Volume Three Hundred Sixty-Seven

A near miss for Woods and Lewis, a first for Ko, and big wins for Bjorn and Jimenez… What a great way to wrap up 2013!

Hittin' the LinksWith Tiger’s Northwestern Mutual World Challenge wrapping up this weekend, most of the top golfers will be heading home this week or next to spend time with friends and family over the holidays.

But there is one more big tour golf event for 2013. This week the European Tour holds the second edition of the Nelson Mandela Championship, which will start a day early and finish Saturday in observance of the state funeral for its namesake. This year’s event was briefly in doubt due to the Mr. Mandela’s passing, but the organizers decided that it would be more of a tribute for the tournament to go on. The championship will benefit one of Mandela’s dreams – to build a world-class children’s hospital in South Africa. To that end, all profits from the tournament will go to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital Trust.

But now, for the week that was… HtL links you up with Zach Johnson’s shocking win, a first-of-(probably)-many titles by a 16-year-old pro, and much more.

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How EA Sports Can Revive the PGA Tour Video Games Sans Tiger

How EA Sports can bring golf video games into the next console generation.

Trap Five LogoAccording to a statement released by EA Sports recently, the video game giant and golfer Tiger Woods have severed ties.

According to who you believe, the Tiger Woods PGA Tour video games already appeared to be on the rocks, and the ’15 edition (to be released in 2014) will be either delayed until at least April or not sent to market at all.

Neither option would be all that unheard-of; EA has monkeyed with the release dates for the Tiger Woods games before. The games were released in the fall every year between 2003 and 2007, until moving towards the late summer for the 2008 version and earlier in the summer for 2010. In 2012 EA cut a deal to include Augusta National in the game, and worked hard to push it out before The Masters.

EA is also no stranger to cutting off a game entirely. They dropped the MVP Baseball series after 2007 (mostly because rival 2K Sports signed an exclusivity deal with MLB in response to EA’s similar deal with the NFL), and have yet to pick the series back up even after the 2K/MLB deal expired. After their NBA Live 10 game received (justifiably) terrible reviews, they cancelled its follow-up, NBA Elite 11, at the last minute, and haven’t released a basketball game since despite relatively weak releases from 2K (though NBA Live 14 is set to come back later this year).

It remains to be seen what exactly the ramifications of the Tiger/EA separation are. I suppose it’s possible that Tiger remains in the game as a playable character, though his days on the cover are surely gone.

The games remain different year-over-year, but the yearly releases have become frustrating. Excess players, expensive extra courses, and rotating single player modes have made the games stale, and while the extra space of Blu-Rays and larger on-board stock hard drives should help them, EA needs to make some deep changes. Here are a few things I think could get the PGA Tour video game series off and running again.

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Callaway Mack Daddy 2 Wedge Review

The Mack is back with the introduction of the new Callaway Mack Daddy 2 Wedges, but is the new version as good as the original?

If you remember a few years back all of the buzz around the golf world was about grooves. Manufacturers were making them deeper, wider, and sharper, giving golfers of all levels the ability to put an insane amount of spin on the ball from nearly any lie. One of the best examples we saw of this was, of course, the Mack Daddy grooves that Roger Cleveland developed for the Callaway X Forged Wedges. These grooves were mean and nasty and had the reputation for chewing up any ball that crossed its path. Then it all stopped… the ruling bodies of golf decided that enough was enough and put limits on the size of grooves that manufacturers could make and since that time everybody has been trying to figure out how to achieve those insane spin numbers while still conforming to the new regulations.

Once again, it seems that Roger Cleveland has done it, or at least, that is what Callaway would have you believe. With the introduction of the new Mack Daddy 2 wedges, Callaway has brought back a old favorite that conforms to the new rules. They say that the new grooves aren’t only as good as the originals but even better. Read on to see if the mack is really back.

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Volume Three Hundred Sixty-Six

Stenson gets selfish about season-ending titles, Chi Chi gets a surprise on “The Big Break,” golf gets (some) credit for determining an election, and, the typhoon in the Philippines takes the lives of several family members of a PGA TOUR pro.

Hittin' the LinksAnother season ends as the European Tour wrapped up last weekend in the same way that the PGA Tour wound up more than a month ago, with Henrik Stenson winning it all.

That leaves the LPGA as the only tour still in its 2013 season, and their season-ending event is this week’s CME Group Titleholders at Tiburon in Naples, Florida. This will be your last chance to see the women play until mid-February.

Even with the seasons over or ending, there will still be golf to watch. The ISPS Handa World Cup of Golf is already under way down under in Melbourne, Australia, with a field that includes Matt Kuchar, Adam Scott, Jason Day, and a number of other names you would recognize. You would be doing well to recognize more than a half dozen of the names on the leaderboard when the European Tour tees off it’s 2014 season in South Africa this week. But that’s the way it goes in the Silly Season.

As always, HtL is here to point you toward some of the more interesting goings-on in the world of golf. Here’s what made the cut this week.

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2013 – The Unpredictable PGA Tour Season

The only thing that was constant about 2013 was that it was wildly unpredictable. I muse about the year that was 2013.

Thrash TalkPrior to hydrant-gate, golf had a certain predictability to it. Tiger would dominate, a few other side players would jump in to win the occasional major, and we would likely have a young player have a big flash and a few feel-good stories to talk about. The story was almost always the same.

Yet the 2013 season had very little predictability. The FedExCup winner is not an unfamiliar face. My best memory of Henrik Stenson is at the 2009 Players Championship. He ran away with the tournament and looked destined to win a major in the very near future. From that point on we didn’t hear much from Henrik. There were times when it would be easy to think that he might not recover from one of the deepest slumps. But here he is, ten million dollars richer, and will be a favorite of many going into the Masters next year, a full recovery back to where he was in 2009, maybe this time just a bit wiser.

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Golfing Plateau

Golf, like any game, is full of peaks and valleys, but occasionally we get stuck on a plateau. This is the one on which I’m currently stuck.

Thrash TalkOther than the fact that Tiger Woods and I were both born in California, we share very little regarding our golf. That is until recently… Currently we both are suffering from a golfing plateau. They are different by a margin that is hard to explain in words, but we are both stuck in a rut.

Tiger’s plateau is simply identified by the number fourteen – the number of majors at which Tiger has been stuck for the past five years. Majors have been hard to come by for Tiger and for a time we could argue that he was changing his swing, but he has won other big tournaments which should tell us that he is ready to launch again from this plateau. But he hasn’t, and has only come up short in the biggest events.

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Mizuno Adds to Their Iron Line-up with Four New Sets

This year, Mizuno is adding two new sets to its MP line of clubs with the sleek MP-4 and the more friendly MP-54 while also expanding the JPX line to include the EZ and EZ Forged.

Bag DropWhile they may not be as big as some of the names out there (Tilteist, PING, Taylormade, etc.) Mizuno Golf has garnered quite a following especially with their ever growing line of players clubs. Every year, the company updates their line of MP clubs and this year they have introduced the MP-4 and the MP-54 irons. The MP-4 is a full-on, traditional muscle back and the replacement for the MP-69, while the MP-54 replaces the two year old MP-53 and features a cavity back design. In addition to the MP line, Mizuno also has the JPX line of game improvement clubs, and they are adding to that line with the new JPX-EZ and JPX-EZ Forged.

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Volume Three Hundred Sixty-Five

Dyson to face a tribunal, Tiger fails to hit Europe, and the U.S. thanks veterans everywhere for their service.

Hittin' the LinksWelcome to another episode of Hitting the Links, our weekly look at, well, the week in golf.

We are really getting down to the last few weeks of any “serious” golf now on the major tours. Even though the PGA TOUR is technically a few events into it’s 2013-2014 season and the European Tour will hold it’s season-ending event this week, make no mistake – there’s still a lot of “silly” in the season, as our seventh “hole” below illustrates.

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Volume Three Hundred Sixty-Four

Chamblee’s son inspires an apology, a new “cheater” is discovered, and the Race for Dubai is getting close to a finale.

Hittin' the LinksWhen last we met, the CIMB Classic was unresolved and headed to a Monday playoff. In case you missed it, Ryan Moore beat Gary Woodland on the first playoff hole to take the title.

If you did miss it, that’s understandable. Depending on how you count them, there are between three and five “major” tours (PGA TOUR, European Tour, LPGA, Champions Tour, and Web.com Tour) and a number of slightly lesser tours. On any given week, several of them, if not all of them, hold events, vying for our attention.

Next week, for example, the LPGA Tour heads to Japan for the Mizuno Classic at the Kintetsu Kashikojima Country Club in Shima-Shi, Mie. The PGA Tour will make a stop at Sea Island, GA, for the McGladrey Classic. Having just concluded their season, the Champions Tour is on hiatus until Q-School opens Nov. 19 (yes, the Champions Tour still has a qualifying school). The big event of the weekend, however, will be the penultimate tournament of the 2013 European Tour season, the Turkish Airlines Open, where those in the running for the Race to Dubai hope to improve their positions in the standings while Tiger Woods and others just hope to make away with a whole bunch of euros.

I guess what I’m trying to say, is that there is a lot going on, even in the last couple months of 2013. The Woods-Chamblee fiasco is into its third week, another “cheater” has been identified, and one more tour has wrapped up its season. Here are those stories and more in HtL.

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