A Fri Day Newsletter...

Team golf, Sir Nick Faldo's major luck, and faves

Author

Sean Melia
February 16, 2024

Friday, February 16

Hey Everyone,

We now live in a world where days of the week can be split into two words thanks to Tiger Woods. What a flex to name his new brand Sun Day Red.

I found the whole thing pretty underwhelming. I’m also not a person who bought any Tiger Woods Nike gear since high school.

Anyway, I appreciate you opening this Fri Day Newsletter. There are plenty of ways to kill time on a Friday morning on the Internet.

I’d love your help in spreading this newsletter. Forward it along to anyone you think might enjoy my inane musings, and tell them to click on the subscribe button!

Thanks!

Let’s get to it.

How to make team golf work

Team golf has been a topic for the last couple of years. LIV Golf has introduced the idea outside of the national team competitions like the Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup.

I’ve been thinking a bunch about what I’d want from professional team golf and what would work.

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Stop worrying about connection to a place

Setting up teams in golf has always had this odd tension that the teams need to have a connection to a city or country. LIV has shoehorned their teams to look a little like national teams. It’s a clunky way to try to inject some national spirit into the proceedings.

Even the TGL indoor league has tried to force this dynamic. For instance, Keegan Bradley should only be on the Boston Common Golf team.

I think that’s nonsense, and it makes the entire thing feel contrived. Paul Pierce is one of the greatest Boston Celtics of all time. The guy grew up in the shadow of the LA Forum and rooted for the LA Lakers.

Geography cannot be used to build professional golf teams. Tom Brady grew up in California and no one cares he played for the New England Patriots.

What is important is having some sort of home course, but that’s a long way off in the future and not worth the time in this post.

Carve out a dedicated time in the calendar.

Golfers are hard to pin down, so this piece will always be the biggest challenge. And it’s why all this discussion about team golf feels fantastical. It either has to be the only kind of golf that exists outside of the majors, or it needs a solid 8-10 week stretch where players are competing for something meaningful. It doesn’t have to be 72-hole events of stroke play every time either.

Losing should have an impact on teams.

At the end of every soccer season in England, each league sends the three lowest-finishing clubs down to the league below. Those teams are replaced by the three teams in the Championship, which is the second-highest league in English soccer.

If golf was to create some aspect of team golf, you could have two leagues of 20 teams each. Five players on each team. That’s 200 players total. 100 in each league. You wanna get nuts, add a third tier with another 20 teams. 300 players total.

Here’s the fun part, teams get relegated and promoted. The discussion has always been about the “churn” of players gaining and losing their tour cards. But what if entire teams lost a spot in the league?

In soccer, teams that are relegated and promoted have a chance to sign new players, and some players leave a relegated team and move back into the Premier League because they’re good enough in the eyes of another team.

Imagine a team of five players battling to avoid relegation. Imagine player movement in the off-season as players look for new teams and stars that are relegated try to find an opening in the top tier while promoted teams try to bolster their roster.

This is absolutely something that LIV could do right now. They could add 13 more teams “second level" team and have them tee off in a shotgun in the morning. It’s what F1 does, the F2 races on the same track at a different time of race week. Imagine LIV trotting out 52 more spots and actually having a full day of golf but it’s two different events.

They will never do it because then guys like Lee Westwood and Graeme McDowell might have their feelings just when they get relegated.

But if you watch the Sunderland ‘Til I Die trailer below, it becomes clear how much promotion and relegation matter to the teams that aren’t Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool, and Manchester United. Of course, this impacts a city and the ties run very deep between the team and the town, but maybe down the road, that’s what team golf becomes, too.

Make team golf look like other sports.

Golf has always been based on merit. Playing well and winning events means you’re likely to have a job.

If team golf is going to work, it has to look like other team sports. There has to be a legitimate draft to fill out rosters, which would generate a lot of buzz.

There also has to be player movement, and we might have to abandon the merit-based aspect of the game. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see what team Tiger landed on? Would a team take a chance on him? Would a team identify a kid like Caleb Surratt and try to lure him out of college? Could there be a college draft?

Team golf cannot just be golf with teams.

There has to be consequences for playing poorly. There has to be a responsibility to a team. That comes from the team failing. It comes from the fear of pulling four guys down into relegation.

This doesn’t have to replace golf as we know it. But having ten weeks a year where 20 teams compete in a league with a lot of money up for grabs and some sort of trophy at the end would be cool. It would also be cool to watch players fight to keep their team in the top tier, and it would be fun to watch teams fight for promotion.

Right now, LIV Golf’s team dynamic is all about who wins. But sports are also interesting when there’s a loser who feels a palpable consequence for playing poorly.

It’s why the Super Bowl is so compelling. There has been as much talk about Kyle Shannahan’s overtime decision as there has been about Patrick Mahomes’ place in history.

These things don’t come in the blink of an eye, but team golf cannot just be something that the players create to make more money and provide comfort and fun.

The Ryder Cup is not comfortable, and it’s why Zach Johnson lost his mind last week. Apparently, people were heckling him about his captainship during the Waste Management. The Ryder Cup was 4.5 months ago.

Team golf needs to drum up that kind of emotion, it would take time. But the way it’s built now, it will never reach any sort of fever pitch.

Double Click

I’m going to use this section to “Double Click” on something I discovered or thought about from the week. Could be anything; in this case, I want to talk about Nick Faldo’s major count.

In my “Five Pro Mulligans” podcast this week, I realized that Nick Faldo might be the benefactor of two of the biggest choke jobs in Masters history.

First, he beat Scott Hoch in the 1989 Masters after Hoch missed a very short putt on the first playoff hole.

Faldo rolled home a 25-foot birdie putt on the next hole to claim his first green jacket.

Then, seven years later, Faldo was on the receiving end of Greg Norman’s famous meltdown on Sunday at Augusta.

Faldo won six majors. He is a “Sir.” He made millions as the CBS lead analyst. He’s the spokesman for Sqairz shoes. He’s won the most majors (6) of any European since World War I. He has the second most majors of any non-American behind Gary Player. Harry Vardon won seven from 1898-1914.

If Hoch and Norman don’t poop their pants, Faldo has four majors, putting him behind Spaniard Seve Ballesteros who has five. Six majors is just a huge cut-off in this era. Phil Mickelson has six, Brooks Koepka has five, Rory McIlroy has four.

On top of all that, Norman would have secured his third major, which changes the way we speak about him.

A pretty incredible pair of green jackets for Sir Nick.

Listen to my Mulligans pod here… here are three of the mulligans I give out…

  1. Tom Watson: 2009 approach on 18 at The Open Championship

  2. Scott Hoch: 1989 putt in the playoff against Faldo in The Masters

  3. Thomas Bjorn: 2003 bunker shot on 16 at Royal St. George’s in the Open Championship.

Merch Table

One way to help support me in my quest to play every course in the Bay State would be to spend a little money on some Bay State Golf swag. Check it all out here.

When I’m not golfing…

I’m reading…

  • Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevins is the newest novel I’m reading. I’m just 45 pages in, but it’s excellent so far. It’s set in Cambridge and focuses on two characters who are both in college and studying video game design.

  • I thought this piece “Tiger Woods is trying to move on” by Kevin Van Valkenburg was outstanding. One wild piece is that the media may not use photos of Tiger in Nike apparel unless it’s an “iconic moment” or something.

I’m listening to…

I’m eating…

  • Before seeing Foy Vance, we had dinner at The Wilder. I had the chopped steak. It was insanely good. Very cool place.

  • I have to give a shoutout to these Trader Joe’s mini ice cream cones that I bought last week. They’re like a mini-Drumstick.

I’m drinking…  

  • I haven’t stayed completely dry since January ended, but I’ve made an effort to watch my drinking more closely. Guinness “0” is pretty good. It’s not as good as the real thing on draft, but it might be as good as the real thing in a can.

  • We had some friends over for the Super Bowl, and they brought a beer cocktail called the Spaghett. It has Miller High Life, Aperol, and lime juice.

I’m watching…

  • We watched the first episode of The Tourist. An Australian mystery series starring Jamie Dornan (The Fall). Dornan’s character loses his memory and has no idea who he is in a car crash. He’s trying to piece it all together, and, guess what, there are some bad guys after him. The Australian outback is a cool setting for a show.

  • Very excited for the last episode of True Detective.

  • The Genesis Open in LA is the first event that really makes it feel like spring, and the golf season, are close. I will be watching this week.

  • Also, The Regime looks kind of awesome.

PLUGS

New stuff:

  • Bay State Golf Podcast: Five Mulligans

  • We got back in the studio at New England Golf Journal and interviewed Sean Noonan, who played pro golf for about a decade and is now the head golf coach at St. John’s Shrewsbury (Youtube).

Old stuff: 

I'm (shamelessly) plugging...

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