ANOTHER 59?!?!?

I assume I may want to use this submit to gloat a bit about Bernhard Langer being tied for the lead on the Senior Open Championship. I simplest picked one participant for this most important, and there he's! But I won't.

I think I should wax eloquent approximately Hunter Mahan's Friday sixty four at the RBC Canadian Open, which placed him in the lead. It's no longer like he was the simplest participant to head low -- Tommy "Two Gloves" Gainey also shot a 64, and John Merrick blistered the path with a 62. But neither of them have been backing up a first rate first round either! Still, I might not recognition on that both.

What has my thoughts whirling nowadays is the fifty nine that Russell Knox shot on the Albertsons Boise Open... But in all likelihood no longer for the reasons you would possibly suppose.

As a long way because the event goes, I'm not so sure fifty nine is all that top notch. Bear in mind that the Hillcrest GC is handing out low rankings like condoms at a brothel. (If you'll pardon the analogy.) There were 62s, seven 63s, and every other 5 64s. That's FIFTEEN scores decrease than we typically see, week in and week out. So I don't assume it's so uncommon that we noticed a fifty nine Friday.

At this fee, we would even see every other one before the match is finished.

No, what fascinates me about that is that we noticed a fifty nine just more than one weeks ago on the Web.Com Tour. Will Wilcox shot a final-round fifty nine at the Utah Championship. In the month of July we've seen the Web.Com Tour's "59 Club" increase from 3 gamers to five -- a sixty seven% growth!

And so I ought to ask myself why. I'm no longer sure I like the solution.

Look, I'm no longer one of those guys who thinks "par manner some thing." In my opinion, par has precisely two reasons to exist:

1. to provide an "invisible opponent" for singles squeezing in some golf
2. to make it possible to compute handicaps

Many of you may have read my 2009 post Why Not a Par sixty seven Course? where I suggested we reduce par on some of the older courses so the Tour could use them again. My reasoning is that we rarely say a player shot, say, 284 at an event any more -- we say they shot 4-under (if it's a par-72 course). If we reduced par to 67 on some of those old courses, all we'd be doing is reducing the number of shots under par... which would make the course sound harder. (If you won by shooting four 65s on such a course, you'd only be 8-under.) In actuality you'd just be eliminating some of the "gimme" strokes from the score.

The following day I did a post called Par and the Weekend Golfer where I talked about the concept of "personal par." (You'll see the name Vince Spence in the comments on these two posts. Vince used to do a blog called The One-Eyed Golfer and he was quite a historian of the game. He passed away in 2010. His death was a great loss to the golf blogging community.) I wrote something in this second post that came to mind when I saw that 59 on Friday:

For the ones of you who didn?T test out the remarks on that remaining put up, Greg at From the Rough voiced an opinion shared with the aid of many golfers: ??The last element we weekend hacks could want to see is a farther separation between execs and joe's - Par is now sixty seven for the pros?? And my reaction become ??Almost every body expects the pros to birdie the par 5s with a -putt. Doesn't that imply they're already playing a par sixty eight... And all of us receive it??

The query of whether or not par really manner whatever or not is at the base of our differing perspectives.

I suppose one of the satisfactory things we weekend golfers can do to enhance our games is to forget about about par completely? Or as a minimum reduce it to a trifling inspiration of what we might assume if we play properly. Many definitions of par describe it because the result of ?Ideal play.? (Which, presumably, way that a birdie is ?Better than best? And an eagle is ?Pretty near godlike.?) But par become usually determined fairly arbitrarily, and no more so than nowadays. When par3s can measure 265 yards, par certainly has become meaningless for the weekend golfer. Have tour gamers genuinely emerge as so true that they can shoot such ridiculous scores at will? I don't suppose so. You see, I watched brief little courses called Merion and Muirfield totally damage the greats of the game. In those two tournaments a grand overall of ONE participant shot below par. You can argue that conditions at majors are meant to be difficult, and you wouldn't need to watch them each week. And I'd be the first to agree...

But I'd also say that normal tournaments should offer at least a bit of a challenge. When 15 players shoot 7-under or lower, that's not happening. We're rapidly approaching the point where shooting 59 doesn't really mean anything at all.

There's a few maneuvering room between 6-inch difficult and no tough. There's a happy medium between 20-backyard fairways and 50-backyard fairways. And most of the longer hitters appear to have problems with shorter holes. Has nobody noticed any of this?

Maybe they ought to. I do not need to demean what Russell Knox did Friday... But that after-magical 59 no longer manner as a lot as it once did.

It seems to me that the tour execs are already playing par-sixty seven guides. Call me while a person shoots 57 in an official event.