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Manhattan: You get to play an 18 hole pro-am with one professional golfer of your choice. It’s a true alt-shot format. The field is filled with other notable pros and capable amateurs, and if you don’t finish top 5 you both have to give up golfing for 5 years.
Who is your current active player pick? Who is your historical choice?
Examples of historical picks:
—2000 Tiger, hope he doesn’t rip your throat out after you spray one in your 6 hours together?
—2004 Phil, hope his creativity, positivity, and overall game keeps you close enough to in contention that he doesn’t mail it in for the last 4 holes?
—2014 Rory, and assume at minimum some sort of back-door top 5 will happen? Some historical version of Jack, Arnie, Seve? Or someone else?
This question has haunted me since I read it, particularly with the current state of my short game. The burden of having a great player’s career in my hands is a heavy one. Do I choose based on skill set? What about a personality fit? And what course are we playing? I have been wrestling with it for days. I would love to play golf for the next five years so I can’t even go full troll and pick a player I loathe just to potentially keep him from the game. This is true nightmare fuel.
Before I choose, I want to address your historical examples. I think peak-Tiger is an interesting answer because I suspect he’s the player most likely to overcome whatever garbage shots I threw at him. And as great as he was, no one has ever been better in the history of golf at turning what should be 5s into 4s. HOWEVER! — shoutout to my old colleague Stephen A. Smith — he’d also have the most to lose, and he’d likely stop speaking to me after the third time I skulled a chip across the green. Can you imagine the historical pressure I’d be under? Tiger won 8 majors between 2000 and 2005. If he and I couldn’t get it done, he’d spend five years of his athletic prime with little to do besides play NAVY S.E.A.L. I don’t think I want that on my conscience.
Phil would be interesting because, you’re right, he’d be the most encouraging. One underrated element of his career — and I suspect one of the reasons he’d felt underpaid for 30 years — is that no one has ever been better at ramping up the charm and enthusiasm when it comes to interacting with those who need to whip out their checkbooks. Watching Phil ham it up during various versions of The Match, cracking jokes, playing to the camera, hat-tipping the sponsors, but also encouraging and instructing Tom Brady when he was potentially unraveling, was a great window into this. He could make a 13-handicap feel like the next shot was going to be flush, even after three or four hosel shanks. Plus, his 2004 season is really underrated. I’d totally forgotten that he just barely missed the playoff between Ernie Els and Todd Hamilton in the Open Championship. He was in serious contention in four majors that year!
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I’d love to pick Rory – can you imagine what I’d shoot from where he hits his drives? (Don’t hate, Randy. I’m just trying to project confidence.) Rory and I would also talk prestige television between shots to keep things light, and he would likely be more forgiving than some players when I left him in a brutal spot. Plus, if he had to sit out of golf for five years, it would not emotionally cripple him the way it would some players. I wouldn't be ruining his life. Hell, he could go to college or write a novel.
The correct answer here, however, is Jordan Spieth.
To paraphrase Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, I may think hitting nervy recovery shots from absurd places is my ally, but Spieth was born into that life. Molded by it. He didn’t see a green in regulation until he was already a man, and by then it was nothing to him!
I think Spieth has lived so much of his life in the golfing darkness, he would feel right at home with some of my misses. Plus, imagine our banter! We both talk a bit too much for our own good and could use a good editor.
It would be, at the very least, a spectacle.
Professorlefty: Which golf legends would definitely have gone to LIV?
It pains me a little to say this, but I think Seve would have 1000 percent gone to LIV. In a different lifetime, he probably would have played the Mickelson role. Remember, Seve spent the better part of his career extremely frustrated at the European Tour, feeling he was never compensated fairly for the value he brought to events in Europe. (He was almost certainly correct.)
I think he would have also seen LIV as an opportunity for him to be a showman. The team concept likely also would have appealed to him. He wanted appearance fees, but the European Tour wouldn’t allow them (much like the PGA Tour) and that’s essentially what LIV’s financial model is. I suspect he also would have loved pushing back on reporters over the whole thing.
I haven’t heard it referenced much in this debate, but the issues surrounding LIV aren’t so different from the issues raised in the 1980s when South Africa was hosting lucrative golf tournaments despite the fact there was an international sporting boycott to protest Apartheid. In 1981, five of the world’s best golfers (Seve, Johnny Miller, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Lee Trevino) competed in a golf competition at Sun City, South Africa. Miller won the top prize of $500,000, which was an enormous sum considering Tom Watson got $60,000 that year for winning the Masters.
Some people's primary motivation is money. The suffering of others doesn’t factor much into their calculus. Gary Player’s argument — at least after he went woke, by today’s standards — was that he was trying to bring about change through dialogue and participation.
“I really don't understand how you can say that you must penalize an athlete for the policies of his country's government,” Player told the New York Times in 1979. “I mean, what would Americans have said if somebody had suggested keeping Jack [Nicklaus] or Arnold [Palmer] out of the British Open because of the war in Vietnam? Besides, if you're going to talk human rights, why stop at South Africa? What about the Russians, the Cubans, some of the black countries in Africa?”
As you can see, the WhatAbout Caucus has existed for many years, and will likely be around indefinitely. Their arguments would resonate more if they wanted to actually discuss human rights everywhere, but mostly what they want is for people to stop talking about any of it so they can count their blood money without being annoyed by criticism. They don’t actually care about what’s going on in China; the misdirection is the point.
So while I can’t say for sure who would have gone to LIV or their reasons for doing so, those trips to South Africa at the height of Apartheid offer at least a clue.
Dmcpherron: How many strokes is a good caddy worth to a pro? What about an amateur? Do we undervalue or overvalue caddies?
Your film room playing lesson really got me thinking about the true value of having a true pro be there for every shot. I’ve played with caddies a couple of times and always felt like I this value is way higher then we truly believe.
I think we overvalue certain things about them, but undervalue others. I think caddies often become an easy punching bag when players don’t play well. It allows us to call for change, deflecting some of the blame from the player. Rory experienced a lot of this with J.P. Fitzgerald early in his career. Everyone wanted Fitzgerald gone and assumed as soon as he was, McIlroy would win more majors. Six years later, McIlroy and Harry Diamond have had a lot of success, but no majors. It doesn’t mean it w
Source: https://nolayingup.com/blog/kvv-mailbag-early-u-s-open-talk-caddies-and-tv-finales