Morikawa’s 64 ties course mark
Ex-Cal star Collin Morikawa shot a second-round 64 Friday to tie the course record and pull within one shot of the lead at the World Golf Championships -- Workday Championship at The Concession in Bradenton, Fla.
Morikawa sits in a three-way tie, one shot behind leader Brooks Koepka, who shot a 6-under 66 to grab the lead. Koepka recorded seven birdies before making bogey on his final hole to stand at 11-under, 133 total, and take a one-shot lead over Morkawa, Australia’s Cameron Smith and Billy Horschel.
Morikawa, who tied a career high with nine birdies en route to his record-tying 64, said he found confidence playing at The Concession, designed by Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin. The course is hosting its first PGA Tour event after the WGC was moved from Mexico last month due to challenges related to COVID-19.
“I’ve only played a handful of times in Florida,” he admitted. “Obviously the grass out here, the way the slopes come off the greens, but I feel confident, I’m getting some good numbers and hopefully we get some good numbers the next two days.
“My putting has never felt this good and whether I make or miss putts, knowing that my stroke is good, linewise, tempo, that’s all that matters.” WEIR GRABS FIRST-ROUND CHAMPIONS LEAD >> Mike Weir shot a 7-under-par 66 to take a one-shot lead over Scott Verplank and a two-stroke lead over Paul Goydos, Jeff Sluman and Kevin Sutherland at the PGA Champions Tour’s Cologuard Classic in Tucson, Ariz.
Steve Stricker, Scott Parel and David Toms are tied for sixth, while Phil Mickelson, Billy Mayfair, Joe Durant, Retief Goosen, and Jerry Kelly are a shot back of them at 70.
KO HANGS ONTO LPGA LEAD >> Lydia Ko of New Zealand fired a 3-under 69 to hold onto a narrow one-shot lead after two rounds at the Gainbridge
LPGA in Orlando, Fla.
Ko, who calls the Lake Nona Golf & Country Club her home course, stands at 10-under 134 and one shot ahead of Nelly Korda (68).
WU LEADS PUERTO RICO OPEN >> Brandon Wu birdied four of his last seven holes to take a one-stroke lead at the midway point of the Puerto Rico Open at the Grand Reserve Country Club in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico.
Soccer
SACRAMENTO OWNER BACKS OUT >> Major League Soccer says Ron Burkle has backed out of plans for an expansion team in Sacramento that was scheduled to start play in 2023.
The league said in a statement that Burkle’s decision was “based on issues with the project related to COVID-19.”
MLS announced the Sacramento Republic as its 29th team on Oct. 21, 2019, and said then the team would start play in 2022. MLS said July 17 that Sacramento would not start play until the 2023 season because of the pandemic.
Burkle’s group had planned a $300 million soccer-specific stadium on a 14-acre site downtown and signed a deal with UC Davis Health to be its MLS jersey sponsor.
But the group had run into cost issues with the proposed stadium site and had yet to break ground on the proposed 21,000-seat stadium.
Football
TEXANS RELEASE RB DUKE JOHNSON >> Running back Duke Johnson was released by the Houston Texans.
According to multiple reports, Johnson, 27, was let go by the Texans as the team tries to dodge the full $5.025 million salary cap hit for 2021, the final year on his three-year deal with the team.
RAVENS’ BROWN DRAWS TRADE INTEREST >> Ravens right tackle Orlando Brown covets a role at the exclusive left tackle position and is pushing for a trade out of Baltimore. Brown made his desire public via social media, and reports indicate the Ravens are amenable to a deal. ESPN reported the Jaguars are among the teams who kicked the tires on a trade for Brown.
Women’s rowing
EX-CAL STAR MAKES OLYMIC TEAM >> Former Clayton Valley High and Cal standout Kara Kohler qualified for her second Olympic Games, winning the championship in the single sculls at the U.S Rowing Trials at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota, Fla.
Jon Wilner writes about Pac-12 football and basketball almost every day of the year. Sign up for his newsletter and never miss a thing. It’s easy and it’s free. Go to mercurynews.com/tag/pac12-hotline
Cal’s latest financial report includes two jaw-dropping but interconnected numbers: The Bears finished the 2020 fiscal year with a $3.2 million surplus (in a pandemic) but received $25.1 million in university support — support that was booked as revenue.
Both numbers run counter to established norms in Berkeley, where huge year-end shortfalls and steep faculty resistance to athletics are as commonplace as gluten-free options.
The $25.1 million in direct institutional aid represents a six-fold increase over the average from the previous five years.
And there’s more coming. Loads more.
The enormous assist from central campus is part of a long-term strategy crafted by chancellor Carol Christ and athletic director Jim Knowlton to eventually corral the Bears’ unbalanced budget. (The plan was discussed with the Academic Senate, in the interest of cross-campus transparency.)
Christ explained her support for athletics in a letter to the campus community that was published more than a year ago on Cal’s alumni association website:
“I believe that our Intercollegiate Athletics program has great value for the Berkeley campus.
“It provides our student-athletes with opportunities to compete at the highest level of their sport and develop qualities of leadership and character that will serve them extraordinarily well in their chosen professions.
“Intercollegiate Athletics also provides us with invaluable opportunities to come together, to strengthen the ties that bind us to the campus, and to feel and celebrate our identity as members of the Cal community.”
But those “invaluable opportunities” come at considerable costs: Cal sponsors 30 intercollegiate sports — more than any school in the Pac12. (Stanford sponsored 36 until announcing last summer that 11 would be eliminated; it cited budget woes as the reason.)
According to their NCAA statement of revenues and expenses, the Bears generated $110.5 million in revenue in the 2020 fiscal year, including the campus support, against $97.9 in operating expenses.
The football program was in the black by $4.9 million, while men’s basketball posted a low-six-figure surplus.
(The pandemic didn’t adversely impact Cal’s overall revenue because the money-generating events were completed before the COVID shutdown in mid-March.)
Meanwhile, all other sports — the Olympic sports, including women’s basketball — combined to lose $17.9 million.
Remove that $25.1 million in campus support, and Cal would have been deeply in the red, just as it was in previous years.
In fact, from FY15 through FY19, the Bears experienced budget shortfalls totaling $84.7 million, according to financial documents reviewed by the Hotline.
That figure includes approximately $4.5 million annually in university support (booked as revenue) and about $5 million that was sent back to central campus (book as an expense) to comply with Cal’s internal taxation system.
The athletic department used reserves to cover the budget shortfall in FY15. But for the next four years, the university stepped in to absorb the losses and wipe the Bears’ books clean.
Yep, that’s a lot of cleaning, and it brings us to the FY20 budget and Cal’s revised approach to campus support.
In many ways, the $25.1 million booked as revenue was simply a change in accounting — the money came to athletics on the front end of the budgeting process, rather than at the end of the fiscal year, before the books closed.
“I hardly need to say this was not a good way to budget,” Christ wrote of the pick-up-the-check approach.
“The incentives were all wrong and this annual practice erroneously and unfairly conveyed the sense that what is actually an efficiently and effectively managed department did not know how to handle its resources.”
(All athletic departments at Pac12 public universities receive support from central campus, many as much as $10 million or $15 million annually in non-pandemic years.)
Christ has taken two steps to solve the shortfalls:
• The first, announced in November 2017, moved approximately half the annual debt service ($18 million) for the Memorial Stadium renovation project off the athletic department’s books: It’s now the responsibility of central campus.
• The second move, unveiled with Knowlton in August 2019, was the creation of a strategic plan designed to build “a sustainable financial model” for athletics.
An acknowledgement of the budgetary challenges that come with sponsoring 30 sports — only two of them are profitable — the plan focuses on increasing revenue and, over time, reducing the amount of campus support.
“I appreciate the support and partnership we have with Chancellor Christ and our campus,” Knowlton said in a statement issued to the Hotline.
“I have great confidence in the resilience and determination in our department and the greater Cal Athletics community to surmount the challenges that we face.”
The six-year strategic plan features a “step-down” model for campus assistance, from $25 million currently to a goal of $13.3 million.
Christ and Knowlton identified four key revenue streams:
Pac-12 media rights, which are expected to jump with the next contract (in FY25), plus ticket sales, Memorial Stadium (or field) naming rights, and philanthropy.
Already, the Bears are outpacing short-term fundraising goals, with $18.9 million in gifts and pledges through the first half of FY21, according to a spokesperson. That’s about $4.5 million ahead of their pace at this time last year.
What’s more, the university’s massive, multi-year $6 billion capital campaign features a $350 million goal for athletics.
With two years remaining, $239 million has been raised, according to the school.
Donations from the capital campaign are earmarked for endowments (scholarships, coaches and programs), in addition to capital projects and the Cameron Institute for student-athlete development.
Of course, the Bears have crafted strategic plans in the past and ended up in the same place, with budget shortfalls and a need for campus assistance.
Tweaks might be required to navigate the pandemic. But Christ is fully committed to supporting athletics with campus payments that will eventually settle at $13.3 million annually.
“That level of support,” she wrote, “is, in my estimation, both sustainable and fully commensurate with the value Cal Athletics brings to the campus and its community.”
MESA,ARIZ.>> A.J. Puk has tried to separate himself from injuries throughout his entire baseball career, but it’s been like a game of tag between a child and a professional sprinter.
No matter how hard he’s worked to outrun them, injuries have caught him at every turn. They found him in the form of back spasms in his junior year of college at Florida, and again with the A’s when he tore his UCL before the 2018 season and required Tommy John surgery, which led to a recovery process that spilled into the 2019 season.
In 2020, Puk didn’t throw a single inning due to a shoulder injury that cropped up on multiple occasions. In September, he underwent a surgery to fix the ailing joint.
To a degree, Puk saw the injuries coming.
He may not have been able to anticipate their magnitude, but the foresight allowed him to shape what he believes to be the best mindset to handle it all.
“If you ask any player they probably all wish that at some point in their career they didn’t get injured,” Puk said. “You’re going to get injured. It’s just all how you bounce back from it.”
Puk said he had a productive offseason in preparation for this season. He worked on getting healthy and improving his technique on the mound in order to put himself in the best position possible to play a full season without incident.
The southpaw said he hopes to start in his age-26 season but said that it will largely come down to his health. Right now, he believes that to be in a great spot.
“Probably about halfway through my rehab and playing catch progression this offseason I just completely forgot that I had shoulder surgery,” Puk said. “I would just come to the field every day and play catch like nothing ever happened.”
In 11.1 big league innings, Puk showed flashes of why prospect evaluators sang his praises. He allowed four earned runs and struck out 13 batters while showing off his upper 90s fastball and sharp slider.
Since 2017, Puk has accumulated just 36 2/3 innings pitched between High-A, Double-A, Triple-A and the majors.
“I got my body in a good position to come out there and compete,” Puk said. “I want to come out and compete every day, and I feel like I’m in a position to do that. I’m excited to get this year going.”
Puk worked out at Cressey Sports Performance in Florida over the offseason alongside fellow A’s lefty Jesus Luzardo. The two lived together and Puk got to attend several Luzardo family dinners where he said arepas quickly became his new favorite food.
Puk’s stay in South Florida also taught him important lessons about how to best utilize his 6-foot-7, 248-pound frame, something he feels will contribute to his health moving forward.
“I’ve got good ranges of motion, and I just had to learn how to control my body in those ranges and create more stability, which will lead to more success for staying on the field,” Puk said.
In his career-long game of tag, Puk feels as though he’s reached a point where he may not need to run as fast. The offseason got him back to a positive point. It isn’t the way it was before.
“Previously, the past year and a half I was a little hesitant coming in just knowing that it’s going to take a while for (his shoulder) to feel good,” Puk said. “Now it’s just ready to go.”
NO WORD ON STARTER FOR SPRING OPENER>> Melvin was hoping to announce a starting pitcher for Sunday’s seven-inning Cactus League opener against the Dodgers but couldn’t after the team had to “move some things around.”
While he couldn’t tab a pitcher for the start, the A’s 11th-year manager said that outfielders Ramon Laureano and Mark Canha, first baseman Mitch Moreland and shortstop Elvis Andrus are expected to appear in Sunday’s contest.
— The A’s first four spring training games will be seven-inning contests, according to Melvin. Per the Major League Baseball 2021 operations manual, spring training games through March 13 will last seven innings but can be shortened to five innings or extended to nine upon the mutual agreement of both managers. Starting March 14, games will be scheduled for the normal nine innings but can be shortened to seven.
— After testing positive for COVID-19 and missing the first several days of camp, A’s right-handed starter Frankie Montas has rejoined the team and resumed baseball activities, his manager said Friday. Though he is “a couple of days behind everyone,” Montas has started his spring throwing routine.