Everyone should have known better last April when Masters Chairman Fred Ridley claimed there was “no timetable” for the work that would lengthen the par five 13th, the first hole that follows Amen Corner.
Things at Augusta National are planned and orderly and nothing is left to happen chance.
Just eight months after Ridley saying there was no timetable, obviously there was one because the newly-created back tee on 13 is finished, looking like it’s been there a long time.
Formerly the 13th was just 510 yards. Many par fours play that distance in championship golf these days. Now, that back tee might add as much as 50 yards to the hole.
The 15th has been viewed as a risk-reward situation. The field last year averaged 4.77 shots.
“The fact that players are hitting middle- to short-irons into that hole is not really how it was designed,” Ridley said at the 2022 Masters.
LIV Looking To Create Women’s Tour?:
Could the next move by :LIV’s Evil Empire make a move on women’s golf?
This past summer, The Lamest Commissioner In The Land (aka Greg Norman) was asked about that topic.
“One hundred percent. Drop the mic on that,” Norman said in an interview with the Palm Beach Post. “We have discussed it internally, the opportunity is there.”
That comment got the attention of LPGA golfers. Some are sending out warning signals to the LPGA.
“I think a lot of women would go because it’s a big difference,” Spaniard Carlota Ciganda said last week from the CME Group Tour Championship at Tiburon Golf Club. “If they are asking you to go to Saudi and they are going to pay you $5 million, what would you do? Would you stay here? Would you go and take the money?
The LPGA Tour and its smaller purses, would be very vulnerable.
Karrie Webb, the seven-time major winner who lives in Boynton Beach said this past June that she fears a LIV women’s league could “ruin women’s golf.” Webb grew up idolizing Norman, a fellow Aussie, but has posted her disappointment in her “childhood hero”.
After the Post interview, LPGA Tour commissioner Mollie Marcoux told the London-based Times “she would engage in a conversation” with LIV if it means promoting women’s golf, but added a there are “a lot of factors to consider” before the LPGA would do business with LIV Golf.
Marcoux Samaan declined to speculate further when asked this week about LIV entering the women’s golf business.
The Saudi Human Rights issues include the fact that women are repressed. Women’s rights activists and female political prisoners reportedly have been sexually assaulted, tortured and killed in Saudi Arabian detention facilities.
