Were the Barclays greens unfair?

First, the Barclays felt a lot like a Major.  I give credit to Bethpage Black - with an assist from the FedEx Cup - for helping to insure that the top players remain engaged as the season winds down.  This course is hard.  With the rough long and thick and the greens fast and severe, it is every bit of its 78.1 course rating, and more.  My "A" group had the thrill of playing there just before it was closed down for the first Open.  We found it almost too hard to enjoy.

There was some whining about the greens being unfair this time, so I decided to dig into this a bit.  First, I have never seen a winner on the PGA Tour 3-putt SIX times as Nick Watney did.  Typically, a winner will have zero or one 3-putts.  Ricky Fowler survived FOUR 3-putts to win in a play-off at Quail Hollow - extremely unusual.  

I thought, "If the winner had six 3-putts, how did the rest of the field fare?  Were the greens unfair?"  For the answer, I re-read my recent blog, written after the 2012 Memorial, in which I discussed a reasonable measure of green difficulty - the age-old Tour stat:  3-Putt Avoidance:  The % of time 3 or more putts were taken for a hole (total 3 and 4-putts divided by the total holes played.)  To read this blog, click here.

According to my 3-Putt Avoidance barometer, Bethpage Black ranks right up there @ 3.51.  This says that the field averaged just over 2.5 3-Putts in 72 holes.  For perspective, the four Majors in 2012 averaged 3.91, with the Masters the most difficult @ 4.88; the British Open the most benign @ 2.53. 

Not quite satisfied, I dug deeper.  What about the number of players in any event that had ZERO 3-putts?  Surely this might provide a strong indicator as to the difficulty of the greens.  I looked at this stat for the 35 events in the books YTD:

# Players with ZERO 3-Putts by event

Fewest (Most Difficult Greens)

• 3 players (Augusta, TPC Sawgrass, Bay Hill)
• 5 players (Riviera, Quail Hollow)
• 6 players (Torry Pines, TPC San Antonio)
• 9 players (TPC Four Seasons, Colonial, Olympic, Congressional, Bethpage Black)

Average for all 35 events - 13 players had zero 3-putts

Most (Easiest Greens)

• 79 players (Trump Puerto Rico)
• 27 players (TPC Louisiana)
• 21 players (Waialea, Copperhead)

Two Points:

1.   Bethpage clearly did not stand out as unfair but stood up nicely with other Major venues as challanging.

2.  Wouldn't The Donald be horrified by this analysis.  To twist the blade, the field at the Trump Puerto Rico event was smaller than the average tour field at only 132 players.  So 60% of the field did not have a 3-Putt!  And dare I say that it was not the strongest field? 

  

How did I do on the Masters?

I am definitely getting old as I look forward to watching the Masters more than Christmas and this year's was a great one.  In one respect my instincts were good as my little syndicate owned the top three finishers in our annual Master's pool AND therefore took almost all of the pot.  Additionally, last week I cited three attributes that the Masters winner would most likely share with our Winner's Profile and three other predictors.  Here is how Charl Schwartzle and I did:

1.  Off Shore Holeouts - Charl had two of these for birdie and eagle on the front 9 of his final round.

2.  Scrambling, extraordinary saves - His Off Shore, chip in on the 1st hole for birdie qualifies - even par would have been a great save.  I am sure that he had others - see #3.

3.  Managing the downside - In round #2 Charl hit only 9 of 18 GIR's but made only two bogeys and finished with a well-managed 71.  For the event, Charl had only 7 bogeys and NO doubles or worse.  That is "Managing...."

I also said:  ...the winner this week at Augusta will almost surely:

• Be a long hitter:  Charl's certainly long enough - 19th on the European Tour @ 297 yards.

• Rank relatively high in GIR stats on his respective tour:  Charl ranks 59th on the European Tour @ 70%.  Again, good enough, especially considering it meets the ShotByShot.com 70% rule for Winners.  

• Has already won on the PGA Tour or a Major:  I obviously missed this one but I will stand by it in the future, regardless.  Why?  He is only the third player in history to get his first win on the PGA Tour at Augusta.  I could only find two players on the Champion's list that have no history or mention on the PGA Tour:  Ralph Guldahl (1939) and Herman Keiser (1946) - a decidedly different era in golf. 

I give myself 5 out of 6, but I also admitted at the time that I was climbing out on a pretty safe limb. 

The PGA - Tiger will be fine, but I worry about Padraig Harrington

OK, so Tiger Woods just lost his first major golf tournament while in the lead after 3 rounds. It had to happen at some point but if it weren't for a very solid round by an unlikely candidate, Tiger was on track for #15. All of the usual subjects were playing by the script and had quietly disappeared by the 9th hole. Only Y.E. Yang was happy to hang around the lead with Tiger. He gave golf's #1 player a bit of his own medicine when he chipped in for eagle on #14 and Tiger was forced to hole an 8 foot, birdie putt just to stay one behind - big sigh of relief around my TV.

After Yang played a poor pitch to the par-5, 15th and Tiger failed to make a 12 foot birdie putt (again!), I submit that Mr. Yang came very close to the "C" word and to giving the tournament away. Not once, but twice.

1st: On the difficult 16th, he made the unthinkable mistake by missing his approach to the right of the flag tucked on the right side of the green, precariously close to the hazard. The gods shined on Y.A. as the ball barely caught the fringe and stuck. Another two feet to the right and his ball most certainly would have bounced into the hazard - Tiger wins!

2nd: On #17, with a 2-putt for par, albeit from about 40 feet, Yang would almost certainly have gained a 2 stroke lead. But he left his lag putt 8 feet short and missed - bogey. Again, he was saved because Tiger's aggressive approach bounced just over the green and into a very difficult lie resulting in his bogey.

So what happened to Tiger? A combination of three things:

1. He simply had "one of those days" on the greens. After he mis-read the 6-foot birdie putt on #1 and burned the edge on #2 from 14 feet for birdie - both putts that he (and the rest of us) expect him to make - I believe he began to doubt his reads. On the back 9 alone, I calculate that Tiger missed six of seven putts inside 14 feet. Each one was either a very minor mis-read or hit a bit too hard or soft, or a combination thereof.

2. Hats off to Nick Faldo who, at the start of the telecast, predicted that the strong, gusting crosswinds would give Tiger difficulty. And they did. They were certainly the primary cause of the missed greens on 17 and 18. Under the circumstances, Tiger was forced to be aggressive and and the gusting winds made it almost impossible to be as precise as he needed to be. Again, Tiger's uncertainty on the tee at the difficult, par-3 8th hole led to another missed green and bogey. And this is just to list the obvious ones.

3. Y. A. Yang handled the conditions and the pressure extremely well.

Aquaphobia! I bet Padraig Harrington will be nervous taking a shower.
Astonishingly, for the second week in a row Padraig literally drowned his chances of a win. His meltdown that resulted in an eight on the par-3 8th hole on Sunday was difficult to watch. To make matters worse, the network chose to splice in the prior week's mistake.

Here is a niblick of perspective: the average golfer on the PGA Tour will miss the green from within 50 yards of the flag approximately six percent of the time - 6 of every 100 opportunities. This ShotByShot.com stat includes all shots and all degrees of difficulty. Granted, Padraig was faced with two very difficult opportunities, but not only are missed greens infrequent for a PGA Tour player, a miss that results in a penalty is so rare that I don't even track it.

It is often said that the great ones must have short memories. But these two dramatic wounds have to leave deep scars for Padraig. I will be interested to see how he deals with it, and as a fan, I am rooting for him to prevail.