Who knew? Corey’s a blogger!

On his most recent post Corey says he’s working over his ideas for pairings. And Monday, right on (marketing) schedule, he’ll begin sorting it all out:

Monday night, Sept. 6, my Assistant Captains and I will all get together, have a great dinner (with the exception of Jeff Sluman, who will hopefully be able to teleconference us from South Korea) and have a meeting of the minds to make the final determination of who will round out Team USA.

These picks will be very important for the 2010 United States Ryder Cup team so the evening may very well last into the wee hours. One thing I know for sure: This will be a very difficult evening.

If I may suggest, Captain Pavin, just go to GolfTripGenius.com and get started with our one-of-a-kind pairings engine. Then you and your assistants can start tweaking.

According to Golf360 this morning, Colin Montgomerie has made two critical, if not controversial choices for his Ryder Cup team.

Sergio Garcia has been named a vice-captain, Monty’s fourth, along with Thomas Bjorn, Darren Clarke and Paul McGinley. “There’s one word that describes Sergio Garcia, and that’s ‘passion.’ I think it’s a great asset to the European cause to regain the Ryder Cup to have him on board.” (Oh, brother.)

Also reported by Golf360, there will be Welsh representation on Team Europe as well. Apparently, Monty has named Rhys Davies his … driver?

“Rhys will become my personal buggy driver,” Montgomerie said. “He’ll look after me around the course. He is a Ryder Cup player of the future, the very near future, the guy with the million-dollar putting stroke.

“I felt it was important to have some Welsh representation on the golf course that week.”

Sorry, but I don’t know where to put the names of the vice-captains and the “buggy driver” on my Ryder Cup team roster in GolfTripGenius.com.

That was this past Monday, before the first round of the Playoffs, reported on the PGA’s website. What Corey Pavin is probably liking now is the way Tiger played on Thursday.

Pavin wants to choose Tiger. And he wants Tiger to play well. They both have a lot to prove.

If Tiger is one of four Captain’s picks, who are the others?

Let’s put aside for a few minutes Captains’ picks and optimal pairings and remember an earlier day, at least before 1952. That was the year the Rules of Golf changed to no longer allow, even encourage the stymie. Years ago I wrote a short blog post about the stymie, stimulated by Eric Gordon’s finding an ages-old scorecard including a “stymie gauge.”

Geoff Shackelford’s book, The Future of Golf, reminds us that Bobby Jones of all people made a case to reintroduce the stymie into the match play game. Jones said this in “Golf Is My Game”: ”

With the stymie in the game, match-play golf becomes an exciting duel in which the player must always be on guard agains a sudden, often demoralizing thrust. More than anything else, it points up the value of always being the closer to the hole on the shot to the green and after the first putt. The player who can maintain the upper hand in the play up to the hole rarely suffers from a stymie.

In my observation, the stymie has more often been the means of enforcing the decision in favor of the deserving player, rather than the contrary. I think it merits a respected place in the game. I know a return to it would greatly enhance the interest and excitement of match play golf for player and spectator alike.

OK, so, imagine how the stymie might impact The Ryder Cup matches. Since Seve no longer competes in the Cup, who today would be its most proficient user?

OK, so what if …

What if Captains Pavin and Montgomerie did as I fancifully suggested and began their team tasking on GolfTripGenius.com? After all, The Ryder Cup at its simplest is just a big – very big – golf trip, isn’t it?

First thing Captain Pavin as organizer might do is insert his eight qualifying team members into a new trip.

Captain Montgomerie, alas, is still waiting for his eight qualifiers to be confirmed. (But you can follow their progress at the Euro team qualifications page.)

Steve S sent me a refresher  - and some fresh thinking – on Ryder Cup history.

Millionaire seed merchant Samuel Ryder could never have imagined a place like Celtic Manor, he writes, the site of this year’s Ryder Cup matches. The 7,493-yard Twenty Ten [get it? 2010?] course is about as far removed from the Donald Ross-designed Worcester country Club, site of the first Ryder Cup back in 1925, as today’s titanium hybrids are from the KRO-FLITE 2 iron that Walter Hagen carried back in the golden era of sport when “the Haig” was a household name … along with other sports giants like Ruth, Tilden, Tunney …

Fact is, these matches have changed so much there’s little that resembles the original event.

Hagen was the victorious captain of the U.S. team, which, like Ted Ray’s GB&I squad, was composed of eight, not 12, players. The format in the early days of the Ryder Cup consisted of four (4) foursomes – or alternate shot – matches on the first day and eight (8) singles matches on the second. The captains’ pairings that created the two-man teams and the order for the singles matches were undoubtedly decided over a bottle of bootleg Scotch and in a room filled with thick smoke from Ray’s ever-present pipe and Hagen’s officially-endorsed Lucky Strikes.

Steve creates quite an scene, but then brings the picture up-to-date by introducing the contemporary issue:

Like the length of golf courses and the design of golf clubs, the responsibilities and pressures facing Captains Corey Pavin and Colin Montgomerie have changed radically. Some of the most interesting and, some would argue, crucial decision-making still surrounds the pairings. Whom should I pair with whom? Whom should I send out first … last? The mathematical combinations and permutations and nuances are mind-boggling … and that’s before factoring in such considerations as Paul Azinger’s “small groups, tight bonds,” the successful strategy the 2008 U.S. captain borrowed from the Navy Seals training manual.

“Mind-boggling” indeed. Why don’t the captains just turn over their pairings and order of play to GolfTripGenius.com?

I last complained about my experiences in sand bunkers as a kind of pain not too unlike what goes on in a back room with a sadistic interrogator sporting a car battery and electrodes.  I also referenced a classic golf book called The Nine Bad Shots of Golf and What to do About Them, first published in 1947. A few of you are curious about how this title came about, because you, like me, have a steady repertoire of ugly shots that numbers into the double digits.  Well, let’s hope authors Jim Dante, 5-time New Jersey PGA president and Leo Diegel, the 2-time PGA champion never kept their own scorecards, because their math is suspect.  Irrespective of the book’s title, they identify 11 possible bad shots in the book’s table of contents.

And what are these crimes against par?  Two of the shots are known to every person who has ever picked-up a golf club: Slicing and Hooking.  Along with the third putt, the Slice is undoubtedly one of the most popular shots in golf. Which of us right-handed golfers hasn’t gazed skyward as their tee ball arcs to the right, in fact, relentlessly toward the right, and then further right, finally disappearing beyond a forest of 100-foot trees, or into a lake beside a fairway two holes over from the one we are playing? On some golf courses in Arizona, the finale to the perfectly executed Slice may come as a crescendo of breaking glass, as another outdoor patio table falls victim to a tragic case of the “rights”.

A bad shot with an altogether different personality is the Hook.  As Lee Trevino famously said, “You can talk to a fade but a hook won’t listen.” Why won’t it listen?  Because it is an arrogant, nasty and many times violent shot. It usually comes off the clubface too hot, too low and too short to have any redeeming qualities.  The one exception might be on dry and fast fairways, where, if you start your ball way right, the Hook overspin buys you an extra 100 yards. But Hooking shouldn’t drive down your self-esteem the way Slicing does.  After all, Ben Hogan, unarguably one of the game’s greatest players, was know as Captain Hook for several years.  Around 1946, Hogan corrected his problem by pronating his hands on the takeaway. Since most of us think pronating is a fertility ritual performed by Mesoamerican shamans, the Hogan cure is of no relevance whatsoever.

Dante and Diegel next address a classic bad shot: Topping. They introduce the topic thusly: “Topping a golf shot is rarely the sin of a golfer with much experience.  It is the common fault of the duffer and the veritable bane of the beginner”.  In addition to suddenly revealing the hand of a ghostwriter, (I just don’t see the old time Pros coming up with the word “veritable”), with this sentence the authors seem to be picking-on only the less talented player. This is pure nonsense. We all know that any “experienced” golfer with even a moderate hangover is perfectly capable of skulling one 30 yards off the first tee. However, the authors are on firmer ground when they write: “No golfer needs to be reminded of the immediate and complete catastrophe that can follow a top”.

I know just reading about these bad shots causes your lower GI tract to start churning around like a tropical depression. Therefore, I will finish off today with only one more swing fault described in the book in gory detail. It sounds fairly exotic, but like the chicken pox virus, it never quite goes away.  The authors call it “Sclaffing”.  Although this sounds like the method barbaric Canadian hunters use to harvest seal pups, sclaffing is, in modern day golf parlance, “hitting the big ball first”, or driving your club head into the ground well behind the ball.  Quoting the  authors again: “Basically, sclaffing comes from practically a complete violation of nearly all the rules of form”.  Translation: if you sclaff, you suck.

Note that I am conscientious of not violating any copyright laws by offering you the fast, simple cures Dante and Diegel prescribe for all these Bad Shots. And because their masterwork has been out-of-print 60 years, you may not find a copy on Amazon.  However, if you have ever been plagued by any of these problems, I recommend you head immediately to the driving range and dig the secrets out of the dirt.  Me? I’m going to Starbucks to get a vanilla latté and re-read the “what to do about them” sections of The Nine Bad Shots of Golf and What to do About Them.

Dante, Jim, and Diegel, Leo. The Nine Bad Shots of Golf and What to do About Them: New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947.

Why is one of the easiest shots for the golf professional so freakin’ hard for me?  I am talking, of course, about the bunker shot.  Just seeing those monsters at St. Andrews on TV made my palms sweat. I remember watching Seve Ballesteros years ago entertaining the Open gallery at the Royal St. George’s practice green, hitting bunker shot after bunker shot to within two feet of the holes: high, low, long, short, downhill lie, radical spin, no spin — the mesmerized gallery would call out the shot, and the short game maestro would execute “to order” while flashing that famous Seve grin.  It was just amazing to witness the artistry of his bunker play.  Just Seve being Seve.

We all know the tour most pros are so confident of a successful up and down they purposely aim for greenside bunkers when they have to bail-out. So what’s my problem?  I’ve read the magazines, watched the videos, spent the money on lessons exclusively devoted to improving my bunker play — and my inconsistent, inept, and tragicomic antics in sand still cost me two or three shots a round. Then I come home to recover with a cold beer or two, and watch Luke Donald (sand save percentage = 74) or Corey Pavin (80%) splash out to within 20 inches nearly every time.

One wise teacher told me that the best way to avoid sand trouble is to avoid bunkers.  Gee, thanks for that $50 piece of advice.  If I was good enough to avoid sand hell, I would probably be skilled enough not to blade 40% of my escape attempts into the forest, and dump another 50% in the very same trap.

Of course, every once in a great while a tour pro will remind me of me.  Recall the name Tommy Nakajima? In 1978, the 48-event-winner on the Japan Tour was in contention at the Open Championship at St. Andrews.  During the third round, poor Tommy found the 17^th green in regulation, and then proceeded to putt into the notorious Road Hole Bunker. It took him four shots to get out, and he recorded a quintuple bogey.  The British press has ever since referred to the bunker as “the Sands of Nakajima”. Then there was David Duval’s nightmarish quad after thrashing around in the same sandpit in the 2000 Open. Last week, it was Anders Hansen who recorded the snowman after 4 blows in the sand.

I have been very lucky to play at Pine Valley.  I have been very unlucky to hit into a vast Sahara known as “Hell’s half acre” on the par five 7^th, which is sometimes referenced to as the largest non-seaside bunker in the world.  During the same round, my tee shot on number 10 ended up in “the devil’s asshole”, a small bunker protecting the green entrance. The pit is so deep the US Department of Labor’s Mine Safety Administration should regulate it.  I would still be in there had I not eventually employed my “go to” sand shot: the soft underhanded toss.

And just when I’ve read all the tips and techniques ever written in the English language, every last one demanding that you open your stance and play the ball well-forward, along comes the respected teacher-to-the-stars Stan Utley who insists that the open stance is all wrong – just set-up normally and swing away.  Uh, sorry, Stan.  I’ll now lying five, still laboring with my S wedge.

The classic, The Nine Bad Shots of Golf (New York: McGraw Hill, 1947), is only half correct: “Playing from the sand, especially from bunkers around the green is perhaps the most feared phase of golf. The knowledge that it is absolutely necessary to get the ball out of the sand, yet not hit it hard enough to knock it over the green, is terrifying to the duffer. Yet it shouldn’t be, for the technique of playing from the sand (here comes the lie) is no harder to learn and probably easier than playing from the tee or fairway.”

The greatest golf writer of them all, Bernard Darwin, once described bunkers as “greedy, lurking enemies”.  I couldn’t agree more.

Only the software development geeks at GolfTripGenius.com will read this entire post.

Golf ball dimples, paradoxically, do increase drag slightly. But they also increase “Magnus lift”, that peculiar lifting force experienced by rotating bodies travelling through a medium. Magnus lift is present because a driven golf ball has backspin. The same Magnus effect can cause a ball to hook or slice if it has sideways spin.

Contrary to simple ideas of trajectories in a vacuum, golf balls do not travel in inverted parabolas. They follow an “impetus trajectory”. This is because of the combination of drag (which reduces horizontal speed late in the trajectory) and Magnus lift (which supports the ball during the initial part of the trajectory, making it relatively straight). The trajectory can even curve upwards at first, depending on conditions!

A golf ball leaves the tee with a speed of about 70 m/s and a backspin of at least 50 rev/s. The Magnus force can be thought of as due to the relative drag on the air on the top and bottom portions of the golf ball: the top portion is moving slower relative to the air around it, so there is less drag on the air that goes over the ball. The boundary layer is relatively thin, and air in the not-too-near region moves rapidly relative to the ball. The bottom portion moves fast relative to the air around it; there is more drag on the air passing by the bottom, and the boundary (turbulent) layer is relatively thick; air in the not-too-near region moves more slowly relative to the ball. The Bernoulli force produces lift. (Alternatively, one could say that “the flow lines past the ball are displaced down, so the ball is pushed up.”)

A difficulty comes near the transition region between laminar flow and turbulent flow. At low speeds, the flow around the ball is laminar. As speed is increased, the bottom part tends to go turbulent first. But turbulent flow can follow a surface much more easily than laminar flow. As a result, the laminar flow lines around the top break away from the surface sooner than otherwise, and there is a net upward displacement of the flow lines. The Magnus lift becomes negative.

The dimples aid the rapid formation of a turbulent boundary layer around the golf ball in flight, giving more lift. Without them the ball would travel in more of a parabolic trajectory, hitting the ground sooner (and not coming straight down). This was discovered by accident in the early days of golf when golfers noticed that old roughened golf balls went farther.

Despite the drag, a dimpled golf ball can even go farther in air than it would in vacuum given the same initial velocity and low angle. However, a golf ball shot at 45° and 70 m/s in vacuum would go 500 metres to the first bounce, which exceeds all records.

References:
Lord Rayleigh, “On the Irregular Flight of a Tennis Ball”, Scientific Papers I, pg 344.
Briggs Lyman J., “Effect of Spin and Speed on the Lateral Deflection of a Baseball; and the Magnus Effect for Smooth Spheres”, Am. J. Phys. 27, 589 (1959). Briggs was trying to explain the mechanism behind the “curve ball” in baseball, using specialized apparatus in a wind tunnel at the NBS. He stumbled on the reverse effect by accident, because his model “baseball” had no stitches on it. The stitches on a baseball create turbulence in flight in much the same way that the dimples on a golf ball do.
R. Watts and R. Ferver, “The Lateral Force on a Spinning Sphere Aerodynamics of a Curveball”, Am. J. Phys. 55, 40 (1986).
Steve Haake, “Physics and Golf? You must be joking!” Physics World 10, 76 (1997).
Journal of Applied Physics 20, 821 (1949) by Davies.
American Journal of Physics 56, 933 (1988) by McPhee and Andrews.
“The Physics of Golf” by Theodore P. Jorgensen

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Updated 1997 by PEG.
Updated 1993 by CDF.
Original by Craig DeForest.

“Champagne” Tony Lema — the name alone evokes late nights and good times.  Going through piles of golf books, I spotted an old paperback copy of “Golfers’ Gold – An Insider’s View of Pro Golf and Pro Golfers” by “Champagne” Tony Lema.  Johnny Miller says the author, who died tragically in a 1966 airplane crash at age 32, was second in tour popularity only to Arnold Palmer. Lema won tour 12 events, and, in 1963, finished one stroke back to Jack in the Masters.  But it wasn’t Tony Lema’s golf talent that made him such a bright light on Tour.  As his autobiography makes clear, he was simply a “capital F” fun guy.  That started me thinking: if you could magically invite a golf professional, past or present, on your next golf trip, who would you pick?  It would be a totally subjective choice, but here are a few ideas to kick around at the 19^th hole.

Rolling back the clock, there were some real characters on the professional tour, many of whom would be a blast to travel with.  How about funnyman and 1947 Master’s winner Jimmy Demaret, known in his day as Houston’s Ambassador to the World? “Golf and sex are the only things you can enjoy without being good at” is a typical Demaret line.  Or, after an evening out in Palm Springs: “I know I had a couple drinks last night, but I didn’t expect to wake-up in Sun Valley, Idaho.”  He was also known for his vast wardrobe (by his accounting, 71 pairs of slacks and 39 sports coats), and his close friendship with Ben Hogan when it was conventional wisdom that the Hawk didn’t have any friends.  Demaret knew everybody in golf and in many celebrity orbits beyond — but it would be great to sit next to him on the golf trip bus for the Hogan stories alone.

Sam Snead was a non-stop storyteller, and most of his tales had at least an R rating.  His hillbilly shtick would probably be fun. How can you not love a guy with one-liners like this: “The three things I fear most in life are lightning, Ben Hogan and a downhill putt”.

I’d like to have Ben Crenshaw at the dinner table ‘cause I like talking course design, and he is one of the best architects working today.  Plus, you get all those Harvey Penick memories and an encyclopedic knowledge of golf history.

I also think Arnie would be great to have along on my trip, but he’d have to loosen-up.  There are a lot more stories in his arsenal than the ones he shared in his authorized biography.  Arnie on Jack, unfiltered? Priceless.

Tom Watson has a straight arrow reputation, but is anyone more articulate about the game? He has known all the modern greats, and he is fearless in his opinions.  And one of the few players with the insight to say, “the person I fear most in the last two rounds is myself.”  Watson is classy and interesting.  Put him on my trip roster anytime.

The Merry Mex, Lee Trevino, has that king-sized, happy-go-lucky personality, but the word is he shut it all down once he walked off the golf course.  Lee reputedly liked to order room service in his hotel room.  No problem, but he can’t be on my fantasy trip.  Too bad, he always seems to have something interesting to say.

Modern players you might want to roll with?  How about Darren Clarke or Woosie? You’ll have company at the pub until the sun comes up.  Faldo seems like he would be a fun guy now that the competitive career is over. Daly? Uh, no.  Tommy Armour III? A true party animal, but probably some mixed opinions out there. Ian Poulter, if his après golf patter is his colorful as his wardrobe. Phil, if you like informed opinions and want to learn the flop.   Steve Stricker and Tom Lehman if you want some good Midwestern manners along for the ride. Boo Weekley has got to be a laugh riot on the road, and he’s fun to listen to. How about Fred Couples?  Everything is more laid back with Freddie. He’d make any fantasy trip one to remember.

Don’t forget David Feherty and Gary McCord.  With that duo along for a weeklong golf trip, your funny bone will be the only body part more worn out than your back.

Who do you want to invite on your next golf trip?  Let me know, I’ll see if I can arrange it.