Dottie Pepper on Rule Changes and more Important Topics!
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
Dottie Pepper should be President! I have always admired Dottie Pepper, the feisty winner of 17 LPGA Tour events, including 2 majors. Pepper was also the heart and soul of six Solheim Cup teams before injuries forced early retirement. Now an analyst for ESPN, Dottie recently weighed in on new rulings by the USGA, such as the anchoring ban and the inadmissibility of scores for handicapping when rounds are played solo.
Pepper also challenges golf’s governing bodies by emphasizing the real issues that need review: the pace of play, green speeds, today’s golf ball, and caddies lining up golf shots.
Whether you agree with all of Dottie’s views or not, you can’t argue that she makes an apparent and supportive case for each issue. Wish our Presidential candidates demonstrated this same ability!
Thanks to ESPN.go.com and Dottie Pepper for this insightful article! (Written January 1st, 2016.)
We are just days away from Rule 14-1b regarding the anchoring of a golf stroke going into effect, some three-plus years after it came on everyone’s radar.
And I am more convinced than ever this is a bad move.
Not because of the impact it will have on senior golf at every level, or championship golf, or even teaching the game. It’s because of the exceptions within the rule, the lack of clarity it provides and the more important issues the ruling bodies should be focusing on rather than anchored strokes. Rule 14-1b, as officially announced in May 2013, prohibits anchoring the club either directly or by use of an anchor point in making a stroke. This is fine on the surface, but let’s take a more in-depth look at the layers of this ruling and the long-term impact.
For decades, golf’s ruling bodies approved of the anchored method, with many of the thoughts being:
1. It will be pretty much confined to senior golf (quickly proven untrue on all professional tours and top-level amateur golf around the world).
2. No one will win a major championship with a long or anchored putter (seeAdam Scott, Keegan Bradley, Ernie Els and others).
3. No one will ever teach the anchored method to youngsters. (USGA President Tom O’Toole Jr.’s young son used to encourag him to learn this method by his professional, thus sending Mr. O’Toole, by his own admission, to his breaking point to take the side of the anchoring ban.
The information about implementation of the rule on the USGA’s website is seven — yes, seven — long pages when printed. The rule itself reads like the tax code and includes exceptions that undercut the strength of the rule, like Matt Kuchar‘s method of putting where he braces the putter grip against his forearm. I have yet to hear an explanation of this particular method that dissuades me from thinking it is an anchored stroke.
Why not say a player might only have up to two points of contact with the club, those points being either one or two hands?
This certainly would make it much cleaner and simpler, especially when the big scream about the rules of golf (and the decisions) are centered on their complexity and difficulty to understand.
Furthermore, the reversal of the previous decision and the course of action with the “because we said so” air undermines the authority of the ruling bodies. I applaud the current USGA and R&A leadership and committees for being more active in protecting the integrity and future of the game, but not like this.
I also disagree with the USGA’s announcement just prior to Thanksgiving that “scores made while playing alone will no longer be acceptable [for] handicap purposes.” Unless the USGA has a larger motive for a global handicapping code (the United Kingdom, among others, does not allow for solo scores to count toward handicapping), then the organization talking about making itself more inclusive has done exactly the opposite.
From a personal standpoint, one of the biggest attractions to the game was the opportunity for solitary participation.
There was no need for someone on the other side of the net to return a shot or even to practice with me. I was raised in a very average, working-class family where both parents held jobs and I played at a working-to-middle-class club just a mile from home. I could ride my bike back and forth to McGregor Links with my eyes closed and knew every blade of grass on the course.
It would have been nearly impossible to find people to play with during regular hours in order to verify my scores by “peer review.” Scores are needed to be eligible for entry to the local, regional and statewide competitions. These paved the way for what has become an incredibly blessed life in and around the game. My life would have taken a very different course if I had to have someone sign every time I needed scores.
Par and personal bests were better than any “peer review” I could ever imagine. My own measuring stick for my dreams of earning a college scholarship and degree. Becoming a professional and a major champion. And ultimately someone who is still involved in the game more than 40 years later.
Dottie Pepper on Rule Changes and more Important Topics!
Good on Golf Canada for feeling much the same way and not enforcing the USGA’s “peer review” ruling.
We need to be putting ourselves in the position of growing the game at every level and not putting up more roadblocks.
As a game, golf has a number of issues that need much more attention and energy than the two just addressed. Such as speed of play, green speeds, the huge distances today’s golf ball travels in concert with the current club technology. And caddies lining up their players during competition.
Here is the Good and the Bad for the 2015 LPGA Season!
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
Dottie Pepper, writing for ESPN W, gives us her insight into the year that was, 2015! There were a lot of great things that happened on the LPGA Tour. But, according to Dottie, there are things that could have been better! Things like poor attendance to LPGA events and the performance of the Americans. (definitely, a link here as Americans like Americans to win!) Of course, there are such a lot of positive things happening on the LPGA Tour right now, and I for one cannot wait to see Lydia Ko and Inbee Park go head to head in 2016. Let’s hope that some American women can step up to the plate in the coming year!
For the third consecutive year, we’ll take this time to look back at the good, bad and the ugly of the LPGA Tour’s season. And, just as last year, there’s much more good than either bad or ugly.
The Good
1. Youth movement:
Among the 31 events on the 2015 LPGA schedule, 11 were won by a player under the age of 21 at the time of her victory and nearly half (15) were won by players under 23.
2. Balance:
Cristie Kerr won twice this year, at the KIA Classic while still a 37-year-old and the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship as a 38-year-old, crossing the $17 million mark in career earnings in the process.
3. Momentum and the 2016 schedule:
Commissioner Mike Whan now has what he considers the perfect number of official events on the LPGA schedule: 33. That has increased by a whopping 10 events in five years, and total purse money has been upped by more than $20 million to a record $63.1 million in a time that many would argue the Great Recession is still not over.
North American events have increased from 15 just five years ago to what will be 23 in 2016, including a new event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and another new tournament beginning in 2017 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Total televised hours have nearly doubled in that same five-year span, while network weekend coverage has tripled from two to six events.
Mandatory Credit: Marc Lebryk-USA TODAY Sports
If you thought the men had a youth movement in golf, the LPGA Tour’s champions in 2015 got younger and then some with nearly half its winners under the age of 23, including five-time champion Lydia Ko, who is only 18 — and world No. 1.
4. Drama:
The formula and format of the Race to the CME Globe is absolutely top notch with the season finale not only contested over a quality golf course at Tiburon GC in Naples, Florida, but with a points reset that rewards both season-long consistency and playing a full schedule.
The format infuses just enough drama for players to endure to finish out the season in top form, as witnessed by this weekend’s event. Lydia Ko, Inbee Park and Stacy Lewis each could have won the $1 million bonus with a win at Tiburon, but because none of them won the actual golf tournament, it brought a hard-charging Lexi Thompson into the bonus mix.
During the final round, Ko, Park and Thompson were each, at various points, projected to take home the seven-figure haul. The two biggest LPGA awards, the Rolex Player of the Year and Vare Trophy (for lowest scoring average), were also undecided until the final hole of the year with Ko taking home the first award and Park winning the second, thus giving her the final point she needed to qualify for the LPGA Hall of Fame after she completes her 10th year of membership in 2016.
Can the PGA Tour adopt some creativity from the Euro Tour?
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
Up until a decade ago, the European Tour was like the Little Engine that Could.
The players were regarded by the Americans as second class citizens and would play golf with them every two years (Ryder Cup) as a show of support. Wow, have things changed. The Europeans are now the dominant favorites going into each and every Ryder Cup, and there are players who played the PGA Tour who has opted to return to the European Tour because it is more user friendly. The European Tour Committee is not afraid to change things up as Jason Sobel from ESPN explains.
Because of weather concerns, the European Tour’s Portugal Masters will adjust to a shotgun start Saturday. Perhaps the PGA Tour uses some of that European creativity in its tournaments. Andrew Redington/Getty Images
The news came early Friday from the European Tour:
Because of weather concerns at the Portugal Masters, the impending third round will be played as a shotgun start.
Almost immediately, social media reaction likened it to any other shotgun start featuring mere mortal golfers.
Is it a shamble format? Can players buy mulligans in the pro shop? Will there be a long-drive contest? Closest to the pin? How many beverage carts are out there?
All joking aside, it’s a brilliant move by the Euro Tour, which has always been more aggressive than its PGA Tour counterpart in offering creative ways to complete its events. Just three years ago, the Nelson Mandela Championship was played as a par-65 on a course shortened by 1,600 yards because of heavy rains.
Hey, whatever it takes, right?
But I’ve often wondered why major televised golf tours don’t sporadically offer a shotgun start, simply for the fan experience.
Think about it: In the opening two rounds of any event, you’re able to catch your favorite player on live television for only one of those days. Sending a large portion of the field out in a shotgun start would afford television networks the chance to cover a greater variety of players while giving viewers a better chance of catching their favorites.
It would also enhance the chances of being able to finish in a given day. The opening round of the 2015-16 PGA Tour season started Thursday — and guess what? It didn’t conclude until Friday.
Should the FedEx Cup End Before the Start of Football?
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
I really enjoy the last 4 tournaments of the year on the PGA Tour.
The FedEx Cup Playoff brings a little more excitement to the year-end PGA Tour season. However, a ton of golf fans are also football fans, and I asked several of my golfing buddies the question, “Which game would you watch on the weekend, playoffs or NFL? The overwhelming answer? NFL. I think it is time for Tim Finchem and the PGA Tour to rethink the playoff time frame. I think Jason Sobel, Senior Golf Writer for ESPN, agrees with me! Check this out!
The FedEx Cup will be awarded on September 27, three weeks into the football season. Ending the golf season before football begins could have a major impact on golf’s playoffs. Chris Condon/PGA TOUR
LAKE FOREST, Ill. — You have a fantasy football team. Make that two. OK, more than two, but we’ll leave it at that. No need to reveal all your secrets.
I’ll bet you’re also in that weekly office pool again. Oh, and the survivor pool, of course. Squares pool, too. And sure, nobody can blame you for picking a few DFS teams after those incessant commercials finally talked you into it.
After all, it’s football season. Like any red-blooded American, your life is only complete with the requisite leagues and teams and pools. So, have at it.
All of which leads me to one semi-related question: What do you think of the current state of these FedEx Cup playoffs?
Yep, that’s right — they’re still going on.
Eleven months after the race for the $10 million first prize began, there remain two scheduled events until a champion is crowned — this week’s BMW Championship and next week’s Tour Championship. This isn’t some quirk of this specific calendar. It’s just how the season is set up. Begin in October, end in September, begin again in October. Consider it golf’s version of Groundhog Day, without the everyman hilarity of Bill Murray.
Check that: Murray is included, too, competing in this Wednesday’s pro-am. So it’s exactly like Groundhog Day.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t one of those “Death to the FedEx Cup” columns. Do an Internet search and you’ll find plenty of scorching-hot takes on how this system isn’t as important as any major (that was never its intention), is too volatile (that’s the nature of any playoffs) and its competitors don’t care (simply untrue). That’s not the takeaway here.
Should the FedEx Cup End Before the Start of Football?
Save for a few needed tweaks, I really like the FedEx Cup.
It provides a conclusion to golf’s interminable season that didn’t previously exist. The first two playoff events have been terrific theater with Jason Day and Rickie Fowler — two of the game’s emerging young superstars — winning the titles.
People who complain about the concept often conveniently forget facts like this: Back in 2006, the final year before the FedEx Cup, the Tour Championship was held in November and the game’s two biggest stars, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, didn’t play because, well, they didn’t feel like it.
Hey, you can’t blame ’em. That’s football season.
Rickie Fowler (pictured) and Jason Day got the playoffs off to a great start with thrilling wins by two of golf’s greatest current talents. But with football underway, how many will see the last two FedEx Cup tournaments of the season? Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images
Which leads back to my original point — and the one major tweak still necessary to fix the playoffs:
They need to end before the football season starts.
Right now, the four-event series too often resembles an inverted pyramid, with the opener garnering the most mass attention pre-football, followed by the next three in chronological order, though not order of importance.
It all dates back to a rare miscalculation from PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, who theorized nearly a decade ago that the playoffs would coexist in football’s domain without any real issues.
“This is not just an event that’s scheduled out there as an island into football,” he said at the time. “This is a series of events that starts before football, runs two weeks pre-NFL, runs two weeks into NFL, is all tied together. … I think it’s like a growing tide during the course of the year; it will carry us in and have really solid ratings.
The real head-scratcher is there is a fairly simple solution to this problem.
The US Open Course – Robert Trent Jones says to expect the unexpected!
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
In an interview with Robert Trent Jones Jr by ESPN.com Senior Golf Analyst Michael Collins, Jones addressed the idea that some players will love Chamber’s Bay and hate it.
Jones says several interesting things about this Washington State golf course that will host the 2015 US Open. Including “expect the unexpected.”
What surprised me most is that this is the first time an original Robert Trent Jones Jr course hosts a US Open. I would have thought that at some other time in his 50-year career as a course architect, a Jones Jr course would have been selected.
After viewing the video, I read the terrific story by Bob Harig from ESPN.com about Jones ‘cloud 9’ emotions at Chamber’s Bay hosting the tournament and about his relationship with his famous father.
With hard, fast, undulating greens like this at Chambers Bay, players are going to have a hard test.
His career has spanned some 50 years, all while he tried to live up to his father’s legacy. He designed golf courses around the world, more than 300 of them, give or take a few.
But Robert Trent Jones Jr. has never gotten to experience the thrill that will unfold for him next week.
A course his company designed and constructed, Chambers Bay, will be the stage for the 115th playing of the U.S. Open.
The venue near Tacoma in University Place, Washington, took a decade to conceive and has been open for just over seven years. Yet the world’s best will convene in the Pacific Northwest for the first time to stage the year’s second major championship.
Even for a man who has mingled with dignitaries, politicians, royalty … and made a lucrative living in the process, this is a big deal. A very big deal.
“Ecstasy is too pale a word to describe my feelings,” said Jones, 75, in a recent interview.
“I’m obviously thrilled. I have yet to come down to cloud nine. I know what it means. I’m a golfer first. And my father had his U.S. Open courses. But this is an honor, and it’s a very personal matter since it was my father who had the last original golf course get a U.S. Open.”
Jones is referring to his father, Robert Trent Jones Sr., who, according to the United States Golf Association, was the last to design a completely new venue and see it open for the U.S. Open — in 1970, at Hazeltine National in Minnesota.
“Bobby had such a close relationship with his father and such an appreciation for his dad,” said Jay Blasi, who worked on the younger Jones’ staff for 10 years. And was the project architect at Chambers Bay before starting his own design practice. “He holds him in such high regard that I think, when the announcement was made, I would imagine all of his thoughts went to his dad. His achievement tied in with his dad’s legacy of working on U.S. Open golf courses. It just made him proud.”
Jones’ father was a prolific designer, credited with approximately 500 designs.
He collaborated with the great amateur Bobby Jones — who was also Robert T. Jones but was not related — on a course in Atlanta and, to avoid confusion, the architect began using his middle name, Trent.
Judy Rankin brings class and dignity to the Golf Channel booth.
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
The Divine Ms. Judy Rankin.
Judy Rankin is my favorite golf broadcaster. As Beth Ann Nichols for Golfweek.com says, “Rankin brings class and dignity to the Golf Channel booth.”
Not many people have outstanding success in more than one career, but Judy Rankin is exceptional. She won 26 titles on the LPGA Tour and is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Her peers and viewers admired Rankin for the classy way she describes a player’s swing or shot, without ever sounding caustic or harsh. She is also revered for her quiet toughness, playing with severe back pain, and later beating breast cancer.
Judy Rankin in the Golf Channel booth with Terry Gannon. ( Courtesy of Golf Channel )
Judy Rankin remembers the phone call as if it were yesterday.
One week removed from a devastating early loss at the 1961 British Ladies Amateur, a 16-year-old Rankin told her father that she wanted to quit golf. He said he understood, and offered to take her fishing.
Then the kitchen phone rang. Her father, Paul, reached back to grab the phone that was mounted on the wall. An editor from Sports Illustrated was on the other end, wanting to know if Rankin would play in the upcoming U.S. Women’s Open at Baltusrol. They wanted to do a cover story.
It’s difficult to imagine an LPGA without Rankin. Her presence in the Golf Channel booth brings such a wonderful sense of class, dignity and credibility. On the eve of her 70th birthday, with a pancake dinner at church on the night’s agenda, the Hall of Famer talked about the idea of perhaps slowing down.
Rankin, who turned 70 on Feb. 18, will work 14 LPGA events for Golf Channel this season and serve as an on-course reporter at the Open Championship in St. Andrews. She has missed only three Open Championships since 1989.
With so much young talent on the fairways, it’s nice to have someone with 60-plus years in the game passing on such a rich perspective.
“If you’re coming down the stretch on Sunday and she’s in the booth,” said fellow Golf Channel broadcaster Tom Abbott, “she always says the right things at the right time.”
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
LPGA Players Paula Creamer and Brittany Lincicome are really pushing for a Women’s Masters at Augusta National.
Creamer proposes a back-to-back women’s tournament with the famous men’s tournament in April.
As Paula recently tweeted, “…. The fastest area of golf growth is women!” She mentions the Drive, Chip, and Putt tournament at Augusta that gives kids a chance to experience this famous place. That Junior Tournament has caught the attention of youngsters nation-wide and is helping to generate more golfers.
Is it time to expand the whole Master’s experience to include professional women players?
Brittany Lincicome and Paula Creamer are two of four players pushing for a Women’s Masters Tournament.
Paula Creamer is calling for a women’s Masters at Augusta National.
Creamer would love for organizers to at least listen to the idea of women playing a Masters in consecutive weeks with the men’s tournament. She reiterated her thoughts Tuesday at Lake Merced Golf Club, where the Bay Area native is preparing for this week’s Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic.
“I’ve been there, I’ve played there, stayed in Butler’s Cabin,” said Creamer, the 2010 U.S. Women’s Open champion. “I had an awesome time. I think the patrons and everybody would love to have two weeks there, two tournaments. Why wouldn’t you? Hopefully, we will see something change and happen.”
While she hasn’t heard from anyone official at Augusta, there has been plenty of positive feedback since she made the comments. She wants to be part of golf taking steps to recruit the next generation of young players.
