#AskAlan, Vol. 72
Thoughts on why Tiger can’t win at Riviera, Sun Day Red’s logo, adding Canadians to the U.S. Ryder Cup team, Scottie’s putting, Charley Hoffman’s bank account, the OWGR’s irrelevance, best golf books
By my reckoning Tiger has never won as a pro at Riviera. It’s possible he won there as an amateur, but Riv doesn’t host a lot of junior tournaments. Why no Riv wins? Is it the course, or just a fluke? @PeteViles
Tiger will never say this out loud about a hallowed course where he made his PGA Tour debut but I don’t think he likes Riviera, and no wonder: In 2000, when he played the most dominant golf of all time, he finished 18th at the L.A. Open, his second-worst finish of the year. He couldn’t crack the top 10 the next year and then skipped his hometown event in 2002. In 2006, Tiger shot a second round 74 and W/D’d, citing the flu. In 2007 and ’08, when he was playing some of the best golf of his life, he skipped Riv entirely. Something about the place has never fit his eye, or his game.
#AskAlan How much of a toll has the last two years taken on Phil Mickelson—he looks worn-out to me? With 20 events on the LIV circuit, Mickelson has just two top-10 finishes to his name. @LaBeets50
Yes, it’s been an extremely intense couple of years for Mickelson: global controversy, exile, repudiation by his sponsors, a much-scrutinized return, a near-miss at the Masters, low-grade vindication, the Billy Walters revelations…no wonder his nerve endings are fried! Mickelson will be 54 this year—it’s asking a lot for him to remain competitive against players half his age. He had a three-decade run that is unparalleled in the game’s history for the combination of longevity and excellence, but it had to come to an end at some point.
Thoughts on Sun Day Red? @LIVGolfEnth
I don’t love the name, or the logo, but the shoes look cool and some of the threads are pretty nice. Tiger has a great physique for modeling clothes so he’ll look good out there. But I will say that after one day I’m already sick of hearing about it.
Should the U.S. Ryder Cup team be expanded to a North American Ryder Cup team? @leaningcowboy
Given the success of the plucky Canucks on Tour, hell yeah! There is precedence for this, as the lads from the other side of the Atlantic didn’t become competitive until Great Britain and Ireland welcomed the continental Europe. Given how the balance of power has shifted, the U.S. clearly needs to call in the Mounties. And we’ll take Abe Ancer, too.
Do the fans have the right to say something to Zach Johnson about his mismanagement of the Ryder Cup? @JStewGolf
Well, sure, he screwed up royally…but shouting out the critiques in Johnson’s backswing is a bridge too far.
If Scottie could putt only as well as an average PGA Tour pro, how many tournaments would he have won by now? If Scottie could putt commensurate with the rest of his game, how many majors would he have won by now? And the kicker – why can’t someone teach Scottie to putt? #askalan @DStan58
14 wins, 4 majors…at least. Even though it gets discussed on every telecast, I’m still not sure folks understand how incredible Scheffler is tee to green. He’s approaching peak Tiger! But the crucial difference is that Woods made a million clutch putts to key his victories while so often Scottie fails to hole the crucial momentum putt. As for why Scheffler can’t just learn how to do it, well, very, very few players are given everything. The golf swing is a marriage of grace and violence, demanding speed, balance, timing and myriad physical gifts. Putting is quiet and contemplative, requiring imagination and extreme concentration. It’s pretty much a different sport from what happens in the long-game. Maybe Scheffler will improve his putting, but that is hardly a gimme.
Nick Taylor has more wins in the last two years than Spieth, Thomas, Morikawa, Cantlay, Schauffele, & Young combined. Why has this become the journeyman’s Tour? #AskAlan @brianros1
That is one helluva stat. You can go through each player mentioned above and find a reason: swing changes, injury, new fatherhood…but the mules on Tour deal with those things, too. Maybe it’s as simple as the corrosive power of money. FedEx Cup bonuses, PIP bonuses, Aon bonuses, travel stipends, $20 million dollar Signature events with no cuts…the top end of the game has become soooo decadent. When you suddenly have generational wealth maybe it’s not as enticing to practice your putting for hours on end under a blistering sun? Meanwhile, the proletariat on Tour are desperately clamoring for a taste of that lucre, and perhaps that hunger is fueling all of these unexpected wins.
Thoughts on DJ slipping 13 spots in OWGR after his win in Las Vegas? I believe he still has the game to make noise in the majors. #AskAlan @RossJon22
It’s cute that you still look at the OWGR. I haven’t done so in months because it has lost all meaning. We can debate a lot of things about LIV but there is zero doubt that Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Cam Smith and Joaquin Niemann are among the best two dozen or so players on the planet. (Talor Gooch might be, too.) That they are inhabiting the nether regions of the OWGR, or soon will be, is a farce. Even those at the top of the World Ranking know it: at Pebble Beach, Rory McIlroy said the all-inclusive Data Golf Ranking is what he checks. As for DJ, his play in the majors last year was atrocious and he said that motivated him to work harder on his game over the off-season. An early win in Vegas suggests that he was practicing the right things. I look forward to seeing what he brings to the biggest tournaments.
How bad should we feel for Charley Hoffman? He sits 30th on the all-time money list, but also it was a sad way to lose a tournament that felt like it might be his career achievement? @Blulinski
I certainly felt a pang for Hoffman on Sunday. He’s had a very nice career and, at 47, will clearly be an ATM on the Senior Tour, if the private equity sharks soon to be running PGA Tour Enterprises don’t shut down that perennial money loser. Still, if Hoffman could have pulled out the win in Phoenix it would have been an exclamation point on his career and given him one last hurrah in the Masters and a few other big events. There are some things money can’t buy. Still, the dude abides.
I’m a Buffalo Bills season ticket holder and they cut off beer sales after halftime. After the debacle of this past weekend, do you think Phoenix will do that going forward, cut off sales at a set time? #AskAlan @BillsMafia1985
They would be crazy not to, but clearly the tournament organizers don’t want to be perceived as party-poopers. The Phoenix Open has been trending toward out-of-control for a while but still very little is done to curtail heavy pre-gaming in the parking lots or cut off patrons who are clearly overserved on the grounds. What will force change is if a bunch of top players start skipping the tournament, even if/when it is given Signature status. That hurts TV ratings, which bums out the sponsor, and that is how revolution comes to the PGA Tour.
Do you get the sense that the PGA Tour is actually willing to play ball with the Public Investment Fund/LIV or are they trying to run out the clock knowing a lot of big names will lose their major exemptions in the next couple years? @UnclePMo
The slow-playing can’t last forever—we will know in the next couple of months whether the framework agreement winds up in the recycling bin or if the PIF will invest a few billion dollars into PGA Tour Enterprises to buy its way into the golf establishment. The time horizon that matters is four years, which is the length of the contracts of LIV’s biggest names. We’re now in year three. The future of LIV will come down to the negotiations and machinations between Yasir Al-Rumayyan and the tour’s best players, beginning this coming off-season. LIV has done a remarkable job keeping it in-house but there is plenty of disenchantment among the players at the heavy-handed and often chaotic way the PIF runs the tour, with much of the decision-making filtered through the white-shoe law firm of Gibson Dunn; professional sports is very different from the oil business and courtroom litigation. But money can buy happiness, or at least acquiescence . Someone close to one of LIV’s marquee attractions recently said this to me about the impending contract negotiations: “Will he stay? If they offer him the same money as last time around, abso-fucking-lutely. But if Yasir gets stingy, he’s gone.”
In this new era of high purses, do you think we will see a regular season match play PGA Tour event? What venue would fit? Personally, I would love to see Bandon Dunes get a crack at that even though the infrastructure isn’t there. #AskAlan @derrickq42
Bandon would indeed be epic, and it actually has plenty of infrastructure for a 64-man field. But match play is dead on Tour for the same reason the Signature events don’t have a cut: sponsors, and TV, are now demanding that the stars be part of the show on the weekend. Match play is too much of a crapshoot, and too few warm bodies are left for the Saturday and Sunday telecasts. It’s a bummer because the last thing the Tour needs is more 72-hole stroke play events.
Wife and I are going on our first non-kids vacation in 12 years. What should I read? Already burned through your books and The Ball in the Air. @RyanGolfGuy
You flatter me, good sir. In no particular order, these are my favorite golf books: The Green Road Home, by Michael Bamberger; The Bogey Man, by George Plimpton; Golf Dreams, by John Updike; Down the Fairway, by Bobby Jones; Hogan, by Curt Sampson; Arnie, by Tom Callahan; Golf in the Kingdom, by Michael Murphy. I’m jealous that you get to discover these for the first time.
Q: Next year should the Wasted Management event have a ‘Colosseum Hole’ where between groups, naked drunken fans have a chance to invade the green and fight to the death with a bear or mountain lion? I can’t see why not. @JTNeesonJnr
I am fully on board with this. There is probably no going back now, so it’s time for the tournament to go all-in with the hedonism.
Is the new Tiger logo a denatured DNA strand and has it some deeper meaning, like it represents how fractured the game of golf is and Tiger is making a profound philosophical statement? @EoinMurphyej1
Our idiosyncratic views is what makes the world so interesting, because when I look at the logo all I see is Fluff Cowan’s mustache.