"The fact is, I don't have anything else to do."

/
nov5_trevino_299x389.jpgLee Trevino, on golf.com, and brutally honest about his brief retirement:
That's why I'll be back for the 2008 season, my 43rd year in the game. I'll probably play about a dozen events, starting in Florida next winter. I really love seeing the guys, but the fact is, I don't have anything else to do. There's nothing wrong with wanting to retire. I wouldn't miss competing. I don't do that very well these days anyway. But I don't have anything else to fill my time. If I owned a golf course or a driving range in my hometown of Dallas, and I could get up, drop my kid at school and then spend five or six hours a day at work, that would be fine, but I don't have anything like that in my life.

Yet Another Senior Major

/

Don Markus writes about yet another Champions Tour major--the Constellation Energy Senior Players Championship--kicking off this week at the venerable Baltimore Country Club, profiling Keith Foster and his work to bring the course up-to-date for today's old geezers. Thanks to reader John for this.

On restoration:

"You're really riding the edge," Foster said of restoring a golf course. "If you do too much, everyone knows, and if you don't do enough, everyone still talks about it."

Club general manager Michael Stott said the principal idea behind the multimillion-dollar restoration, the cost of which was shared by the club and the PGA Tour, was to make the Five Farms course "relevant again" in terms of modern technology. It appears that Foster accomplished that goal.

While most of the players have yet to test their skills on the course, which has a major golf history dating to the 1928 PGA Championship, the early reviews have applauded Foster's work. It has been ranked as highly as the No. 1 course in Maryland by Golfweek, and No. 83 in the country by Golf Magazine.

"Why is it that tournament organizers insist on reducing every player to the same hack-out when they miss a fairway? I don't get it. I bet the spectators are bored watching everyone do the same thing."

/

I know it was like, soooo last week, but remember this is my personal clipping archive and I had to grab these comments from Golf World writer John Huggan's Senior Open Championship game story:

Actually, Watson isn't quite right there. On a Muirfield all but covered in long grass -- "It is worse than Carnoustie in 1999," he had said earlier in the week -- there were plenty of other nasty spots he could have found on that 18th hole. The level and extent of the rough, in fact, had come in for almost unanimous criticism over the four days of an event that will shift to Royal Troon next year under new sponsorship, MasterCard replacing Aberdeen Asset Management.

"It's serious -- six inches of rough under two foot of hay fescue," shuddered senior debutant Nick Faldo before shooting an eight-over-par 292 that left him eight shots adrift of Watson in a tie for 14th place. "Very severe and very narrow."

Others were less circumspect in their opinion of a course set up that some felt was more difficult than that at Carnoustie one week previously. Former Open champion Sandy Lyle, a spectator at Muirfield, was just one calling the length of the rough "ridiculous."

"It misses the point of links golf, which is to create a variety of shots and allow players to hit recovery shots if they are good enough," said the 1985 Open champion, who turns 50 next February. "Why is it that tournament organizers insist on reducing every player to the same hack-out when they miss a fairway? I don't get it. I bet the spectators are bored watching everyone do the same thing."
If there was any doubt the people running the game have no golfing souls, this should do it:
Lyle wasn't alone, either. Many players shared his bemusement at the level of point-missing achieved by tournament organizers who had ignored a request from the Muirfield greenstaff to cut the rough as much as two months before the event. "There was no decision to make," insisted championship committee chairman, and Muirfield member, Alistair Low. "The wet summer produced the rough we have this week, and the course would be this way whether we had a tournament on or not."

But, of course, they did have an event to run, one that sadly lost some of its luster for most of the field.

"I think if you go [in]to the rough, you are dead," said a prescient Eduardo Romero of Argentina, who finished T-4 despite hacking his way to a double bogey at the 71st hole. "Just play sand wedge and lob wedge and put the ball in the fairway and try to make bogey, that's all. It is more severe than Carnoustie because it is so wet and very thick."

 

"Hay-like rough, like that at Muirfield this week, is 'pointless and boring,' by the way."

/
John Huggan writes about the worst caddy nightmare of them all: rain, and lots of it. All during his two day stint looping for Mike Clayton at the Senior Open Championship:
The low moment actually came a couple of holes later. By that time the rain had gone from merely torrential to monsoon-like and my man had vindictively decided to hit his tee-shot at the short fourth into the bunker on the left side of the green. After he had splashed out to four feet or so, I had to rake the sand. Standing there, everything already soaked and with 14 holes still to play, it was hard to think back to the time when this caddying thing seemed like a good idea.
He also writes about Clayton's playing companions and this exchange:
Over the course of the two days, Russell and Clayton must have covered most aspects of golf course architecture and course set-up. Hay-like rough, like that at Muirfield this week, is "pointless and boring," by the way.
Meanwhile Clayton had plenty of positive things to say about Muirfield even though on television it looked terribly confining and excessively defined:
In an age when architects like Bill Coore and his partner, Ben Crenshaw, Tom Doak and Gil Hanse are building some of the most beautiful bunkers since the nineteen twenties and thirties, Muirfield has some of the least impressive looking bunkers of any great golf course. Some like the bunker short and left of the 10th green would not be out of place on the most basic of public courses yet every single bunker is perfectly placed to influence both shots and decisions.

The greens are one of the best sets to be found and they are brilliantly tied into the surrounding ground and without being overly severe they demand that you putt from the right side of the hole and approach from the correct side of the fairway.

The holes are routed unusually with the opening nine going clockwise all the way around the outside of the inward nine but unlike Troon it's difficult to determine which half is the more difficult which is a comment on how well the course is balanced so that it favours no particular type of player.

Length is of no great advantage, rather placement and the ability to make the right decision are rewarded at Muirfield and whilst it may not appear so special at first glance it is one of the purest golf courses one can find and its promise is that it will ask fascinating but different questions every day and one never grows tired of the rare and special courses that do that for us.

"My only excuse was one John Huggan on the bag."

/

Mike Clayton is filing daily reports on his Senior British Open appearance. You can read the first two, including this summary of his first round 80:

This is a summer (at least that's what the calendar says it is) like no other and if you drive it in the rough the guarantee is you will find three or four of the member's balls before you find your own.

You don't want to hear about my miserable 80 and it certainly it's not worth talking about other than to say my only excuse was one John Huggan on the bag.

Wow, but look at his technique. One arm crossing over the other resting lazily on the bag to hand Mike the driver. Such enthusiasm! Your captions please...

Clayton_Huggan.jpg 

Roberts Deems Faldo An Instant Open Threat; Three Writers Hospitalized With Injuries Induced By Extreme Eye Rolling

/

I guess Loren Roberts thought it would be rude to tell the assembled inkslingers at Muirfield that Nick Faldo hasn't got a bloody chance since he's spent most of the year in the booth.

Well, he sort of did.

"We all expect him to be instantly competitive, especially here. But he's doing 44 weeks of television now, so that will limit his practice time."

Watson Unable To Win One For Driver

/

Considering the rough week Walter Driver's had, what with having to constantly sign autographs of that Golf World story where he comes off as tired, bitter and pretentious (and that's just the cover shot), you'd think Tom Watson would have the decency to have won one for his beleaguered fellow Stanford alum to cap off Driver's fairy-tale USGA Presidency.

They tell fairy tales in hell right?

Gentle Ben On Whistling Straits

/

After his second round 67 put him in a tie for 2nd, Ben Crenshaw talked about plenty of fun stuff, including Whistling Straits:

 Q. As an architect yourself when you see a course like this, does that possibly inspire you maybe to?
BEN CRENSHAW: This is a great piece of work. You know, I know a little something about what was here, which was not anything like this. This is unbelievable.

Q. What's the most unbelievable thing about it?
BEN CRENSHAW: Well, this is, to make a course look like this from what it was, is just spectacular creation. This is incredible.

Q. Does it go along with your design philosophy?
BEN CRENSHAW: Well, Pete is probably the best with working with material and just working at it. God, it's just unbelievable.

 

Champions Tour To Crack Down On Performance Enhancing Drugs; Fill In Cialis Joke Here

/

Apparently Rick George did one of those state of the Champions Tour things, and after assuring everyone that the old geezers would show up so that we can see more of charisma junkies Jay Haas and Loren Roberts, he reported that the Champions Tour would be adopting the PGA Tour's performance-enhancing drug policy.

Speaking of testing, George might want to be checked out this delusional take on the state of the Champions: 

The tour has resumed its growth after struggling during the early part of this century, George said. Low-performing events were weeded out, which had the added benefit of improving the remaining fields by building weeks off into the schedule.
Ah yes, anything to get Hale Irwin, Lanny Wadkins and Curtis Strange more starts. The people are heartbroken when they don't tee it up.

This is fun... 
Television ratings are up 20 percent and attendance is up 35 percent midway through the schedule.

"It's probably never been in as good a position as it is today," George said.

Right!

Irwin To Put Colorado Grads Through One Last Boring Lecture

/

It seems the folks in Boulder ran out of speaking options, because they signed up one of the mast famous alums to put the grads through one more boring lecture. Kirk Bohls in the Austin American-Statesman reports:

"Does anybody listen at commencement speeches?" said Tom Purtzer, who left Arizona State eight hours shy of a degree. "They're kids. It's not like they're paying attention. You're so excited to just get out."

Irwin gets it. As he puts it, "they get a piece of paper and good friends. You don't know what you take away until you look back years later when you have to ask, 'Did I apply myself?' "

He did, and he still is.

Following the advice he received from former Supreme Court associate justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Irwin plans to follow his heart and say what he really feels. So he'll get something off his chest to the cap-and-gown crowd.

His message?

Respect your elders.

"I'm going to talk about respect," he said. "That's something young people don't do very often."

Oh how I have missed Scott Hoch:

Hoch applauded Irwin for the high honor of joining the elite company of those who give commencement addresses, a list as diverse as Steve Jobs and Billie Jean King. Hoch graduated as well — "I'm one of the few" — completing his communications degree at Wake Forest in 4 1/2 years when the dean convinced him to give up the notion of an economics major because of the demands of travel with college golf.

He takes mild exception to the fact that Arnold Palmer gave the headliner speech at Wake Forest in 2005. Arnie had an army but no diploma.

"My feeling is you shouldn't give it unless you graduate," the candid Hoch said. "But Arnold's Arnold. People probably would get more out of his speech."  

"I think this rough might even be a little too juicy for some of the older guys like myself''

/

Normally I would find the idea of harvesting thick rough for a Champions Tour event to be ridiculous, but somehow hearing Johnny Miller complain about it makes it a bit more tolerable. After all, he celebrates the USGA's mindless approach, so it's nice that Johnny gets to experience it.

Tim Guidera quotes him:

"I think this rough might even be a little too juicy for some of the older guys like myself,'' added Johnny Miller, who is playing his first event on any tour in nearly 10 years this week. The NBC commentator is teaming with longtime friend Mike Reid in the Raphael Division. "It's major championship rough.''