And let me make myself clear on desert golf. I don’t just not like it. I despise it. The courses are all the same. Fairways meandering through phony mounds and airlifted boulders, papier mâché mountains in the distance, slow greens, fake waterfalls, decorator palm groves, Brooke Shields lagoons, reptile exhibits and much cactus can you do? DAN JENKINS as Bobby Joe Grooves
And let me make myself clear on desert golf. I don’t just not like it. I despise it. The courses are all the same. Fairways meandering through phony mounds and airlifted boulders, papier mâché mountains in the distance, slow greens, fake waterfalls, decorator palm groves, Brooke Shields lagoons, reptile exhibits and much cactus can you do? DAN JENKINS as Bobby Joe Grooves
Congrats to the man who's covered some of the great golf images in the modern era.
Bill Fields, the PGA of America’s lifetime achievement award winner in journalism, saluted David Cannon at The Albatross. And Brian Wacker profiled Cannon a few years ago and it’s worth checking out.
DAVID CANNON TO RECEIVE PGA OF AMERICA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN PHOTOJOURNALISM
Cannon’s career to be celebrated on May 18 at PGA Championship in Tulsa, Oklahoma
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. (Feb. 8, 2022) — The PGA of America today named David Cannon of Sussex, England as the second recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award in Photojournalism. Cannon and his work will be celebrated on May 18 in the leadup to the 2022 PGA Championship at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Tour pros would rather go through an IRS audit than play in a pro-am. Publicly they say they love meeting interesting people and how great the pro-ams are. In truth, they loathe them. They're out there for six hours, see countless bad shots and hear the same stale jokes. If Tim Finchem announced next Monday that pro-ams were henceforth eliminated, he'd find 200 cases of champagne on his porch Tuesday morning. TOM WEISKOPF
Golf.com’s Michael Bamberger assessed Phil Mickelson’s attack of the PGA Tour and majors making money off the player backs and suggests Lefty’s never talked better but also may be going about this the wrong way. In making his point, Bamberger also inadvertently hinted at another potential problem Mickelson created for himself.
The fellas playing MLB, in the NFL and in the NBA, have an appealing level of individuality, but they are union workers playing team sports. They have, really, a completely different mentality.
If Mickelson really wants to affect change the most effective thing he could do is get 150 or so Tour players to stage a sit-down strike on the eve of, say, the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Then get that group to agree on media rights, purse distribution, governance structure and a million other things.
Good luck with that.
There has been some talk about Phil getting Tony Romo money to talk golf on TV. He’d be good at that, but it would bore him. It’s easier to imagine him as the commissioner of a golf league. Which one is hard to say just now.
It seems to me that a mad puppy threatens golfers. The gentility that wants its course called a “championship course”. I am not thinking of any particular course, but I hear this foolish phrase constantly used. Most courses are not fit for a championship, never will be fit for one, never will get one and nobody wants to see one there. Then, why in the name of goodness should we set up this nonsensical standard and then spoil our courses trying to live to it. BERNARD DARWIN
It seems to me that a mad puppy threatens golfers. The gentility that wants its course called a “championship course”. I am not thinking of any particular course, but I hear this foolish phrase constantly used. Most courses are not fit for a championship, never will be fit for one, never will get one and nobody wants to see one there. Then, why in the name of goodness should we set up this nonsensical standard and then spoil our courses trying to live to it. BERNARD DARWIN
It seems to me that a mad puppy threatens golfers. The gentility that wants its course called a “championship course”. I am not thinking of any particular course, but I hear this foolish phrase constantly used. Most courses are not fit for a championship, never will be fit for one, never will get one and nobody wants to see one there. Then, why in the name of goodness should we set up this nonsensical standard and then spoil our courses trying to live to it. BERNARD DARWIN
Pebble Beach in 80-degree weather with no wind howling off the Farallons, no clouds scudding in low and gray, no foaming surf crashing over the greens and fairways is like Samson shorn, Man o’ War limping, Muhammad Ali hanging on the ropes and bleeding. I can’t look. It’s enough to make you gnash your teeth when you see players hitting 4- and 5-irons to No. 17, to see them teeing off with 3-woods on 18 and in general insulting the course as if it were some pitch-and-putt in Chillicothe. It’s like seeing the USS Missouri aground, the Titanic hanging off an iceberg. Golf at Pebble Beach was never meant to be a walk in the park, a dance with your sister, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. JIM MURRAY
Phil Mickelson’s “obnoxious greed” claims have not gone over well in a variety of ways, namely that he’s in Saudi Arabia collecting a hefty appearance fee from some pretty shady characters.
His comments were posted on Golf Digest’s Instagram account and earned this reply from Brooks Koepka:
DK if I’d be using the word greedy if I’m Phil…�”
The Daily Mail offered this headline to Derek Lawrenson’s story, which ran for some time on its home sports page.
After his opening 67 in the PIFSIPSIA, Mickelson was sort of asked about his comments to Golf Digest.
Q. There's a lot of buzz this week; is the sport itself the true nature, the competition, something to lose, to gain?
Phil Mickelson unleashed a torrent of criticisms at the PGA Tour from the Saudi International. After a fairly benign press conference session, Mickelson told GolfDigest.com’s John Huggan that he’s been forced to consider various business opportunities because of the Tour’s “obnoxious greed.”
The us vs. them stance, even though players appear to have more control and influence over the PGA Tour’s operation, may not resonate very well with fans. Mickelson is aware of this danger but forged ahead with some incendiary comments.
“It’s not public knowledge, all that goes on,” Mickelson said. “But the players don’t have access to their own media. If the tour wanted to end any threat [from Saudi or anywhere else], they could just hand back the media rights to the players. But they would rather throw $25 million here and $40 million there than give back the roughly $20 billion in digital assets they control. Or give up access to the $50-plus million they make every year on their own media channel.
“There are many issues, but that is one of the biggest,” he continued. “For me personally, it’s not enough that they are sitting on hundreds of millions of digital moments. They also have access to my shots, access I do not have. They also charge companies to use shots I have hit. And when I did ‘The Match’—there have been five of them—the tour forced me to pay them $1 million each time. For my own media rights. That type of greed is, to me, beyond obnoxious.”
Two parts to this stand out. The rights to “my shots” would seem motivated by a desire to cash in on NFT’s. More concerning is the claim of personally paying $1 million each time he’s played The Match and the “beyond obnoxious” green of the Tour.
I don’t have much to add until we see how this plays out, but you know the old saying: you can never have too much tracer on a golf broadcast. By most accounts, Trackman remains by far the best and most accurate of the launch monitors, so kudos to the PGA Tour for pushing this technology and hopefully making the fan viewing experience even better.
The most exciting potential revealed may be in the second to last paragraph, with the announcement of a mobile system to catch more shots from the fairway. Or, perhaps, the trees when a player has to shape a shot and viewers theoretically get to see the bend of the ball traced.
Overall, this means more data, better tracer coverage and more of it on PGA Tour Live coverage. How much is adopted by the networks using the Tour feed remains to be seen.
PGA TOUR selects TrackMan™ tracking and tracing solution beginning in 2022
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