Category: Thrash Talk

The 2015 British Open comes to us from the home of golf, St. Andrews, with all sorts of fantastic story lines. Tiger has shown improvement since is terrible showing at the U.S. Open. Jordan Spieth, on a Grand Slam watch, just finished a successful defense of his title at the John Deere Classic. Lastly, not to be outdone 2015 Players Champion, and don’t call him overrated, Rickie Fowler just won the Scottish Open. The only downer is defending champion Rory McIlroy is out with a leg injury after a soccer accident. The field is set and everyone is playing their best and it is setting up to be an epic showdown at St. Andrews. If you aren’t excited about this years British Open you just aren’t that into golf.

With that lets hear what The Sand Trap staff is expecting at this event.

Continue reading “2015 British Open Staff Predictions”

Missing a short putt to win a major sucks. As a golf fan with whom the outcome is neutral, watching a player miss a short putt is painful. “I am in shock” was the comment from Jordan Spieth who was the beneficiary of the miss. My heart was in my stomach as Dustin walked up to tap in his par. I did not want to see him three putt from less than fifteen feet to lose the U.S. Open.

Spieth has now won the first two majors of 2015 and he is a worthy winner. I am happy for him. I would just have rather him won it in an eighteen-hole playoff on Monday as he should have. Not because Dustin missed that putt. The drama of the U.S. Open was incredible. Even Dustin’s storyline of being the clear leader, to then a story of him losing it, to then an incredible birdie on 17, to then the deflation of the three putt. It was an emotional rollercoaster.

Continue reading “U.S. Open Drama”

If you asked most golfers to describe the U.S. Open in a single sentence you would likely hear a great deal about thick rough and tree-lined traditional golf courses. Well, not this year. The U.S. Open is heading to my new home state of Washington in the Pacific Northwest to play at Chambers Bay not too far from Seattle. The venue is getting lots of people talking as well as the new broadcast team from Fox of Joe Buck, Greg Norman, and old favorite Holly Sonders.

With Tiger struggling to find his game and Rory coming off two straight missed cuts in Europe there are no clear favorites to get behind. Even recent Masters champion Jordan Spieth has not played that well since donning the green jacket. So you could call the U.S. Open truly an open competition because just about anyone has the chance to win.

With all these great storylines to discuss let’s see what the staff’s expectations are for this year’s event.

Continue reading “2015 U.S. Open Staff Predictions”

The term overrated is overused. It has become a common terms used by sports talking heads when they feel that someone has been given credit they don’t deserve. I am not saying that some teams or players have not been given more credit than they’ve earned, but we overuse the term.

Rickie Fowler was recently rated as one of the PGA Tour’s most overrated players. He answered his fellow anonymous touring professionals by winning The Player’s Championship. Even putting this most recent win aside, voting him the most overrated golfer was misguided at best. I honestly don’t know if they watch the same tour that I do. How could they rank a guy with the highest finish in all of the majors last year overrated. I simply don’t get it.

Continue reading “Is Rickie Fowler Overrated?”

I’ve started to question recently if I’m truly a golf fan.

Every now and then we’ll get a TST forum member who decides that no one is a “real golf fan.” They believe themselves to be, apparently, the sole member of this rare species. The rest of us are Phil fans, or Tiger fans, or Joost Luiten fans. Maybe they’re right.

I think I’m a real golf fan. I still love playing golf, and I love following it, but there are a lot of ancillary aspects of the sport that grate at me. Golf isn’t a particularly mainstream sport, and I think part of that owes to the general attitude of many golfers. Because allegiances aren’t (grain flow) forged at birth, golf fans tend to pick their favorite golfers irrationally, and that boils over into their general golf fandom. Black-and-white opinions bug me in general, but especially in the golf world, a sport built on a foundation of black-and-white rules, they tend to be the norm. Nuance is lost. Outrage and sensationalism wins out over enjoyment. It stops being entertainment.

Golf has always been entertainment for me. If it ever ceases to be, I’ll move on. Everyone keeps telling me hockey is great.

Continue reading “On Tiger Woods and Augusta”

The first news of the Ryder Cup captaincy came as more of a “leak” rather than an announcement. We heard from Tim Rosaforte that Davis Love III was going to be captain again.

My first feeling was disappointment that they did not take my suggestion of a Ryder Cup CEO, but rather choosing the safer route of picking a popular figure in the game. My second feeling? How could this be the result of the Ryder Cup task force? To pick DL3 again?

If the answer to the question is that, yes, this is the result of the task force, then I am extremely disappointed. This is a “more of the same” type of move rather than trying to make the big changes the U.S. Ryder Cup needs. Sure, Davis is a nice guy and he had basically won the 2012 Ryder Cup before his team’s lousy Sunday singles play, but he is not change. He is one of the many losing captains the U.S. team has had in its recent past. How as a fan of the U.S. team can you not feel anything but disappointment?

Continue reading “The Ryder Cup Disappoints Again”

There’s a question we have to start asking ourselves.

Could this be the end? Retirement? The end of watching Tiger Woods play competitive golf?

It is hard to fathom. Tiger is too young, by golf standards, to retire. Jack Nicklaus won a major at forty six – surely Tiger can win one at forty.

Yet here we are. In the last handful of tournaments he has played he has either finished DFL or hung a WD next to his name. I know he’s hurt. In fact, some have said that the injury seemed to be made worse by the fact that he wasn’t playing that well, but at Torrey he had just birdied the par-five tenth hole and gotten himself to even par for the day before a final double bogey and all sorts of pain caused him to withdraw. So I call BS on that. He is withdrawing, at least at Torrey, because he is hurt. I sense he wants to play. But all this pain makes you start to wonder could this be the beginning of the end of watching Tiger Woods on the PGA Tour?

Continue reading “Is Tiger Going to Retire?”