• Hate to be Rude: Jim Weathers
Jeff Rude’s “I Hate To Be Rude” column appears on Golfweek.com on Friday, the same day as his video show of the same name.• This week, for the first time in about 20 years, the PGA Tour is taking a week off during the season. No big deal. The problem is that top U.S. players usually take the next week off every other year.
• Oddly enough, World No. 2 Phil Mickelson is 1-9-1 in his last 11 Ryder Cup matches. And he was playing lefthanded.
• Look for Mickelson to pair with young star Anthony Kim early and often. Perhaps Kim can help inspire Lefty. Or, at the least, try to trick him into thinking this is the Masters or PGA Championship.
• So who’s going to win? OK, I’ll give you my latest take, provided I can change my mind before next Friday without being accused of being a flip-flopper like John Kerry:
It is difficult to pick the United States considering it has lost the last two meetings by nine points apiece. And considering it is without Tiger Woods. And considering Mickelson is out of form. And considering the European likes of Padraig Harrington, Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood, Henrik Stenson and Robert Karlsson have had their best seasons. And that the Euros get up for this event more than the Americans do.
All that points to more waving of blue flags. The head says Europe by two points.
But ... the hunch here is that positive karma around Kenny Perry, who poured his whole year into the Ryder, will pay off in U.S. victory. Call it 14 1/2-13 1/2.
The Perry fairy tale has a happy ending.
• For what it’s worth: The
Golfweek computer says the 12 U.S. players have a 68-59-17 edge over the Euro counterparts when matching head-to-head common rounds in 2008. What's more, the U.S. dozen lead 68-54-22 in common tournament finishes.
Europe has the edge in world ranking, 22.4-24.5, but the Americans have a better average
Golfweek/Sagarin ranking, 20.33-34.75.
Thing is, the
Golfweek computer wasn’t inside the ropes watching the last two Ryder Cups.
• Yes, the FedEx Cup needs more tweaking, and you can expect that in Year 3. Change particularly is needed with regard to decreasing points awarded to those who finish last or near the bottom the first two weeks. As an example of one problem, hypothetically a player finishing 70th the first two weeks would have gotten more points than someone who placed fifth and missed a cut.
Top finishes need to receive more reward, and last needs to get less. Too much merit has been placed on mediocrity. For instance, Bubba Watson didn’t do anything special in the first three playoff events – ties for 12th, 44th and 28th. Yet he moved up from 56th in the FedEx standings entering the playoffs to 29th and a Tour Championship berth.
Back to the drawing board.
• Evidence the new U.S. Ryder picking system is better: Four guys low on the automatic qualifier list last time have gone back under the radar – J.J. Henry, Brett Wetterich, Vaughn Taylor and, most surprising, Zach Johnson.
• Michelle Wie will return to Stanford University even if she gets her LPGA card through Q-School this fall, her coach, David Leadbetter, told
Golfweek’s Beth Ann Baldry. What’s more, he said “the family feels she could be rookie of the year and player of the year if things go according to plan.”
What year? 2009?
If she somehow accomplished all that against all odds, she’d complete the crazy triple and also win Comeback Player of the Year.
Don’t count on it. Multi-tasking won’t cut it. Attending a demanding school like Stanford and trying to beat the best players in the world at the same time work against each other. It will be hard to do both extremely well. Take if from the several PGA Tour pros who tried to be TV broadcasters and play the Tour at the same time. They have said the same thing: You can’t do both and do them well.
We and Wie won’t know how good she really is at golf until she focuses solely on golf.
• OK, the FedEx Cup won’t have drama entering the playoff finale. But the picture is far prettier if focus is shifted from points to individual achievement. Two compelling storylines emerged: A 45-year-old Fijian from humble beginnings, Vijay Singh, won twice, hiking his number of victories since turning 40 to a record 22; and Colombian Camilo Villegas, from a country where all but a couple of the 50 or so courses are private, broke through with his first Tour victory.
Point standings aside, the big picture is that two fitness-freak overachievers from non-golf factories excelled with improved putting. Singh used to walk through a watery underground tunnel to go hit balls; Villegas comes from a low-income nation where it’s common for workers to earn $150 a month.
Six months before matriculating at the University of Florida, Villegas spoke little English and had his coaches worried about academics. Yet he didn’t make less than an ‘A’ after that first year.
In other words, the theme this playoff season isn’t so much “These Guys Are Good” as “These Guys Bust Their Butts.”
• You don’t think this game is 90 percent mental? Then listen to Singh from the other day. You just might improve your putting. To hear Singh, good putting is mainly belief. At least that’s his candid take on his remarkable transformation from being woeful on little putts to putting like Ben Crenshaw in winning the two playoff tournaments.
“When things started going bad, the negatives were very strong,” Singh said. “I would stand over a putt and feel like I was going to miss it before I hit it. That’s not a way of putting. You’ve got to keep talking to yourself that you’re the greatest (putter). ... (The key was) fixing the attitude, the sick feeling I had over the short putts. We may call it anxiety.
“To be able to overcome that and win tournaments, those are the most satisfying things that I look back and say, ‘Wow, if I hadn’t fixed that part of it, maybe who knows, this could’ve been the end of it.”
Instead, this has been a middle-aged springboard for him.
• Name game: Dan(ny) Noonan shot 84-80 in the New Hampshire Senior Amateur and finished 15 strokes back. The reader reporting the news suspected Lacy Underalls and Judge Smails missed the cut.
What’s more, there’s a junior golfer in Ozark, Mo., named Ben Hogan. He’s set to graduate high school in 2011 – and presumably play on the 2020 Ryder Cup team after digging the secret out of the dirt.
Posted: 9/12/2008
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