Golf Observations

1. Has anyone else noticed the hump in Tommy Fleetwood’s back? He seems to be too young for osteoporosis, but it certainly looks like an early onset.

2. On the LPGA I find it curious that none of the commentators has said anything about Inbee Park’s amazing weight loss. In less than a year she’s gone from balloonish to svelte. Well, not entirely svelte, but she seems to be getting there. I guess marriage has been good for her.

3. This last weekend’s WGC match play tournament in Austin showed us the deadliness of having only two matches on the final day. What does the network do in between shots? You got it—commercials. Match play can be compelling, as it often is on Sundays during the Ryder Cup, Presidents Cup, and Solheim Cup, when there are twelve matches going on. That gives the network plenty of time to go from one compelling moment to another without so much commercial time. But in this WGC, the two semifinal matches in the morning and the final and consolation matches in the afternoon weren’t enough to sustain interest, especially when that final match between Bubba Watson and Kevin Kisner ended so early and without any kind of suspense. Bubba was five up after the first five holes, and everyone knew how that would end. It was deadly.

4. During almost every PGA event, I notice more and more golfers (the younger, the more likely) spitting. A while ago I wrote a blog about sports spitting with baseball players being the most frequent offenders. I went on to say that professional golfers were too gentlemanly to ever demean their game with spitting. That may have been true a decade ago, but no longer. Two of the younger golfers, Daniel Berger and Kevin Kisner, seem to have suspicious bulges in their cheeks which might suggest a wad of snuff, and when they all too often spit, it’s not a little squirt but a big drizzly gob. Don’t they realize they’re in the ubiquitous eye of the all-seeing camera? Don’t they realize how disgusting their spit is to most viewers? I guess not. There are others whom I’ve seen spitting occasional little baseballish squirts, like Tiger and Dustin Johnson, but you’d never catch Speith or Kutcher or Mickelson doing it. I’m going to keep a close eye on everyone at the Masters in two weeks. None of them should even think of dissing the hallowed halls of Augustan ivy. The powers that be might disqualify them for such disrespectful expectoration.

5. The game has changed so much I can hardly recognize it. Bubba Watson in his match on Saturday hit a drive that went 489 yards. What! And for many tour players, averaging over 300 yards off the tee is no big deal. I know that many young players are now in remarkable physical shape and swing with blinding speed, but most of this distancing and straightening is because of the clubs and balls they use. A 350-yard hole is now considered just a long par-3. How much farther can it go until all our courses become as extinct as pterodactyls?