Joel Zuckerman writes best Pete Dye Book ever
…well except for Pete’s “Bury me in a Pot Bunker.” I’ve been so swamped finishing up my Robert Trent Jones, Jr. interview and some pieces on Leatherstocking G.C. and Long Shadow that I have not been able to write it up, but I love it and use it as a great reserach tool and fun read on the couch watching football. Anyway, do yourself a solid and buy Joel’s book. Jeff Shelley - direct descendent of Mary Shelley! - has this excellent write up.
Colorado Golf Club gets 2010 Senior PGA
Here’s the Cybergolf article. Colorado Golf Club gets the 2010 Senior PGA. Shackelford still says he thinks they’ll get a PGA Championship, but all that scuttlebutt may really just have been a sop to the Champions Tour for a little extra traction and a bone thrown to minimalism as a design doctrine, (read: Coore and Crenshaw in this case).
J.P. Hayes Penalizes Himself out of Q School
Geoff Shackelford is right, this may be the bravest act of sportsmanship this year.
Gary D’Amato’s article about J.P. Hayes DQing himself from Q school after realizing he played with a non-conforming “prototype” Titleist ball is here. What a gentlemen; he didn’t even blame his caddy, even though the caddy wanted to take some of the blame. Welcome to the Honor Roll, J.P. Your seat is waiting.
Hat tip: Chewbacca
GolfChannel.com runs my Tobacco Road piece
Enjoy…and run down there to play it.
Ballesteros Out of Intensive Care, still in Hospital
Well there is some good news, his condition has been upgraded.
Cybergolf article here.
U.S. Senate to NFL: More Free Game Broadcasts
The U.S. Senate has asked the NFL commissioner to make more game-day broadcasts available to local fans at no cost on broadcast television.
From the article in the Sports Business Journal:
“The league already provides free broadcasts in the home cities of competing teams, but in a letter to Commissioner, Roger Goodell, 13 members of the Senate said that the NFL is too narrowly interpreting what a home city is.
“The policy leaves behind NFL fans across the country simply because they live outside cities to which the NFL has granted franchises,” the senators told Goodell, pointing out that the NFL does not consider the western Pennsylvania town of Johnstown part of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ home market.
The NFL Network and several cable operators, including Comcast and Time Warner, are in a dispute over football carriage. The NFL wants the network placed on cable’s basic tier, while the cable companies want it to be a premium channel or part of a paid sports tier.
In a statement to the press, the NFL, said: “The goal of our NFL Network games is to show [games] to a national audience. However, that goal has been undercut by several of the largest cable operators that are discriminating against our network by either refusing to carry it or placing it on a much more costly tier than the sports networks that the cable operators themselves own. These cable operators are denying their consumers fair access to this popular NFL programming.”
The NFL tries to spin that they are the victim, but some argue they are cheating fans out of local broadcasts in the name of increased revenue. Now if the Senate would keep the pressure on instead of only stepping in when things get bad - like in the steriods scandal. After all, free TV is what MADE the NFL what it is today. And this is how they thank their revenue…errr….fans.
Now if the Senata could do some thing about Personal Seat Licenses, the legal fiction/scam to make you pay twice - or more - for your season tickets. They were asking us for a bailout long before we even knew what a bailout was.
Campfire Story - PGA Championship coming to Denver area?
Coore and Crenshaw’s Colorado Golf Club may host a future PGA Championship. Deets coming out on November 20.
Video of the Week: Craziest End to a Traffic Stop Ever
All you can say to this lugnut is, “get a driver’s test re-administered immediately!”
“Turn the car off!”
Tim Rosaforte on Aronimink
Tim Rosaforte of Golf World writes this solid piece on Aronimink, the new site of the AT&T National in 2010 and 2011. As usual, Tim’s informative and makes youn think.
From the article:
“For a city with such a rich tradition in golf, the Philadelphia market has been displaced on the PGA Tour calendar. The area hosted the SEI Pennsylvania Classic in 2000 and 2002. Before that the IVB Philadelphia Golf Classic was played at Whitemarsh Valley GC in Chestnut Hill in 1970s, and was won by headliners Billy Casper (1970), Tom Weiskopf (71-73), Hubert Green (74), Tom Kite (76) and Jack Nicklaus (78).
Tiger’s AT&T will presage the U.S. Open’s return to Merion GC in 2013–the first time in 32 years that a major will be played in the City of Brotherly Love. The big picture from all this: Philadelphia is back on the golf map, at a club with a tradition that made a transformation. “There are some great clubs and courses here that you would think would be hard to avoid,” Naumann said. “That’s kind of incredible that there has not been a PGA Tour stop here for so long. You wouldn’t expect that in a market like Philadelphia.”
Tim is absolutely right. With all the great golf in the Philly area, a tour stop should be a no brainer. Denver should get one back too, and quickly. There’s too much great golf in both Denver and Colorado to have then be barren at the PGA Tour level.
2009 PGA Tour schedule is out
The Lion’s share of what you really need to know is Augusta National, Sawgrass, Bethpage Black, Hazeltine National, and Harding Park, (Oct 6-11).
Here is the list, minus the meaningless nonsense of the Kids Table…err…”Fall Finish.”
MLB still making lame excuses not to test for HGH
Good thing the guys at the daily News are so diligent exposing steroid cheats and clamoring for better testing. Nate Vinton has this article about how MLB is still dragging their feet while trying to make it seem to Congress that they are doing the minimum necessary to NOT trigger more hearings.
From the article:
Nearly a year has passed since the Mitchell Report described the rampant use of human growth hormone in baseball, but it will be years before drug testing can tell the same story.
That was the unmistakable lesson Monday in Beverly Hills, where Major League Baseball sponsored a day-long medical conference exploring the barriers to HGH testing in professional sports.
The biggest challenge appears to be the fact that despite recent progress incorporating nanotechnology, no urine test exists for HGH - and the baseball players’ union remains opposed to blood testing, even though a certified blood test has emerged for the Olympics.
“Today’s conference suggests to me that a lot of good work is being done by a lot of well-intentioned people, but there is a lot of work to be done before we have a reliable, validated, universally accepted test for the detection of human growth hormone,” said Gene Orza, the union’s chief operating officer, who attended the conference.
Universally accepted? Read: “unless everyone in the world agrees with it, incluing the players’ unions junk scientists, we won’t do it and WANT to cheat. So screw you. Now pay us the millions we and our agents rightfully deserve, chumps.”
Steroid cheats? HANG ‘EM HIGH. In fact, hanging’s too good for ‘em. Like this chump.
ESPN Ohmbudsman Slams Her Network’s Cross-promotion
Thank Goodness for ESPN’s ombudsman, LeAnne Schrieber. She has the courage to be the voice of the Great American Sports fan (much like Steve Czaban).
Here is one of her latest articles, discussing how deeply offended we get when ABC sitcom and drama highnlights show up in Top Ten Lists.
Transparency Alert! The anchor has no clothes!
From the piece:
When everything on ESPN points us toward something else on ESPN, as it so often and relentlessly does, viewers (or is it just me?) start feeling trapped in the sports equivalent of “The Truman Show,” a claustrophobic bubble world that substitutes its limited contours for the whole of external reality. But for 17 days, the Olympics punched holes in the false horizon, letting us glimpse sports as if they had an existence independent of ESPN. (Seeing Phelps in his first “SportsCenter” commercial, I thought, “Oh no, swim away before you run out of oxygen.”) If my allergic response to cross-promotion were only a product of ombudsman’s overdose, I would have no business raising the issue here, but there is plenty of evidence I am not the lone sufferer. “We do carpet bomb you with information about what you can see here,” said Vince Doria, ESPN senior vice president and director of news. “And we’ve got the reputation, in part from newspaper critics, of being the big bad TV guys that want to capture your mind and tell you what to do and when to watch and where to go — go over to dot-com now, go to radio now, go buy the magazine and then come back here, we got four networks; wait a minute, radio’s on, go back there.”
Trust me: nobody likes the knucklehead, know-it-all sports fan ESPN tries to breed. Just think of the idiot in those “Yeah, I’d say all that makes calvin Johnson next.” Thank God they didn’t do “Who’s Now,” thing single most hated ESPN piece of garbage. Continuing:
“The problem might not be cross-promotion itself, which does have its uses for viewers, but a degree of multiplatform corporate synergy that often feels so relentless and all-encompassing that ESPN’s heaviest viewers go berserk from time to time. Often, what drives a viewer over the edge is some slight, gratuitous bit of corporate promotion that the viewer can’t imagine being of use to anybody — such as the “Wipeout” highlight — but “Wipeout” rage is just a last straw reaction to a chronic condition. The chronic condition is rights-driven programming. The endlessly swirling synergy of events programming continuously reinforced by pre- and post-event shows, by preseason and postseason shows, by news shows that cover those events and by opinion shows that derive their topics from those events is a business model both extremely effective and extremely transparent. Call it cross-promotion or synergy or just serving the fan to surfeit, ESPN’s self-reinforcing practices have the effect of implanting ESPN’s business interests — especially the recouping of rights fees — too much at the forefront of too many viewers’ minds. And that awareness can drain the fun out of sports. ESPN has been so successful at building a better fantrap that viewers who look to sports for escape now often tell me they need to escape ESPN to enjoy sports.”
Folks, I think LeAnne has found herself a candidate for a Jazzy Award…
Some Great stuff in this month’s Golf World
…leaf through editor Geoff Russell’s piece and see what tickles your fancy. Ron Sirak, Tim Rosaforte, and Bob Carney are leaders in the clubhouse this issue.
Awful Announcing has a top ten list to crack you up
You’ve got to love Awful Announcing, shining a light on the dumbest things said each week in sports.
This week’s Pammy Awards - named after gaffe-tastic Pam Ward, she who advised a team to spike it on fourth down - are here, but here’s my top three:
3. “Fearless. Totally fearless. The gunslinger. If you don’t get to the Gunslinger, he’s gonna fire all over you.” - Gary Danielson
2. “Tripper Johnson makes the stop on Stafon Johnson, much as he made the stop on Ronald Johnson. We are chalked full of Johnsons”- Barry Tompkins
“I got a bunch of Twenties in my pocket. Andrew Johnson”- Petros Papadakis
[Editor's note: pull out a twenty if your confused about why this is funny...]
1. “Some guys handle wet balls better than others.” - David Norrie
Unbelievable. That’s what passes for broadcasting these days.
Brian from AA, we need you to start watching Johnny Miller and Dan Hicks for us, please!
New Years ‘09 Tour Announcement: Texas - Yee Hah!
The winter tour will be in Texas and will once again feature rock stars Bowling For Soup as my playing partners. We’ll be hitting Jeff Brauer’s Cowboys G.C. in Dallas, Colonial C.C., Pine Dunes, Oklahoma City Golf and Country Club, and others. Deets later.
For now, Steve Habel, Cybergolf’s southwest correspondent has this report on Texas PGA and Champions Tour stops.