Scoring From The Rough

Thanks to reader Tuco for the link to this interesting Tiger-related stat from his play at East Lake earlier this month.

3 FOR 19: The number of strokes that Tiger Woods was under par on the 19 fairways that he missed after 36 holes of the season-ending PGA Tour Championship. Translated, that means he hit it in the junk 19 times and was 3 under par on those 19 holes. This is more than scrambling; this is mystical. If he had played in Colonial days at the Salem Open, he would have been burned at the stake (after he was presented with the trophy, of course).

Finchem On TC Telecast

Commissioner Tim Finchem stopped by the ABC booth for his annual Tour Championship visit. He noted that the reaction from players to the proposed FedEx Cup has been "very positive" and the dreaded "impactful" was dropped again. Most importantly, the new, more impactful finish will allow the events "to raise more money for charity."

Mike Tirico asked why now, and Finchem launched into the usual lines about how the Tour has been growing and will "continue to grow," then offered this: "The competition in today's environment is strengthening. When you see what other sports are spending to create the theaters for their sport and the fan experience for their sport..." etc, etc...

So the message remains the same: continue to focus on the imagery and mythology, ignore issues with the way the sport is played and how it might be made more entertaining. It's worked so well for tennis and the NBA, why not golf?

Flashback: East Lake in '98

From Sunday's post round press conference, after Hal Sutton beat Vijay Singh in a sudden death playoff at East Lake in 1998:

Q. You talked on TV about it's a high -- it calls for a high shot. You really can't get it that high.

HAL SUTTON: Well, I was a little worried. I needed the birdie at 15 really bad. I felt like, That's not a really good shot for me either. This golf course, as a whole - I should probably reflect back on this - I went to dinner with Tim Finchem Wednesday night. He said, "What do you think of the golf course?" I said, "It's a golf course, but it really favors a high ball hitter. I'm going to have to play pretty defensive. I'm not going to be able to attack the flag a lot. I'm going to have to try to be patient, 2-putt, make a putt wherever I can." He just kept reminding me of that all week long. I didn't really have a lot of close birdie putts. Probably the happiest that I am to report is that I had a lot of long putts all week long, and I only had one 3-put all week. That was the big difference right there. But the finishing holes - getting back to your question a little bit - when I didn't birdie 15, 16 was my last opportunity that I felt like a low shot could be okay, and I drove -- hit a good drive. It just trickled into the rough there. I was fortunate to get a good second shot into the green, but I still didn't have a good birdie putt. When we got to 17 and 18, I knew Vijay had the advantage because he could drive it up on top of the hill. That shot is a much different shot from on top of that hill than it is from 30 yards back there where you can't see the green. Then 18 does require a high shot. That's why I carry a 4-wood most all the time. When I saw that hole early in the week, I knew the 4-wood was in for sure.

Q. How far was 18 playing? Is that a perfect yardage for your 4-wood?

HAL SUTTON: It was playing 240. That's exact yardage that I try to hit it most of the time. Actually, I can fly it about 230 - between 230 and 235. That was just under the hill, so it could release up top.

East Lake Scoring

Tiger wasn't happy with his 66 where he hit 6 of 14 fairways. 17 players were at par or better in round one. Remember when East Lake had teeth way back in 1998 when Hal Sutton's winning score was 274 (-6). It's 200 yards longer than it was in '98 and they torch the place. 

Time for another Rees-toration?  After all, this will be the host of the Super Bowl of golf...

East Lake Skeptic

This Cy Connelly piece for Sports Network offers some pithy comments about East Lake and the Tour.

These days, its not enough for the Tour to put on golf tournaments; it needs to be a highly visible (and tax-deductible) force for social change. Its all quite heartwarming stuff, except that while passion is hard to quantify, the financing behind the East Lake revival is not. Simply put, while a lot of money has flowed into East Lake, its not clear that golf has played a central role, despite the Tours continued focus on the East Lake story.

Of the $100 million thats been invested in East Lake, over $70 million came from only two sources: Tom Cousins, a prominent Atlanta real-estate developer with a strong philanthropic bent; and the U.S. federal government, through its "Hope VI" program for restoring public housing.

Various corporations contributed nearly another $20 million indirectly, as part of a national drive to recruit members for the restored East Lake Golf Club, which is now strictly private. (In the old days, the course was a popular choice among promising local juniors because, as Stewart Cink pointed out, "you could always get on.")

As Cousins cheerfully concedes, however, these memberships were structured to provide a substantial tax break. In return, the corporations got near- exclusive access to a top-flight golf course. Ray Robinson, Chairman of East Lake Foundation, slipped a little off-message at last years Tour Championship, noting dryly, "The golf course has little to do with whats over [at East Lake community], because this is a private club; the neighbors dont belong." The neighborhood kids are, however, welcome as caddies, though the clubs "no tipping" policy may come as a surprise to them.

Ouch. Now, as much as I enjoyed this passage, it's not quite entirely true:

For its part, the Tours actual contribution to the East Lake Foundation was roughly $700,000 last year. To put this in context, the Tour plans to spend $24 million upgrading the TPC Avenel course next year, part of the continuing cost of its unwillingness to take on the equipment manufacturers and rein in driving distances.

Actually, it's just not a very good course. Though added length and the elimination of a birdie friendly (perish the thought) par-5 are components of the redo plan.

And how about the highly-touted East Lake charter school, whose pupils will be trotted out for todays "Drive to a Billion" photo op? Its actually run by the controversial Edison Schools outfit, a for-profit concern best known for two things: shareholder lawsuits and its proposal to require students to do unpaid administrative work, as a means of cutting operating costs. Last week, Edisons efforts in "Little Vietnam" were given a borderline-passing grade by the people who brought us "Big Vietnam" - thats right, the RAND Corporation. Tough marks given that Edison itself had commissioned the study and paid $1.6 million for it.

All of which leaves the Tour sitting squarely in the middle of a broad experiment in social engineering. To the extent the East Lake story works, credit goes to a strong-willed developer with a social conscience and a lot of federal dollars to spend. Can the experiment be replicated elsewhere? Not if the White Houses current budget passes: it eliminates the "Hope VI" program entirely. If the Tour and its corporate sponsors hope to add more federally subsidized golf communities to the PGA rotation, they should get in touch with their lobbyists immediately.

Finchem's Statement

Lesson #1 from today's State of the Tour press conference? Leave the joke telling to Jackie Burke.

COMM. TIM FINCHEM: Thank you, Bob. We're delighted to be at this venue. The word "venue" reminds me of when we went to Champions in Houston and Jackie Burke took me aside and said, we're delighted to have you here, this is about ten years ago, and your people have sent me this contract to play here. You used this word "venue." I want you to know when I played on the PGA TOUR we played on the golf course and I don't know what a venue is, but we're going to play some golf this week.

Deafening silence from the assembled inkslingers. We continue... 

This morning rather than recap the year, I think all of you have done a good job recapping the year as we've gone through the year. We had a great year and have had a great year...We spent most of the year focusing on the future. And as we look at the future, we look at we reevaluate ourselves. For the past year or two, we've asked ourselves where are we and where should we be headed.

Okay Yogi, are you cutting tournaments or not?

We're not going to talk about the details of our schedule today, but when we do announce it after television I think you'll look at it and see that it's stronger, it has a better flow, we have better golf courses, better sponsor groups, et cetera, to make a good schedule. 

Oh good, better courses means Bellerive and Hazeltine. Can't wait. So for all of the betterness, things aren't so bad today, right? 

In terms of the business side of the equation, our sponsorship today is by far the strongest it's ever been. We have the strongest collection of sponsors on the PGA TOUR, we have the strongest collection of marketing partners, and the number of marketing partners we have, that's tripled in the last five or six years from 18 to 54. And we have a good group of marketing partners.

I think we have our key word of the day...marketing partners. Or is it strongest? What is a marketing partner anyway? Forget it. What about the Players Championship? Excuse me, THE PLAYERS Championship.

And then with respect to our tournaments themselves, starting with THE PLAYERS Championship, we will rebuild the infrastructure for THE PLAYERS Championship and changes the marketing approach for that tournament. We will bring and heighten the impact of our tournaments across the board going forward after 2005. So all that is in play.

And the way to do that?

...there is one pressing need, we think, to help us compete, and that is the need to define our season. You may remember 20 years ago almost now, this tournament started. And the reason it was started was to deal with the challenge of defining a season for our fans. We have a long season, a very long season. And in that season are tournaments which are week in and week out much more impactful than some other weeks.

(Note to the Commissioner: impactful gets a big nasty red line underneath it from MS Word).

Here's a little 135 sentence that I bet you can't read without rolling your eyes:

We think it's a system that will relate well to fan interest in trying to bring to those 112 million fans something they can focus on week in and week out, something that will create more value for our sponsors, something that will create more compelling television for our television partners, something that will create more excitement for our players, more opportunities for our players to be involved in something meaningful each week, and obviously more financial benefits to our players, and also something that we think will help us drive toward that second billion because we now have announced the commitment to get to the second billion so working with our tournament structure to really build the strength of our charitable giving back is fundamental to everything we do, including a year long competition.

Isn't it something that allows us to catch our breath after this first Drive to a Billion before we plug the daylights out of the Second Drive to a Billion?

As for the newly announced FedEx Cup points race:

Let me now turn to the FedEx competition, the FedEx Cup, and talk a little bit about the details. I want you to know that the details at this point stop at a certain point because a lot of the detail is not going to be worked out until 2006, and when that detail is worked out, we will have another visit where we lay out the promotional schedule and promotional themes of the Cup and our relationship with FedEx and how that's going to work, how the point system is going to work and things of that nature.

I know fans are on the edge of their seat about that promotional schedule and promotional theme concept, but here's where the details stop:

Players will compete for position on a points list starting the first week in January and going through late August. There will be a point where that portion of the competition stops, players will then be seeded for a four week championship series. The four week championship series will culminate here at the TOUR Championship presented by Coca Cola, but the first three weeks of that four week series will be at other tournaments around the country. 

What these seedings actually mean remains a mystery.

One, the players need to play to position themselves in a seeding position for the championship series, and the championship series will then be structured on points, which will be the most impactful series of events in the history of the sport.

There's that impactful stuff again. Here's where it gets confusing:

After the TOUR Championship, you can think of the fall series a number of different ways. One of the ways is that actually what players are doing is playing to position themselves to be in the Cup the following year. But in addition to that there will be overall eligibility on the PGA TOUR, securing a card, possibly a continuation of the Top 70 for certain events. 

So in the fall they'll be playing to keep their cards and position themselves for the following year's Cup (really original name idea there by the way, Cup...I wonder where that came from?). Later on someone asked for clarification on this and I'm not sure they got the answer they hoped for.

Okay, warning, MBAspeak answer of the day:

There are a number of benefits strategically to the stronger season. First of all, we think every one of our events is going to be strengthened. We think players are going to be motivated and incentivized to actually play more. Our television we think is going to be not only more impactful but more balanced because we'll have a better number of huge profile events at the end of the season which can tie to our different television packages. We think overall field strength will be supported, as well, and we think fan interest and some of the other things we're going to do, different platforms, can bring fans to be related to FedEx Cup competition during the course of the year. 

Incentivise, impactful, strength, strengthened and of course, platform. Great stuff.

He opened it up to questions from there, which will be looked at in a later post. Oh, and they also presented Adam Scott, Sergio Garcia and Olin Browne to confirm how great everything is, even though they didn't get to see a schedule either.

Finchem Press Conference Broadcast

According to the Tour's media site, Tuesday's "Briefing by PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem" will be viewable via a webcast on PGATOUR.com, starting at 10:00 a.m. ET Wednesday, November 2, 2005. Of course a full autopsy and tally of MBAisms will follow here as soon as a transcript is posted.

Halloween or the Pro-Am?

Doug Ferguson writes that Phil Mickelson may have done Tim Finchem a favor by skipping the Tour Championship. And he says that Mickelson is citing Halloween and a desire to be with his family instead of playing Tuesday's pro-am as the reason he isn't playing.

Lefty won't say this publicly, but what annoys him is the PGA Tour's policy that players must take part in the pro-am to play in the tournament. He already cited that as the reason he didn't play at the Memorial, which also has a Tuesday pro-am. Mickelson had plans to be at Pinehurst No. 2 to prepare for the U.S. Open that week.

The pro-am for the Tour Championship was Tuesday, a good reason for him to pull out. Mickelson reasoned that he couldn't possibly get from San Diego to Atlanta for the pro-am after such a big night for the kids.

Mickelson's absence has minor ripples. Lucas Glover, the last guy to qualify, will have to play alone in the first round. The tournament lost a fair chunk of change from the pro-am considering it cost nearly $40,000 for each three-man team of amateurs, and one team didn't have a pro.

Dumb question here, but why doesn't #31 on the money list get in if someone does no enter?  Wouldn't that deal with the pro-am and onesome situations?

It wasn't like Mickelson pulled out at the last minute. 

Boy the Tour does some strange things.