What a Rush! Powering Up at the Wegmans LPGA Championship

When I left the sleepy media tent at Locust Hill Country Club around 11:30 am today, just as the clouds had stopped opening up (at least for the time being), I expected to head past the putting green on my way to the driving range and my car for a quick drive back to Hamburg, so my parents could have one day off before heading back on the road again to help out with onechan and imoto's cousins in Connecticut. Instead, as I approached the putting green and saw a crowd gathered around it, it felt like someone had flicked a switch and turned the intensity back on. Ai Miyazato, Mika Miyazato, Ji-Yai Shin, and about a dozen other pros had their game faces on as they quickly prepared for their practice rounds and tried to figure out how much the rains had softened and slowed down the greens at Locust Hill. About the only people who seemingly weren't drawn into the serious vibe were Tiffany Joh and her pals, but even their high spirits seemed a product of the heightened energy and concentration of everyone getting ready to play. If you've seen any episodes from the Dragon Ball animation franchise, you'll know what I'm referring to in the subtitle. Don't get me wrong--nobody was going all Super Saiyan just yet...



...but you certainly could feel the players' power levels rising....

Oh, it's definitely major!

Walking the Wegmans with Onechan

No, this is not a post about taking my 5-and-a-half-year-old daughter to the grocery store. Sorry to disappoint you.

What this is about is the road trip a jet-lagged onechan and I took to the Rochester area to spend Saturday and Sunday at the Wegmans LPGA tournament at Locust Hills Golf Club. We got to hook up with my mom and dad for a little while, follow Mika Miyazato and then Ai Miyazato, play in the Sports Zone, meet Meredith Duncan, face off in Wii golf, and avoid every single drop of rain that fell on Pittsford that weekend. What I didn't get to do was try out the LPGA's new blogger media-credentialing process (I missed the deadline the 1st half of our visit to the Full Metal Archivist's family in Japan), follow the range of players I wanted to, or hang with Momoko Ueda on the driving range (yes, she missed the cut but worked hard on her game all weekend).

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start from the beginning, which is my crazy decision to take a pre-school girl who fell asleep from noon to 8 pm Friday and stayed up till 5:30 am on Saturday on a 2-hour drive to walk as many holes as we possibly could on a rain-delayed moving day. At least I had the sense not to try to take her 3-year-old sister, imoto, along with us. She had been enough of a handful when she was 2 that I couldn't envision taking a more mobile, articulate, independent (to put it nicely), louder, faster, and sleepier (last night was the 1st dinner she had since returning to the States late last Thursday) girl to an LPGA event. Now, the Futures Tour event in Syracuse at the end of the month, that's another story. But I'll save her 2nd LPGA experience for next year. Assuming there is a next year. (Check Dave Hackenberg's excellent piece on this week's event for context on the LPGA's shrinking schedule.) Anyway, my worries about onechan proved to be unfounded. She entertained me on the drive up telling stories about Foxy, a character she just made up. Apparently he gets into a lot of trouble and is often sad or lonely, but onechan told the stories in a gleeful voice and loved to come up with abrupt endings that she found hilarious. Uncle Bill Benzon and Grandpa Bob should be proud!

Speaking of Grandpa Bob, I had to question his judgment for suggesting that we meet at the pro shop rather than at the 17th green, right near where the shuttle buses let you off, not to mention the Sports Zone and the food dome. Sure, thanks to our oversleeping we missed all the early morning groups finishing their 2nd rounds, but onechan had to handle a long walk across the street and up the 10th fairway to see him and Grandma Joy for the 1st time since well before we had left for Japan in late May. As it turned out, though, both the walk itself and the search for my folks (we circled the pro shop twice before we found them) were totally awesome. Onechan was carrying a fairly large plastic baby doll, which she had dolled up for the event by drawing in blue ink flowers in the little hair she had, earrings, nail polish, and lipstick, and as she was getting a lot of "Aww, cute" looks from fans, players, and caddies, I decided to make a bet with her that she would be the only kid with a doll or toy we'd see all day. Trying to find evidence to win our bet turned out to be a fun game for her. As for me, I was struck by how intimate a setting a golf course is for a sporting event. I was walking by pros whose faces looked familiar but whom I couldn't quite place ("Is that Mika Miyazato? Or maybe Ji Young Oh?"). Some players I definitely knew: Vicky Hurst, Jane Park--and of course Ai Miyazato, who just happened to be at the putting green when onechan and I made it to the pro shop area. As Ai-chan was leaving, I was able to say, "Kyoo gambare!" (Go for it today!) to her. I don't know if she remembered onechan or me from last year, but she looked down at the short American wearing a hat bought in Okinawa that said "Island Boy" in kanji and kneeling down by a young girl wearing a flower print dress we'd bought in Hawaii in the middle of my Fulbright year, smiled, and said "Thank you," very sweetly.

Not long after that, we ran into my mom and dad and they had plenty of stories for us. My mom, who is a champion talker, told me how they had run into Karrie Webb while the 3rd-round pairings were being organized, so of course she told her about how big a fan onechan is of her and how I had invented Carrie Mi, Karrie Yoo, and Keri Hu (still useful devices for teasing onechan and imoto out of a desire to be carried!). My dad was psyched that a lesson on the driving range had shortened my mom's Mi Hyun Kim/Sakura Yokomine-like backswing and flattened its plane so well that she was carrying her driver around 150 yards (sadly, the lesson didn't carry over to the course when they got back to Clinton). And we played the game of "Who is that...?" as we got our food, walked over to tables by the 10th tees, and perused the pairings sheet I had gotten from a volunteer as we had been looking for my folks. (He got me on Katherine Hull, and I mistook Na Yeon Choi for Eun-Hee Ji.) He told me how impressed he was by Vicky Hurst ("She could be a center for a women's basketball team") and how Cheyenne Woods's game was much better than he had expected. (Guess who they had followed on Friday!)

So, yeah, with players going off the 10th tee while we were eating--I got a good look at Aree Song's swing (not a lot of shoulder turn there), for instance--and the 1st tee right around the corner, my dad's idea of meeting at the pro shop to follow some early groups was a good one. And when I saw that Mika Miyazato was going off 2 groups ahead of Ai-chan--and that Na Yeon Choi was in the former group while Se Ri Pak was in the latter, not to mention that Amanda Blumenherst was in the threesome between them--I immediately pitched my idea that we follow Mika as long as onechan could handle it, then rest to wait for Ai-chan and follow her as long as possible before resting and watching the leading pairings play through. Best laid plans, of course: my parents were too tired from their Friday outing to make it past the 4th tee before they headed out for home, while the second onechan realized that the front 9 circled back to the clubhouse, she was more interested in getting to the Sports Zone across the street than making it to the 8th green to hang out for 45 minutes. And of course I kept us as far away from the greens as possible, not trusting onechan not to blurt out whatever thought happened to come into her mind at any moment. So I didn't get to see Mika actually make a downhill curling 15-footer for birdie on the uphill par-4 2nd, or, for that matter, Ai-chan's short birdie putt on the short par-4 4th hole fail to drop.

But I did get to see her call her caddie over to swat a black fly that had been pestering her as she was setting up for her putt. And I did get to see every shot that Mika and Na Yeon played between the 1st and 4th tees, and every shot Ai-chan and Se Ri played from their approaches to the 3rd green to their tee shots on the par-3 7th. I can't go into the amount of detail that I did last year, but I do have some general impressions. Mika has a very powerful swing, particularly through the ball. Her tempo's a little quicker and less rhythmic than Ai-chan's, but overall she's a little more aggressive and athletic. I had heard from Q-School interviews that she's a short hitter, but I'd say her length is average, plus she has the capacity to hit it longer than usual when she wants to. I expected her to be well behind Choi and Reilley Rankin, but she was even with them more often than not (although probably b/c they were dialing it down to avoid the rough). As for Choi, she parred every hole we saw, but never gave herself great birdie chances. I came away confirmed in my thinking that both are going to be major talents on tour. But of course most of my attention was on Ai-chan, and I noticed that she had a little tendency to break her wrists early on her backswing, which may have contributed to her pull on the downhill 6th. Other than that, her game was as strong as I expected it to be. Even while struggling--she had to make 2 6-to-9-footers to save par and missed 2 birdie putts of about that length--and dealing with jet lag (I don't care how accustomed to international travel you are, you still feel it for 10-15 days after you settle into a new time zone), she was completely calm, self-contained, and focused. She didn't chat a lot with her caddie or other players, just followed her ball and hit her next shot without making a big fuss about it. Very similar demeanor to Se Ri Pak, now that I think of it, although Pak was definitely longer, of course.

But that's about all I have for observations on the players, as most of my attention was actually focused on keeping onechan happy and quiet. Whether it was playing rock-paper-scissors (in Japanese, of course) or having little races with her between shots and holes when other groups weren't nearby (I let her win all of the latter, but she beat me 7 games in a row in the former, and I was really trying!), assuring her we'd make it to the Sports Zone (eventually), carrying her on my back a few times (including all the way up the par-5 8th's fairway), or getting pro shop staff to open up an "out of order" real bathroom for her b/c once again she was afraid of the port-a-potties, this was a full-time job. It was a lot easier when my folks were still hanging with us. My mom took her to look for frogs by the creek and pond on #2 and gave her a pad of paper and markers (which she used to good effect, although, unfortunately, not to the intended purpose--to get autographs), while my dad asked her questions and told her about the players. I can't say that onechan was particularly into my explanation of what to do off the tee on a dogleg or why you're not allowed to put your club on the ground when it's not in a water hazard but is behind the red line surrounding it, or particularly happy not to be following Karrie Webb and Natalie Gulbis on the other side, but she never whined, she never talked loudly, she never moved (much) while a player was hitting, she loved it that Carri Wood was playing with Ai-chan and Pak, and she won our bet when she found a young Japanese family near the 7th green with twin 2-year-old boys who had a kuma (bear) stuffed animal with them on their stroller.

And the Sports Zone! When I asked her this morning what she remembered about the tournament, that's the first thing she mentioned. She went through the inflated maze/obstacle course that was too wet for her last year, climbed to the top of the 15-foot climbing wall that was too scary for her last year, and, on Sunday, actually practiced chipping outside and putting inside (including a lesson with Meredith Duncan, who's a real sweetheart). I won't get into how onechan chipped in for a birdie on the 2nd hole of the Wii golf they had set up inside or how I hit 3 sand shots into the water hazard and took a mercy 9 on that par-3, or all the fruit juices and ice cream flavors we tried out in the food dome, but I will brag a little about how many times onechan hit the target when practicing those pitch shots.

So even though I didn't get to follow Seon Hwa Lee or In-Kyung Kim on Saturday, hang at the putting green as players finished their rounds, take onechan to the driving range on Sunday, where Momoko Ueda was working hard with caddie, or follow Ai-chan for awhile in the final round (we went straight to the Sports Zone this time and the weather looked threatening by the time onechan was all exercised out), we had an absolutely fantastic time at the Wegmans. I got a great reminder that a classic course like Locust Hills, with its tight, tree-lined fairways, small, tiered greens, and elevation changes, could be a great challenge with just the light breezes that were turning approach shots into exercises in judgment, precision, and finesse. Sadly, these are qualities that seem to be lacking in LPGA HQ these days. With the Corning gone and the Wegmans seemingly in trouble, I'm wondering if there's a Route 390 curse or if Carolyn Bivens is taking the LPGA seriously off course. It's all well and good to move into bigger domestic and international markets, but why not hold 40+ tournaments a year and keep the mid-market, community-based events by offering a reduced fee structure for them?

オバマmania

You don't need to understand Japanese to appreciate this NHK report on Obama City and Obama onsen (in Nagasaki):



This one from February has English subtitles:



As always, Japan Probe is the place to go for further background. Here's James's takes on a commercial that has been called racist; on a Japanese Obama lookalike; with more video on celebrations in Japan; on Jero's reaction to Obama's win....

Maybe we can expect a win from Oyama (Shiho) this week in the Mizuno Classic!

Sybase Classic Friday: A Long Hard Slog

Perhaps the biggest news coming out of the now-suspended second round of the Sybase Classic is that Hee-Won Han and Karen Stupples have withdrawn from the tournament (after shooting an opening-round 75 and dealing for months now with being on the road a hemisphere away from her infant son, I don't blame Han, and Stupples is travelling with her relatively newborn baby, so why not get more quality time?).

Nothing against the people from the morning groups who had been playing well in the rain (Catriona Matthew is a mudder as well as a mother, apparently, and has caught Rachel Hetherington for the lead at -6 with 11 holes to play for them, while bogeys on the 6th just dropped Pat Hurst and Song-Hee Kim back into a tie with Annika Sorenstam at -5, and Danielle Downey, Ji Young Oh, Alena Sharp, Meaghan Francella, Gloria Park, Guilia Sergas, Michelle Redman, and Na Yeon Choi were moving up the leaderboard just by being 1 or 2 under par on their rounds thus far), of course. Or even the ones just hanging on--like Ai Miyazato, who's hung tough at -3 through 27 holes, and Teresa Lu, whose bogey at 6 brought her back to -4 in the tournament but is still 3 shots ahead of her rookie friend and countrywoman Ya Ni Tseng. There are plenty of people who were doing much worse this morning.

It's just that some of the most compelling stories in the tournament can be found in the afternoon rounds:

• The brewing and much-anticipated Ochoa-Sorenstam Clash of the Titans;
  
• How Brittany Lang, Seon Hwa Lee, Morgan Pressel, Jee Young Lee respond to the fine play of fellow Junior Mints Lu, Miyazato, and Francella;
  
• How Inbee Park, In-Kyung Kim, and Jane Park respond to the fine play of the resurgent Song-Hee Kim and Na On Min as well as the continuing struggles of Angela Park, still the leader of their Super Soph pack;
  
• How Ya Ni Tseng and Momoko Ueda respond to the fine play of rookie rival Na Yeon Choi as well as the surprising performances thus far by fellow afternooners Carolina Llano, Anna Rawson, and Eunjung Yi;
  
• Whether Candie Kung, Carin Koch, Karrie Webb and Hee Young Park have the motivation, focus, and game to fight their way onto the right side of the cut line.
  

Whether we'll actually see how any of these pan out this afternoon is an open question....

[Update 1 (2:13 pm): Still no golf, but a pretty good profile of Ya Ni Tseng in USA Today. Doesn't quite capture her personality, but not bad.]

[Update 2 (3:52 pm): Looks like the last sentence of my post was unfortunately prophetic. The LPGA has announced they're wiping Friday's round from the record books and starting play afresh tomorrow--and reducing the event to 54 holes. I really don't understand these kinds of decisions. The weather forecast for the weekend wasn't all that horrible and there's nothing wrong with having a tournament continue onto a Monday. Even if they felt it was unfair to the people in the morning groups to have their horrible starts to their rounds make making the cut impossible, why not just erase today and finish the tournament on a Monday? It's just as unfair to those who didn't go low Thursday to reduce a 72-hole event to a 54-hole one. And it's not like it's that hard to travel from Clifton to Corning. How is the LPGA going to get taken more seriously if they don't take themselves seriously enough to do what it takes to make a 72-hole event a 72-hole event?]

[Update 3 (3:58 pm): The LPGA has got Hound Dog riled up. Bad move! Bad LPGA!]

[Update 4 (5/17/08, 5:45 am): Here's the LPGA's explanation, in a nutshell, first on the erasing of the rounds in play and next on the reduction to 54 holes, with commentary.

Sue Witters argued that neither tv nor the decision not to declare lift, clean, and play conditions Friday in anticipation of bad weather was a factor (because it rained much harder than the forecasts indicated), but that the round was wiped because conditions would be so different between yesterday (soaking by the end of the morning, with 3 greens unplayable and another 3 close to it) and today (after a projected 12 hours of drying) that it would be unfair to the players in yesterday's morning groups relative to the afternoon groups who would be playing in basically fine conditions.

This sounds strange to me: no one said they ought to erase rounds in The Players Championship when the wind changed dramatically between the morning and the afternoon, or in this week's PGA event where the afternoon groups from the first round not only encountered much worse conditions than the morning ones, but also had to deal with worse morning conditions the next day. So it seems to me the lift, clean, and place issue is the core one. Apparently the course isn't going to dry off enough so that they could avoid playing it today, which does introduce the problem of the same player playing the same round under two different sets of rules--much different from the players in the afternoon groups, who would only be playing under the one set of rules. That seems to me to be the real equity issue. Witters would have been better off just stating that the unexpectedly long and hard rain got them into this mess with lift, clean, and place.

Witters spent much less time on the bigger issue to me: the decision to turn a 72-holes "winner's event" with a $2M purse into a 54-hole tournament. Basically she pointed out that the weather forecast for Sunday is not good and left it at that. The reporters present didn't press her on this non-answer; nobody asked the obvious follow-up question, "So there's a chance this could end up being a 36-hole event?" or the follow-up to that one, "If there are contingency plans for a Monday finish in place, why not simply plan for one and keep this significant tournament a 72-hole event?" Yeesh.]

[Update 5 (6:05 am): Tom Canavan of the AP accepts and disseminates the LPGA's party line, but manages to add some good details on Rachel Hetherington's struggles into his story. Strangely, he makes nothing of the fact he notes in his closing paragraph that the last such decision occurred in 2006 at this very tournament. Apparently there's a Sybase Classic tradition of bad weather reducing the event to 54 holes, but why should they continue it now that it's a "winner's event"?]

Constructivist Family Sing-along: My Grandfather's Clock

Actually never heard of this until the Full Metal Archivist got curious about the English lyrics to the song she was teaching onechan in Japanese. Thought I'd include some things I found along the way, just to show that I can at times be more than a one-note blogger during the golf season! (But how about that Paula Creamer making 4 birdies on her last 5 holes to overtake Jeong Jang at the Fields Open? Wow!)

First the Johnny Cash version:



Interesting how the grandfather basically calls for...robots near the 1876 song's end, eh?

Then some Vanilla Mood:



Next, the daikon slide whistle:



And finally, the MTV generation learns Japanese:



No, wait--let's not forget the NHK generation!



In Japan, the song is all about the loyalty of the clock (kinda like that song about the dog), whereas in America the same general idea gets expressed more negatively. Any historians have a bead on the cultural politics of the song as a post-slavery lament? Or have a sense of its transmission lines to Meiji Japan and just how and when it got transformed in translation?

Advice to Students: Test Well

Au Wievoir? PWiemature!

All right, thanks to Geoff Shackelford and Mulligan Stu, I've been keeping up with the "Wie Washed Up" meme making its rounds in the golfy mediasphere. A wonderful and much-appreciated 18th birthday present, I'm sure, but then again, she didn't have to accept the sponsor's invitation to play in the Samsung World Championship this week. At least the local news is framing the event in ways that go beyond Wie's woes.

Me, I'm worried more about how far south Ai Miyazato's, Mi Hyun Kim's, and Morgan Pressel's games have gone and whether Jee Young Lee's, Sarah Lee's, and Jeong Jang's injuries have healed enough for them to perform at anything close to their full capacity. I'm curious to see if Paula Creamer, Suzann Pettersen, or Maria Hjorth can hang with Ochoa. And I'm hoping the Samsung organizers learn from their mistakes and figure out how to differentiate their event from the ADT Championship and the new HSBC Women's Champions world stroke-play event (to complement their world match-play event) in Singapore that's starting next year. My suggestion would be to drop all single-event or career-based or ratings-based invites--to the year's major winners, to any Hall of Famers or sponsor's exemptions--and make entry into the tournament purely performance-based over the entire year. Invite the top 3 money winners on the KLPGA, JLPGA, and LET and the top 11 from the LPGA. Take the performance-based nature of the ADT and the worldliness of the HSBC match- and stroke-play events and you make the Samsung stand out, that is.

At least the organizers got something right: pairing Wie and Rookie of the Year Angela Park was the absolute right thing to do. Too bad they didn't pair any of the Super Sophs. A Seon Hwa Lee-Morgan Pressel showdown among the top 2 Super Sophs, or a Seon Hwa Lee-Ai Miyazato rematch from the finals of the HSBC or a Seon Hwa Lee-Jee Young Lee battle for top Korean Super Soph status would have been equally compelling. And if they were going to pair Ochoa and Pettersen, why not Korean legends Pak and Kim or top Americans Creamer and Kerr, or, even better, do some Solheim Cup rematches like Castrale and Hauert, Creamer and Hjorth? A lack of imagination for the Thursday pairings goes nicely with a lack of judgment in their lead-up to the tournament, but at some point you'd hope the tournament organizers would build on their successes.

So, yes, my overall point is that women's golf is bigger than Wie. It would be nice if anyone who wasn't already a fan noticed, but I'm not holding my breath, even for the people paid to write about women's golf. What I will say about Wie is that it's too soon to tell how her career will pan out. Every professional is going to have a slump in his or her career--just ask Julieta Granada, Brittany Lang, Meena Lee, or Karrie Webb about this year, or Grace Park and Se Ri Pak about several previous years--what matters is how you get through it and deal with the adversity. Maybe learning how to handle the pressures that come with public and humiliating failure can better prepare you to deal with the pressures that come with success. So I wouldn't put too much weight on Wie's performance this week. When I think about how much my students change over the course of their college careers, I have to laugh at the idea of writing off any 18-year-old.

[Update: Mulligan Stu has updated his post to clarify his position on Wie's career (for those unfamiliar with his writing, it's an excellent precis and representative of the fairness and thoughtfulness of his writing). For those who care about my opinion of Shackelford's LPGA/Wie blogging, you can read my comments at MS's Waggle Room. And I'm not just saying that--or this--b/c I write the occasional diary over there.]