pga365.com

Ah, Glory's Last Shot...that's what the PGA Championship is also known as.  If you don't know why, well, it's because it's the last of the 4 majors.  It's really hard for me to believe that The PGA is already at our doorstep.  It seemed like only yesterday that we (or myself, at least) were giddy at the thoughts of Amen Corner and green jackets and all of that.  The gap between the Masters and the next major, the US Open, is usually about 3 months.  That makes it seem as if the season is really long, but once the US Open arrives in June, the Open Championship and PGA quickly follow it, each only about a month apart from the other.  It's kind of, sort of, almost like the end of the season.  Many players call it quits after the PGA, choosing rather to play sporadically or not at all, or maybe enter in a charity tournament or play a round or two overseas.  Each year we can look forward to either the President's Cup or the Ryder Cup in September, so there is still some great golf to be had for us fans.  But let's give The PGA some time in the limelight...

Oakland Hills Country Club has hosted many a prestigeous tournament before; 6 US Opens, 3 PGA Championships and even a Ryder Cup for good measure.  Some guy by the name of Donald Ross designed this place, so that should immediately ring a bell (Pinehurst No.2) and tell you that the greens of Oakland Hills are something truly special.  You can expect monster bending breaks on virtually all of the greens on this course, with breaks and ridges and humps that make reading greens a dizzying task.  The beauty of this place is that the greens have remained entirely unchanged since the days of Ben Hogan.  A bunker or two have been moved around, and new tees have been added, and of course a tree or two have been removed, but this course is essentially the opposite of Augusta National in that it has barely changed since way back in the day.  Hard to believe, but many consider these greens the most difficult in all of golf, even surpasing those of Augusta National.  In 1951, Hogan was so skeeved out by the green of the Par 3 9th that he considered laying up and chipping to the flag.  This hole will play at 257 yards this year.  Yikes.

The PGA is has arguably the best field in golf.  The venues are always great, and the tournament isn't set up to be impossible but rather the philosophy is to "err on the side of the players," unlike the US Open which sometimes tends to be unfair in its setup.  It's a tough test of golf for sure, but it's fair.  While all four majors are fantastic tournaments, I think The PGA gets the worst rap of all.  It seems so unimportant after The Masters, US Open and Open Championships, but the truth is that it is a consistently fantastic tournament  with tons of great players on great courses.  And it also gives qualifying PGA club pros a shot at some fame as well.  Keep a close eye this year on how weather is a factor...there is some rain in the forecast for the first two rounds which will soften the place up a bit, but when it dries out I think anything can happen and the difficulty of the greens will play a huge part in how the winner is determined.      

Posted by vaca22 at 03:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're a regular to PGA365.com you'll know that there is a Fantasy Golf forum in which I (attempt to) make picks and predictions for each week's tournament.  My prediction of Ernie Els, Phil Mickelson and Adam Scott bombing out were correct.  Well, Els ended up T7 and came back hard after a disastrous first day and managed to be one of only two players in the entire field that had two rounds in the 60's (the other being the champion, who we will discuss in just a bit).  In their defense, the first half of the field to play on Thursday played in winds strong enough to displace Dorothy from Kansas, in 50 degree weather with rain coming in sideways.  These players included Els, Mickelson and Scott as well as some other notables.  Trying to play golf in those conditions is just incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.  These were the players that had to fight hard just to make the cut and post a decent score.  The weather finally broke a bit in the afternoon but the damage was done to these groups of players.  My tournament favorite, Sergio Garcia, finished a dismal T51.

A few things were going to make this tournament memorable.  Insane weather, a dramatic fight to the finish a la Torrey Pines or an unlikely champion.  2 out of 3 ain't bad.  While the weather was certainly bonkers, what was going through your head after DAVID DUVAL was lurking on top of the leader board after 2 rounds??  What about Greg Norman leading after 3 rounds??  The fact that either of these players had a reasonable chance to take home the Claret Jug would have been an amazing story, but equally as amazing was the fact that Padraig Harrington (affectionately known as Paddy) was perhaps the single most unlikely player to walk away with this major given the fact that he wasn't even sure if he was going to play the day before. 

Harrington injured his wrist 8 days before the tournament and gave himself only a 50% chance of even finishing, managing to hit only 3 full swings the day before the tournament started.  That's when everyone, myself included, entirely dismissed him from being a factor at this year's Open Championship.  Harrington called his injury a "great distraction," and rightly so.  So much pressure was taken off of him because there were no real expectations for him to defend his title, and no one bothered paying attention to him at all until  after the 3rd round when he had managed to finish in a tie for 2nd place with KJ Choi.  On a day when mostly everyone wore a light sweater or some kind of long-sleeved shirt, Harrington was out there with the whipping winds in just a regular short sleeve polo.  That's Irish right there.

Brilliant ball striking and smart, calm thinking allowed him to take full advantage of other people's mistakes.  Norman, an excellent driver of the ball, would have been better suited hitting a few more hybrids or irons off the tee and Choi vanished into a T16 finish with his highest round of the tournament, a 79.  You have to be extremely creative with Open Championship golf, and Harrington has proven that he knows how to make his way around these wind-swept gems of links courses that dot the UK.  He's created a bit of a dynasty now, showcasing his ability to use both power and finesse wisely.  Next to Tiger Woods, he'll easily be the '09 favorite when the tournament returns to Turnberry.

Harrington is the only player (aside from Tiger Woods) to win more than 1 Open Championship since Greg Norman did it in 1993 at Royal St. George's, and Europe's first player in more than a century to win it two years in a row. 

Posted by vaca22 at 01:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

First of all, I'd like to apologize to all of our loyal readers and participants for the lack of material lately.  As summer comes so do many activities and events.  On top of that, my game hit the proverbial "brick wall" and I've been working tirelessly to correct a couple of faults in ye ole swing.  I'm glad to report that my ball striking is probably as solid as it ever has been and I'm looking forward to competing in a couple of friendly tournaments in the upcoming weeks.

Yours truly, before the swing revamp: laid off at the top, and coming in too far from the inside!   Dammit!  (Picture courtesy of The Monkey Photography, LLC 2008)

The 137th Open Championship is now upon us.  Just looking at that number tells you that this major is OLD...the oldest of the 4 majors, in fact.  One of the real treats of the Open Championship venues is that they are flashbacks as to how golf was originally played.  In the US we have beautiful parkland courses and excellently fabricated links courses, but the UK offers the best in true links golf, period.  That's not to say genunie links golf does not exsist in the US...it does.  Ever hear of Shinnecock Hills?  Any one of the 9 courses currently on the Open Championship rotation are stunning examples of seaside links, the way golf was originally played hundreds of years ago.  Trees?  We don't need no stinkin' trees!  Give us July temperatures of 60 degrees, howling winds and rock hard fairways, along with the nuttiest bunkering you've ever seen and you now have true links golf.  I can taste the salty air right now.

Royal Birkdale is the site of this year's Open Championship.  The strangest thing about Birkdale is its clubhouse.  It seems entirely modern and out of place for a course that was founded in 1889.  Not quite as strange (but strange enough) is the fact that its fairways are as flat as your kitchen floor. Some speculate as to why the fairways are like that.  Frederic Hawtree, the architect in charge of the course's first reconstruction in 1932, stated that he left the course the way he saw it.  Others say that later architects, perhaps mistakenly, filled in the areas between the dunes to create perfectly graded roadbeds.  Why?  Because there really weren't many golf construction firms and the only folks who could could do the work and had the necessary tools were local road contractors.  But really, who cares, because I bet if you were to play on a perfectly flat course your mind would start playing tricks on you and you'd have no idea what to do.  Some say that Birkdale is the fairest of all the Open Championship courses, and you can probably make an argument for that.  However, when the winds blow, expect to see uncharacteristically high scores pop up.

Birkdale's greens were practically as flat as its fairways up until 1991, but the club decided to redo the drainage on the greens and subsequently the more undulating, curvy greens that we see today are the result of this reconstruction.  The last time the Open Championship was played here was i 1998, and at that time I was paying virtually no attention to golf as a young college student, so I'm greatly looking forward to analyzing this course as it is broadcast on TV.  It's a real shame that Tiger Woods is unable to participate in this year's tournament because I thought his strategy in 2006 of using no driver at Royal Liverpool was both downright silly and brilliant.  Open Championship golf requires the most imaginative shotmaking skills to win.  In 2006, Jim Furyk half putted / half chipped out of a bunker to within about 12 feet with a PUTTER.  Hard, fast conditions mean that you need to land the ball short of the intended target and let it release to the hole.  Do you think Willie Park, Jr. was spinning 9-irons off the green back in day?  No chance - these balls were running up to the hole. 

In 1998, Justin Rose made a dramatic chip from the rough on 18 for birdie to finish tied for 4th.  With Tiger Woods out for the year and Phil Mickelson playing like junk at the Open Championships, I really have no idea  who will win this tournament.  No British, European or South African player has ever won an Open Championship at Royal Birkdale - only Americans and Australians have been victorious.  I have a feeling that a European golfer will take the Claret Jug home this year.  Only time will tell.

Halfway through July, I hope you've been playing great golf, or at least having a great time attempting to do so.  :o) 

Posted by vaca22 at 02:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The word on the street is that this year's US Open at the South Course at Torrey Pines won't be the ball-breaker that Oakmont was last year.  Oakmont's layout is notoriously difficult as it is, so when you add graduated rough and lightning-fast greens on surfaces that resemble tilted panes of glass, players feel as if they've gone 12 rounds with *insert your favorite boxer here*.

Sources tell me that this year's US Open will be different.  "OMG how can it possibly be different," you say?  Simple.  First, the fairways will be essentially the same width as they were set for the Buick Invitational.  The rough isn't going to be that much deeper than for the Buick Invitational as well.  Finally, the tees will be pushed back, but not as far back as humanly possible...because if they were, they course could be stretched back to over 7,600 yards, which is totally insane.  It will still be the longest US Open course by more than 300 yards.  Ouch.

But that doesn't mean that Torrey Pines will be a walk in the park.  The setup of Torrey Pines has been very, very carefully considered and scrutinized.  Surprisingly, Torrey Pines isn't on Golf Digest's Top 100 Greatest Golf Courses.  Crazy, right?  It's the first time that an Open course hasn't been in the Top 100 since 1976 (that distinction would belong to Atlanta Athletic Club).  Torrey Pines does belong to the Top 100 Public Golf Courses list, but even then it's ranked at a high 90th position by that golf publication.  Instead of pencil-wide fairways and 7-inch uniform rough, Torrey Pines will feature other characteristics that will make it plenty challenging.  

Mike Davis, the senior director of Rules and Competition for the USGA, can be credited with introducing the graduated rough that was mentioned above; that is, rough that becomes progressively deeper the further you hit into it.  Similarly, the rough around the greens will also be mowed in concentric steps.  The approach areas in front of the greens, which will consist of Bermuda grass instead of the Kikuyu that can be found in the fairways, have been aerified and top-dressed as if they were greens.  Top-dressing is the process of adding a fine layer of soil to the surface, a process which is done to greens to make them as firm as possible.  Why do this?  According to Davis, it's so that players can bounce shots into the green instead of flying them onto it, if they choose...and unlike Donald Ross's dome-shaped greens at Pinehurst or the steep sloping greens of A.W. Tillinghast's Winged Foot, Torrey Pines' perfect Poa greens were designed to hold long iron shots.  And here is where the brilliance of Davis' Open strategy shines - making all type of shots possible for all types of players while being as challenging, and fair, as possible.  Going back to the idea of graduated rough, Davis wants players who can bomb the ball to have that advantage of distance.  However, if you wander too far off the beaten path, long hitters will find themselves closer to the hole but in deeper rough that is a mix of gnarly Kikuyu and ryegrass.  If you're wondering what the hell Kikuyu is, Kikuyu is a coarse-textured light green grass that is actually considered a weed in coastal California.

Did I forget to mention that the fairways and greens on the coastal side of the course have been relocated closer to the ocean, bringing the cliffs into play?  Hope you don't start snap hooking into the Pacific!  Many areas around hazards, such as the small pond in front of the Par-5 18th, will be shaved so that anything landing near it will funnel into the water.  Torrey Pines' greens won't be running close to 15 on the Stimpmeter like they did early in the week at Oakmontl ast year, but should hover around no more than 13.  That's still fast as hell, as fast as either you or I have ever experienced.  But here's the real kicker, to show you how freaky Davis and his crew are:  he has kept bleachers and TV towers positioned off to the side of the greens at the 3rd, 4th, 7th, 11th, 12th, 14th and 16th holes to keep the targets fully exposed to the coastal winds.

In a way, it's totally sadistic.  It's undenialbly ingenious.  It's the US Open in all it's glory.  And if this strategy proves to be successful, I think you can count on seeing Torrey Pines a little more regularly in US Opens or PGA Championships.

Posted by vaca22 at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (0)

Got an email the other day about the opening of Vokey.com, a sub-site of Titleist selling the Brian Vokey-designed wedges.  As you may or may not know, Titleist also has a separate site for their Scotty Cameron line of putters.  This is pretty cool because any time you have a separate website for your putters (or whatever other equipment that is being offered) you know that it's there for a good reason, and that is to highlight the importance or exclusivity of said equipment.
The Vokey.com website tries to do what the Scotty Cameron website does, which is to highlight their products and explain why they are great, giving a little bit of history or design explanation from the creator(s) and some player testimonies...just not in as much detail.  As I was browsing the site I noticed a new wedge included in the Vokey lineup - the Vokey TVD 60.   

The TVD 60 will be released in a limited-edition batch of 600.  Limited-release stuff is gobbled up by club junkies and if the response to the limited release is anything as good as Cameron's limited release stuff, 600 wedges will end up selling in no time flat.  But somehow I don't think that Titleist is concerned as to whether or not they can move those 600 wedges...I know they can. 

The TVD 60 has, according to the site, a high-performance sole and sole relief.  The bounce surface (which is "crescent-shaped") is cambered to keep the club from bouncing but also has enough sole width and bounce angle to prevent digging.  There is heel, toe and trailing edge relief that is designed to keep the club's leading edge close to the ground from a variety of playing positions.  The wedges also inherit the machined grooves and face of the Spin Milled models. 

The price?  $250 according to the website.  But that price also includes some personalized stamping that you can have added such as a set of initials, your choice of shaft and grip.  But why pay $250 for a "custom" wedge that is actually stock, and differs only slightly from the Spin Milled version which is over $120 cheaper?  The only real difference I see is that the TVD has a sole grind (the other Vokeys do not) and more relief.  

I guess I'm just disappointed that the website didn't really have the content I was expecting.  The Vokey.com site was lauched primarily to highlight the TVD wedge but the site didn't go into explaining the wedge as well as I had hoped.  I know that this site is a work in progress; the Cameron website started that way and has grown into its own subculture, it seems.  I hope that more loft and bounce options will be available in the future.  Perhaps the creation of the site was meant to be a way to guage the amount of interest generated by the TVD?

I'm sure the TVD is a terrific piece of equipment but $250 seems a bit steep for a wedge, a tool that is actually disposable, at least in my opinion.  If you play many rounds and hit a lot of balls your wedges will eventually lose their bite - take a brand-new wedge out to a practice bunker and hit some balls and you'll realize that you're slowly wearing down the face of the club.  Maybe it's the exclusivity of the club that will attract people, but if you're looking versatile wedges with multiple loft and bounce options, companies Cleveland and Callaway will have your head spinning with a dizzying amount of choices.  With the addition of wedge master Roger Cleveland to the company lineup, Callaway now has 2 different grinds available (PM and C-Grind) in addition to their regular sole for the same price as any other wedge, and if true customization is the name of your game then you can have a Scratch or Chikara wedge completely tailored to your preference and swing style instead of an off-the-rack single-option Vokey TVD for the same price.

Or you can take a $120 Spin Milled to your nearest bench grinder and create your own. 

Posted by vaca22 at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)