Golf Shanks It

We're Wrecking the Wrong Things

TODAY'S RAMBLINGS

3 Minute Read

Happy Monday. Today’s muse was Steven Simon and news he shared with me recently from the world of golf.

This might appear to be just another old man yells at cloud rant post. And maybe it is, but I still bemoan generational things that have fallen out of favor to one degree or another.

And have now been deemed in need of a change or spin or edge or something.

Because I argue there was nothing wrong in the first place.

I understand that myopic attention spans distracted by infinite choice require things that are bright and shiny and new. But that doesn’t mean it’s good or right to trash the intrinsic qualities that make golf special in the first place.

LIV Golf, which is already an abomination and something I’ve blasted here before, is worse than I thought. That’s because they’re pushing a desperate PGA Tour to get their own team tournament thing going. The teams are city-based (vs. nothing-based, as on the LIV tour), and this new league will be holding its tournaments in a stadium and use a big simulator.

You know, instead of something as old and outdated as playing on an actual golf course.

It’s true. So instead of watching shitty venues like Pinehurst, Augusta, or Pebble Beach, you can watch your favorite players hit into a screen! Inside!

It’s called The Golf League, or TGL for short, and it’s all here in this rather horrifying article in Golf Digest. Here are some excerpts.

TGL is a sort of tech-infused hybrid of simulator and real-world golf. The matches will be played in the 250,000 square-foot SoFi Center, which will seat 1,500 fans and house a massive simulator screen that is 53 feet tall and 64 feet wide.

This is what it will look like; the simulator screen is the gray thing in the back.

To start a hole, players will hit into the screen from the tee box 35 yards away. Teams will continue to hit into the screen until their ball finishes inside the boundary of the Greenzone, after which players will turn around and play on the real grass putting surface and green surrounds. The tee boxes include fairway-cut grass, rough and real sand for bunker shots. Around the green players will be able to hit real chips and pitches as well as bunker shots from three bunkers

The golf simulator company Full Swing created a green with 600 actuators which can change undulations in just five seconds, allowing the surface to play quite different from hole to hole. What’s more, the entire green and bunker platform rotates 360 degrees, allowing for approaches to come into the green at different angles on different holes.

There’s no doubt the tech will be trick, and the team aspect a new dimension. And sure, TGL is backed by Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and some other bold-faced names, but I don’t care.

What needs to happen instead is for the PGA and LIV to stop their pissing fight. Then, have the world’s best players compete against each other weekly, on the world’s most beautiful and challenging golf courses. Maybe consider these ideas. Leave the team stuff to the Ryder and President’s Cups, as it’s part of what makes them special, plus the mano a mano nature of golf tournaments is a feature, not a bug. Problem solved.

Because golf doesn’t need stadiums and rotating greens. It needs common sense and respect for the game that supersedes greed and sportswashing.

FROM THE UNWASHED MASSES

Many thanks to those of you who sent along birthday greetings, and extra thanks to those who personally helped me celebrate.

Thank you for reading this newsletter.

KLUF

I doubt David Bowie played golf, but this is still one hell of a greatest hits collection, and it does feature a song entitled “Changes.”