Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 18, 2012 · 4:00 pm

Final Shots in Fifth-Major Battle

Bowing to reader demands that Gary Van Sickle’s The Players: NOT the Fifth Major be given an extended run, we’ve held onto his third act until this afternoon. (Actually, Matt Kuchar’s second-round 68 at the HP Byron Nelson Championship reminded me that I had not posted the final installment, as promised. Fortunately, it was one of those “we” promises, not an “I” promise.) Kuchar, you’ll recall, won last week’s edition of THE PLAYERS. It was his fourth PGA Tour victory and his first “fifth major.”

Or not. Gary picks up the thread with some ruminations about another would-be biggie.

Now to the last real contender, the Memorial Tournament. Jack Nicklaus founded it in Dublin, Ohio, and he has said that no, he wasn’t trying to build a major championship. Come on, of course he was! Check out the current Nicklaus.com home page:  “The Memorial Tournament has grown into one of golf’s premier events, often called the fifth major.”

Actually, it isn’t. Maybe for 15 minutes about 30 years ago. The hometown Columbus Dispatch jumped on Jack’s bandwagon early. After Roger Maltbie beat Hale Irwin in an experimental three-hole playoff in the inaugural ’76 Memorial, and Nicklaus himself won the next year, Paul Hornung wrote in the Dispatch, “The first two tournaments have been more than memorable athletic events. In that short time, they have established the Memorial as a candidate for fifth major designation.”

The Memorial was Jack’s ode to Augusta National. Concession tents were dark green. Caddies wore white jump suits. The course was immaculately maintained, and say, that par-3 12th hole over water looks familiar. Tour players were gushing in their praise. From Bob Baptist in the Dispatch before the ’81 Memorial: “When he was asked, What do you think about the Memorial’s chances of one day being a major, Mark Hayes flatly predicted, ‘One day I think it will be bigger than Augusta.’”

That’s right. Bigger than Augusta.

In 1984, Baptist quoted former Memorial champ David Graham in the Dispatch: “Nicklaus is a legend who has surpassed Bobby Jones and probably everyone else. One of these years, he’s going to retire. The only place players and fans will be able to see Jack will be Muirfield Village during the Memorial. Shades of Augusta National. You think that won’t make the Memorial a major?”

Perhaps it might have if the Tournament Players Championship hadn’t barreled right over it. A new era began in 1982 when Jerry Pate won and inaugurated the terrifyingly difficult Stadium Course and its infamous island-green 17th hole. It had a surprise—if choreographed—ending on national television in which Pate pushed tour commissioner Deane Beman and course designer Pete Dye into the lake and dived in after them.

Just that quick, the Memorial fell to second place in the Fifth Major arms race. From Ian O’Connor’s 2008 book, Arnie & Jack: “In fact, the Memorial was battling the tour’s Player Championship at the TPC at Sawgrass for unofficial honors as the game’s fifth major.  ‘Deane came up with a great idea with the Players Championship… but you can’t buy a major championship and that was sort of the effort being made,’ Nicklaus said. ‘The Memorial was his only competition… but everything he could do to put one ahead of the other, he would do and that’s always stuck in my craw.’”

It’s not as if Nicklaus didn’t see it coming. He joked that he won the first TPC event in ’74 “just in case” it became a major later, but despite winning the tour’s new flagship event three times, Nicklaus never treated them as significant wins. For obvious reasons. Just ask Deane Beman, the happily retired PGA Tour commissioner who helped create The Players from scratch, as detailed in Adam Schupak’s tale of the tour’s dramatic rise, Golf’s Driving Force: “’Bobby Jones was Jack’s model,” Beman said. ‘His goal was to win more majors than Bobby Jones. When Jack decided to build his own facility and have his own tournament, that tournament would be to him what the Masters was to Bobby Jones. And of course, our tournament stood in his way.’”

While rain often poured on the Memorial and it’s late-May date, almost the only thing that poured on the Players and its new Stadium Course was more publicity. Dye’s design was controversial. “It was like playing Donkey Kong out there,” Tom Weiskopf said, likening it to a popular video game. There was Pate, his orange ball and menacing camera shots of a trolling alligator. There was even media hype. From Golf’s Driving Force: “Before the first putt has been stroked, the first hot dog sold or the first complaint made about the rough, it has been billed as golf’s Super Bowl,” wrote Golf Digest’s Dwayne Netland. “This is quite a burden for any unborn event, no matter how noble its blood, but if the grandiose plans materialize, the Tournament Players Championship may become the sport’s fifth major event.”

Greg Larson, the golf writer then for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, raised the bar with his report from the 1985 PGA Championship: “Deane Beman was quoted in a New York Times story yesterday as calling for the TPC to be declared a fifth major. If the PGA, which begins today at Cherry Hills, is any measurement, Beman should be screaming for fourth place… After two days of walking around Cherry Hills… nothing jumps out and says, ‘Hey, this is different than the Memorial, the Crosby or the Bay Hill Classic.’”

So here we are three decades later, on the verge of a fifth major… or not.

If there is going to be a fifth major, Dan Jenkins said, it has to be The Players. Lawrence Donegan, the respected golf writer for Scotland’s The Guardian, has a different idea. “America doesn’t need any more majors,” he said, presenting a view widely shared in Europe. “It’s ludicrous that we have four majors and three of them are on one continent. Golf is becoming more global and if Asia is the new frontier, and it is, where better to have another major? The fifth major should be the Australian Open. It’s got the history, the tradition, the courses. But four’s a great number. So forget the PGA Championship—just plug in the Australian Open.”

Larson, who’s still going strong as a Jacksonville-area sports-talk radio personality since leaving his paper in ’89, thinks Pate put The Players on the short list of contenders but… “The tour was always blowing in people’s ears, ‘This is a major,’ and I think they pushed it too hard,” Larson said. “If they’d just left it alone, everybody would consider it a major by now.”

Beman is hopeful but said he never had any illusions that his tournament would get major status quickly. “The last element to become the fifth major, or to replace one of the others, is that the players need to fully understand how important it is to their enterprise and they have to fully embrace it,” he said. “The tour is reluctant to tell them that. Somebody else needs to.”

There is one other possibility, Beman believes, that might accelerate the coronation of The Players—Tiger regaining form and winning more Opens or Masters. “Then Jack may want this to become a major after all,” Beman said with a laugh. “Because he won it three times.”

If The Players is a major, the new score is: Jack 21, Tiger 15.

And Kooch 1. Thanks to Gary for his analysis.

Top 50 on TV:  Nothing this week, but Mike Van Sickle of Wexford, Pa., advanced to U.S. Open sectional qualifying after earning medalist honors with a 67 at Quicksilver Golf Club in Midway, Pa. Van Sickle, who starred at Marquette University, is a prominent blogger.

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May 12, 2012 · 9:13 pm

Fifth-Major Debate Heats Up

Assuming you’ve all found your way back to your seats, we’re about to dim the lights and present Act Two of Gary Van Sickle’s The Players: NOT the Fifth Major. (For those of you who prefer the Cliff Notes versions of the classics, we recommend Gary’s charticle, “Taking the 5th,” which appeared in the PLAYERS preview edition of SI Golf+.)

Act One ended with Gary lancing the pretensions of the Australian Open. The curtain rises again to the strains of “The Forest Ranger Song” from Little Mary Sunshine.

Like the Aussie Open, the Canadian Open also began in 1904, taking a lengthy break for World War I before resuming. Tommy Armour, the legendary Silver Scot, called the Canadian Open “not the third but the second-greatest championship in the world,” ranking it behind the U.S. Open, possibly because he won it three times (1927, ’30 and ’34). But in the mid-‘30s, what else was there?

Fast forward to 1965 after Gene Littler won the Canadian Open and said, “I never go into any major tournament with the idea that I’m playing well enough to win.”

That’s right, Littler lumped it among the other majors like it was fact. That’s notable. Lee Trevino won the Canadian in 1971, sandwiched between his U.S. Open and British Open titles, a feat promptly christened the Triple Crown. Later, Trevino recalled, “The Canadian Open is one of the world’s oldest championships and I rate it among the top four in the world. The only Open I can’t seem to win is the Mexican Open.”

Ernie Els in Dubai

Ernie Els, a winner of national Opens on both sides of the Atlantic, thinks the British PGA is a big deal. (John Garrity)

Trevino never missed a chance to take a jab at the Masters, a tournament whose course and policies didn’t agree with him, but the Canadian Open did have an impressive run. Its champions included Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Walter Hagen, Locke, Billy Casper and Palmer. Also, the World Series of Golf was then a four-man event for the winners of the four majors, and if a player won two majors in a year, guess who filled in at the World Series? The Canadian Open champion.

Jack Nicklaus played in the Open every year from 1974 through ’89. He finished second seven times, which helped revive the event. After he built the Glen Abbey course near Toronto and it became the tournament’s permanent home in 1977, the event lost its national championship feel and morphed into just another tour stop. Tiger Woods gave it an adrenaline boost by winning in 2000, but even he didn’t return after 2001. When the FedEx Cup series began, the Open was shoe-horned into an unfavorable date and stuck with a weak field. The glory days are long gone… unless RBC can buy a better date.

“Now,” said Toronto Star columnist Dave Perkins, “virtually every reference to RBC rebuilding the tournament carries a line like ‘attempting to restore the Open to its former glory, when it was widely considered the fifth major.’ I think it’s one of those self-fulfilling media prophecies. We keep repeating it as if it were true, therefore it must have been true.”

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion, which we’ll post Sunday afternoon when the final twosome, Kevin Na and Matt Kuchar, step onto the tee of the island-green 17th.

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May 12, 2012 · 4:05 pm

THE PLAYERS: Van Sickle’s View

Gary Van Sickle, our chief course rater and principal PGA Tour correspondent, moonlights as a Sports Illustrated senior writer. In that capacity he is, at this very moment, covering THE PLAYERS at the 51st-ranked TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course in Ponte Vedra, Fla. Busy as he is, Gary was kind enough to slide a few thousand words of cogent analysis under our door, asking only that we not identify him as the author. We therefore ask that you, the readers, honor his request.

Phil Mickelson

Mickelson, a former PLAYERS champ, was happy to take the Fifth. (John Garrity)

Gary’s chosen topic, by the way, is “THE PLAYERS: Is It the Fifth Major?”

Repeat after me: There will never be a fifth major championship.

Now repeat after me again: Never say never.

It is no longer a stretch to use the words fifth major in the same sentence as THE PLAYERS. It’s been done. In fact, starting in the pages of Sports Illustrated in 1984 when Dan Jenkins, famous sportswriter and soon to be World Golf Hall of Fame member, wrote about the Tournament Players Championship (a.k.a. The Players). “For two years,”Jenkins wrote, “the pros had been howling louder than a North Florida wind about the horrors of the design of their own course at their own headquarters and the site of their own championship, which has certainly become the ‘fifth major.’”

Ahh, you say, but Jenkins is a comedian and a master of sarcasm. Those aren’t quote marks around fifth major, you say, those are Dan’s dried tears from laughing so hard at his ironic use of “certainly” and “fifth major.”

Fine. Let’s go to Pebble Beach during the West Coast Swing of 2008, where Phil Mickelson was answering a question about where he plays. “What’s difficult from a player’s point of view,” Lefty said, “is scheduling, because if you take the five majors, counting the Players, and the three World Golf Championships, which is eight…”

Five majors. He said it!

Not so fast, you counter. Phil, too, is a comedian and… wait a minute, didn’t Phil win The Players the year before this comment? He’s counting The Players as a major because HE won it!

Gee, you people are so cynical. I don’t even know you anymore.

Let’s agree on two things, at least. One, golf history is fluid. It meanders like the mighty Mississippi. Even the Masters wasn’t always a major. Adding a fifth major championship may seem as unnecessary as dunking an Oreo in hot fudge, but hey, it might happen in this now-now-NOW world where yesterday’s tradition is today’s who cares?

Two, the competition for any future fifth-major status looks a lot like a Soviet election—only one real candidate. The Players is effectively the last man standing.

You’re not so sure? Well, follow along as I weed out the pretenders, who will fall away, one by one, like those sniffling, rose-less Bachelorettes.

Let’s start with the weakest.

A friend, whom I will identify only as a “Mr. Google” in order to protect his true identity, found this in a 1981 Associated Press story: “Tom Watson, who turned back the Masters bids of Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller, can expect a challenge from a different quarter this week in golf’s “Fifth Major,” the $300,000 MONY Tournament of Champions.”

Sounds like the new kid at the AP desk swallowed some bad press release for lunch. The T of C was a small-field event for winners only. Not a major. Not even close.

Next, from the bargain bin at Borders, there’s Tales from Q-School: Inside Golf’s Fifth Major, by John Feinstein. Horror stories from the PGA Tour’s qualifying tournament could, indeed, fill a book, but if Q-School is really a major championship, you should be able to name a Q-School winner of the last 30 years.

Can’t do it? Didn’t think so. Case closed.

Next up is AmateurGolf.blogspot.com with the headline, “THE FIFTH MAJOR: THE U.S. AMATEUR.” Yes, it used to be called the National Amateur, and it was once part of the Grand Slam (or the “Impregnable Quadrilateral,” a nickname that somehow didn’t stick), won by Bobby Jones in 1930—the U.S. and British Amateurs, the U.S. and British Opens. That was back when amateur golf mattered and pro golf was viewed as a troupe of unwashed vagabonds. The National Amateur faded in relevance, however, well before the 21st century.

The only thing funnier than last year’s Golf Boys’ video was when the European Tour issued a press release touting its BMW PGA Championship as golf’s “Fifth Major.”  Yes, seven of the top nine players in the world ranking competed, and yes, golf’s pendulum of power has clearly swung toward Europe for the first time since America invented the game. (Just kidding—laugh, Scotland!)

Said England’s Lee Westwood, a delightful and clever chap, “The Players probably used to be regarded as the fifth major, and it felt that way back in the late ‘90s. But since the invention of the World Golf Championships, it’s actually stepped back. So what is it, eighth on the list now?”

Ouch. Added South Africa’s Ernie Els, “This event is definitely taking the place of the TPC. I also feel we’ve got a stronger field here and a classic golf course.”

Naturally, their comments were totally objective. Westwood is a longstanding critic of The Players, notably skipping it, and Els needed to justify his redesign of the Wentworth Club course, which drew loud criticism even though everybody loves Ernie.

Golf’s Fifth Major, the BMW PGA? Please, serious attempts only, gentlemen.

Here’s what a real Fifth Major contender looks like. The Australian Open, the toast of an entire continent, dates to 1904, is played on classic layouts such as Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath, and its roll call of champions includes Gene Sarazen, Norman von Nida, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Greg Norman and Bobby Locke. Gary Player won it a record seven times. Nicklaus won six.

Even better, Nicklaus called it the fifth major on his many trips Down Under, which is noted in nearly every Aussie Open reference. When the Greatest Golfer of the Twentieth Century speaks, people listen.

But when the Greatest Golfer of the Twentieth Century writes, they don’t read. In his 1969 biography, The Greatest Game of All: My Life in Golf, Jack stated, “In conversations with friends I referred to the Australian Open as a major championship, but they knew and I knew I was kidding myself. Being the national championship of a golf-minded country, the Australian Open was a most estimable tournament to be won but simply wasn’t a major championship except in the eyes of Australians. Of course, the men who won it prized it highly.”

Sorry about that, mates. No Jack endorsement plus few top American players in the last 20 years equals no major.

Gary’s rant will resume shortly. (Our fact checkers need a breather.)

 

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May 10, 2012 · 4:24 pm

Z Boaz Was One of “America’s Worst”

In my last post I promised that “tomorrow” I’d reprint a report on 11,237th-ranked Z Boaz Golf Course from my almost-best-seller of 1994, America’s Worst Golf Courses. By “tomorrow,” of course, I meant “next week.” I’ve spent much of that week searching Catch Basin for my file of Z Boaz photographs. When I find them — and after they’ve been digitally enhanced from the drab colors of the last century to glorious black-and-white — I’ll present them in gallery format. Meanwhile, here’s what America’s Worst Golf Courses had to say about Z Boaz:

“Riding on its reputation.”

 

That’s what you hear whenever Z Boaz shows up on the latest list of America’s worst courses. And it’s true — this vintage layout has suffered numerous improvements since its debut as a WPA project in 1937. The spindly trees have grown into impressive oaks; ponds and creeks have filled with water; once-faceless sand bunkers now yawn impressively. It’s a far cry from the hardpan heaven that earned Z Boaz the nickname “Goat Hills New.”

 

Richard Teague, the muni’s current assistant pro, looks out the clubhouse window and shakes his head over the changes. “When I played here, there wasn’t no trees,” he says. “Wasn’t no grass, either, for that matter.”

What Z Boaz has going for it is its legacy. In a memorable article in Sports Illustrated called “The Glory Game at Goat Hills,” writer Dan Jenkins recalled his student days at nearby Texas Christian University, where he and his band of rowdy, bet-happy ne’er-do-wells wasted their afternoons on the parched fairways of the old Worth Hills Golf Course.

 

Overtaken by development — not to mention good taste — Worth Hills went under the bulldozers some years ago, causing SI  to remark that “it was nice to learn that something could take a divot out of those hard fairways.” Z Boaz carries on the tradition as best it can. Every summer, Jenkins invites a touring pro and a bunch of lesser lights to Z Boaz for a one-day tournament, the Dan Jenkins Partnership & Goat Hills Glory Game Reprise. Although not as bleak as Worth Hills in its prime, Z Boaz still offers a pungent contrast to Fort Worth’s elegant Colonial Country Club, some miles away. No clipped hedges and high-dollar homes here — just a stark rectangle of Texas Hill country bounded by a railroad line and three busy streets.

 

The din of traffic, in fact, is an inescapable feature of golf at Z Boaz. The neighborhood is rich with furniture showcases and warehouses, most of which provide a pleasing backdrop to the golfer about to play a shot. Batting cages, miniature golf, and a life-size statue of a giraffe enhance the northern boundary, while empty storefronts and a karate school line the seventh fairway on the east side. And where, save for the finishing holes at Cypress Point, will the golfer find two more natural greensites than Z Boaz’s sixteenth (at the foot of the neon “Checks Cashed” sign) and seventeenth (hard against Long John Silver’s Seafood Shop)?

 

Surely, this is what Robert Louis Stevenson meant when he described Z Boaz as “the most beautiful meeting of land and transmission shops that nature has produced.”

Can such a course really be at death’s door? Will golfers no longer gather on the banks of the Firth of Camp Bowie to ponder its murky depths and weigh the risks of reaching for a muddy ball. Will dog owners and skate boarders defoliate the sacred sward?

Stay tuned for further updates.

Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but THE PLAYERS Championship has begun on Pete and Alice Dye’s 51st-ranked TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course in Ponte Vedra, Fla.   Described on a PGA Tour web site as “perhaps the world’s most famous golf course,” it is not. 

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May 1, 2012 · 5:41 pm

Texas Course Threatened by Progress

“John, I’ve got some bad news.”

Dan Jenkins, waiting for his ride outside the Savannah Rapids Pavilion, couldn’t have looked more troubled. Which was surprising, since he had just been honored for being honored at the Golf Writers Association of America’s annual dinner.

The world’s greatest golf writer cut to the chase: “They’re closing Z Boaz.”

Witnesses say that I made some gaspy, guttural sounds and began swaying like a pine in a stout breeze. My Top 50 aide-de-camp clutched my elbow and offered to send someone for a ginger ale.

“No,” I said, regaining my composure. “But I’d like some grapes.”

My flunky hustled inside, leaving me to get the whole story from Dan. The Fort Worth City Council, he told me, had voted by a margin of 6-to-1 to close the scenic and 11,237th-ranked Z Boaz Golf Course in September and replace it with a 138-acre community park. “I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings,” Dan said, “but I know how you feel about Z Boaz.”

A month has passed, and I’m still reeling from the news. Z Boaz featured prominently in my 1994 almost-best-seller, America’s Worst Golf Courses: A Collection of Courses Not Up to Par. While not the worst course I’ve ever seen — that distinction still belongs to Florida’s Ft. Meade City Mobile Home Park Golf Course — Z Boaz is undoubtedly the worst course I’ve played multiple times to increasing levels of satisfaction and fondness. Z Boaz was the venue for the annual Dan Jenkins Partnership & Goat Hills Glory Game Reprise, a two-man scramble tournament for sandbaggers, golf writers, aging celebrities and down-on-their-luck PGA Tour pros from across the country.

“It’s all about the money,” Dan told me at the Masters. “Z Boaz is supposed to generate enough revenue to pay for itself, but usage has decreased from 46,873 golfers in 2000 to 21,844 in 2010. They say Z Boaz lost $234,000 last year.”*

*This may not be an actual quote by Dan, unless he was reading to me from an April 3 article by Bill Hanna in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

I’ve done a little research of my own since then, and I’ve found evidence that Z Boaz’s demise is being promoted by well-funded lobbyists for the dog-park and mountain-bike-trail movements. (See the Star-Telegram’s coverage of a public hearing, which states, “Other speakers advocated for a dog park at Z Boaz and the possible addition of mountain bike trails.”) Some park proponents have poisoned the debate by characterizing Z Boaz golfers as “profanity-spouting layabouts with coarse habits, showing minimal regard for taxpayer dollars” — as if that justifies shuttering an operation that has served its community for more than 80 years.

Am I going to take this lying down? Probably. I’ve reached the age where a thrice-daily nap is critical if I’m to operate at peak efficiency.

But I will not take this standing up! I hereby announce that John Garrity’s Top 50 Blog will join Hall of Fame golfer Kathy Whitworth and the ghosts of Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan in pleading for Z Boaz’s life. It’s not too late, Fort Worth City Council! It’s not too late!

(Tomorrow, I’ll reprint the Z Boaz chapter from America’s Worst Golf Courses. In the meantime, I invite my billionaire readers to consider a generous donation to the Save Z Boaz Foundation, if there is such a thing.)

Top 50 on TV: The PGA Tour’s Wells Fargo Championship is being played at 32nd-ranked Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, N.C. The practice range at Quail Hollow ranks in every pro’s Top 5, as you’ll discover when you read my SI Golf Plus article from 2006, “7 Days on the Range.”

 

 

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