Hi and Open

Since I am such a trend setter I will follow the theme of introducing myself to the blog before I get into anything else. I am engaged to a wonderful girl and we currently live with her family in western Wisconsin as I work with my Elementary Education degree as a substitute teacher. We’ll be getting married next May, and possibly at some point I can give a few pointers on what to expect and how to handle the whole wedding planning process.

You could say that I am new to the whole blog world, at least in a format like this, but I do contribute quite a bit on a forum (Scott Wright’s Draft Countdown), where I have accumulated over 25,000 posts. The site’s main focus is the NFL Draft, the ranking of prospects and posting of mock drafts. The NFL Draft, getting to mix college football with the NFL, is my number one interest when it comes to the sports world, and I follow the other big sports like baseball, basketball, hockey and the next tier sports like golf and tennis. Once the football season starts, many of my blog posts will be directed towards football as I do work on my own rankings, which are usually unique, and I also take the time to do a mock draft every once in a while. Needless to say, the football season can’t get here soon enough.

The blog won’t be littered by entries of my opinions on video games, movies or television shows since I don’t play much on the Xbox any longer, don’t hit up the movie theater much at all and I only have a select few shows I feel I really need to watch on a weekly basis. What does that mean? It means most of my posts will be sports related.

Enough about me and what I like, and time for a quick opinion. The NBA Finals has drawn my attention over the past week and will continue to have me watch once we get to Sunday night. Just like any Father’s Day weekend, the US Open is consuming the majority of my days. Merion is a golf course I knew little about before this week except that it’s under 7,000 yards, which for non-golf fans to know is rarely heard of in the PGA nowadays, and the expectations were for players to take full advantage of the lack of length. Plus, you factor in wet conditions recently, making the course soft, and it’s seemingly a recipe to see far better scores than we’re accustomed to seeing at an Open.

Well it’s Friday afternoon/evening now, the leader (Phil Mickelson) is 2-under par and only four golfers are under par altogether. Merion has proven to be pesky as it asks golfers to play more strategy than bombing it with their length. The rough is the customary Open length and nearly serves as a stroke penalty in spots. What has stood out to me more than anything is the professionals’ inability to take advantage of the short approach shots with their wedges. One would think that guys who play golf for a living would be able to knock the ball close when they’re sitting at around 100 yards, but that simply hasn’t been the case, and the approaches look more like something I’d hit during an afternoon out on the course.

The short game is undoubtedly the most difficult part of golf, and whichever golfer can figure out the course and their own short game will likely be the winner when we hit Sunday. I am always pulling for Tiger Woods when I tune in and that’ll hold true entering the weekend, but if I needed to tell you a winner as I sit here right now I would put my money on Wisconsin’s very own Steve Stricker. There are few with a better wedge game and he does a great job of managing his game, never trying to do too much.