AimPoint: what's the point, wonders Nantz
Is it time to ban the gruesome green-reading tactic? PGA Tour returns to Utah at distinctive Black Desert
AimPoint has spread into putting routines such as Viktor Hovland’s like kudzu (Keyur Khamar/PGA Tour via Getty Images)
It’s pretty simple, the USGA blew it, and now it’s miserably part of golf’s lexicon.
AimPoint
If you listen to John Huggan’s recent podcast, The Thing About Golf, with CBS Sports broadcaster Jim Nantz, you will hear the utter disgust the “voice of the Masters” has for the green-reading system.
“It really drives me crazy when you see their backs to the hole, and they’re trying to feel the break, and they walk another five feet and they do it again,” Nantz said. “They go through this process; where’s the feel in it?”
Well, Jim, how about straddling the line like they are playing some kid’s game?
The look is horrible, but that alone should not be the reason to ban the process, just because it looks terrible.
However, that is precisely what the R&A and USGA said when anchoring was banned; it doesn’t look like golf. Or when they outlawed Sam Snead’s croquet putting stroke.
So, how does AimPoint look like golf?
“I know they’re trying to win and trying to find a shot over the course of four days that can make the difference, but, to me, if you’re playing a lot of golf and you’re standing over a 20-footer, it’s a cup outside the left, it’s the left edge, play it a cup and a half,” Nantz continued. “I mean, all this, is it really making a difference? Maybe it is. But I can’t stand looking at it."
The Rules of Golf and their authors are a finicky bunch.
When they outlawed anchored putting but then created a loophole big enough for an 18-wheeler to drive through, you had to wonder what all the fuss was about to begin with.
Then they gave into the spike-mark complainers, which sometimes looks bad when a player thinks their entire line needs a quick tamping down job with their putter.
Then they get to walk back and forth over their line, hoping their feet will see something their eyes can’t.
Of course, the real insult is when the caddie gets to jump into the festivities and starts walking the line as well.
So, let me see. We got rid of the greens books because it gave too much information, so instead, we let players tap down spike marks and straddle the putting line, all in the name of what?
Bring the greens books back since it speeds up play. It’s too late to stop the tamping of spike marks, so that’s a lost cause.
But can we please drop AimPoint? There’s precedent beyond the anchored putter.
Back in 1966 when Sam Snead — who shares the all-time PGA Tour wins record with Tiger Woods — adopted the croquet putting style to overcome his weaknesses with the flat stick. Snead got really good at it, finishing T6 in that year’s PGA, winning the Senior PGA Championship by nine shots and finishing T10 in the Masters the next spring at age 54.
Bobby Jones didn’t like the look of it one bit.
So after the 1967 Masters, Jones bent the ear of USGA executive director Joe Dey Jr.
“The wheels to outlaw croquet putting turned very fast,” wrote Bill Fields in Golf Digest in 2011. “A little more than a month after the 1967 Masters, the USGA and Royal and Ancient GC met in Great Britain on the eve of the Walker Cup and proposed a rules change, subject to final approval by the association’s executive committees, that would be effective Jan. 1, 1968: ‘On the putting green a player shall not make a stroke from astride, or with either foot touching the line of the putt, or an extension of that line behind the ball.’”
Snead was forced to putt side-saddle after that to avoid straddling the putting line.
Now players straddle the line routinely every putt, slowing down play and making it tough for even Jim Nantz to watch.
To reiterate — can we please drop AimPoint?
Noting looks more un-golf like than that.
The lava fields and red rock mountains at Black Desert Resort (Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images)
Black Desert? You’re gonna lava it
The PGA Tour returned to Utah this week for the first time in 60 years for teh inaugural Black Desert Championship at the Black Desert Resort. Everett Munoz wrote in Global Golf Post+ about the stunning resort carved into the black lava fields underneath red-rock mountains in the southwest corner of Utah — closer to Las Vegas than Salt Lake City.
“This puts Utah squarely on the map of bucket-list golfing locations,” Patrick Manning, the managing partner of Black Desert Resort, told GGP+. “This becomes a true destination, with 14 courses just right here in our county.”
In addition to the FedEx Fall Series event this weekend, Black Desert will play host to an LPGA tournament in the spring, exposing more people to the distinctive course designed by the late Tom Weiskopf and Phil Smith.
The Black Desert Championship provided an opportunity for 65-year-old Jay Don Blake to play his 500th PGA Tour event. Blake is a native of St. George, Utah, growing up in a trailer park just down the hill from the new resort course in Ivins.
“I pretty much kind of look in awe of what the golf course presented, the lava rock and the beautiful green grass and the sand traps,” Blake said of the first time he say the course. “I knew in the back of my mind that I just grew up just down the road a little ways.
“It wasn’t until I think about the second time I played, I had a little bit more time to kind of stand up on some of those little lava rock peninsulas and look a little deeper down the valley where I grew up in a trailer park. And standing there I’m thinking, I probably stood on this same peninsula when I was a little kid. Used to come up in this valley right here, and there wasn’t anything out here, just the lava rock and sagebrush and a few rabbits that I was chasing around.”
Blake marvels at what Manning and the architects where able to do with the property.
“You look at the terrain, it’s kind of a desert kind of terrain around this community,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that have asked me, where did all the lava rock come from? They think they actually brought it in to create the golf course with lava rock. But about three miles up the road just kind of up one of the valleys, there’s a couple volcanos, which that’s probably where it came from.
“The golf course is very unique and beautiful, and the scenery everywhere you look is spectacular. You’ve got the red cliffs kind of north of us and to the sides. … And throw the white sand out with the green grass, and then you’ve got the lava rock just right off the edge of the grass, it’s a very unique kind of style of golf course for this desert kind of climate. A lot of people have made the comment, I feel like I’m in Hawaii playing on some of the courses.
“What they’ve done is make a spectacular golf course and picked a great location for the beauty, and they're trying to finish up this resort that’s great for the community. They've got bigger dreams that go way beyond my imagination.”