Tiger's Iron Play Improves And Aren't We Glad ShotLink Proves It

In his return to PGA National, Tiger Woods opened with an even par 70 in breezy conditions with greens under criticism from players for a lack of grass (Randall Mell reports).

Bob Harig's story for ESPN.com covers what was again, mostly positive, with one rough hole mixed in along with a less-than-pretty day statistically.

In Tiger's previous two starts, he noted and observers like myself confirmed that his iron play was needing work. While the sample size is small, GolfChannel.com's Ryan Lavner noted this from the round one ShotLink data:

The more telling stat was this: His proximity to the hole (28 feet) was more than an 11-foot improvement over his first two starts this year. And also this: He was 11th among the early starters in strokes gained-tee to green, which measures a player’s all-around ball-striking. Last week, at Riviera, he ranked 121st

While a mysterious sport like golf can't always be summed up in stats, this kind of nugget is not only practical to Tiger, but to media and fans wanting to quantify progress. It's all a reminder that the PGA Tour's investment in ShotLink has often been underestimated in its magnitude, as is the tireless effort of the ShotLink crew and their volunteers each week.

Shock: PGA Tour's Procter & Gamble CMO Has All Of The Best B-Speak Down Pat

WSJ's Brian Costa gets the first in-depth interview with PGA Tour Chief Marketing Officer Joe Arcuri (thanks reader John) and the ex Procter & Gamble man is the first true B-speak and M-speak artisan at Tour headquarters since the Finchem brand-platform years.

Surely this authentic frontier gibberish works with corporate types, and you have to admire the consistency levels to ensure total buy-in, but when you break the words down there just isn't much substance here.

WSJ: How is marketing professional golf similar to marketing consumer packaged goods, as you’ve done for much of your career, and how is it different?

MR. ARCURI: What I’ve found similar is how fundamental the power of your ideas is, and the ability to create authentic and engaging connections with your consumer, or in our case our fan. That remains the fuel of great brand-building, and the Tour brand is no exception.

The biggest difference is the higher degree of unpredictability inherent in marketing a sport, given the week-to-week variables of live competition. What you have to get really good at is real-time storytelling. You need to be very nimble week-to-week on the story lines that are occurring.

Why didn't I think of that! Though I would have gotten a platform mention in.

WSJ: What are the Tour’s biggest marketing priorities for 2018?

MR. ARCURI: My overall focus is to grow new fans. We have a very strong and affluent core fan base to build on. But to future-proof the Tour,

Whoa...future proof, so good. Go on...

we need to make sure that we’re attracting and growing new fans.

Grow 'em baby, grow 'em!

We’ve been shaping our marketing plans through a fans-first lens to ensure that our media, our partnership deals, our content across all platforms, right to our on-site tournament experience, will allow us to reach beyond that core fan and attract new fan segments.

So good and yet you ask, do people listen to that gibberish and nod their heads?

WSJ: Who are those new fans?

MR. ARCURI: We’re trying to attract millennials, but also what we call sports socialites. Those are a more diverse group of fans. They skew a little bit younger than our core base. They’re more diverse in general, and they consume the product at a high rate on both digital and social platforms.

Do they now? I best they just love five hour and 20 minute rounds too.

WSJ: What makes “sports socialites” distinct from millennials?

MR. ARCURI: It’s not an age thing. It’s more a mind-set of how they want to interact with the sport. They are as interested in what we call outside-the-ropes stories as inside-the-ropes stories and competition content.

Spring Break 2 K! Wooohooo, yay let's yell on their backswing! Woke!

They’re interested in what’s going on with our players beyond just the competitive action. They have a broader sense of the sport and want to engage with it on different levels.

Good for them. Please tell us how you reach these special people...

The same example from Jordan’s hole-out to win a playoff at the Travelers Championship comes immediately to mind. Our suite of social analytics and listening tools showed us quickly that the content was getting tremendous traction through our own channels, and we did two things.

Action! Activate!

First, we amplified the content we had already produced by pushing it through advertising to targeted new audiences that hadn’t yet seen it. And second, we moved to quickly produce new content, including the mix of fan-collected video I mentioned to create other ways for fans to experience the moment.

Such a fancy way of saying we edited together some fan video for Snapchat. Give this man an SVP title, another million a year and a Pablo Creek membership, stat!

Negative Campaign Ads Come To Golf: Hurley Attacks Spieth

When you're campaigning to chair the PGA Tour's Player Advisory Council to table slow play discussions started twenty years ago, declare caddie parking in Memphis a crisis and send Jay Monahan's calls to voice mail, you go negative. At least that's the risk Billy Hurley is thinking in his campaign for more chairmanship votes than Jordan Spieth.

No matter what side of the aisle you sit on, concede that Hurley's gone to the best ad makers in the business.

For those of you who don’t know, I am running against @JordanSpieth for Chairman of the @PGATOUR Player Advisory Council. One final push for the voting that ends tomorrow pic.twitter.com/dO2uLiTg3B

— Billy Hurley III (@BillyHurley3) February 12, 2018

Youthquake? Statistical Evidence Showing The PGA Tour Plays A Young(er) Man's Game

Strokes gained creator and stat guru Mark Brodie has crunched numbers as far back as possible and concluded that, at least based on Strokes Gained, the elite player of 1996 to 2004 was a lot older than today's top players.

Writing for Golf.com:

From 1987 until 1996, the average age of the top 100 players in total strokes gained steadily rose from 32.3 years to 36.5 years. In that decade-long stretch, Watson and contemporaries like Greg Norman, Tom Kite and Hale Irwin were playing competitively into their late forties. The average age of the top 100 players remained steady between '96 and '04.

Since '04, Broadie finds that the average age of the top 100 strokes gained players "plummeted from 36.5 to 33.0 years."

Romo To Play New PGA Tour Event In The Dominican Republic

The first year Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship--the CPRACC as it'll become known in time--will be played opposite the WGC Dell Match Play in late March.

Given that this is a former Web.com Tour event looking for attention, it seems like a wise move. I've love to hear griping, but hopefully players have learned that (A) celebrity sponsor invites have been happening for almost a century, (B) opposite field events need all the the help they can get, and (C) the last players in most opposite field events are generally coming from a little known exempt status category called Hasn't Been Relevant In Years.

As with Steph Curry playing in last August's Web.com Tour's Bay Area event, golf should be ecstatic to have such a well-liked pro athlete loving the game, and playing it a high level.

For Immediate Release:

Tony Romo to play PGA TOUR’s Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship

Punta Cana, Dominican Republic – Tony Romo, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and current lead analyst for the NFL ON CBS, will compete in the PGA TOUR’s Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship (March 19-25, 2018) in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic as a sponsor exemption. The Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship is a first-year PGA TOUR event in 2018, previously having a two-year run as a Web.com Tour event.

Playing as an amateur participant with professional partner Will Zalatoris in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am this week, Romo revealed during a press conference Wednesday that he has received a sponsor exemption to the new PGA TOUR event, which carries a purse of $3 million with four-round television coverage broadcast on Golf Channel. Romo will compete as an amateur in the Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship.

“As a professional athlete, the love and thrill of competition never entirely leaves you,” said Romo. “Outside of my family and football, golf is one of my greatest passions. So, playing and competing in a PGA TOUR event is a dream come true. I am grateful to the Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship for giving me an incredible opportunity to test my skills against some of the best on TOUR.” 

The Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship will be the first official PGA TOUR event in which Romo will compete as an individual against PGA TOUR professionals in the same competition.

Romo, who carries a +0.3 handicap at Dallas National Golf Club, has attempted to qualify for the U.S. Open three times. In 2010, Romo advanced to the sectional stage of qualifying for the national championship, but was forced to withdraw due to his practice schedule with the Cowboys. Last year he participated in the prestigious Western Amateur, where he was unable to advance to match play. Also in 2017, Romo finished T16 in the 89-player celebrity field at the American Century Championship, marking his return to the event in which he had played six consecutive years (2007-12), finishing runner-up three times in a row (2009-11).

“As a first-year PGA TOUR event, we are elated to have Tony Romo accept our offer to play in the Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship,” said Grupo Puntacana Founder and Chairman Frank Rainieri. “Tony Romo rose to an elite level in professional football, and then quickly became a popular and well-regarded broadcaster for CBS when he retired. He has a history of achieving success in the face of major challenges. And now he’s going to face a new one, the rare opportunity to compete as an amateur against the world’s best golfers. We are very excited to see how this plays out.”

Romo, 37, signed as an undrafted free agent with the Cowboys in 2003 after playing collegiately at Eastern Illinois University. Beginning his career as a holder, Romo became the Cowboys' starting quarterback during the 2006 season. Serving as the team's primary starter from 2006 to 2015, he guided the Cowboys to four postseason appearances and was named to the Pro Bowl four times. Romo retired after the 2016 season and immediately was hired by CBS Sports to become the lead analyst for the NFL ON CBS, teaming with Jim Nantz in the broadcast booth.

Romo holds several Cowboys team records, including passing touchdowns, passing yards, most games with at least 300 passing yards and games with three or more touchdown passes.

Pebble Pro-Am, West Coast Swing Have Their Swagger Back?

Amazing what a little tinkering with formats and emphasizing course design can do!

Not long ago the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was known for six hour rounds, has-been pros in the field and never-was "celebrities" getting too much air time. With the world's top-3 playing this year and plenty of celebrity intrigue to offset the corporate crowd--Golfweek posted the full field list here--Der Bingle's baby is back.

But as Ron Kroichick noted for MorningRead.com, the AT&T matters again as as stalwart event thanks largely to some key changes in format and rota.

Or put another way: Pebble matters again.

AT&T officials couldn’t do much about the weather, but in 2010 they shrewdly swapped Poppy Hills (unpopular among Tour pros) for Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course. They also trimmed the field from 180 pros and amateurs to 156 of each, and made a conscious effort to land better amateur golfers.

While athletes were always part of the event, their rise in celebrity status and the inclusion of more pro jocks seems to have given the event a boost. Let's face it, for a lot of PGA Tour golfers the chance to hang out with a world class athlete for three rounds is more interesting than getting paired with a corporate dude.

Unless said corporate dude has a jet and a third home on the Peninsula with a separate guest entrance.

Randall Mell at GolfChannel.com notes the improved golf professional component in saying Pebble has its swagger back.

Maybe it’s fitting Doral doesn’t host a PGA Tour event anymore. The old adage that the year in golf doesn’t begin until Doral wouldn’t hold up any longer. Today’s stars aren’t using the West Coast swing to get warm in a run up to the Masters. They hit the year hot with Johnson, Rahm and Jason Day among the big names getting on the board with victories in January.

The intensity only builds this week with Spieth looking to rebound from a missed cut in Phoenix last week. He is defending the title he won last year. It also builds with McIlroy making his first PGA Tour start of the year after coming off second- and third-place finishes on the European Tour last month.

Over at CBSSports.com, Kyle Porter notes the seemingly improved week-to-week quality of the tour. While I'll remind him of this column in mid to late May, the point should be made that the fall wraparound schedule has not harmed the West Coast Swing as folks like me feared. Perhaps it's the mediocre quality of those events and lack of eyeballs trained on them, but the West Coast still feels like the tour's bread-and-butter season for big venues, big fields and lots of eyeballs. As it and the Florida season should be given a quick study of history.

Also not to be discounted: the subtle but important inclusion of stars who don't play 25 events the previous year now being forced to play events haven't been to in at least four years.  That subtle PGA Tour rule could, for instance, explain Rory McIlroy's appearance this week. Or, at the very least, helped get him to Pebble Beach when making out a schedule in search of adding an event due to the rule.

PGA Tour Going Against The (Sports) Grain On Pace Of Play

The European Tour introduced a shot clock tournament this year in response to a growing sense the pro game takes too long. And while we have not seen the slow play "personal war" predicted by Chief Executive Keith Pelley when he took the job in 2015, the European Tour continues to suggest that it sees where the world is headed: toward shorter, tighter windows for sporting events.

Major League Baseball is working desperately to shorten games. Bold proposals will be floated at the upcoming owners meetings, even to the point of experimenting with radical plans for extra innings. This comes after the first wave of pace initiatives did not go far enough.

The NBA has already limited timeouts at the end of games and cut TV timeouts. The end of a game moves better.

The NFL attempted to address fan concerns about their long games but only made a half-hearted attempt at picking up the pace. At least they tried.

Even professional tennis is experimenting with a much faster product for the "NextGen".

The PGA Tour avoids enforcing its pace of play rules and, as we saw at Sunday's 6-hour Farmers Insurance Open that was tainted by J.B. Holmes, this is a tour rallying around a player who openly defied (paying) fans, his playing partners and common sense. He knew he could not be penalized so why rush?

We could blame the PGA Tour's slow-play apathy to now-retired Commissioner Tim Finchem's disdain for penalty strokes and his obsession with vanity optics (such as players taking off their caps to shake hands). Those concerns of the Commissioner's office about a player's brand taking hit made enforcement impossible for the tour's referees, who also face pressures in moving fields around from faster greens and distance-driven log-jams on half-par holes.

There was hope new Commissioner Jay Monahan would follow the progressive lead of colleagues like Adam Silver (NBA) or Rob Manfred (MLB) and realize that younger fans are far more interested in action sports that take less of their time. But forget the kids. Who can watch a sport that takes over five hours and featuring players who have no regard for anyone else but themselves? Imagine paying $55 to watch a guy not play ready golf and playing only when he absolutely feels ready.

By signaling this week he sympathized with the supposed plight of Holmes, Monahan confirmed he will not use the power of the Commissionership to speed up play. All Monahan had to do was suggest that with high winds and pressure, it was a tough spot but the fans were right to believe this was a less-than-ideal look for the sport, particularly at a time millions of non-golf fans had tuned in for the Grammy's.

Instead, Monahan made it hard to believe his tour is interested in gaining new fans or in addressing the concerns of longtime fans that some of today's players are just too slow to watch. The Holmes incident captured on camera what paying fans all-too-often see during a PGA Tour event: a player taking much longer than their allotted 40 seconds.

Meanwhile, the European Tour is forging ahead with pace-related initiatives on multiple fronts designed to draw in new fans and intrigue those bored with the sport. While some of the measures are extreme and a middle ground with the PGA Tour position is the ideal, at least the European Tour is building off of the prevailing view after golf's 2016 return to the Olympic Games: the professional sport is woefully ill-equipped to compete in the global sports marketplace at its current pace, scale and preferred format. The pro game will fade into irrelevance if it does not adapt in a world that loves sport more than ever, just in smaller doses.

PGA Tour's New 9&9 Pro-Am Already A Hit

The Forecaddie reported last week that Tiger Woods practically moon-walked at Torrey Pines last week upon hearing that PGA Tour events could mimic the LPGA's longtime policy of nine hole pro-am rounds for players.

As Brentley Romine reports for Golfweek, everyone at the Waste Management Open was praising the first official day of 9&9, including Jordan Spieth:

“I’m a fan as long as the sponsors are enjoying it, too,” Spieth said. “They’re the reason we are here. A lot of times we get caught up in what the players want and we forget about why we actually have this. … I thought it was a good idea when it was proposed last year, just within the PAC because I thought the sponsors might actually enjoy it more. The opportunity to have somebody very engaged for nine holes and you get another guy fully engaged for nine holes versus sometimes it just gets long and for us players, it’s fantastic because I’ve got the rest of the day now that I can go out there and get work done."

Monahan Moves To Head Seat At Five Families Table

PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan--because he doesn't have enough on his plate--moves to the top chair and Mike Whan slides over a seat for the next World Golf Foundation meeting.

For Immediate Release:

PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan Named World Golf Foundation Chairman for 2018

(ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla.) – World Golf Foundation (WGF) – the organization uniting the golf industry to support initiatives to grow the game – announces Jay Monahan, PGA TOUR Commissioner, has been named WGF Chairman for 2018 by the Board of Directors. He succeeds LPGA Commissioner Mike Whan.
 
Monahan was appointed the fourth commissioner of the PGA TOUR on November 7, 2016, officially taking office and succeeding former Commissioner Tim Finchem on January 1, 2017.
 
“I look forward to continuing to work closely with the members of the World Golf Foundation in our efforts to find new ways to bring this great game to a broader, younger, more diverse audience,” said Monahan. “We are excited about the state of our sport and confident that with continued collaboration, we can ensure its future growth and success.”
 
Monahan, who joined the PGA TOUR in June 2008 as Executive Director of THE PLAYERS Championship, had served as Deputy Commissioner since April 1, 2014; he assumed the additional title of Chief Operating Officer in early 2016, working directly with Commissioner Finchem on the entire scope of the TOUR’s business operations and strategy.
 
Monahan came to the PGA TOUR from Fenway Sports Group (FSG). He served as FSG’s Executive Vice President, leading the sales and business development team for the property ownership and representation divisions. Additionally, he directed FSG’s sponsorship sales operations for Boston College Athletics, the Boston Red Sox, Major League Baseball Advanced Media and NASCAR’s Roush Fenway Racing, among others.
 
“Commissioner Monahan’s leadership will be critical as we address several issues of importance to the game," says Steve Mona, CEO of WGF. “Raising awareness and promoting the game’s health, economic, environmental and charitable benefits are all key priorities and he will be instrumental in leading our efforts in these areas.”
 
Along with Monahan, other WGF Board members include: Pete Bevacqua, CEO of the PGA of America; Mike Davis, CEO/Executive Director of the USGA; Will Jones, Executive Director of The Masters Tournament Foundation; Keith Pelley, Chief Executive of the PGA European Tour; Martin Slumbers, Chief Executive of The R&A, and Mike Whan, Commissioner of the LPGA.

Ponte Vedra We Have A Problem: J.B. Holmes Takes 4 Minutes, 10 Seconds To Lay Up When Millions Were Watching

Tim Finchem famously discouraged slow play penalties during his reign as Commissioner. Other than Glen Day in 1995 and an odd slow play stroke penalty at last year's Zurich Classic, the PGA Tour has used a secret fining system to protect player brands and breed a culture of entitlement.

Rarely have things spilled over into as loathsome a display of self-centeredness as J.B. Holmes taking four minutes and 10 seconds to play one shot in the 2018 Farmers Insurance Open final round. He faced a decision of whether to go for the 18th green in two shots or lay-up. Two strokes back and needing eagle to make an eventual playoff, Holmes ultimately chose to lay up and did so terribly.

This nonsense was set against the backdrop of a round already nearing a six-hour pace due to blustery conditions on a firm, fast golf course lined by thick rough. CBS was already running over into their planned Grammy's Red Carpet show, and now facing a decision whether to stay with the golf or go to the Grammy's start at 8 pm ET. To their credit, CBS stayed with the last group completing play, then turned the broadcast over to Golf Channel.

Due to the Grammy's bump, this meant millions were tuning in to watch music's big night and getting a flavor of PGA Tour golf. What they saw was an embarrassment to the sport, a reinforcing of every stereotypical view and a painful product of a Ponte Vedra discouragement of slow play rules enforcement.

There was, however, one positive. Holmes was slammed on social media and some of it is quite entertaining, as this Golfweek roundup shows. Luke Donald excoriated his peer.

While no one wanted to see CBS put in a predicament, television networks have long exhibited ho-hum attitudes about PGA Tour non-enforcement of pace of play. Even known-violators like Holmes, who is inconsistent in his pacing compared to known turtles like Ben Crane or Jason Day, have escaped any significant censure by the PGA Tour thanks to twenty years of enforcement complacency.

To date, new Commissioner Jay Monahan has publicly suggested he does not see slow play as major issue as his counterparts in Europe introduce new rules and even a shot clock tournament. And there certaily are times where an indecisive player on a risk-reward hole makes for dramatic theater. However, when it's a known slow-poke who ultimately doesn't even take the risky shot in hopes of winning, the appearance is dreadful.

Perhaps a Monday phone call to Monahan from CBS Sports head Sean McManus or network honcho Les Moonves will convince the tour it's time to embolden the rules officials to dish out more bad times so that a Holmes-at-Torrey fiasco is never repeated again.

Mercifully, The PGA Tour Pro-Am Will Never Be The Same Again

There was a test last year in Memphis and the LPGA has done it for years, but as The Forecaddie writes, the PGA Tour will now allow tournaments to install a nine-hole format for players.

Tiger was informed during his pro-am round Wednesday and was pretty giddy at the news. Seven events, including next week's Waste Management Open, are all in on the new approach to what is an important charity cash cow for most events.

Note to Commissioner Jay Monahan's regular FedEx and UPS deliverymen: leave the shipments of wine, chocolates, and other gifts on the doorstep, no signature required.

Reading Between The Lines Of Farmers Renewal

Some day the Farmers Insurance Open will be studied for going from a turbulent sponsorship history to the brink to a stalwart event. Yesterday's announcement did prompt The Forecaddie to consider the ramifications for this event, the impact on the 2021 U.S. Open and other PGA Tour events looking for a sponsor.

Given this tournament's struggle to invest in the future, the agreement between the PGA Tour, the Century Club and Farmers should make a very nice tour stop into a great event. Then again, with Torrey Pines, San Diego and a phenomenal date, that this event ever struggled to find a Farmers-like sponsor will have historians scratching their heads.

Congrats to all and long live the PGA Tour in San Diego. Now can we do something about all of this overseeded rye rough and Rees Jones design...