Tagged: Abu Dhabi
2016 Waste Management Phoenix Open — The Greatest Show on Grass
Golf is fun again! After a Monday finish featuring trees ripped up from the ground and all scores over par except Sneds, the PGA Tour is moving down to Arizona for the Waste Management Phoenix Open. No more sideways rain, we’re expecting sun and dryness in the desert.
What to watch for this week:
The “Coliseum”
The “Coliseum” is what happens when tournament organizers end up embracing rowdy drunk people instead of getting annoyed at them. For the majority of this tournament’s existence, this hole has been somewhat of a party area. Check out Tiger making a hole in one back in 1997, to see the reaction right after he makes contact. Want to feel old, Tiger hit this shot 19 years ago!
Since that time, the WMPO (Wampo? What a great nickname, using that from now on) organizers added grandstands, and now completely surround the hole. Adhering to the time honored tradition of naming things that don’t need to be named, they christened the hole the “Coliseum”, which is now one of the most memorable holes on the PGA Tour.
With a capacity of 20,000 probably drunk people, there’s a constant buzz of noise you’ll probably hear before guys tee off. Also expect loud cheers with a green in regulation, and boos if a players misses the green #brogolf.
Another fun feature of the hole is some of the random promotions or games that are allowed on the 16th hole that don’t show up elsewhere.
2016 CareerBuilder Challenge — Also, the Clintons are involved somehow
Third event of the 2016 year, and the first pro am of the year. All the good guys are across the world in Abu Dhabi, leaving the dredges of the PGA Tour to play with the random amateurs in the California Desert. That’s a decently pessimistic description of the event, but I’m not into sugar coating. Still plenty of storylines for the new year though with young guys looking to leave their mark on a controversial course, making this tournament worth the TV time.
About the Sponsor!
This was actually one of my favorite sections of the preview from last year, and I figure I’ll bring it back whenever we have a new sponsor.
Most boring logo ever. Can’t even come up with a caption
In the ironies of all irony, turns out the CareerBuilder office is right next door to the place I’m starting work in two weeks. Unfortunately for you all, I’m too lazy to make the trip to downtown Chicago to take a picture of the building, or even get that interview with the CEO everyone’s been clamoring for. I’ll assume that the CEO is somewhere in California schmoozing with Bill Clinton and all the NBC crew and use that as my excuse.
I’m a fan of company names that make it easy for a person to figure out what they do. So big congrats to CareerBuilder on that front. Taken directly from their website is, CareerBuilder’s slogan / tagline, “Find the Right Job. Right Now.”
Even though I have a job lined up, I decided to take CareerBuilder’s job search for a spin. “Web developer in Chicago” turned up more than a few jobs. The first was for front end development for some company called Collabera, who I won’t talk about until they sponsor a PGA Tour event. Interesting is that my ad block detected and blocked 29 ads on that job listing page alone, but then I realized that the entire page was a giant ad, so ad block failed by displaying anything at all. No idea how up to date or real the listings are, but in a few minutes I found a job that I could conceivably take. So good job again CareerBuilder.
It really is amazing how many odd businesses are able to be title sponsors of PGA Tour events. You probably don’t think that a job listing site could generate enough money to validate a sponsorship, especially when they’re somewhat competing with Craigslist. However, finding the right person for the right job, right now is difficult. And companies pay big money to have that taken care of. So maybe it does make sense to sponsor a tournament.
None of the Top Players in the World
Shoutout to Abu Dhabi, the European Tour, and appearance fees that lured all the top players in the world away from the US for this week’s event in oil country. With a pairing that includes Spieth, Rory, and Rickie, that’s probably going to be more interesting to watch in terms of world ranking. And good golf for that matter.
Golf On The Mind 