2010 Open Championship App

It looks really sweet. Without the tournament underway it's hard to tell what will appear on the "Live Cast" option and how fast the leaderboard will work, but just poking around it looks like an essential component to your Open viewing. A few screen shots:

How can you not love a learderboard mimicking the on-course boards?
The Road hole fairway is there if you look closely enough. Hole-by-hole overheads also include WiFi only flyovers.

The news page also includes bulletins and weather updates.

"In the Open, competitors hole out and increasingly must take a brisk, 100-yard-plus walk back to the next tee."

John Barton makes this shrewd point in previewing this year's Open at St. Andrews and its many tees-played-from-other-courses.

At St. Andrews, you used to tee off within a club-length of the hole into which you'd just putted out; nowadays, in the Open, competitors hole out and increasingly must take a brisk, 100-yard-plus walk back to the next tee. If driving distances were ever allowed to become so great that the Old Course were rendered obsolete, a museum piece unfit for tournament play, then golf will be a lesser game and its governing bodies will have failed.

"Just how tough does the R&A want the Road Hole to play? It seems to have held its own for decades."

Ron Whitten takes on the Road hole's new tee controversy and doesn't think it's that big of a deal. I would agree if the fairway width corresponded, but it doesn't and therefore threatens to be more goofy than great. Ron also won't be getting an invite to the R&A anytime soon. After spelling out the many architects criticizing the ball issue in light of the changes to the hole, he writes:

But if many architects are oblivious to the Road Hole's past, so is the R&A, which issued a press release last fall quoting Dawson: "Over the years, we have seen the threat from the road behind the green, and to a lesser extent the Road Bunker, diminished as players have been hitting shorter irons for their approach shots, allowing them to avoid these hazards more easily. This change will ensure that the hole plays as it was originally intended."

As originally intended? The hole has been around since play was conducted with sticks carved from tree limbs and balls stuffed with feathers. Nothing at St. Andrews plays as originally intended.

"But it remains a great sadness that the proud Spaniard and the planet's biggest golf-playing nation never found more common ground when, in so many ways, they were made for each other."

John Huggan laments Seve's absence from next week's Open and America's view of the great man:

That the U.S. does not generally join the rest of us in recognizing the peerless charisma of the señor from Pedrena, a small fishing village on Spain's windswept northern coast, is surely the greatest tragedy of Seve's professional life. It has always been hard for an American audience reared on the lazy stereotypes of wild driving, shots from parking lots and wars with authority in the shape of the unyielding Deane Beman's PGA Tour to appreciate fully Ballesteros' greatness.

There were faults on both sides, though. Looking back, Seve perhaps took too much obvious pleasure from beating Uncle Sam's nephews in more than one Ryder Cup for things to be any other way. But it remains a great sadness that the proud Spaniard and the planet's biggest golf-playing nation never found more common ground when, in so many ways, they were made for each other.

Kostis Proposes The Impossible

Warm chuckles to be had by most reading Peter Kostis' proposal to socialize the costs of runaway technology by suggesting the USGA build two of its pricey facilities to host various national championships. If written with a trace of irony in making the USGA pay for faulty regulation, I'd say it was a brilliant column, but I think he actually believes this is a good idea and a great use of millions of USGA dollars. (Assuming they had to write a check for USGA greens with Sub-Air they might rethink their subsurface standards, and if they owned their own courses they might get tired of adding new tees and narrowing fairways).

Anyway...

Each facility would be home to three courses: one to host the U.S. Open, another for the U.S. Women's Open and a third for amateur events — the men's and women's U.S. Amateurs, the Walker Cup and the Curtis Cup.

The most elite American designers would be asked to create these courses, with input from the USGA — Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore; Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish; Jack Nicklaus; Tom Doak; Rees Jones; Robert Trent Jones Jr. ; Pete Dye and Tom Fazio. Who wouldn't be honored to donate his time and expertise to such an amazing project?

Getting Morrish and Weiskopf together, now that would a miracle.

By having its own national championship facilities, the USGA would have year-round control of the speed and firmness of the greens, the thickness and depth of the rough, the trees and the width of the fairways. And because the courses would be built with modern golfers and equipment in mind, we would see challenging but logical holes instead of tricked-out versions of classic layouts. Imagine fairway bunkers that guard the fairway instead of being 10 yards in the rough because of altered fairway lines. With modern SubAir drainage systems, the USGA could control runout in fairways and firmness of greens even in rainy conditions.

Are we doing SubAir under fairways now too?  That would only cost what, $40 million!

Think about all that for a minute. By creating these facilities, courses like Merion, Winged Foot, Pebble Beach and Shinnecock Hills would no longer have to be lengthened or altered to meet USGA championship standards. The crown jewels of American golf course architecture could remain exactly as they were intended.

Which was what, museum pieces?

No those great places were for the golfers first, their architecture and the bigtime events that have defined them and will continue to do so. At least, I hope.

Tom Watson Inside Tiger's Head!

It's just a shame these two couldn't play together in the Champions exhibition. Maybe in the Open itself instead?

Tom Pilcher of Reuters reports on Watson's latest comments:

“His life is a lot more complicated now. He doesn’t hear
 that absolute silence when he’s playing, and he mentioned when 
he’s playing his best he hears nothing,” the American 
eight-times major winner told a news conference on Wednesday.

“I’m sure there are things going on in his mind that make it 
very difficult for him.”

"As we stood on the first tee, the wind was blowing so hard from the left that the starter advised a petite woman in the group ahead of ours to aim her tee shot well into the 18th fairway..."

From David Owen's engaging look at all of the courses that have hosted the Open, capturing the allure of St. Andrews...

The R&A is less ancient than the Honourable Company, but it now rules the game everywhere in the world except the United States and Mexico. It's the outfit that puts on the Open, and its clubhouse is the bank-shaped hunk of stone and glass that looms above the first tee of the Old Course -- which I played the next day. My group included an American university student from St. Louis, whose name was Walker. He had transferred to St. Andrews from Duke -- with the enthusiastic approval of his father, a member at Bellerive -- and had been pursuing an unofficial year-long elective in the Old Course, as a supplement to his thesis research on David Hume. At the beginning of the school year, he said, he had paid £170 for a student golf ticket, which allowed him to play any Links Trust course whenever he felt like it, ho-hum. As we stood on the first tee, the wind was blowing so hard from the left that the starter advised a petite woman in the group ahead of ours to aim her tee shot well into the 18th fairway, so that the gale and her presumed slice would bring her ball safely back into play; she aimed where he pointed, then power-hooked her drive very nearly onto Old Station Road.

Aren't We Over This?

Oakmont is really, really hard! The ladies are going to suffer.

Oh joy?

Reading a few stories, starting with Ron Sirak's preview, it's clear the setup at Oakmont is absurd and barring a last minute rough mowing, green slowing and liberal use of alternating (forward) tees, will once again prove very little except that they make their courses tough in Pennsylvania. Yippee.

Sirak writes:

The betting on the winning score has ranged as high as 14 over par, with one caddie who was part of an Open win saying he likes eight over.

Davis was hard at work well before this week. A new tee was built on No. 2 so its can play at 325-yards and at 265 yards, a tempting try-to-drive-me distance. A new tee was also built on No. 17 so it can play as a 260-yard par 4. Remember how cool it was in 2007 when both Woods and Furyk came to 17 needing a birdie to catch Cabrera, tried to drive the green and made bogeys?

The par-3 eighth hole, which played at more than 280 yards for the men in 2007, will be anywhere from 225 to 252 this week. No. 16 will play as long as 209 yards and as short as 134 yards. The par-5 12th hole will play at 602 yards, the longest hole in the history of women's golf.

Even if the rough is not knee high, it is lush and thick. And the greens, well, it's Oakmont. They are steeply contoured and frighteningly fast. The winner this week likely will be the person who hits fairways and chips and putts the best. That bodes well for Cristie Kerr, who is also the hottest player on the LPGA right now, or accurate drivers like Jiyai Shin, Paula Creamer and Morgan Pressel.

After the 2007 U.S. Open, several players noted how silly the bunkers had become and the thrill and skill of the sideways recovery figures to await players this week. Sean Martin notes that nothing has changed:

“Three times I tried to get it out of the bunker, and I was not hitting it that thin,” she said. “I said, ‘You know what? Being a hero is not going to win this U.S. Open.’ ”

And this from Michelle Wie:

The sloping greens and thick rough usually are the focus when discussing Oakmont’s difficulty. The fairway bunkers can’t be overlooked. “A lot of the bunkers, if you’re in them, you’re going sideways,” Wie said. “You’re not going forward.”

The Details Are In The Wear Patterns

This isn't really a golf post, but since I got three emails today about the ball, the power game and it's effect on golf. All seemed were inspired by Wimbledon's efforts to try and reverse the same dreadful trend that has lessened all-around skill.

While golf now has a database of wear patterns (of sorts) via ShotLink since 2003, what better evidence of the change in tennis than this post (courtesy of reader Brian) from tennis fan and blogger Paul Kedrosky.

"Are you a Phi Beta Kappa yet?"

Dan Jenkins, eat your heart out at this opening exchange for Michelle Wie at her pre-U.S. Women's Open presser...

MODERATOR: Welcome to the 2010 US Open Women's Open Championship, by the way. Our first guess this morning is Michelle Wie. I was thinking about it, and when Michelle won the LPGA tournament that she won earlier in the year, I was thinking I believe you were the only college student to ever win a tournament in the LPGA Tour.

That's another little feather in your cap. Just tell us a little bit. You won a tournament now. You're still in college. Are you a Phi Beta Kappa yet?

MICHELLE WIE: No sorority for me yet, but it's been fun.

"Everything's working itself out."

I saw a few stories speculating on the likely rough road for Tiger when he meets the media next week at St. Andrews and didn't think much of it. After reading about the exchanges he had today in Ireland for a pro-am, perhaps it's best if he takes a pass on the pre-tournament presser.

Incidentally, the transcript for the session was not posted last I checked.

Pavin Finally Talks To Azinger; Comp'd Book En Route!

I missed the Tweet from Paul Azinger confirming that with only a few months to go, U.S. Captain Corey Pavin finally got around to chatting it up with 2008's winning front man. Thankfully, John Strege caught it.