Steve Stricker

I have nothing personally against Steve Stricker. Well, not nothing; I believe he's a fairly intense huntin', fishin' type, though not quite as flamboyent about it as Boo Weekley. But I don't really have any reason to dislike him as compared to your ordinary PGA Tour professional.

But I don't enjoy watching him play. Johnny Miller and Dan Hicks were discussion him, and Johnny Miller described his game as being "comfortable" to watch, mentioning that he didn't do a lot of scrambling and "hoping for good breaks" but was just consistently down-the-middle. I have a better word that "comfortable" for Stricker's game: boring. Unspectacular. He doesn't hit amazing shots. His swing is the opposite of energetic (and yes, this matters; one of the things I like about Tiger Woods is that his swing is very, very energetic, while at the same time being so rigidly precise and elegant). He has a very good version of a very conventional short game. He's a very good putter, but mainly in the sense of almost never missing in the 5-10 foot range; he is neither, to my knowledge, particularly stunning inside that range or outside of it, and he lacks the icy consistency that makes Tiger so remarkable on short putts. He doesn't make a lot of eagles, and yes, that is a function of length, but I think it is honestly true that the kind of game that includes the possibility of eagles is more exciting to watch. His best strength seems to be that he hits his short clubs very close to the hole, on average, which is certainly something I respect; however, hitting to 13 feet from 75-100 yards is basically what pros are supposed to do all the time; anything worse constitutes a distinct mistake, so this also looks kind of like a general low rate of mistake-making. He is very, very consistent; that is, I think, his main selling point, but he is consistently good, not consistently great. Tiger Woods is consistently great. Phil Mickelson is inconsistently great.

As I said, I have nothing against him; unlike with Boo Weekley, I don't root hard against him in general, though I did today in the simple interest of having an interesting tournament, which we did kind of have. But I just don't enjoy it when he's the one who's in the lead and taking up all the air time. And I hope Phil wins at Pebble Beach next week and takes back the #2 spot. Phil deserves the #1 spot much, much more than Stricker does, since he's, you know, the second-best player of this era, and Steve Stricker is, in all honesty, not in the top-10.