By Tim Rosaforte

Steve Stricker wakes up some early mornings and isn’t able to fall back asleep. Actually, I know, as he admitted it’s one of the most tangible effect of being leader of a U.S. golf team. “I’m thinking about things a lot,” said the U.S. Presidents Cup captain on Sunday night. “It’s probably the hardest part of the captaincy, making sure you make the right picks.” Even on the Labor Day weekend, when Striker was moving his daughter back to college, he found himself on the phone with vice captains Tiger Woods and Davis Love III. “I haven’t been able to watch much on TV,” Stricker said after the third round of the Dell Technologies Championship. “I’ve been following it on the phone. Every half hour I’m getting out of there to see how guys are doing.” What he saw as it relates to players on the bubble at TPC Boston was not much of a case for picking Charley Hoffman (10th on the points list, with the top 10 securing automatic spots), Kevin Chappell (11) or Brian Harman (12). “It’s an important part of the team,” Stricker said. “You want to make sure the two guys you pick are going to fit with the team. Hopefully they’re playing good. It’s a big decision, and I think about it quite often.” What he thinks often about are Phil Mickelson, especially as he is trying to make a case for himself with rounds of 69-67-69 in Boston. “It’s weird,” Stricker admitted. “I had a talk with him [at the WGC Bridgestone Invitational] in Akron. Here I am asking Phil Mickelson to show me something for the rest of the year. Here’s a guy with 12 tour wins asking a guy with 40-something tour wins and five majors, asking him to show me something before the end of the year. It just doesn’t seem quite right.” What sounds right is that with one round to play and the picks announced on Wednesday night, Mickelson has a real chance at age 47, with only one top-10 in 2017 since March, to make his 12th Presidents Cup team. “Phil’s in a position where, I don’t know how to say it, I’d like to see him play well,” Stricker said. “I know how much he means to the team, not only as a player, but a guy that’s in the team room. He means a lot. I don’t know if any guy outside the top 10 can say that. He’s just really good in the team room and that’s vital. I’d like to see him show something this week, which is great to see.”

I Saw …

The photo posted on Twitter by Steve Timms, president and CEO of the Houston Golf Association, of mowers on the first green at the Golf Club of Houston. While acknowledging that way down the priority list are Houston’s golf courses, there was also a sense of relief hearing that the two courses hosting tour stops in the flooded city have actually opened for play in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, just as there was the Houston Astros opening the doors of Minute Maid Park for a doubleheader with the New York Mets over the weekend.

https://twitter.com/TimmsSteve/status/903679332547211264

Symbolically, it means the same for golfers and golf charities that benefit from the Insperity Invitational on the PGA Tour Champions, as well as the Houston Open at GC of H. “People that depend on us are encouraged that the golf course is bouncing back,” Timms told me on Sunday of Labor Day weekend. Having visited White Sulphur Springs and The Greenbrier Resort after the West Virginia flood in 2016, I can only equate what Timms must be feeling to the sense of pride and victory I saw when the Greenbrier Classic returned this past July to the Old White. On a lesser scale in a bigger grid is the Houston Open, a tournament still without a title sponsor for 2018 that has donated $70 million to charity in its history. “[Houston] is such a vast area,” Timms said. “There are so many people affected that have dire circumstances. Part of the city will be flooded for two more weeks, but you remain hopeful that things are going to be all right for those folks.” One can only hope.

I Heard …

From Grayson Murray’s manager that the 23-year-old didn’t want to do one-on-one interviews during tournament week at the Dell Technologies Championship, which I get. Murray entered the second FedEx Cup playoff event ranked 70th in points, with the top 70 advancing to the third event, the BMW Championship. But eventually Murray had to talk based on his play at TPC Boston. With rounds of 68-68-67, the rookie found himself tied for fourth with a late tee time on Labor Day Monday. Although surrounded by major champions on the tee sheet, Murray was talking about not being scared of the moment, or scared of winning. Just like he wasn’t scared of winning on Sunday at the PGA Championship. “I legitimately had a chance at Quail [Hollow] this year in the PGA,” Murray said. “It wasn’t because I was nervous. It just got caught up with bad driving.”

Drew Hallowell/Getty Images

Nothing seems to have caught up with him at the Dell. He’s played his last 22 holes in eight under and was four-of-five scrambling on Sunday. For someone better known for his social-media rants at the beginning of the year, and later for his anxiety and depression issues, Murray is becoming identified more for his golf since winning the Barbasol Championship in July, the same week as the Open Championship. He has not tweeted since the day after the Barbasol, thanking his mother and father for all they sacrificed so he could pursue his dream. That dream could lead to East Lake for the Tour Championship and possibly Rookie of the Year honors depending on how it plays out the remainder of the playoffs. “If my season ends right now, I’ve had a great year,” Murray said. “I don’t put any pressure on me. But obviously the goal is to get to East Lake.”

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With Harvey sitting over south Texas and appearing to be heading back to the gulf to reload, higher on Burke’s the priority list than the recovery of her two golf courses was the safety of her members stranded in their homes along the banks of Cypress Creek. Some of them have evacuated by kayaks and canoes.

“It’s pouring down raining, and as it continues to flood, it’s who can you help along the way,” Burke said. “It’s awful to go into people’s homes and water is up to the waist. This is devastating.”

With the one of America’s great golf cities now a water hazard, the top 100 golfers remaining after the opening round of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs were doing corporate outings on their way from Long Island to Boston. One of those was Patrick Reed, who told me in a text that the backyard of his house at The Woodlands outside of Houston had 10 to 12 feet of water, which was encroaching on his home. Worse, several of his neighbors’ homes were completely flooded.

Jhonny Vegas was in a better spot. Coming off a T-3 with Jon Rahm at The Northern Trust, ranked 10th in FedEx Cup points, Vegas started this trip with his father, who was visiting from Venezuela. At home in The Woodlands, four miles from Reed’s house, were Vegas’ mother, wife and children. There was plenty of food and supplies on hand. But with airports closed and expressways turned to rivers, there’s a question of just how long it would be before Greater Houston was accessible again.

Chris Stroud, who made a big splash at the PGA Championship, also lives north of the city, in Spring, Texas. Twenty family members and close friends were holed up at his house over the weekend and were hurricane equipped with a generator and plenty of food. It sounded like a pretty good hurricane party until police showed up at the door with a warning that while evacuations were not mandatory, flood-controlled reservoirs to the north would be opened with 30 more hours of rain coming.

On Sunday, a close friend of Stroud’s who is a former Navy SEAL, was contacted to help some of the elderly evacuate from the neighborhood. They took Stroud’s truck, which sits five feet off the ground, and were barely above the high-water mark. Escaping to a lake house two hours to the north was not advisable on flooded I-45. He had been on the phone all day, texting people back home.

“I hate not being there to help my family,” Stroud said. “This is a tremendous problem, and it just started. It’s a scary situation. I pray nobody gets hurt.”

Steve Timms, president and CEO of the Houston Golf Association, paid a visit to the Golf Club of Houston, site of the Shell Houston Open. He emailed the photos and explained how Nos. 1 and 18, once separated by a lake, is now just one body of water (above photo). “Just the damage that’s going to happen remains to be seen,” Timms said. “The longer that this water stays on top of the turf, the longer it gets a lot of silt.” And silt is not what Timms needs, not when he’s hoping to sign a title sponsor before next year’s Houston Open.

Typical of the golf culture rallying in times of need, Steve Elkington opened his home to the University of Houston golf teams, and UH men’s coach Jonathan Dismuke joined Women’s Golf Team coach Gerrod Chadwell (husband of LPGA pro Stacy Lewis) in saving six sets of clubs and two TrackMan golf computers stored in a building on the range at the Golf Club of Houston. Checking the radar, they took advantage of a one-hour break in lightning to take three kayaks (above) and two blow-up mattresses on their mission.

“Kayaking with golf clubs is not a great idea,” Dismuke said. “It was a terrible situation, but we’re so fortunate that we’re talking about saving TrackMan rather than human lives.”

That’s the general sentiment right now, as the rain continues to fall and people remain stranded in their houses. At some point, golf will matter again and Houston will go from search and rescue to rebuilding. But in the moment, everyone is focused on the here and now.

“We are concerned for all those in need, so many families in Houston need help,” Robin Burke said. “We will see all the damage as soon as the water recedes. … We can grow grass. More important are the families all over Houston. Let’s get everyone safe first.”

The post Tour pros with Houston ties worry about Hurricane Harvey’s destruction appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

The extent of the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey won’t be understood for awhile and is likely to expand in the days ahead after the storm hit the Texas gulf coast over the weekend and continues to dump rain on the region.

“This is not over yet,” Steve Timms, president and CEO of the Houston Golf Association, said. “This storm got caught between two high pressure systems. They’re usually out of here, but this one camped over south Texas. It’s now backed up, and they’re projecting that by tonight it’ll be back in Gulf of Mexico, which could have further strengthening. We could be in for a forecast of 15 to 20 inches of additional rainfall.”

The association’s offices are adjacent to the Golf Club of Houston, site of the PGA Tour event formerly known as the Shell Houston Open. The tournament course there is bisected by the Greens Bayou, which carries water from north of Houston down to Galveston Bay and into the Gulf of Mexico.

https://twitter.com/TimmsSteve/status/901933403381137409

“It’s been out of its banks since probably yesterday [Sunday] at about 9 a.m.,” Timms said. “We’ve had literally massive flooding. We’ve never seen anything like it.

“If it were to stop raining now, I would say we’re probably at least another day or two before we’ll see any significant receding of water. It’s a massive amount of water. We’ve received so much rain upstream of us that it’s got to come through major bayous. The longer you keep water on turf, the more silt and turf damage you’re going to have. I just can’t even start imagining how much damage there will be. Obviously, it’ll be significant. One thing we do is that greens and tees are built up out of the 100-year floodplain to protect them. But this is not a 100-year event. It’s more like a 500-year event.”

https://twitter.com/TimmsSteve/status/902199339921154049

Timms said he spoke on Monday morning with Robin Burke, wife of Champions Golf Club co-founder Jackie Burke. “Cypress Creek, which runs through their golf course, is way out of its banks. She said the 18th tee on the Cypress Creek golf course is under water, which is a pretty good distance away from Cypress Creek. It’s pretty devastating flooding for Champions.” The third and 12th greens reportedly were under water as well.

The Cypress Creek course has hosted the U.S. Open and a Ryder Cup, among other prestigious events.

This is Champions area.. pic.twitter.com/vmgur5Cegp

— Steve Elkington (@elkpga) August 27, 2017

The Woodlands Country Club north of Houston, the site of the PGA Tour Champions’ Insperity Invitational, has sustained moderate flooding, its director of golf Darrell Fuston said.

“I expect the Woodlands Country Club to be OK for the most part. The Palmer Course tends to have high water on it, but it shouldn’t be too awful. Other courses in area are not going to be as fortunate. Kingwood, the Golf Club of Houston. There’s some others I’m hearing about.”

Fuston has been unable to inspect whatever damage there is to his courses. The flooding is such that he is trapped on the street on which he lives, he said.

“So many of these courses are built in floodplains designed to be runoffs when floods happen,” Fuston said. “I guess there’s a reason they are where they are. So much water moves over the courses, but something like this is unprecedented, really.”

River Oaks Country Club, once a Houston Open and Western Open sites, is adjacent to the Buffalo Bayou was largely flooded, as seen in the Tweet below:

Prayers to all members.send us course photos: in photo: River Oaks CC: Supt: Morris Johnson https://t.co/ZyT745tHlS pic.twitter.com/sX3x9KYHQO

— South Texas GCSA, Inc. (@STGCSA) August 28, 2017

The Houston area’s newest high-profile course, Bluejack National in Montgomery, Texas, largely escaped damage, despite encountering between 15 and 20 inches of rain, general manager Casey Paulson said.

“We’re about an hour north of Houston,” he said. “We’ve had a ton of rain, but it’s not quite as bad as some of the stuff you’ve seen on TV. No serious damages here. We’ve had a couple of trees go down. That’s about the extent of it. We’ve been pretty fortunate out here.”

The Houston Golf Association, meanwhile, is renovating the municipal Gus Wortham Park Golf Course, adjacent to the Brays Bayou east of downtown Houston.

“About five holes have been grassed,” Timms said. “In the last 24 hours they’ve had 24 inches of rain on the job site. We don’t know what that will look like until we get there.

“It’ll be quite … devastating is the right word to use for these golf courses in our region. We can recover from that. But there are people in Houston really hurting. It’s a debilitating event.”

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