An open letter to LPGA Commissioner Craig Kessler.

Hi, Craig

Golf’s future in my life was teetering on the edge in 2017. A hip injury prevented me from playing. Tiger Woods was pretty much over. I was not far from becoming someone who only watched The Masters. 

Attending that year’s Solheim Cup at Des Moines Golf & Country Club changed everything. Watching those 24 players interact with fans and play great golf reignited my love for the game. Plus I actually got to see them play, the Ryder Cup where I mostly saw the back of other people’s heads. I won’t say this turned me into an LPGA junkie, but in the years since I’ve been to women’s tournaments at Pebble Beach, Harding Park, Sharon Heights and Riviera. I’ll be back at Sharon Heights again next March, at Lake Merced Club next September and if there’s no baseball season to travel for maybe I’ll head to Inverness or the JM Eagle. When I have a choice of what golf to watch, I almost always choose to watch the LPGA.

So that’s where I’m coming from here. 

Listening to your interviews, I think you understand the opportunity and the challenge you face. As a fan who believes the Tour can still capitalize on this moment, here are five things I want you to consider. 

One: Marketing aggressive messages. I’ve heard you say the LPGA is a disruptor brand, and you’re right. Back that up with the way you message and market the Tour. 

Modern audiences reward believers who refuse to back down. They want you to stand for yourself. Do it. Assert a world where Nelly Korda has the best swing on the planet and defend that assertion against all doubters. Challenge the assumption that the best golf on Sunday afternoon is played by men. Challenge the assumption that driving distance is a prerequisite for great golf. Mock the foolish notion that a man with a three handicap could hold his own against Ayaka Furue. 

Your best marketing message should come with the risk that golf bro Twitter laughs at you for it. Find it and stand behind it. If you do, I think you’ll see the LPGA increase its share of attention across mainstream and social media. That’s a key part of creating a flywheel you need to grow the Tour’s stature in the game and in sports culture. 

Two: Forcing great courses to tell you no. I’m glad the Tour is back in the Bay Area but let’s be honest: Sharon Heights isn’t going to attract attention. Cal Club would. San Francisco Golf Club would. Cypress Point and Seminole sure would. They might laugh at you for asking, especially now with the PGA Tour potentially trying to get in. But you can offer all these clubs something the PGA Tour can’t: History. So go after them like a believer. Ask them this question point blank: 

How can you be one of the world’s greatest courses if a woman has never won there? 

If they don’t want an annual Tour stop, tell them hosting every five years is okay. The Tour gets the attention that comes with playing them, the clubs get a legitimate place in all of golf’s history. Win-win. 

Three: Wait…tournaments rotating to prestige courses…did I just describe a major? I think so. 

We need to talk about The Chevron. It’s great that Chevron put a massive amount of money into the tournament. Now it deserves a better course that connects it to golf history. Memorial Park can’t deliver that. It also hosts a men’s tournament only a few weeks earlier. Stop riding the coattails of a mid-tier PGA Tour event. 

I understand you’re trying to build something in Houston, and that’s laudable. But again I encourage you to think more aggressively. Why do you have to build anything? A believer would act like the LPGA deserves to host its major at a more famous course…because it does.

(If Chevron doesn’t like that because it’s easier to throw hospitality parties in its corporate hometown, then maybe Chevron isn’t the right partner for you after all.) 

In addition to the stunners I mentioned earlier, potential courses can easily be found in the list of sites that can no longer regularly host mens tournaments: Olympia Fields, Medinah, Cherry Hills, Castle Pines, Firestone (which is about to lose its senior event) and Cog Hill to name a few. 

Three(b): Don’t forget about made-for-TV match play. This opens up an entirely new category of courses. Think Sand Hills, Fishers Island, Friar’s Head or Ohoopee because you won’t need to transport or support thousands of people on the groups for multiple days at a time. Now imagine matches not covered like traditional golf broadcasts, but produced like theatric films. 

Four: Claim Hawaii. The PGA Tour opened the door wide open for you here. Make Kapalua yours and tell Wai’alae that we all know Tiger Woods is never traveling to Hawaii for a seniors event, so there’s no reason to take the PGA Tour’s consolation prize. If it won’t budge, find another great course to schedule after Kapalua. Then market the hell out of being the top tour playing golf in Hawaii. Because you will be.

This can fit neatly into your existing schedule. If you’re willing adjust the timing at Lake Nona (or give it one of your fall events) the LPGA can be the tour that starts its season with primetime Hawaiian golf. That also makes it a lot easier for your players to travel for the first Asian swing. 

Five: Figure out streaming. I know Golf Channel is the only place that carries the LPGA, and that’s fine. But I have no idea when it’s on. Find a way to get your broadcast partners to have a consistent TV window. I won’t pretend this is easy; the economics of your media partners are miserable. But you’ve got to find a way to give current and potential fans a consistent way to easily find your product.

At the risk of 20/20 hindsight, I’ll say that all of this would have been a lot easier four years ago. Previous Tour leadership is at fault for not capitalizing on the mens game tearing itself apart. Be the aggressive advocate and believer those leaders weren’t. 

I truly want you to succeed and for the Tour to succeed. Watching the two Asian swings in primetime on the west coast is a highlight of my sports year. One of these years I will make a point of attending each. 

I wish you the best. 

Severance season two finale: My thoughts

In keeping with the style of season two, I will present my thoughts on the Severance finale in a random and disjointed way.  

I loved the conversation between iMark and oMark. Season one never fully delivered on the most fascinating part of its premise—what it means for one person to be two people. Season two did. The Marks trading home videos with each other was such a creative way to make the first innie-outie interaction happen. 

I loved the emotional awareness from oDylan in his letter to iDylan. I think of iDylan as the Hurley of Severance. He sometimes speaks for the audience, and we can relate to his ability to find simple joys in a strange situation. So it hurt to see him so despondent at the end of episode nine. I also didn’t like how they made oDylan seem like such a lout for most of this season. His letter saying he’s comforted knowing his innie is down there was really sweet. But…

I think this storyline (and a few others I’ll mention in a minute) might have been the victim of rumored conflict between Severance creator Dan Erickson and writer Mark Friedman. They apparently couldn’t stand each other in season one and had to grin and bear it to get through the much delayed, heavily re-written season two. Beau Willimon (House of Cards guy) came on to fix the later half of season two and will take on a more prominent role in season three. Good. Pretty much everything after the ORTBO was a mess. Beautifully made, but a mess. 

The love triangle between iDylan, oDylan and his wife might be an example of this. What was this, like six scenes in the entire season? It feels like we saw an abbreviated version of something they meant to explore more deeply. Ricken’s book project with Lumon could easily be another. That had one or two scenes at most? The only one I can remember is the one with Natalie.  

Irv’s season two arc also felt stunted. Why give him a mystery phone conversation in episode one and not resolve it? That seems like a very odd string to leave dangling until season three. They also just kinda aborted his entire season after the dinner at oBurt’s house. Why go through all that—including Burt accidentally (?) revealing he worked at Lumon before being severed—then drop it for two episodes? And then not really address any of it when you put Irv on a train to somewhere Burt can’t know. I can’t help but wonder if that was initially meant to be something much different than what made it to our screens. 

I loved Drummond. He was a good character and one season feels like the right amount of time for him to be part of the story.

And actually what was with having two character-centric episodes in a row? I can’t remember any show I’ve ever watched that took back-to-back detours like that. It took us out of the season’s natural momentum and actually de-emphasized iMark’s completion of Cold Harbor. Mark didn’t go to work from episodes seven through nine. That’s three installments of the show where he made zero progress on what we were told would be the greatest moment in the history of the planet Earth. You couldn’t make it less dramatic if you tried. 

Ms. Huang is another character who seems like she should have been more impactful to season two’s outcome. What was the point of her really? I can come up with two possibilities. She might have been a way to help the writers work Milchick into a simmering rage (more on him shortly). Or she might have been a timely example of the way Lumon exploits children. I’m fine with either. But shouldn’t she have, like, done something tangible? In the end she mattered exactly zero to the four refiners. 

Now let me vent on something I really hated about the season two finale: Milchick. My favourite storyline this season was the way they kept pushing this character closer and closer to his boiling point. Think of all the indignities he endured at the hands of Lumon: Not taking Cobel’s name off his computer, being put in charge of a child intern, a humiliating performance review, those weird paintings with massive racial undertones, being mocked by a puppet and being constantly looked down on by Drummond. That scene of him growling “Grow. Grow.” at himself in the mirror was tremendous. 

So why did they trap him in the bathroom for the most important parts of the finale??? That’s like benching your best player in the fourth quarter, and I think it sucked drama out of Mark’s dash to the testing floor. 

Speaking of that, I think the whole “Gemma is gonna die when Cold Harbor is finished” thing was a little underwhelming, too. I never felt a moment when Gemma’s life was truly in danger. 

Imagine this instead:

There’s no stupid goat sacrifice. Drummond and the dentist watch Mark complete the Cold Harbor file. Drummond leaves the observation room and goes to get the gun and bullet from the gun and bullet dispenser. He starts the long and winding walk to the room where Gemma is taking apart the crib. 

Meanwhile, Mark has broken free of the marching band and makes a mad dash to the elevator…with Milchick on his tail because Milchick is not stupidly trapped in the john. Mark turns a corner and runs smack into Brienne of Tarth taking a goat to…who gives a shit where because the goats are stupid. Oh no! This gave Milchick time to catch him. But have no fear! Brienne kicks the shit out of him so Mark can get away. Another indignity for Seth.

Who will get to Gemma first—Mark to save her or Drummond to end her? Cut between Drummond marching toward Gemma’s doom and Mark frantically trying to find a room that says Cold Harbor. oMark gets there first but wait! He can’t get in. Don’t worry. Sandra Bernhard is there as the nurse we met in Gemma’s episode. She’s low on Lumon’s totem pole but knows who this is and what it means that he’s standing outside this door. He looks at her. She looks at him. A beat. No words are spoken. Will she let him in? 

Yes! Mark convinces Gemma to follow him. Gemma is saved! Not so fast. Drummond is waiting outside the door. Fack! No worries, nurse Sandra Bernhard needles him in the neck from behind because she hates what Lumon did to Gemma down there. 

I don’t know. Maybe the pacing wouldn’t work. But, geez, there’s got to be a louder ticking clock on Gemma’s life than vague insinuations that she would die if Mark completed the file. 

So here we are at the end, which I mostly loved. iMark stood at the end of the hallway covered in blood (By the way how weird was it to see so much blood on this show? And the color red.) having played his part in freeing Gemma. Now he faced the unfair choice his outie thrust on him: Follow Gemma out the door or turn back to the life he wants with Helly? 

In the moment I saw this going either way. A heroic sacrifice of himself so his outie can reunite with his wife. An entirely justified decision to take control over his life and stay with Helly. His choice to stay divided the fan base. I’m not mad. Agency is one of this show’s core themes. Innies have almost none of it. They can’t even decide when they exist. I’m happy iMark got that choice and won’t argue with his decision. 

We don’t know when season three will land (it’s in development) but we won’t have to wait as long as we did for season two. Hopefully we will get something worth trying to write coherent blog posts about.  

‘Andor’s Beau Willimon Added To ‘Severance’ Season 2 & 3, Amid Reports Of Delays & Production Troubles

Severance season two finale preview: Where is their heads?

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan used to ask his writers room “Where is Walt’s head?” When they sat down to break an episode. That was his way to make sure they were always grounding themselves in writing stories that truly reflected what Walter White would do. 

Let’s ask the same about the characters on Severance, a show literally about heads, as we await the season two finale. 

Where is Mark’s head?

Mark started this season wanting to find Gemma, and he’s taken increasingly dangerous steps to do it. Burning his eyeballs didn’t work so he tried reintegration* only to pass out on the floor in front of his sister. As Mark sits down for a conversation between himself and his innie**, his head is in a place of growing desperation. But unlike the other two severed employees still left, innie Mark and outie Mark are on the same mission: Find Gemma. I’m excited to see what that causes him—or his protective but weirdly into finding Gemma sister—to do.

Where is Helly’s head?

Helly’s season two arc has been fun tbh. She went from the stage at the end of season one to being held underwater by Irv at the end of the ORTBO episode. Can you imagine? Then she finds out Helena used her to vessel Mark’s innie. Then she decided to vessel him for real. Yowza. She seems to be over all that and back to being the innie rights activist we met in season one. Except for two key things. First, she knows she’s an Eagan. We saw her hold that over Milchick in episode nine. What will that give her the courage to do? Second, she’s alone on the severed floor. Whatever she does for the innies, she’ll have to do without Mark, Dylan and Irv’s help. 

Helena’s head…harder to figure out. I don’t know what to make of the boiled egg scene from last week, and the show hasn’t given us much since Irv blew her cover. I still think she’s pro-Lumon, and honestly don’t care if she’s in the finale or not. 

Where is Dylan’s head?

Innie Dylan has taken it on the chin this season. He was so happy and cheerful in season one, and then even happier to meet his outie’s wife. Losing her completely broke his spirit and now he wants his consciousness to be over.**** We start the finale with his head wanting nothing to do with any of this anymore. I don’t expect his outie to accept his resignation, so how will Dylan react to whatever Helly asks him to do if he’s still on the severed floor? 

Where is Cobel’s head?

I’ve thought about this since the Cobel-centric episode two weeks ago. Does the revelation that she invented the severance chip change the fact that she wants to see Mark’s innie complete Cold Harbor? If we are to believe her cryptic statement in episode nine that Gemma would already be dead if Cold Harbor is over, then why is she seemingly helping Mark? His goal is for Gemma to not be dead. Or is she trying to prevent Cold Harbor because completing it would be Lumon’s greatest day and she’s mad at being fired? I don’t understand.***** 

These are, in my view, the only four characters that matter in the finale. I’ll check back this weekend to see where their heads are at when it’s over. 

*btw is his reintegration just over now? If the innie-outie conversation happens there’s no need for him to reintegrate in order to find her. One of the many confusing developments this season.

**Something not really made clear until the commentary after episode nine. 

***We’re done with Irv for the season, right? I don’t know how they bring him back from a train ride to the unknown. But hella fucking frustrating either way for a character who started the season placing a mysterious phone call. 

****I debated writing “his life to be over”. That’s one of my favourite philosophical questions about this show. Is life your physical body or your consciousness? 

*****Just like I was upset with the Gemma-centric episode for not being more concrete, I didn’t like Severance not giving us this kind of clarity in Cobel’s episode. 

Let’s not get Lost in Severance

“The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people.”

How many of us were so caught up in the mystery and minutiae of The End that we barely registered Christian Shepard’s words to his son, Jack? My mind was racing thru what mind-blowing reveal might yet come in the few minutes we had left. I wasn’t in the right headspace to realize Lost had just laid its meaning bare after six mind-bending seasons.

This occurred to me early in the second season of Severance on AppleTV+. People are saying it’s the most engrossed they’ve been since Lost, and I believe it. Last week on Threads there was a whole trend of people breaking down the elevator dings for each character. If that doesn’t remind you of fans obsessing over Lost’s blast door map, I don’t know what will.

They’re even coming up with some, um, theories:

  • Mark’s outie is actually the severed one and everyone in his life is a Lumon plant;
  • Cobel is Mark’s mom;
  • Ms. Huong is Mark and Gemma’s child;
  • Cobel is a robot (or should I say, an ORTBO);
  • The pineapple is a trigger that makes outies more compliant;
  • Dylan and the door factory manager look alike for a reason;
  • They all drive old cars because the show takes place in an alternate timeline;
  • They’re Mormons;
  • Kier Egan is going to be reincarnated into Mark’s body; and
  • This is all a ruse to trick Christopher Walken into saying he needs more Cobel.

I have theories, too, and I’ll talk about them shortly. But I watch Severance in a world in which Lost existed. I don’t want to miss what this show is really about because I’m so focused on what it’s not. Goats? Not even a little bit interested. But I do care about Helena and Helly reckoning with their shared autonomy over one body and how Dylan G is accidentally ruining his outie’s marriage. 

And, of course, I care about Mark S. Every great story is about the obstacles between its characters and what they want the most. We entered Mark’s life two years after he decided he wanted to be free of grief—for eight hours a day—by undergoing the severance procedure. That was going okay for him until the characters around him instigated a series of events that gave him the opportunity to want something more: Gemma back. He was so motivated to pursue this want that he was willing to fry his retinas and scramble his brain for the chance to see his wife again (no, of knowing he was seeing his wife again). 

But again it’s not a great story unless something stands between Mark and what he wants. This is my theory about Cold Harbor. I believe macrodata refinement tunes the severance chips to block specific emotions from their recipients like how a programmer trains an algorithm to accomplish a task. The emotion in Mark’s case is grief. As we near the end of season two, his innie is 96 percent done with the Cold Harbor file, which will give Lumon a way to permanently remove grief from the human experience (without severing the rest of their memory). That’s the kind of lofty achievement that merits saying it “will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet.” 

And there we find drama: Mark’s innie is unknowingly about to give Mark’s outie his freedom from “choking on Gemma’s ghost”, but Mark’s outie is unknowingly screwing that up by pursuing a risky reintegration treatment that will render Cold Harbor ineffective. Dammit! Great storytellers absolutely torture their characters, and what could be more torturous for Mark to know that he could have been free from the grief of losing Gemma if he hadn’t tried to reintegrate? Bad for Mark, compelling for us! 

I think Lumon even suspects Mark is working with Reghabi, the mad scientist behind reintegration who already fatally experimented with another severed Lumon macrodata refiner. That’s why Helena happened into the same Chinese restaurant Mark did after a recent procedure. Calling Gemma by the wrong name was a test (Mark’s innie wouldn’t know her name) and Britt Lower giving her Helly face straight to the camera a clue to viewers that Helena was, once again, not being honest with us. 

This is also what made the most recent episode “Chikhai Bardo” so frustrating. The show had to tell us Mark and Gemma’s story and what happened when Gemma/Ms. Casey was sent back to the testing floor in season one. But with only 10 episodes, the show doesn’t have time to take scenic detours unless they lead somewhere concrete. And this one didn’t. All we really got was 1) a very vague look at what Gemma’s life on the testing floor and 2) that Mark didn’t die from his stroke at the end of the previous episode. Instead it just threw more unanswered questions at us: Did Gemma go to Lumon willingly? If so, why? What is the purpose of the experiments Ms. Casey is forced to undergo? We got some hints, including our first look at the team supervising the refiners, but it was told in such riddles that even Gemma got fed up with it. By the end of the episode, so was I. 

*This episode was visually stunning—especially considering it was directed by Jessica Lee Gagné, the show’s cinematographer, in her first time behind the camera. Shower her with awards.

To go back to my original point, you’re not reading my thoughts about where Lumon is located or if its board is a disembodied consciousness. Or those damn goats. I don’t even really care if  Burt worked at Lumon for 12 years like he believes, or 20 like his “husband” insisted during their dinner with Irv’s outie. 

If you’re a viewer caught up in things like that I encourage you to listen to the official podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott. They aren’t talking about clues to unraveling mysteries. They’re talking about the actors’ performances—what their characters are thinking and feeling as they move through this cryptic world. 

That’s what this show is really about, and what I’m trying to care about. Mark wants a break from grief. Dylan wants a piece of the happiness he believes his outie has. Helly wants the free will her outie refuses to believe severed people deserve. Being obsessed with anything else is a fruitless exercise, just like it was during Lost. 

Thoughts on The Masters TV broadcast and why golf needs bifurcation.

I spent four days on my couch bingeing The Masters. Here are my fairly unrefined thoughts.

The course and the tournament

Nothing proves the need to bifurcate the rules and roll back pro golf equipment more than The Masters. Out-of-control equpiment forced one of golf’s great layouts to pervert some of golf’s most exciting holes to keep them relevant. For example…

Massive fairway bunkers on the 2nd, 5th and 8th holes are Augusta National’s equivalent to US Open rough: Automatic pitchout. Where’s the chance for a brilliant recovery? The reward for driving past them doesn’t outweigh the risk, so too few golfers take them on. Playing away from trouble is boring content.

Length and ill-placed trees ruined the 11th hole. What should be an exciting, challenging second shot over water is too often a bail out to the right even from the middle of the fairway. I don’t care what Ben Hogan said or did, this makes for bad content in 2024. 

More than any other hole in the world, 13 shows the damage wrought from the governing authorities’ failure to regulate distance. Pushing the tee box back at least made that shot longer, but it is not more challenging. In fact players can how it a straight ball to the middle of the fairway and have a non-momentous chance to reach the green in two. This isn’t how the hole was meant to be played. There’s no benefit to risking a draw close to the tributary on the inside of the dog leg. Distance and low-spin drivers have sadly taken that consideration completely out of play. The only real solution to restoring this hole’s excitement is to relocate the green 20 yards farther away. I doubt the Club is willing to do that. 

What they’ve done to 15 is a crime. The trees on the left betray the Jones-Mackenzie design philosophy. Scheffler said he hit 3- and 4-irons into the green, that’s perfect. I want to see players hit long irons or hybrids over water to a shallow green, not punch out around the trees. But even when players hit the side of the fairway with an unobstructed shot to the green, they too often choose to lay up because keeping the course challenigng means the green is a concrete driveway unable to hold a shot from distance. It’s a shame and it’s ruining this tournament. 

This is the future of men’s professional golf. Players hit the ball so far and so high with such expert spin control that the only way to defend a course is to make it so impossibly difficult as to suck the life out of competition. You could say that’s the proper way to identify the game’s greatest players. I’d grant you that. But I say it too often makes for uninteresting content. 

We shouldn’t want this.

The beating heart of golf is people and places. Its most storied places are already locked away behind private gates, inaccessible to the vast majority of its people except once a year on television. If distance continues to advance unchecked, we risk losing even that as they become too short and too easy for the mens’ game. I don’t see any other way to save it than to bifurcate the rules for men’s professional golf, including drastic rollbacks in allowable equipment. Equipment companies will balk—loudly. But they need to stand down for the betterment of the game. 

The broadcast and the broadcasters

The holes 4-5-6 coverage with Dave Flemming, Jeff Sluman and Scott Verplank is the most enjoyable coverage all week. Because they have fun. Dave keeps it light and they all understand about 19 people are watching. Errant drives still land in the second cut and patrons still sit in patron observation stands. But it’s fun. They’re not trying to impress anybody. They’re just three guys talking about golf. It’s wonderful. 

There’s a short list of broadcasters I want to bottle and save forever. Verne Lundquist is on it. Jim Nantz game him a little send off after the final group finished 16, but I would have preferred they do that ahead of time and let Verne’s final commentary be simply sending the players to the 17th tee. 

Speaking of Jim Nantz, I have a conspiracy theory: Augusta National forces Jim Nantz to script his call after the winner’s final putt. There’s no other reason why such a great announcer would say such cheesy things in such a cheesy way. “All his calls sound that way,” you might say. I disagree. He didn’t script “The Golden Bear has come out of hibernation” in 1986 and his sizzle reel from the NFL and NCAA basketball back me up. Augusta National made The Masters The Masters by insisting on tight control over how CBS presents the tournament. I believe they require him to present the winning moment that way to protect and enhance their brand. 

I don’t get the Trevor Immelman adoration. I mean, he’s a likeable guy and does fine. But he’s not “18th tower memorable”. As a character he’s just flat. Johnny Miller was…aggressive at times. Nick Faldo has quirks and, oh, six major championships. Ken Venturi was dignified and connected to the game’s golden era. I don’t know what makes Immelman memorable. It’s too bad Phil Mickelson broke bad or else we’d have an all-timer in that chair.

Letting Dottie Pepper walk with the final group is the best broadcast decision since they switched to color pictures. She was okay in the 13th tower but her best work is following the leaders and it’s elevated the entire presentation. 

I don’t know what CBS is going to do with 15-16 now. 15 hasn’t been the same since Feherty left (coinciding with the Club butchering the hole’s design). Without two greats anchoring those pivotal holes the broadcast is in danger of hollowing out. I can’t even think of who would be in line to take over. NBC’s struggle to replace Paul Azinger shows the lack of golf commentator talent right now, too. 

Lastly, I’d like to see the Club allow CBS to use more ground cameras. Lower angles do a better job showing the slopes and undulations of Augusta National’s greens. I get that there’s brand consistency in having tower cams in the same place for 50 years, but there’s also value in showing viewers the contours players deal with shot after shot.