Vijay Singh hadn’t won a PGA Tour Champions event in nearly five years. But that wasn’t what made the 60-year-old’s Sunday victory at the Ally Challenge a surprise. Rather it’s how he won … or rather how Paul Goydos lost.

Looking for his first senior win in six years, Goydos held a one-stroke lead heading to the par-3 17th hole at Warwick Hills in Grand Blanc, Michigan. But after hitting the green off the tee, Goydos watched his 18-foot birdie try go three feet long. And then it got ugly.

Four putts from 3 feet.

Paul Goydos' 1-shot lead became a 2-shot deficit after a triple bogey on the 17th hole @AllyChallenge. pic.twitter.com/KRRdp97iXo

— PGA TOUR Champions (@ChampionsTour) August 27, 2023

Four putts from three feet, and five putts total for a triple-bogey 6 left him now two shots back of Singh, who was in the group in front of Goydos and in the midst of posted a four-under 68 to get to 14-under 202 for the tournament. When he looked at the leaderboard, he realized he was suddenly out front.

“I was 14 (under), Jeff [Maggert] was 13 and no … no Goydos,” Singh said. “I was surprised what he did there.”

That contrasted the incredulous look Goydos had on the 17th hole, wondering how things had slipped away. Not to mention the incredulous voices of the Golf Channel announcers watching what was happening.

John Swantek: “It has become complete unglued for Goydos, who was in command here at 17.”

Lanny Wadkins: “I was thinking all he had to do was tap this short one in and par 18 and it’s his. But not now …”

Goydos would make a par on the 18th hole to finish with a one-under 71 and in a tie for third place.

The win for Singh was his fifth career PGA Tour Champions title but first since the Charles Schwab Cup Championship in November 2018. Interestingly, it was the fourth time he’s won a pro event at Warwick Hills; the course used to host a PGA Tour stop that Singh was the victor in at 1997, 2004 and 2005.

“For some reason, I drive the ball very well here,” Singh said. “I did that this week, and I putted well. Putting has been a mystery for a long time. I found a few things out in the last few weeks and I’ve been putting really well.”

And as for Goydos’ reaction to what happened? Well here was his response on social media, posting this music video with the lyric: “I’m not sick, but I’m not well.”

Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta (Official Music Video) – YouTube https://t.co/dlPbh3GWmU

— Paul Goydos (@PaulGoydosPGA) August 27, 2023

The post WATCH: Gut-wrenching five(!)-putt costs PGA Tour Champions pro first win in six years appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By John Feinstein
On Wednesday afternoon, shortly before they were scheduled to face the Orlando Magic in an NBA playoff game, the Milwaukee Bucks decided not to play. They wanted to protest the most recent police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., on Sunday. Blake was shot seven times in the back by police while getting into his car—with his three children in the back seat.

Blake is in critical condition and paralysed. His shooting set off protests and national outrage. Since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in May when a police officer kept his foot on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, more and more athletes have been speaking out against police brutality.

Once the Bucks made their decision, all three NBA games scheduled for Wednesday were postponed. The WNBA followed soon after, postponing three scheduled games. Three Major League Baseball games were also called off, and past U.S. Open champion Naomi Osaka said she wouldn’t play her semifinal match in the tennis warm-up event for this year’s Open before that match was halted by a day. Nine NFL teams called off practices to protest and speak out. On Thursday, the National Hockey League announced a two-day postponement of playoff games in protest of the Kenosha shooting, and seven more MLB games were called off.

Golf?

Cameron Champ, who is biracial, spoke up after showing up to play the first round of the BMW Championship wearing one black shoe and one white shoe. And the tour released a statement saying it supported the actions of the athletes in other sports “and many of our own members [who are] standing up for issues they believe in.” The statement then went on to talk about the work the tour has been doing this summer “to make a deeper and more specific commitment to racial equity.”

The next sentence was the most baffling: “We understand that now is not the appropriate time to highlight our programs and policies but rather to express our outrage at the injustice that remains prevalent in our country.”

Actually, now is exactly the time that the tour should be talking in specifics about what it is doing. Calling off the first round and scheduling 36 holes for Sunday certainly would have sent a message.

Tiger Woods, who along with Champ, Harold Varner III and Joseph Bramlett is one of the four players of colour across all three tours (PGA Tour, PGA Tour Champions, Korn Ferry Tour), said he had talked to commissioner Jay Monahan after the other sports announced their shutdowns and that he was comfortable with the tour’s statement being enough. “We’re all on board,” he said.

Tony Finau, who is of Tongan and Samoan descent, said, “We’re in full support of what the NBA is doing,” adding, “If we can learn from each other, listen to each other, I think it’s a big deal.”

Along with the statement issued Thursday morning, the PGA Tour also posted to its website a one-minute video of Champ describing the symbolism of his shoes.

“It was something I knew I wanted to do as soon as I saw the Kenosha video,” Champ said Thursday night after playing his first round. “I mean, my jaw dropped when I saw it. I thought, Not again, but there it was. I mean all I could say was, ‘Wow.’ ”

Champ has worn one black shoe and one white shoe in the past—to celebrate Black History Month. This, however, was different.

“My grandfather grew up in the south when Jim Crow [legal segregation] still existed and the KKK was still feared,” he said. “I know those stories, and I know how difficult it can be to be Black in this country—even now. I think we [in golf] need to use this as a starting point to become more diverse on and off the golf course. It’s amazing that we have only four players of color on tour right now. We need to improve that.”

Champ received a good deal of blowback Thursday on social media for his shoes and for his video, which concluded with him saying, “This needs to end.”

“I’m not naïve,” he said. “I knew that was coming.”

Paul Goydos, who has played on the PGA Tour and the PGA Tour Champions dating to 1993 and once taught school in the inner city of Long Beach, Calif., said he didn’t expect to see many tour players speak out on the current state of affairs.

“That’s not the way we are politically,” he said. “Everyone knows that. The tours are mostly white and lean right. But it’s more than that. Team sports are owner-driven financially. We’re sponsor-driven. I think there’s a reluctance to say or do anything that might upset sponsors.”

Sean M. Haffey
After his round Thursday at the BMW Championship, Tony Finau spoke of the need to continue to have “uncomfortable conversations about systemic racism.”

Goydos said he admires the Black Lives Matter sticker that fellow PGA Tour Champions player Kirk Triplett put on his bag two weeks ago. “Let’s face it, there are neighbourhoods in this country where it’s borderline illegal to be Black,” Goydos said. “If I walk down a street, no one will notice. If a Black man walks down that same street, it’s entirely possible people will call the police. I think the most important thing I can do right now—that we can all do—is listen and try to learn.”

Triplett has four children, two of them adopted. One is Hispanic and one is Black/Japanese—his 18-year-old son Kobe. When Triplett put the sticker on his bag he talked about “the talk” he felt compelled to give Kobe—the same talk most fathers feel the need to give their Black children when they become teenagers.

“Think about this,” Triplett said. “When you have a segment of the population that is frightened of those that are there to help with public safety, you have an issue.”

Perhaps the most surprising—and encouraging—occurrence of the past few days was the decision to shut down by the NHL, where 97 percent of the players are white, according to USA Today. The fact that players in a predominantly white league decided to take a stance is a new development. Most of the raised voices of athletes—dating to Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel for the national anthem in 2016—have come from Blacks.

Champ, Finau and Goydos are right about what should come next in golf. Everyone needs to listen and understand why there is so much anger and frustration about these issues. And, as Champ says, the tour needs to move beyond words and address the sport’s lack of diversity.

From tragedy, can come progress.

The post Now is the time for golf to have ‘the talk’ about racial inequality appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

He’d told only a small handful of friends, including his closest friends on tour—Kevin Sutherland, Steve Flesch and Billy Andrade—what was going on. Then a reporter from Golfweek called and asked why he wasn’t playing. “I’m staying home with my kids because my wife is having some health problems,” he said, leaving it at that.

“I was telling the truth,” he said this past weekend. “I just left some things out.”

Wendy Goydos had gotten addicted to methamphetamines, which she had started taking to deal with pain from constant, hammering migraine headaches. She’d gone to rehab more than once. That was the part Goydos left out.

When the reporter called Wendy, she told him the whole story. And, just like that, the private life of the Goydos’s—all four of them—became public.

Goydos thought about that when he read the story last week about Lucas Glover’s wife, Krista, being arrested for allegedly assaulting her husband and her mother-in-law. According to the police report, Glover, the 2009 U.S. Open champion, had come home after shooting 78 to miss the 54-hole cut at The Players Championship.

Krista began berating him, call him a ‘loser.’ Lucas’s mother, Hershey Glover got involved. Eventually, Krista placed a 911 call. When the police called back, Lucas answered and told them they weren’t needed. They came anyway and Krista was arrested.

Later, Lucas tweeted about the incident saying, “Krista will be cleared in this private matter.”

Except the incident wasn’t private—not with the 911 calls on tape and the police report a matter of public record.

Michael Cohen/Getty Images
Goydos had his own experience when a private challenge within his family was publicised.

“If Lucas was a lawyer and he came home after a bad day and the exact same thing had happened, it wouldn’t have been any kind of story,” Goydos said. “But because he’s a professional athlete (and a U.S. Open champion) it’s all over the Internet and the news. Things happen in people’s private lives all the time. But when you’re a public figure, they tend not to be private.”

There is a tendency for those who watch great athletes perform to think the rest of their life is as easy as they make playing a sport appear to be. After all, those who succeed at the highest levels of sport make money that few people can even relate to.

“People think because you’re making a lot of money—whether it’s as an athlete or an actor or any other job where you perform in public, that you have a perfect life,” Goydos said. “In reality, that’s often far from the truth.”

The most famous case of a golfer’s private life being nothing like the public perception is that of Tiger Woods, who became a daily subject for tabloid news shows around the world in 2009 when it was revealed that he’d had countless adulterous liaisons with women at a time when he was posting photos on his website of his wife, children and dog. Woods was arguably the greatest golfer of all time; richer than most sultans and had the perfect family—beautiful wife, daughter, son, dog.

And yet, behind closed doors, his private life was in chaos.

Illness is a little different. People don’t rush to report it. Hilary Watson, wife of eight-time major champion Tom Watson, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October. Only a handful of people knew she was sick and was going through chemotherapy, followed by radiation treatments, followed by surgery. David Feherty knew but wasn’t going to talk about it on NBC or Golf Channel. I knew because Watson and I have worked closely together on a charity golf tournament since Bruce Edwards’ death due to ALS in 2004. I wasn’t going to talk about it either.

Tiger Woods’ sordid private life was exposed when he crashed his Cadillac Escalade in 2009.

Only after doctors declared Hilary Watson cancer-free following surgery earlier this month did they talk to Vahe Gregorian of the Kansas City Star about what had happened.

Years ago, long before the story was public, Arthur Ashe told me he was HIV positive and was dying of AIDS. I had no desire to break that story.

Sometimes, as a reporter, you know things about an athlete’s personal life that you don’t report because it IS personal and it should be up to them whether to go public with the story.

But when there’s a police report involved—as with Glover two weeks ago; as with Woods nine years ago and again after his DUI stop last year—privacy is no longer an issue. Once a public figure is involved in a story that is in the public domain, any pleas for privacy will go unheeded.

There are times when talking about difficult, personal issues can be cathartic for an athlete. Jason Day felt he owed the media—and, thus the public—an explanation when he dropped out of the World Match Play a year ago because he couldn’t focus on golf with his mother facing cancer surgery. Later in the year, when Day’s wife, Ellie, miscarried, she posted a long Instagram about her loss, clearly not because she was obligated to but because sharing her feelings helped her deal with what had just happened to her.

Years ago, when Watson was just becoming a star and was bothered by what he saw as media intrusions into his private life, he asked Arnold Palmer—arguably THE most public athlete ever—how he put up with being constantly asked for autographs when he was out with his family or the never-ending demands made on his time by the media.

“Don’t you need privacy SOME time?” Watson asked.

“Of course,” Palmer answered. “But it’s always there. When your kids jump into bed to watch a TV show with you and your wife, that’s all yours. When you sit down on the floor and play a game with your kids, that’s all yours.”

Athletes are like the rest of us: they have wonderful family moments and they have tragic family moments. Last summer, Feherty lost his oldest son to a drug overdose. He’s spoken about it publicly, but the incurable pain will always be locked up inside him.

Being an athlete—even the wealthiest and most successful of athletes—doesn’t protect you from loss or from unhappiness. Goydos remembers reading a story about a group of researchers who interviewed several lottery winners and several paraplegics and then going back to talk to the same people about their lives a year later.

“Almost without fail, the parapalegics were happier than the lottery winners,” Goydos said. “A lot of times life is about your expectations. You win the lottery, you EXPECT to be happy. If you’re a paraplegic, you’re probably happy for anything good that happens in your life.

“When you’re a kid playing golf, you think that if you make it to the PGA Tour and make millions you’re GOING to be happy because that’s your dream. Sometimes, when the dream comes true, you find out it isn’t all you’d thought it would be. And that can make you very unhappy.”

Every once in a while, when an athlete’s private life becomes public, we’re reminded of that. And, even though it really shouldn’t surprise us, it often does.

The post Lucas Glover’s private struggle is a reminder that golfers are human, too appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.