand Indiscretions.

Flogging: It Works For Tiger

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On Mike Vitti's PGATour.com ShotLink blog (scroll down to find the post), he breaks down an interesting new "percentage-of-distance-covered-by" stat that validates the flogging approach, at least for Tiger Woods.

So, for example, if a player hits a 300-yard drive on a hole measuring 450 yards the percentage of drive covered is 300 yards/450 yards or 66.7 percent. The 2006 TOUR average for this statistic is 61.7 percent for all driving holes. On par 4s the percentage rises to 65.6 percent, while on par 5s it drops to 52.1 percent.

He brings the stat up to look at Tiger possibly using driver less often: 

Judging by his results at Royal Liverpool, it appears that Woods should do whatever he can to find the fairway, and not worry about distance. However using the distance covered percentage on par 4s as the counter to this argument, accuracy in lieu of distance may not be Woods' best option. Consider the following from par-4 statistics by Tiger Woods:

2005-2006 Tiger Woods Par-4 Scoring
Drive Covers at least 67% of Hole Yardage   Drive Less than 67% of Yardage
Total Drives                 465                                                 341
Under Par                    130 (28.0%)                                     47 (13.8%)
Over Par                      45 (9.7%)                                        62 (18.2%)
In 2005-2006, Woods had 465 drives on par 4s where he covered at least 67 percent of the distance of the hole from off the tee. In these instances, he was able to make birdie or better 28 percent of the time. On the drives where Woods did not reach this mark, he only made birdie or better 18.2 percent of the time, and he also had a higher rate of over-par scores in these situations.

Then he looks at drives landing in fairway v. rough.

2005-2006 Tiger Woods Par-4 Scoring
Drive Covering at least 67%, Out of the Fairway  Drive Less than 67%, In Fairway
Total Drives                         211                                               193
Under Par                            41(19.4%)                                      36(18.7%)
Over Par                             30 (14.2%)                                     16 (8.3%)

2005-2006 Tiger Woods Par-4 Scoring
Drive Covering at least 67%, In the Fairway   Drive Less than 67%, Out of Fairway
Total Drives                           254                                               148
Under Par                              89 (35.0%)                                     11 (7.4%)
Over Par                                15 (5.9%)                                       46 (31.1%)

The conclusion:

Out of the rough on longer drives Woods has about as good a chance of making birdie as he does from the fairway on shorter ones, and more importantly, if he misses the fairway on a shorter drive he has a much greater chance of making bogey. If you are thinking that his accuracy with the shorter club should be greater than with the longer one, look at the numbers again. Woods' accuracy on drives that travel at least 67 percent of the fairway is around 55 percent while the accuracy rate for drives less than 67 percent is only around 43 percent. So why bring a greater risk of bogey into play if you can avoid it?

So Vitti concludes:

Back to the original argument, on whether Woods should change his strategy, I would say yes - every time he plays Royal Liverpool or a course that dictates that would be the best way to win. Otherwise, I think with 49 career victories, including 11 majors, Woods already knows what approach is best for him. 

Ogilvy At Warwick Hills

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Geoff Ogilvy talking to da medja at Warwick Hills:
Q. You guys are professional, you play all over the world in all kind of conditions, but how difficult is it to go from a golf course like Hoylake which is brown

GEOFF OGILVY: Total opposite to here?

Q. Total opposite to here.

GEOFF OGILVY: How much of a difference is that? It's harder to go from here to there than it is to go from there to here, because we play that once a year; we play this type of setup pretty much every week, you know, rough like this, just off the green.

I guess you just learn to adapt. I guess if all you'd ever done in your whole life was played a golf course around here and you went to this for one week, it would be completely bizarre. You grow up in Australia, Australians have to travel somewhere to play because Australia is on its own. It's a small country. You get to a point you have to go somewhere. So we are all used to traveling to different countries and playing different golf courses. That's the nature of doing that is you I think by the time you get good enough to be a professional golfer, you tend to play a lot of different types of golf and you learn to adapt week in, week out. The British Open, that's why a lot of players don't play the week before and will go over to Ireland and all that because it takes a while to get used to it again. But coming back from there to here, we play this type of setup so much that it's quite easy to get back into this.
Nice chance for any number of questions about Hoylake, PGA Tour setups, architecture, etc... uh no.
Q. You were talking about the field a little bit and how that makes it a bigger deal, a lot of the players say they don't pay attention to who else is here, but a field like this with Tiger and Vijay and Furyk and yourself does that make it a bigger deal? Do you get more fired up or is it a bigger deal to win?

North Speaks!

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Looks like Gary Van Sickle's caddie stint inspired Andy North to speak his mind, as evidenced by this Rob Schultz piece in the The Capital Times looking at Milwaukee's PGA Tour stop:

Madison's Andy North, who has played an important role over the years to help the tournament succeed, hopes he can continue to help draw good-sized galleries and satisfy its sponsors. He is here playing on a sponsor's exemption this week, and tournament officials had him busy playing in and emceeing Tuesday's celebrity pro-am shootout and emceeing a pro-am draft dinner Tuesday night.

North believes the U.S. Bank Championship might be wise to consider other options other than the usual PGA Tour setup. One option he'd like to explore is teaming senior golfers with regular-tour golfers. That would take advantage of the interest top seniors like Loren Roberts and Fred Funk have for the Milwaukee tournament.

"Let's have 64 teams of one senior tour player and one regular tour player," North said.

If the setup remains the same, North said the U.S. Bank Championship should offer an invitation to Michelle Wie, the 16-year-old phenom from Hawaii who has already played in several men's events but has yet to make a cut in any of them. The U.S. Bank's Brown Deer Golf Course might be the perfect setup for Wie because, at 6,759 yards, it's the shortest regular stop on the PGA Tour.

"She would be the ideal person to get here to play," said North, who plans to discuss inviting Wie with tournament director, Dan Croak. "It will be two weeks before the women's British so that could be a possibility.

"We'll see what happens," added North. "Our commissioner (Tim Finchem) doesn't always do us the biggest favor."

26!

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Gary D'Amato reports on Corey Pavin's front nine 26 at Milwaukee:

"I've never done anything like that before," Pavin said. "It was pretty exciting for me. It was quite a front nine and rumor has it it's a scoring record on the Tour, which is nice. It was just kind of a magical nine."

Pavin birdied the first six holes, missed a 40-foot birdie putt on the par-3 seventh and then birdied Nos. 8 and 9.

"I kind of messed up (No.) 7, didn't I?" he said.

His 26 broke the Tour's nine-hole record of 27, shared by four players, including Andy North of Madison. Robert Gamez recorded the most recent 27 in the third round of the 2004 Bob Hope Chrysler Classic.

Pavin had a legitimate chance to become the fourth player in PGA Tour history to shoot a 59, but missed a 7-foot birdie putt on the par-3 14th and failed to get up and down for birdie from 40 yards on the par-5 15th.

Here's Pavin's scorecard, with that lone par on the front nine.

And how long before this prompts a post on Bomb and Gouge or you know where about how all is well because the Tour's shortest hitter just shot 61?  

Beyond Belief

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gw20060714_cover.jpgI've read about some pretty silly things coming out of the golf executive suites in recent years, but nothing shocked me more than this from Geoff Russell's "Mid-Year Report" in the Golf World British Open preview.

Under Most Disappointing (off-course), Russell lists a series of PGA Tour miscues, but this is beyond belief:

"most extraordinary, the refusal to allow Bob Tway to miss the BellSouth Classic pro-am to attend the funeral of Bradley Johnson, 17, who lost the 2005 U.S. Junior Amateur final to Tway's son, Kevin."