Category Archives: commentary

Something I Need to Say

Republican politicians are saying exactly this to the families of those killed in recent mass murders*: “The cost to me of not getting re-elected because I voted to approve effective gun control legislation is greater than the cost to you of your child being murdered in their school classroom, or your loved ones in their grocery store or church.”

Why Republicans Won’t Budge on Guns

* Let’s stop saying “mass shootings.” They’re mass murders.

USGA to Roll Back Distance

I get several golf newsletters in my e-mail every morning. Today there is an article in the Golf Digest newsletter about the USGA making plans to roll back distance of “elite male players” by altering the characteristics of the ball.

Read it here.

Also, the Saudi League is going to start up anyway, though I don’t know where they will get any players of interest. They are certainly throwing LOTS of money at the project.

Read it here.

The tournament schedule is here.

Professional Handicaps

Want to know how good PGA professionals really are? The chart below shows their handicaps from 2016 to 2000. They’re pretty low.

To put plus handicaps into perspective, it is said that there is a greater difference between a 3 and a +3 that there is between a 3 and an 18.

If a plus handicap is a new idea to you, it works like this, roughly. Take the course rating and subtract the handicap. So if your local course is rated 70.0, and a pro’s handicap is +8, their expected score would be 62.

That’s not exactly how it works, but that gives you the general idea.

The average index is +5.4. The best index achieved as Ricky Fowler’s +8.4.

It all works out to the fact that they’re playing a different game than we are.

(Click to enlarge)

300 Yards? I don’t get it

I was at the range a few days ago. There is a post 300 yards away from the line of tees we hit off of.

300 yards is along way. You don’t really know how far away that is until you’re looking at it.

And yet there are guys who hit the ball father than that on the fly.

Yes, they are strong, they are superior athletes, and their technique if flawless. I know all that.

I guess it’s my imprinting that I can’t shake. When I started the game, 200 yards off the tee was long for your everyday recreational golfer. 250 yards was a Tour drive and the big hitters averaged 265, maybe 275.

I understand 275 on the fly and roll out to 300.

But 300 and more in the air I don’t think I’ll ever understand.

The USGA’s Distance Insights Report

After years of hand-wringing about how far touring pros are hitting the ball, the USGA s**t has finally hit the fan.

Their report, including recommendations, is titled Distance Insights Report and is available here as a 102-page pdf.

The Report has six chapters:
1. Scope
2. The evolution of hitting distances
3. The factors which impact hitting distances
4. Analysis of golf course lengths
5. Impact of increase in hitting distance and golf course lengths
6. Golf stakeholder perspectives and opinions on hitting distances

If you don’t have anything to do, you might want to read it. It really is pretty interesting, especially chapters 2-5.

After having assembled all their data, what does the USGA now want to do about it? Mainly, tweak equipment. For whom?

The answer depends on where you think the problem lies. Believe it or not, when stakeholders were asked, If distance is a problem, who [sic] is it a problem for? five percent of the respondents said it is only a problem for recreational players.

When comes the day that I can drive the ball 280 with one hand, I’ll agree.

There is even talk of bifurcation of the rules, which the UGSA likens to asking them all to drink a quart of rat poison, though there is baseball and softball, tackle football and touch/flag football, pro ice hockey and amateur no-checking ice hockey. Why not golf?

Rory McIlroy put matters into perspective a few days ago, saying that distance is a problem for only about 0.1 percent of golfers in the world. He said the solution is not to tweak equipment, which OEMs can find a way around, but to make golf courses harder for them.

The USGA says it is doing this because it says it wants to protect the game. But golf is not the professional game. Golf is way bigger than the professional game. It’s our game and if it needs needs protecting, it’s not from how far you or I hit the ball.

I feel like I’ve just said the same thing three times. If distance is a problem, it’s a problem because of and for Rory and Bryson and Dustin, not you or me.

So enough ranting. What to do? The Recreational Golfer knows exactly what to do.

Long hitters on Tour bomb it because if the ball ends up in the rough, even thick rough, they can still get par and birdie isn’t out of the question. The solution is to line each side of the fairway from 310-350 yards not with thick rough, but with a bed of pea gravel ten yards wide and two inches deep. If they figure out how to hit out of that, we can change it to 3/4 minus.

You have to think outside the box.

Sorenstam and Player Accept Presidential Medal of Freedom

In a ceremony yesterday at the White House, Gary Player and Annika Sorenstam accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Trump in a private, secret ceremony.

How this is even possible given the events of the previous day is almost impossible to understand.

Maybe you could say that both of the recipients are foreign-born (Sorenstam is a naturalized American citizen) so the assault of the United States Capitol, fomented by the very president they would be seeing, doesn’t register the way it otherwise might.

Maybe they could say, like Justin Rose said when he went to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the state-sponsored murder of Jamal Khashoggi, “I’m not a politician.”

We don’t know yet why they went to the White House.

But whatever excuse they come up with won’t be good enough. These two people have blackened their reputation and their legacy in my eyes forever.

What they did was inexcusable. Period.

It’s time to vote!

I know this is a golf blog, but I also know there are things more important than golf and this is a forum I can use to talk about them. Voting is one.

This is it. The November election has arrived. Or should we say, with a record number of early voters, it ends today.

I hope you have made your plans to vote, either at a polling station or by a mail-in or absentee ballot.

If you have an early ballot, check with your county office to find out how to turn it in.

And turn it in as early as you can. Don’t wait until the last minute.

Once more–vote! Your vote does count.

And for your reward, there will be a post that is actually about golf on November 4th.

After all, this is a golf blog.

[November 4, 6:00 a.m.] THANK YOU FOR VOTING!

Election 2020

I know this is a golf blog, but I also know there are things more important than golf and this is a forum I can use to talk about them. Voting is one.

The November election is 95 days away.

If you are not registered to vote, register today. Or next week.

Covid-19 developments could make voting in person on November 3rd problematic, impossible, or just plain risky.

Therefore, if you do not live in a state that intends to allow voting by mail, request an absentee ballot.

I am not, and will not, advocate for any candidate. Who you vote for is your business, not mine.

I am only reminding you that being able to vote, and getting your vote counted, could be difficult this year in ways it never has been.

Plan now. And vote!

Thank you.

Fixing the FedEx Cup – III

About ten years ago, I wrote a piece on how to make the FedEx Cup more interesting and more fan friendly. That is, get rid of the point system and re-adjusting of the points that no one understood at that time or since.

No one listened.

Two years ago I had another go at it, with a more complicated but more fun way of paring down the list to the final 30-man tournament.

Again, no one listened.

So, here I go again, a voice of reason proposing a system that is so obvious and so simple that again, it is unlikely that anyone will listen.

Except you, my loyal readers.

Take the top 30 players on the year’s money list and there’s your field for the Tour Championship and the $15M prize. Best players for the year, one tournament, done.

The current points are handed out based on the order of finish in a tournament, which is the same way money is handed out. Points and money track each other closely, so why not take the obvious step and go with money, which everyone understands?

Since the FedEx Cup is a Tour championship, I would make two exceptions. Do not to include money won in major championships and WGC tournaments in the FedEx money rankings because those fields are not open to everyone with a Tour card. The major champions would get in, though.

Last week’s field was pretty much the top 30 money winners. There were only four exceptions (with money list rank on parentheses):

In – Abraham Ancer (32), Lucas Glover (36), Louis Oosthuizen (37), Jason Kokrak (44).
Out – Shane Lowry (20), Francesco Molinari (22), Tiger Woods, (24), Ryan Palmer (29).

The point system that we still don’t understand, and the two extra tournaments to get to the final 30 at a time of year when the guys are kind of tired of playing, served only to put four players into the Tour Championship in place of four others who had a better season.

And on top of that, two of the year’s major winners, Woods and Lowry, were excluded.

If the FedEx Cup is a season championship event, the participants should be selected purely on their season performance. They should not have to re-qualify. They already qualified.

Will the powers that be listen? I have the nagging suspicion that The Recreational Golfer flies unnoticed in the golfing skies.*

So next year they will tweak some more, get it wrong again, and say, “We are studying it and hope to do it better next year.”

But what the heck. This blog is about recreational golf. Every now and then, though, I have to rant when I see something so SIMPLE made so complicated.


*Where on earth did that metaphor come from?

Why Golfers Don’t Improve

I recently read a piece in the GolfWRX newsletter about why golfers don’t improve.   It goes in several directions, but fails to mention the main reason.   Almost everyone who takes up the game does it the wrong way.

Let’s talk about learning to play the piano.   You would start out with easy pieces and basic skills.   You would play within your capabilities because that is all you could do.

Over time, you would become more skillful in your technique, but to become a pianist your focus would have been all along on being a musician, technique being a means to that end.

Learning golf should be the same way: start with easy, basic skills and work up as you go along, playing on courses that your skills make you capable of playing, and using those skills to be a golfer all the while.

But what normally happens is that amateurs tackle the full game from the very start, get in way over their heads, and continue to try solving advanced problems instead of starting off small and working up.

They are like beginning piano players try to start off trying to play this:

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instead of this:

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People who never went through a process of getting into the game gradually, but rather tried to take it on all at once will find improvement difficult and time-consuming because they never created a foundation from which significant improvement can emerge.

Until they build that foundation, no amount of tweaks at the back end will help very much.

Every year I go through a re-learning process.   I get back to basic putting: hitting a lot of 2- and 3-foot putts.   Hitting 30- and 40-footers.

I re-learn my chipping stroke and re-calibrate my chipping formula. I re-learn my pitching stroke and re-calibrate my pitching game from 55-100 yards.

My swing? I get a refresher lesson with a 5-iron, and another one with a driver.

In short, I become a beginner again.   I re-create a solid foundation.

And that, I believe is what every golf who is stuck should do—start over.   It doesn’t matter if you are trying to break 100, or 90, or go from the high 70s to the low 70s.

If you’re stuck, start over with the small strokes.   Play most of your golf on par 3 courses for a while.   That’s golf without the driver, and if you can’t score there, you can’t on the big course, either.

Get really good at shots that are technically easy before you move on to shots that are technically difficult.

Honestly!   Life is long.    Taking out three or four months months to build a foundation for your future in a game you will play for the rest of your life is such a minimal investment that will pay off huge rewards.

And if you say, well, thanks for telling me this in the middle of July when I want to be out flailing away at 6,400 yards of heartache, I’ll say, why not spend a few weeks tuning up your game, then a few months honing it on smaller courses on which you will have a shorter outing and have more fun and become a better golfer, and this is the IDEAL time of year to do it.

But that’s just how I see it.