Smoltz Trying To Win The Golfing Lottery

The former Brave, Red Sock and Cardinal is one of 9,052 golfers attempting to qualify for the U.S. Open.

Anyone with a handicap index of 1.4 or below can enter the tournament, which begins with 111 local qualifiers spread out across the U.S. with satellite locations in the U.K. and Japan as well.

If he is one of a handful of people who qualify from each site, he'll advance a 36 hole sectional qualifier and from there, the going really gets tough. He'd have to compete not only with the other top flight amateurs that made the previous cut, but non-exempted PGA tour professionals, club pros, college players and other excellent sticks all anxious to make it to the big stage.

Tiger Woods has called Smoltz the "best non-PGA Tour golfer" he's ever seen and has predicted that he could make a Senior PGA Tour when he turns 50. Right now, Smoltz sports a +2 handicap (as in two under par) with several rounds of 65 already this year. He once beat Annika Sorenstam in a fun match and has shot a scorching 63 (nine under par) at the Floridian Golf & Yatch Club in Palm City, Florida.

Smotlz also has a some features on this property any golfer would die for:

Smoltz’s backyard, however, looks like a mini country club replete with a couple of synthetic greens, nine teeing grounds and a 10,000-square-foot practice green. Smoltz is involved with Southwest Greens International, which builds synthetic-turf greens, tees and athletic fields, so his yard “basically [became] a showcase for the company.”

“It was designed for me to go to the next level,” said Smoltz, “and I have not utilized it the way I would like yet.”

Even with all the skill and advantages Smoltz has, it's still going to take a good deal of luck for him to make it. The final field of the U.S. Open is composed of 156 players, but the majority of those spots are occupied by exemptions granted to anyone who has won the tournament in the past ten years, any other major in the past three years, last year's top 30 from the PGA tour money list, the top 15 from the previous year's European Tour money list, the top 50 in the World Golf rankings among others. And most of the ones not taken by exemptions are won by tour pros in qualifying.

Last year, there were 15 amateurs in the field at the Open and it would be safe to assume that there will be a similar number this time around. So that's roughly 8,900 non-professionals (9,052 minus the Tour and club pros trying out) competing for 15 spots and the right to get their ass kicked by the best in the world at Pebble Beach in June. Even if you grant that Smoltz is in the top 15% of the field, that still gives him only a scant 1% chance of qualifying. And all it takes is one bad round along the way to knock you out of contention.

As the former dominant starter and closer said:

The one thing [in pitching] is you can get away with a lot of mistakes. In golf, you have to play your foul balls.

A-Rod For Sportsman Of The Year?

So, it's official, Derek Jeter won the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year Award. It's easy to understand why: The Yankees won the World Series this year, he's been an excellent player for a long time and nothing short of a class act.

What I can't possibly fathom, however, is the fact that Joel Sherman thinks that "If the competition were A-Rod vs. Jeter, it is not even close: Rodriguez is the Sportsman of the Year". He elaborates:

Alex Rodriguez should be the Sportsman of the Year. Before you hit me with how that title should go to someone who embodies the best in sports let’s remember that both Pete Rose and Mark McGwire have won the award, and before long we might remember that Tiger Woods has won twice.

Would you like a side of perspective to go along with your triple-stack of hindsight, Joel?

How does what happened with Tiger Woods over the weekend (if even the most salacious speculation is true) in any way alter whether he embodied "the best in sports" or more accurately, as the award says, was "the athlete or team whose performance that year most embodies the spirit of sportsmanship and achievement" in 1996 or 2000 years before he even laid eyes on his wife?

Pete Rose won the award in 1975 when he capped off a great regular season (5th in the MVP voting) by being named the the World Series MVP, ten years before he bet on baseball and almost 15 years before the rumors of those indiscretions came to light. Mark McGwire shared it with Sammy Sosa in 1998, six years before androstenedione was considered to be a steroid by Congress.

If Sports Illustrated had a crystal ball, perhaps they wouldn't have given the awards to Rose or McGwire in '75 & '98 (the Woods assertion is flatly ridiculous), but they need only a rearview mirror to realize that A-Rod was far from the right choice this year.

So what's Sherman's argument for Rodriguez?

Sports are publicly messier these days, and we should not run away from that. Heck, the initial broken story on Rodriguez’s steroid use was published by Sports Illustrated. He also touches on the advancement of sports medicine as he came back successfully from significant hip surgery months after undergoing the operation. And he was again a great player, this time finally in the postseason, as well.

In the end, A-Rod offers a story of second chances and redemption. He was a better teammate and was rewarded with the most positive feedback yet as a person while scoring that elusive championship.

So we should give A-Rod the Sportsman of the Year Award because he did steroids, recovered from an injury and was a "better teammate" (mostly because he was such a shitty teammate before)? How about the fact that Derek Jeter is widely assumed to never have done steroids, was not injured this year and has always been a great teammate?

Sherman has been pushing this story of the faux comeback of A-Rod for quite some time, but in reality, Jeter is the one who improved over last year in ways that can actually be measured.

Jeter raised his OPS+ from 102 to 132 and his UZR from negative to positive. A-Rod played in the fewest games he has since 1995 and had his lowest HR and RBI totals since 1997. But don't let the facts get in the way of a good story, Joel.

The award doesn't say anything about "second chances and redemption" it rewards "sportsmanship and achievement" and both of those things Derek Jeter has - and has had for a long time - in spades.

The New Yankee Stadium Of Golf

[Photo]

Since Matt brought the topic up before, here is an interesting (albeit pretty one-sided) article I saw about the course they played the Barclays' Championship at, Liberty National:

If you haven't heard about Liberty National, it's the world's most expensive grassy view lot -- a former oil tank farm that had all the visual appeal of a collapsing tenement building, even the rats avoided it. But it was located just across the water from the southern tip of Manhattan, roughly 1,000 yards from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

So a rich guy bought it and built a private golf course that has generated more conversation, commentary and criticism than a penal U.S. Open track. As one player sarcastically pointed out, it's probably no accident Lady Liberty faces the other direction.

What follows is a bunch of tour pros trashing the place, similar to what we heard from some players about the New Yankee Stadium. Similarly, Liberty National cost far more than other courses to construct ($250M) and demands a $500,000 membership initiation fee before annual dues are factored in, which I'm going to blindly guess are north of $50,000. However, it's only a short private shuttle-boat ride from downtown Manhattan which offers a level convenience which is unmatched in NYC area golf.

The owner, Paul Fireman freely admits that the course as a poor investment, and the designer Tom Kite readily acknowledges that due to the way the course was constructed, nothing is natural about it. For 30 years, they played the tournament at historic Westchester Country Club and no such kvetching was heard. Sound familiar?

Sure, most of the bitching from the players was unwarranted. And all of it was unnecessary, if you ask Vijay Singh:

"One who doesn't worry about what the golf course is, and just plays one shot at a time," Singh said. "You go out there and start criticizing the golf course, then you might as well not show up."

The great thing about golf, like baseball, is that everyone plays under the same conditions. So when it all shakes out, regardless of the difficulty or quirkiness of the place you are competing, the playing field is level.

The Bethpage Report

Yesterday, for the second Tuesday in a row, I headed out to Bethpage State Park. This time, however, I wasn't planning on playing 18 and we didn't get rained out. I love to play golf, but couldn't care less about the PGA Tour on a week to week basis. Like many of you, however, if I'm trying to take a nap on a Sunday, golf is the perfect backdrop. It's almost as if the announcers know you are trying to sleep.

That said, I love the US Open. I think I only like the British Open because it's on when you wake up in the morning and I'm not captivated by the Masters or the PGA Championship. But the US Open winds my clock. I love the fact that they take an incredibly challenging course and make it impossibly hard. Having the winning score end up around par every year is also a refreshing change from tour events like last week, when the winning score was -18.

As is the case with all of golf's majors, the early part of the week leading up to the US Open is reserved for players to play practice rounds, get a feel for the course, and fend of all the annoying autograph hounds. Despite the practice being explicitly forbidden by the tournament, even on practice days, it's still wildly prevalent.

Every time a player goes from a green to the next tee they have to walk past dozens of people sticking out US Open hats, flags, posters, shirts and other memorabilia for them to sign. It's the reason that Tiger sneaks out at 7am and only plays 9 holes. It's probably cool to walk away with a US Open flag with a bunch of signatures on it, but in order to do so, you have to constantly pester the players for them. Not my cup of tea.

My friend Mike got our Trophy Club passes on Craigslist for half of face value including shipping. Why they were $60 to begin with is beyond me, but we got a pretty good deal. We took the LIRR from Penn Station out to the Farmingdale stop. It was $14 a person, with shuttle service right to the course and took a little over an hour both ways. Highly recommended if you are going out to the course from Manhattan. I promise it's faster and less of a hassle than driving.

We checked out the driving range and short game area when we first got there. One thing that was truly amazing is that each player practices with the same kind of balls they play with. As a result, there is a staff of 3-4 volunteers at all times taking the balls off the practice green and sorting them by brand. The entire tournament is staffed by volunteers. It's too bad the USGA doesn't make any money off of this thing or there isn't $7.5M in prize money given away, cause you'd think that these poor schlubs sorting the fucking golf balls might deserve to be compensated for their efforts.

We walked the entire course in reverse, and below you can find some of the better pictures I took. You can check out the entire layout here.

#5 - 478 Yard Par 4

# 6 - 408 Yard Par 4

#10 - 435 Yard Par 4

#17 - 207 Yard Par 3

#4 - 517 Yard Par 5

What's amazing about #4 is that #7 is 525 yards... and it's a Par 4. Even for the pros, that's pretty ridiculous. At a certain point, it's not a two shot hole anymore. There are 3 par 4's over 500 yards at Bethpage. That ain't right.

The total length of the course as the players will take it on this weekend is 7,426 as a Par 70. To give you an idea, that's about 200-400 yards longer than most tour stops and about 1,000 yards or more than the tracks your average Sunday slashers call home. And most of those are par 72's.

I'd be willing to bet two things I noticed yesterday are going to lead to somewhat lower scores this year than when Tiger won the Open here in 2002. #1) It was wet. This might make it more difficult for your average Joe, but wetter conditions allow the pros to hold fairways and greens and they'd gladly trade the distance they lose off their drives to be hitting from the fairway and have their approach shots sit softly on the greens. #2) The rough is graduated. This means that right off the fairways, there won't be the six inch rough that vexed the players last time. The rough is still long, no doubt, but it's not nearly as punitive as it was in past Opens, namely when it was at Winged Foot in '05 the winning score was Geoff Ogilvy at +5.

I doubt I'm going to make it out for any of the actual tournament days, but it's probably for the better. As Malcom Gladwell said in a conversation with Bill Simmons a few years back, golf is probably the sport that has the most to gain by being televised live. You miss a ton when you are on the course but watching on TV, they can omnisciently bring you all of the best action.

Inspire the Ire: John Smotlz

[Every so often we feel the need to drum up some hatred for a divisional rival, or in this case a new member of an opposing team. Today, our part-time labor relations correspondent and half-assed internet detective John checks in with a report on John Smoltz]

I began researching John Smoltz hoping to find some heckling gold, just one fact despicable enough to inspire a great summer of yelling at the television screen. Unfortunately, there was not a while lot of fruit from my labor. A few things though: He's crazy Jesusy. (via the 700 Club) [Not the Philly sports blog, The 700 Level]

You have people that say, ‘It’s easy, John Smoltz, to share your testimony. You have money. You have family. You have success. You have power. It’s easy for you to talk about those things.’ My rebuttal is it’s even harder, because if I have those things, I don’t need God. It’s when you have all those things and the distractions of the world tell you you’ve got to gain them. It’s even harder to share this when you have it all.

None of that made even the slightest amount of sense. "It's ever harder to share this when you have it all"? Riiiight. Is it harder to share because of the $130M you have in career earnings making you the 13th highest paid player in baseball history?

He once broke out this quote in regards to gay marriage:

Smoltz, a devout Christian, criticized those who want to legalize gay marriage,” the AP reported. “‘What’s next? Marrying an animal?’ he asked derisively.

That's some pretty strong editorialization, but the quote still stands. Then two years later, he and his wife of 16 years (and 4 children) got divorced. Nothing like judging someone else's marriage as a gateway to legalizing bestiality, and then not being able to work out your own despite having four children together. That's why (especially as a supposedly "devout Christian") you probably shouldn't judge other people's personal lives; because some asshole like me can dig it up on the internet four and a half years later and return the favor.

As far as "ire" goes though, that's pretty mild. Apparently, John Smoltz is not only a great pitcher, he is a good father, donates his time to the community, enjoys alcoholic beverages, and most importantly is “the best golfer outside the PGA Tour that [Tiger Woods] has observed”. Damn it John Smoltz.

Your golf game gives you somewhat of a pass, Mr. Smoltz, but nothing can excuse your selling of your soul to the most fascist of all organizations (the fackin' Red Sawx) in the most liberal of all states. That sanctioned and evil gayness in Boston will soon consume your soul, and never let go until you are wedded to a gay sheep named Steve. Baaaah.