Shotgun Start: Feeling groove-y; age-old dilemma; sizing up Singh

March 10, 2010

CBSSports.com senior writer Steve Elling and golf writer Scott Michaux of the Augusta Chronicle

The U.S. Golf Association and Ping made major separate announcements Monday on the unquestionably confusing grooves front, which will clear the way for all players on the professional tours worldwide to be playing the same equipment. Were you satisfied with the solution?

ELLING: Satisfied, relieved, overjoyed. I was getting bleary-eyed writing about the confusing and conflicting grooves issue, which was truly an inside-baseball detail, but was nonetheless important to the health of the game. Ping CEO John Solheim agreed to remove the legal loophole that had allowed pre-1990 Ping irons to be used in competition on the Champions, Nationwide and PGA tours and the USGA has agreed to stage open forums to discuss any further proposed rollbacks in equipment. It’s nice to see that, in a sport that occasionally has been rife with individual organizations fiercely protecting their own fiefdoms, reasonable agreements can still be struck, for the betterment of all Phil Mickelson, who passionately spoke out about the grooves loophole and lack of “transparency” in the USGA rule-making process. He was dead right, too. “Accountability is never a bad thing,” as the USGA’s David Fay said.

MICHAUX: Hallelujah! Amen! Yada, yada, yada and la-di-da. If this resolution means that I will never have to discuss or hear about this groove issue ever again, then I am all for it. Clearly this has been a bee up your and other techno-philes’ bonnets all year long. It was obviously a silly inconsistency and it’s nice to see that reasonable heads prevailed and that common sense reigns with a treaty of uniformity. What this really fixes in golf, however, I have no idea. It’s clear that the governing bodies are trying to regulate spin ratio by this back-door application of grooves. But the point Mickelson was trying to make about the arbitrary ruling on submitted clubs that met all the new parameters is still a significant glitch in the system. If the USGA wanted to regulate spin rate, why didn’t it just say so and draw that quantifiable line in the sand instead of making a groove mandate that didn’t quite do what it wanted? Wait. I’ve said too much. My head is hurting. Please don’t ask me about grooves again. I’m begging you. Can we declare this controversy over and move on?

Another kid has won on the European Tour, this time an 18-year-old Korean, who took down international star K.J. Choi in the Malaysian Open to become the youngest professional winner in that tour’s history. Thoughts?

ELLING: It was classic how he won the tournament, getting up and down from beside what appeared to be a hot-dog vending cart stationed near the 18th green for a surreal victory over a vastly more seasoned pro in Choi. Seung-yul Noh is the second teen in as many years to win on the E-Tour, joining Korean countryman Danny Lee, who accomplished the feat last year as an amateur at the Johnnie Walker Classic. Part of me wants to stand up and applaud, but down deep, there’s a sort of nagging parental alarm jangling that says kicking a kid into the deep end of the pool is a dangerous proposition. What has Danny Lee done since? He has missed the cut in 16 of 29 international events, yet he finished T7 at the PGA Tour’s AT&T National last summer. Clearly, the go-to-college template has been dynamited, possibly for good, but there are certainly risks associated with fast-tracking prospects, just like in Major League Baseball. England’s fresh-faced Justin Rose was buried for three years after he turned pro as a teen, and Ty Tryon has hardly been heard from since he got his PGA Tour card at age 17. But turning pro as teens worked out fine for young veterans like Kevin Na and Sean O’Hair. Still, part of me grimaces, even when youngsters experience success, because they seem so much more developmentally fragile at that age. After all, teeing it up is just a small part of being a professional.

MICHAUX: So where are you classifying Rory McIlroy and Ryo Ishikawa on your list of youthful phenoms? Or Sergio Garcia before them? Of course turning pro as a teenager is not for everyone, and the mini-tours are stocked with examples of failures. But if a guy manages to actually win a professional tour event, I have a hard time classifying the decision to play with the grown-ups as cautionary in any way. If that early success doesn’t pan out into a world-class career filled with major appearances and wins by the handful, well welcome to the same career as hundreds of other rank-and-file pros trying to make a living at this game. Dude won a European Tour event. What more do you want? I never heard of this Noh kid until this week. Now he’s the answer to a trivia question. Good for him. Before we leave this topic, can we please take a tangent and clear up what nationality we’re going to use for Danny Lee? He was Korean-born, but his family moved to New Zealand in 1999 and he became a New Zealand citizen in 2008. Stephen Ames goes by Canadian now instead of his native Trinidad & Tobago. At what point do we accept the individual’s choice of nationality? At the 2016 Olympics when he walks in with the Kiwi team? Just saying.

You two both watched and heard what Vijay Singh had to say last week as he contended at the Honda Classic and posted his best finish since 2008. Is he ready to be a steady presence on leaderboards again?

ELLING: The crystal-ball stuff is always an iffy proposition, but based on what Singh said and how he performed, I’d only go halfway on that thought. He’s going to contend more often than he did last year, when he failed to log a top-three finish for the first time in his PGA Tour career, but being in the weekend mix is going to be more sporadic. Singh turned up last week with a long putter, eschewing the traditional and belly models he has used interchangeably over the years. It’s a cry for help, no doubt, and it’s again become the weakest part of his game. Sure, Singh was once a poor putter who absolutely willed himself into improving on the greens, becoming the world No. 1 in the process. At age 47, he seems to have finally overcome his two knee surgeries and issues with his back that he believes came as a result of compensating for the gimpy knee. But until the ball starts going in the hole more often, he’s morphing into a younger version of Fred Couples, who can beat anybody with the 13 other clubs in the bag but can whip the regular PGA Tour competition only on occasion.

MICHAUX: Vijay Singh has fashioned a pretty nice career out of being a pretty lousy putter. The guy has always been a flip-flopper when it comes to putters. He won a Masters 10 years ago and he’s won more tour events in his yippy 40s than any other golfer in history. The way he plays from tee to green when healthy will keep him on plenty of leaderboards for a few more years, regardless of what putter he pulls out of his garage. As he said last week, he’s a lot fitter than Kenny Perry and that guy should have won the Masters last year. And the Fred Couples reference is a little harsh (and not just because Couples is 56-under in three senior starts plus another 13-under in two PGA Tour at-bats this year). Singh has won seven more tournaments (22) and as many majors (1) since he turned 40 than Couples has in his whole tour career. I’d call that better than “on occasion.” Couples needs to be thankful he’s got a three-year head-start on the Champions Tour because starting in 2013 the Fijian is going to own that circuit.