PGA tour

Power or Finesse in Golf

/ The Grateful Golfer / 13 Comments
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Finesse

I was watching two volleyball games at the local college. The Canadore Panthers, men and women, played against Le Cité college for a regularly scheduled match. The women hit the floor first and then the men. As I watched these young athletes play, I could not help but notice the similarities between of the volleyball matches and golf.

As you can imagine, the women’s match was mostly finesse with some power and the men’s match was mostly power with a bit of finesse. Without dissecting all the possible finer points, I would suggest that the LPGA and the PGA Tours follow the same style of play. Continue reading →

FedEx Cup Starts Today

/ The Grateful Golfer / 3 Comments

The FedEx Cup starts today. I actually forgot that it was here and I overlooked…well everything!

The FedEx Cup is an interesting golf competition because of the “play well – move on” format. At the Barclays, all 125 players will start, but only 100 players will move on to the next event at the Deutsche Bank Championship. The third week at the BMW championship will only have 70 players competing; then at the TOUR Championship, 30 players will be left to vie for the 10 million dollar grand prize. Continue reading →

The Players – Is It the Fifth Major?

/ The Grateful Golfer / 6 Comments

The Players Championship played this weekend is lauded as the Fifth Major.  It is the only significant tournament owned and administered by the PGA Tour.  The majors all have different sponsors:  The Masters is owned by the Augusta National Golf Club; the U.S. Open by the United States Golf Association (USGA); The Open Championship by The R&A, and the PGA Championship by the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA of America).

This tournament was created in 1974 and Jack Nicklaus won the inaugural tournament.  This tournament has a short history, but gathers an elite field every year.  The tournament runs every year at about the same time with the final round sometimes being played on Mother’s Day.  It has a permanent home at TPC Sawgrass since 1982 at the Stadium Course.
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Making The Trip to The Masters!

/ The Grateful Golfer / 7 Comments

shell_houston_open_logoHow important is the Shell Houston Open? Many elite players, who have their invitation to the first Major of 2016, use it as a warm up for The Masters next week. Yet, there are those few players vying for a win to receive their invitation to the big dance! Now that the cut is determined, the pressure to win for some will exponentially grow as the weekend progresses.
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Golf Stats – Strokes Gained

/ The Grateful Golfer / 13 Comments

This is my last installment on golf stats. As previously discussed in two different articles (1,2), golf stats are deceiving. As with all stats, the analyst can draw many different conclusions depending on the criteria that the data is measured against. The PGA Tour is trying to rectify the confusion by introducing a new set of statistics that measure the player’s performance against the field. Sounds interesting.

I decided to copy Mark Broadie’s explanation directly from this website. I thought by trying to simplify this new golf stat, I would just muddy the waters. So here it is in its entirety.

“Mark Broadie is at the forefront of a revolutionary new approach to the game of golf that uses analytics from the financial world to uncover the secrets of the game of golf. He crunches data to show both professional and amateur golfers how to make better decisions on the course.”
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