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marinessA list of top ten guy trips.
I hardly even know where to begin, although perhaps a question of why, of all of Major League Baseball's 30 teams, the Boston Red Sox was chosen as the most masculine, or how, precisely, the article managed to miss that women are welcome at TPC Sawgrass (Marriott Resorts: it's not your gender that concerns us, but your money) might be in order.
*************
The TPC Sawgrass bit particularly caught my attention because of my new obsession with golf. Oh, not playing it, but watching it. And not on NBC broadcast, but on the web.
I'm going somewhere related with this, so stay with me.
Watching golf on broadcast TV generally ranges from either mildly interesting to spectacularly dull, largely because of the nature of the television broadcast, which jumps from player to player and hole to hole in a scatter shot fashion, rarely giving you more than a glimpse of the game. But because of my finger injury, I found myself watching the U.S. Open last Thursday. NBC soon switched to our hideously bad local news, so I headed to the promised continuing coverage on the U.S. Open on the web. And, well. Wow. The site offered multiple ways to watch - you could focus on just two holes (7 and 17) on Pebble Beach, getting to see all of the golfers, no matter how obscure, or you could follow along with the marquee groups - three elite golfers (Phil Mickelson was in one group, Tiger Woods in the other), following every hole, and every swing.
This was great stuff. For one, the sheer entertainment value of watching the long, long, long line of reporters, camera people and hangers-on desperately following Tiger Woods and panting as they went could not be beat. Beyond this factor, though, this sort of coverage gave a real sense of how the game really works - the pauses, the walks, the focus, Y.E. Yang's horrific meltdown, cute little otters and sea lions (ok, this is probably just a Pebble Beach thing), conversations, and so on. And the announcers.
With each group, ESPN had a normal, sports coverage guy who played amateur golf, paired up with various experts who went in and out of the group - former and current professional players, golf course designers, golf club designers, the head of the PGA tour, and an NFL coach. (Ok, the last was not exactly a golf expert - and admitted to it - but he offered various amusing stories of football players who could not play golf.) On occasion this led to the commentators speculating about sea otters, which did not go well, but this mostly led to finding out that the PGA tour takes this game seriously enough to hire PhDs in materials engineering, and discussing the processes of working with composites and the resulting change in the game (er, it sounded more interesting when they were talking about it) and explaining how golf courses are designed and different approaches to golf course design. The coverage also featured professional women golf players who had played Pebble Beach, asking them questions like, "Jane, now, you've played this hole many times before. How would you approach it?" or "Jane, you got yourself into a similar situation...."
This not surprisingly brought up the role of women in golf, and here, I'll just quote myself paraphrasing the golf commentary fromshadefell's blog, typed up on Friday, with two days still to go in the U.S. Open:
"There's two different issues: membership in golf clubs (most notably with Augusta, which hosts the Masters, but does not as far as I know have any women members) and course design.
Professional men golfers can drive a ball further than women can. Because of that, many courses (not Pebble Beach, which is where the U.S. Open is) are designed for "men" or for "women," and also "professional" versus "amateur," with the idea that to really challenge professional male golfers, you have to have them on a longer course.
As the commentators were pointing out, Pebble Beach kinda suggests the opposite - it's shorter than many other professional men's courses by about 500 feet [edit: that should have been yards], and yet, ALL of the men golfers were fumbling all over the course, since, even with the shorter drives, it's incredibly tricky (I don't know if you've seen the course, but the basic problem is that it's on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, so it's windy and balls have a tendency to fly into the ocean.) A couple of the commentators were suggesting that this division between men/women/amateur/professional courses was problematic, and that the better idea was to move into the Pebble Beach direction - the course that challenges everybody.
In the meantime, a course like Augusta continues to be designed for the long range professional male golfer. This didn't come up in the discussion, so this is just a guess on my part - but I expect that one reason why women continue to be excluded from Augusta is that the club can say (truthfully) that, hey, we're designed for men! Look at the length of our drives!
It was pretty clear from the ESPN commentary that several men golfers on the PGA tour would like to move to the Pebble Beach model, but they are facing resistance from some who feel with better drivers/balls courses actually have to get longer. (And then there was stuff about how Doral grass will never be as tough and unexpected as Pebble Beach grass which just reminded me how angry the Doral grass issue makes me so I tuned out for a bit.)
(Thank you ESPN for addressing this yesterday so now I know.)"
At the end, not a single one of the professional male golfers - men who do this for a living, who play golf daily with top notch, exceedingly expensive equipment, was able to finish the Pebble Beach course under par. Not one. Graeme McDowell, the winner, came in at exactly par; the two top male golfers in the world, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods, came in three strokes over.
At the Masters, that course designed with the long drives? Mickelson came in 16 strokes under its par, several others were well under par.
The course designed strictly for professional men turned out to be easier than the course that challenges everybody.
Hmm.
(No fear; this will not be turning into a golf blog, especially now that my finger is close to healing up. I just thought this was interesting.)
I hardly even know where to begin, although perhaps a question of why, of all of Major League Baseball's 30 teams, the Boston Red Sox was chosen as the most masculine, or how, precisely, the article managed to miss that women are welcome at TPC Sawgrass (Marriott Resorts: it's not your gender that concerns us, but your money) might be in order.
*************
The TPC Sawgrass bit particularly caught my attention because of my new obsession with golf. Oh, not playing it, but watching it. And not on NBC broadcast, but on the web.
I'm going somewhere related with this, so stay with me.
Watching golf on broadcast TV generally ranges from either mildly interesting to spectacularly dull, largely because of the nature of the television broadcast, which jumps from player to player and hole to hole in a scatter shot fashion, rarely giving you more than a glimpse of the game. But because of my finger injury, I found myself watching the U.S. Open last Thursday. NBC soon switched to our hideously bad local news, so I headed to the promised continuing coverage on the U.S. Open on the web. And, well. Wow. The site offered multiple ways to watch - you could focus on just two holes (7 and 17) on Pebble Beach, getting to see all of the golfers, no matter how obscure, or you could follow along with the marquee groups - three elite golfers (Phil Mickelson was in one group, Tiger Woods in the other), following every hole, and every swing.
This was great stuff. For one, the sheer entertainment value of watching the long, long, long line of reporters, camera people and hangers-on desperately following Tiger Woods and panting as they went could not be beat. Beyond this factor, though, this sort of coverage gave a real sense of how the game really works - the pauses, the walks, the focus, Y.E. Yang's horrific meltdown, cute little otters and sea lions (ok, this is probably just a Pebble Beach thing), conversations, and so on. And the announcers.
With each group, ESPN had a normal, sports coverage guy who played amateur golf, paired up with various experts who went in and out of the group - former and current professional players, golf course designers, golf club designers, the head of the PGA tour, and an NFL coach. (Ok, the last was not exactly a golf expert - and admitted to it - but he offered various amusing stories of football players who could not play golf.) On occasion this led to the commentators speculating about sea otters, which did not go well, but this mostly led to finding out that the PGA tour takes this game seriously enough to hire PhDs in materials engineering, and discussing the processes of working with composites and the resulting change in the game (er, it sounded more interesting when they were talking about it) and explaining how golf courses are designed and different approaches to golf course design. The coverage also featured professional women golf players who had played Pebble Beach, asking them questions like, "Jane, now, you've played this hole many times before. How would you approach it?" or "Jane, you got yourself into a similar situation...."
This not surprisingly brought up the role of women in golf, and here, I'll just quote myself paraphrasing the golf commentary from
shadefell's blog, typed up on Friday, with two days still to go in the U.S. Open:"There's two different issues: membership in golf clubs (most notably with Augusta, which hosts the Masters, but does not as far as I know have any women members) and course design.
Professional men golfers can drive a ball further than women can. Because of that, many courses (not Pebble Beach, which is where the U.S. Open is) are designed for "men" or for "women," and also "professional" versus "amateur," with the idea that to really challenge professional male golfers, you have to have them on a longer course.
As the commentators were pointing out, Pebble Beach kinda suggests the opposite - it's shorter than many other professional men's courses by about 500 feet [edit: that should have been yards], and yet, ALL of the men golfers were fumbling all over the course, since, even with the shorter drives, it's incredibly tricky (I don't know if you've seen the course, but the basic problem is that it's on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, so it's windy and balls have a tendency to fly into the ocean.) A couple of the commentators were suggesting that this division between men/women/amateur/professional courses was problematic, and that the better idea was to move into the Pebble Beach direction - the course that challenges everybody.
In the meantime, a course like Augusta continues to be designed for the long range professional male golfer. This didn't come up in the discussion, so this is just a guess on my part - but I expect that one reason why women continue to be excluded from Augusta is that the club can say (truthfully) that, hey, we're designed for men! Look at the length of our drives!
It was pretty clear from the ESPN commentary that several men golfers on the PGA tour would like to move to the Pebble Beach model, but they are facing resistance from some who feel with better drivers/balls courses actually have to get longer. (And then there was stuff about how Doral grass will never be as tough and unexpected as Pebble Beach grass which just reminded me how angry the Doral grass issue makes me so I tuned out for a bit.)
(Thank you ESPN for addressing this yesterday so now I know.)"
At the end, not a single one of the professional male golfers - men who do this for a living, who play golf daily with top notch, exceedingly expensive equipment, was able to finish the Pebble Beach course under par. Not one. Graeme McDowell, the winner, came in at exactly par; the two top male golfers in the world, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods, came in three strokes over.
At the Masters, that course designed with the long drives? Mickelson came in 16 strokes under its par, several others were well under par.
The course designed strictly for professional men turned out to be easier than the course that challenges everybody.
Hmm.
(No fear; this will not be turning into a golf blog, especially now that my finger is close to healing up. I just thought this was interesting.)