The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Bubba, the real Masters pick
There’s nothing shining like a beacon as a subject for this week’s T2G, so let’s have a little miscellany...
Bubba the smart favourite for Augusta
Really, set aside the (entirely understandable) hysteria for a minute: Tiger Woods’ wayward driving is not going to cut it at Augusta, where if memory serves the last time he played he hit one fairway, and that was the ninth... off the first tee.
Quite apart from the fact Bubba Watson’s won there twice and Augusta tends to suit left handers would be enough to place him in every Masters conversation, but after his matchplay victory in Austin he’s also won twice in the last month.
And unlike Tiger, the course, as it plays now, is set up in much the same dimensions as they were when Bubba won. The Augusta where Tiger won his jackets is ancient history now.
Still not getting it right at the Matchplay...
One understands why they play three days of “round-robin” at the WGC Matchplay, but it’s still not the right solution. As CBS analyst Peter Kostis observed, the extended format leaves players exhausted by the weekend, when the quality of play plummets, and we get mis-matches like Sunday evening’s final.
If the Tours want the top players to be there for more than potentially one day then a couple of days of strokeplay qualifying might be a solution, although that might be soporific to watch.
The real solution is just to switch back to straight knockout. No alternative format “weeds” out the also rans with any great efficiency. It’s matchplay, and it should really be win or bust.
We do this only once or maybe twice a year. If the event is scheduled right – close to the Players when it moves back to March next year for example -– the travel for even possibly one game is not onerous for overly-delicate superstars.
...and getting it dead wrong at the Olympic Games
There is to be no change of format for the Tokyo Olympic Games golf competition, with just the regular 72-hole men’s and women’s events. What a missed opportunity.
As we’ll see at Gleneagles this summer in the European Team Championships, having the men and women at the same site is the perfect chance to innovate with team and mixed formats.
To make a decision on the Olympic format even before this event is played as a dry run smacks of closed-minded stupidity.
The Rio Olympic golf competition was a qualified success, but introducing some form of a team element was surely the least they could have tried.
Logistically this requires little preparation – just pick the teams off the world rankings. They should still do it. A historic artefact... on YouTube I’ll freely admit that the most golf I watched during a post-Six Nations restorative week off was not from Austin but from the fantastic resource provided online by Augusta National Golf Club.
I’m never slow to have a go at the green jackets when they deserve it, but the decision to put every “telecast” of the final days’ play in the Masters online, on YouTube, is just fantastic.
You can lose yourself for hours in there. Here is Roberto de Vicenzo saying “what a stupid I am” in 1968 and Bob Goalby, the beneficiary of great Argentine’s incorrectly signed scorecard, looking shell-shocked.
There’s so much Seve, which is a big thing for a golf fan of my generation. There he is at 21, bear-hugging Gary Player after the South African birdied the last for a (then) record 64 to win in 1978.
There he is two years later, in an incongruous white cap, with a 10-shot lead on the back nine on his way to his first jacket, just a few months after his first Claret Jug.
There he is in 1983, with the US commentators almost openly derisive of his “lucky” chip-in at the last. And there he is in 1986, an ugly duck hook into the lake at 15, opening the door for Jack Nicklaus to win one last time.
There’s Sandy Lyle in 1988, with the US commentary – the great Pat Summerall and Ken Venturi – effusive of their praise of THAT bunker shot, like the Peter Alliss commentary we all recall.
Then there’s Faldo, there’s Norman in 1987 and 1996, Tiger in 1997, Ollie and Woosie and Phil and Angel and Adam right up until Sergio last year.
Trust me, you’ll be in there for ages. A fantastic historic archive, and it’s completely free. An awful loss to Scottish Golf Less than a year after we lost a great Perthshire man in Barrie Douglas, came the news last week of the sudden death – at just 54 – of Graham Lowson.
Scottish Amateur champion in 1991 and a long-time internatonalist, Graham was a superb competitor and hugely respected on the amateur circuit, as the tributes to him from Stephen Gallacher and Dean Robertson showed.
He always had a word – and an opinion – for loitering reporters.
A top man, and a huge loss to Scottish golf.
“The real solution is to switch back to straight knockout...