In case you missed it, here is part 1. We gleaned questions from a thread on our message board, The Refuge, and posed questions to the whole crew.
What PGA Tour event would you move (course, location, and date all count)? And if you could, where would you add a new Tour Event? -TigersWoods
SOLY: Speaking from the standpoint of what is most realistic and seemingly easiest, flipping Honda and Mexico makes way too much sense. I’m sure there’s a reason why this hasn’t happened, but this solves a lot of February/March scheduling issues.
RANDY: Michigan needs an annual Tour event. I’d flip Greenbrier and The National on the calendar and move The National into Michigan (I’m not tied to any particular course). The schedule would then go from Michigan to Quad Cities to The Open Championship (oppo event is the Barbasol in Lexington, KY) back to Canada and then Bridgestone in Akron. A legit Great Lakes Swing!
NEIL: The Pacific Northwest needs love too. I don’t know what courses, but I’d be alright with expanding the West Coast swing by a week or two at the expense of the Lone Star State. I’m way out on the Texas Swing. It feels mundane and blends together between all the majors. The Byron Nelson has always been meh (saved this year with everyone quaffing Trinity Forest), The Colonial is a landlocked, diet Heritage with no vibe (Dean & Deluca was the perfect sponsor as an overrated coffee purveyor but even they bailed), and The Texas Open feels like something the Club Pro Guy or Roy McAvoy should playing in. The courses all feel flat, hot, and long. No thanks.
D.J.: The Valero was the event that sprung to my mind as well, although I’ll admit I’ve never attended it. That’s the hard part with a lot of these events – for many of them there’s such a different vibe on the ground than what you see on TV. So in that respect, even if I think an event stinks from my couch, if the people that go to it each year (and the charities that benefit from it, etc.) love it, then by all means, carry on. I’d also like to see them move the second Playoff event because I think TPC Boston low key stinks. Not only are there 45 other dope spots in Boston that would be cool to see, but on years like this where you have the first three legs all on lush, tree-lined courses in the Northeast, things start to feel a little like Groundhog Day.
TRON: Oh man (cracks knuckles and takes a deep breath)… I like all of the above. This stuff gets my juices flowing. Michigan needs a tour event (I love taking the National there like Randall mentioned). I’m also pouring more resources into the John Deere and putting it on a rotation that includes the Twin Cities, Des Moines, Quad Cities and other golf-crazed markets in the upper midwest. Get it a better spot on the calendar too. Hell, make it a playoff event.
The Midnight Troubadour
Tough and timeless, this polo is built for the long ride. Featuring a crisp, non-collapsing collar and a rugged, stretchy fabric, it's the perfect shirt for any cowboy's wardrobe.
I’m moving the Malaysia event to Japan, moving the Shanghai WGC to Australia. Like DJ said, we’re decamping from TPC Boston (which may already be in the works). I like Neil’s emphasis on hooking the Pac-NW up, unfortunately that ain’t gonna work on the West Coast Swing as it’s Jan/Feb up there and the weather stinks. So start the wraparound season in Napa, go up the coast to a new event in Seattle or Portland, and then you rotate the Canadian Open between Vancouver and Calgary for the next five years for the week after that and helps it avoid the post-Open Championship malaise it’s currently in. This removes a couple weeks from the bulk of the summer season, lets you move playoffs up to avoid football, and capitalize on the primo September/early October weather out west. I could keep going for another couple hours on this topic.
How can you be a proponent of rolling back the ball after the results this weekend at Chapultepec? Course played sub 6500 yards, winner at a very fair 16 under, lots of excitement, etc. -BigJake
SOLY: Apologies BigJake, but any argument against rolling back the ball that cites par or Chapultepec as an argument against change is misplaced. Chapultepec is a laughable layout that is simultaneously awesome to watch the pros play. But it has next to zero interesting architectural elements, and isn’t that relevant in the ball discussion as a hole.
There’s still plenty of tournaments played on shorter courses where the scores aren’t disgustingly low. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t an issue. Fact is, because of how far the ball goes, architects and tournament organizers have been forced to artificially protect par by growing the rough up, narrowing the fairways, shaving down the greens and hiding the pins. Eliminating fairway width also takes away strategic elements of playing a hole. When a player has nowhere to go but dead straight, every single player has to play a hole the exact same way. It's maybe the most egregious example on tour of a course that forces players to play each hole the same way – straight through narrow corridors of trees.
Dialing back the ball would help bring back so many of the architecture elements that many course designers intended to be considered when playing a hole. Bunkers will be in play and will require precision to play around or near them to provide the best angle at the pin, rather than being irrelevant and capable of being bombed over.
The farther we move the tee boxes back, the more the longer hitters will benefit. The farther the ball goes, the bigger advantage the longer hitters will have. If we dial it back 10%, a guy that carries it 300 yards will now carry it 270. A guy that carries it 270 will carry it 243. Yes, that’s only a three yard difference, but that’s not insignificant. And when you factor in roll, that gap between those two players will close even tighter.
D.J.: I think I like Chapultepec a lot more than Soly does, but I can’t disagree with a lot of his points. The reason scores were relatively protected on the short course was pretty simple – it was claustrophobic as shit off the tee. I think this was crazy fun to watch for one week because you get guys hitting recovery shots constantly (my favorite), but it’s just not possible as a solution from week to week for a million reasons. The downside of seeing a course like this “succeed” on Tour is that the casual fan sees a popular winner and assumes that means it’s a “good” golf course. This is how you end up with tight, punishing public courses that lead to 6-hour rounds, agronomy problems and all the strategic elements Soly mentioned being wiped away.
Did the Killhouse furniture come from a Goodwill or did you just find it in various alleys?
– Lazstradamus
NEIL: The #Killhouse design aesthetic is what I’d call ‘Chic Donation,’ a ragtag mix of Goodwill, free stuff people send Soly & Tron, and old furniture from the humble ATL abode of The Franchise and Peg (aka, Tron and Neil’s parents). The Patrick Reed couch was actually one of two in our family room for about 10 years. It has not aged well, and goes better with a darker wall color and a less sunny family room! My vision for the #Killhouse is a museum of useless golf history, objects that represent inside jokes that no one gets (see: welding mask), and mismatched furniture that garners stern but fair shit talking from the gallery during the live show. I think we’re well on our way!
RANDY: Fun fact–‘Chic Donation’ is an interior decor line bourne from the revolutionary Derelicte fashion line from infamous designer, Jacobim Mugatu.
What do you guys think has happened to Smylie? – assortment of Refugees
NEIL: I don’t think Smylie is that good. He got hot in Vegas and stole a win, went comatose for 3 days at Augusta, and then regressed back to where he should be. The problem is he upped his personal #brand on SB2k16, and got put in the convo with dudes that have been the creme de la creme from junior golf through today.
TRON: Smylie’s an interesting story – Neil nailed it on the head, and that’s not meant as a slight to Smylie. You have to respect someone getting hot, taking advantage of it and having the confidence to keep riding it. He was a middling college player for three years at LSU (averaged around 74-75 each season) before he got v hot his senior year. Then he won in his first year on the Web Tour in ‘15 (an impressive five shot win at the tough Victoria National, probably the hardest course on that circuit), and then parlayed that into a PGA Tour card and went unconscious Sunday at the Shriners. He went from 71st in SG putting in ‘15, to 138th last season, and down to 158th thus far this year. 2016 was the outlier and
Source: https://nolayingup.com/blog/march-nlu-mailbag-part-2