2019 US Open- Pebble Beach

Time to Mo Vaughn

RIP Dernell
SoSH Member
Mar 24, 2008
7,202
This kid, Hovland, looks good. Really good.
Hovland is incredibly impressive. He's going to have quite the career.

And Brooks is winning this.
Won the 2018 US Amateur. Low Amateur at the masters (32nd place overall), low amateur for the US Open (12th place overall) and broke Jack Niklaus's US Open Amateur record by 2 strokes. He's 21 and will be going pro this week.

I noticed him on Thursday in the featured group with Molinari and Koepka. Plenty of distance off the tee, extremely poised both out on the course and in his post round interview. I think there's a good chance he's in the top 10 in world rankings in the next 3-4 years.
 

cshea

Member
SoSH Member
Nov 15, 2006
36,047
306, row 14
There’s not a whole lot they can do to Pebble. It is a short course, and there isn’t enough land to lengthen it. The greens are tiny so they only have so many hole locations to work with. It was still hard, but for true carnage they need weather/wind. They didn’t get it. I thought it was still tough. A missed fairway or green made life miserable.

NLU talked about this on their podcast, but the other option is changing the scorecard. Make 6 or 18 (or both if we’re getting really crazy) a par 4 and the same amount of strokes will be taken but the perception will be it was harder because the score would be lower in relation to par. Woodland would’ve been -9 if 6 was a par 4 for instance. Koepka -6 under the same scenario.
 

cshea

Member
SoSH Member
Nov 15, 2006
36,047
306, row 14
Also on Hovland- The kinda crazy thing is he’s a stud but was probably the 2nd best player on his Oklahoma State team this year. Matt Wolff was his teammate, Wolff just turned pro and is playing at the Travelers this week.
 

The Needler

New Member
Dec 7, 2016
1,803
NLU talked about this on their podcast, but the other option is changing the scorecard. Make 6 or 18 (or both if we’re getting really crazy) a par 4 and the same amount of strokes will be taken but the perception will be it was harder because the score would be lower in relation to par. Woodland would’ve been -9 if 6 was a par 4 for instance. Koepka -6 under the same scenario.
You could say that about literally every hole on every course. You can't make an easy course hard just by lowering par. It's still the same course Ray Romano and Kevin James played back in February. The pro scoring average in round 4 then was 72.02. It was 71.19 yesterday. You're right that there's nothing you can do about the weather, but it definitely was not playing hard.
 

cshea

Member
SoSH Member
Nov 15, 2006
36,047
306, row 14
You could say that about literally every hole on every course. You can't make an easy course hard just by lowering par. It's still the same course Ray Romano and Kevin James played back in February. The pro scoring average in round 4 then was 72.02. It was 71.19 yesterday. You're right that there's nothing you can do about the weather, but it definitely was not playing hard.
Yeah, I get that changing the scorecard doesn’t actually make it harder to play. Par is irrelevant. My point was that if they changed the scorecard, the perception among the casual viewers would be that it played more difficult because the scores would be higher in relation to par, even though the players are taking the same number of strokes whether it is a par 70,71,72 or whatever.
 

RedOctober3829

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 19, 2005
55,298
deep inside Guido territory
You could say that about literally every hole on every course. You can't make an easy course hard just by lowering par. It's still the same course Ray Romano and Kevin James played back in February. The pro scoring average in round 4 then was 72.02. It was 71.19 yesterday. You're right that there's nothing you can do about the weather, but it definitely was not playing hard.
Pebble had played very difficult in past US Open's but if you get good weather it's definitely not as tough. In '72, the final round scoring average was 78.8 and Nicklaus was the winner at +2. In '82, only 2 players were under par. In '92, the final round scoring average was 77.3 and only 2 players finished under par. In 2000, Tiger albeit at -12 was the only player under par. In 2010, nobody finished under par as G-Mac won it at E.
 
A couple of snippets from the US Open column I finished writing today for The American magazine:
Not counting Koepka, 14 men have played the majority of their professional golf on the PGA Tour in America and won four or more major championships: Nicklaus, Woods, Hagen, Hogan, Player, Watson, Snead, Palmer, Trevino, Nelson, Mickelson, Floyd, Els and McIlroy. Between them, these 14 golfers won a total of 652 PGA Tour-sanctioned events, of which 112 – 17.2% – were majors. Only one of them, Gary Player, can say that more than 25% of his wins were majors (9 out of 24, or 37.5%). Koepka’s ratio is currently 66.7% (4 out of 6). This simply isn’t how modern professional golf works: the occasional fluke notwithstanding, tour pros are supposed to learn how to win majors first and foremost by learning how to win regular tour events.
Does Koepka need to win more regular PGA Tour titles to be taken seriously as one of the game’s greatest players? It’s a fascinating question, and one without an obviously correct answer. But Koepka is still only 29 years old, and he has plenty of time to make the question moot – if he wants to. Maybe he doesn’t. Perhaps Koepka will self-consciously use the normal PGA Tour grind as little more than a (lucrative) laboratory and warm-up track, fully fueling his precision-crafted golfing engine only four times a year as he openly mocks the FedEx Cup. I’m already a little bit smitten with Koepka as it is; how much more awesome would that approach make him?
Those stats in the first excerpt are pretty mental, aren't they?