Maybe Tiger Woods was on to something.
Maybe last Monday he placed a quick phone call to Jim Cantore, the Weather Channel’s resident work-out guy and posed the question:
“Hey Jimmy, what do you think?”
To which Cantore, after shuffling through his reports and checking out the extended forecast for Napa said to Woods:
“Hey man, looks like a lot of rain and cold weather, you might want to re-think that comeback stuff, no way you want to get into that start-stop, sloshing around, cold temperature stuff with your back and all, after all, you are 40!”
To which Tiger Woods promptly hung up the phone, looked at caddie Joe LaCava and declared:
“Joey, we’re going home.”
And after viewing the madness that transpired at Silverado for four very, very long days, it’s a matter of Woods probably doing what was right for him.
This Safeway was no way to start the 2016-17 PGA Tour season.
It was pure misery, yet another exercise in start, stop, wait a heck of a long time then try to start again. Oh by the way, we’re playing lift-clean-and-place. And would someone please tell Tim Finchem at PGA Tour headquarters that it’s pure stupidity to go up against college football and the NFL in the fall.
They won’t show the ratings for this one because there probably weren’t any.
Is it possible to draw a “zero” share of the viewer market?
Then there was the weather. You want rain delays, you got rain delays. We’ve heard that you need sun to grow grapes to make wine there in wine country but there were absolutely no grapes growing last weekend any where near Silverado.
Rain gear was the outfit of the day. Saturday afternoon it got real ugly, wind, hard rain, cold temperatures, you would have thought it was a day in Scotland.
Wonder why there were no spectators out there? They had better sense. Even by Sunday, when you looked in those fancy hospitality boxes, there were more empty seats than people.
Hey Finchem, you seriously want to go up against the NFL? The crowds were so sparse that this looked more like a Web.com event. The women draw bigger crowds than what they got at Napa.
No telling what might have happened to Woods with the cold temperatures and rain delays. That would have been trouble for his surgically-repaired back, no doubt. It was incredibly warm back in Jupiter.
But it wasn’t all that horrible for Brendan Steele. He swiped this one from Patton Kizzire and he did it the old fashioned way by shooting 65 on Sunday to post the winning 18-under par total. That’s usually something that will get you a win in a field devoid of the big-name stars save Phil Mickelson.
Steele did it the old fashioned way — he made critical putts down the stretch — four feet at 16, 15 feet at 17 then the game winner from eight feet at 18. It was beyond satisfying for Steele, who held the 54-hole lead in Napa last year, only to blow it on Sunday and watch Emiliano Grillo take the trophy in a playoff with Kevin Na.
This time, Steele got it done.
“Awesome,” was how he described it.
Obviously he paid no attention to the weather.
