Major Golf Research Articles

Weather and Event Visitor Expenditures at a Professional Golf Tournament in the Netherlands

Most event organizers depend on visitor expenditures to generate revenue, yet the full economic potential of many events is not fully exploited. This unprecedented research examines if weather conditions contribute to greater visitor expenditures. Data were collected from 2,935 in-person administered surveys at a major golf tournament in the Netherlands over a period of 3 years and examined sociodemographic characteristics, behavior, motive variables, and weather conditions to determine their relationship with visitor expenditures. The results show that the amount of rain was related to visitor expenditures and not air temperature. To maximize the visitor expenditures for events like outdoor golf tournaments it is recommended to choose a dry over a warmer period.

Optimizing the use of entomopathogenic nematodes for the management of Listronotus maculicollis (Coleoptera: Curculionidae): Split applications and combinations with imidacloprid

Entomopathogenic nematodes have shown potential as biocontrol agents targeting larvae of the annual bluegrass weevil, Listronotus maculicollis Kirby, a major golf course turf pest in eastern North America with widespread insecticide resistance. Control levels of single applications of nematodes have been too low and variable in the past to support application by golf course managers for weevil control. We examined if splitting nematode applications in two at half rates approximately 1 week apart as well as combinations of the nematodes with the neonicotinoid imidacloprid could improve nematode performance. In greenhouse experiments in pots with grass infested with ABW larvae, the entomopathogenic nematodes Steinernema carpocapsae, S. feltiae, and Heterorhabditis bacteriophora were similarly effective for larval control. Combination with imidacloprid resulted in additive weevil mortality. In a field experiment with natural infestations of larvae using 1.25 and 2.5 × 109 nematodes ha−1, respectively, of S. carpocapsae and H. bacteriophora, additive mortality in the combinations with imidacloprid amounted to 82% and 79% control, respectively, at the high nematode rate. In three additional field experiments using only S. carpocapsae, the low and high nematode rate provided on average 59% and 74% control, respectively, while their combinations with imidacloprid provided 75% and 84% control, respectively. Imidacloprid alone averaged 37% control. Mortality in all combination treatments was additive. Splitting S. carpocapsae applications provided a marginal increase in mortality that was significant only in one of three experiments. However, combining split applications with imidacloprid provided 88–95% control which could offer an effective alternative to synthetic insecticides.

Heard on the Green: Sociability, Golf Courses, and the Performance of Institutional Investors

We hypothesize that prestigious golf courses attract golfers and visitors from across the country, providing greater opportunities for nearby investors to build social connections. Our evidence suggests that institutional investors located near prestigious golf courses earn significantly better benchmark- and risk-adjusted returns. This reflects the benefits of sociability as our findings are stronger for golf courses with reciprocal guest policies that allow wider participation and increase when major golf championships rotate to the state. Their portfolios reveal hallmarks of active trading – higher concentration, greater selectivity, more frequent turnover – and include more distant stocks. To establish a causal link, we exploit the fact that golf is a weather-dependent outdoor activity. We find that their outperformance occurs during times of low precipitation around golf courses, evaporating when bad weather keeps golfers off the greens.

Automatic Curation of Sports Highlights Using Multimodal Excitement Features

The production of sports highlight packages summarizing a game's most exciting moments is an essential task for broadcast media. Yet, it requires labor-intensive video editing. We propose a novel approach for auto-curating sports highlights, and demonstrate it to create a first of a kind, real-world system for the editorial aid of golf and tennis highlight reels. Our method fuses information from the players’ reactions (action recognition such as high-fives and fist pumps), players’ expressions (aggressive, tense, smiling, and neutral), spectators (crowd cheering), commentator (tone of the voice and word analysis), and game analytics to determine the most interesting moments of a game. We accurately identify the start and end frames of key shot highlights with additional metadata, such as the player's name and the whole number, or analysts input allowing personalized content summarization and retrieval. In addition, we introduce new techniques for learning our classifiers with reduced manual training data annotation by exploiting the correlation of different modalities. Our work has been demonstrated at a major golf tournament (2017 Masters) and two major international tennis tournaments (2017 Wimbledon and U.S. Open), successfully extracting highlights through the course of the sporting events. For the 2017 Masters, 54% of the clips selected by our system overlapped with the official highlights reels. Furthermore, user studies showed that 90% of the non-overlapping ones were of the same quality of the official clips for the 2017 Masters, while the automatic selection of clips for highlights of 2017 Wimbledon and 2017 US Open agreed with human preferences 80% and 84.2% of the time, respectively.

Donald Trump’s Golf Resort in Aberdeenshire, Scotland: The ‘ Greatest ’ Incomplete Planning Disaster in the World?

In 2006 Donald Trump submitted a planning application to transform an area of protected dunes and open countryside along the coast of north east Scotland into a major golf and leisure resort. He claimed the golf course would be the greatest in the world and would transform the region’s oil economy. Citing the economic benefits the Scottish Government approved the project in 2008. Trump has constructed the golf course but has failed to deliver the hotel and other elements of the project. Against the backdrop of planning deregulation, the paper examines why the officials failed to include appropriate planning conditions to ensure delivery of the project and prevent a great incomplete planning disaster. Recognising the limitations of current public law enforcement mechanisms it invokes concepts borrowed from contract law. Holding that Trump is in breach of contract and has benefitted from unjust enrichment, it examines the scope for applying damages, restitution and specific performance as alternative remedies.

Predictive Cloud Computing with Big Data: Professional Golf and Tennis Forecasting [Application Notes

Major Golf and Grand Slam Tennis tournaments such as Australian Open, The Masters, Roland Garros, United States Golf Association (USGA), Wimbledon, and United States Tennis Association (USTA) United States (US) Open provide real-time and historical sporting information to immerse a global fan base in the action. Each tournament provides realtime content, including streaming video, game statistics, scores, images, schedule of play, and text. Due to the game popularities, some of the web servers are heavily visited and some are not, therefore, we need a method to autonomously provision servers to provide a smooth user experience. Predictive Cloud Computing (PCC) has been developed to provide a smart allocation/deallocation of servers by combining ensembles of forecasts and predictive modeling to determine the future origin demand for web site content. PCC distributes processing through analytical pipelines that correlate streaming data, such as scores, media schedules, and player brackets with a future-simulated tournament state to measure predicted demand spikes for content. Social data streamed from Twitter provides social sentiment and popularity features used within predictive modeling. Data at rest, such as machine logs and web content, provide additional features for forecasting. While the duration of each tournament varies, the number of origin website requests range from 29,000 to 110,000 hits per minute. The PCC technology was developed and deployed to all Grand Slam tennis events and several major golf tournaments that took place in 2013 and to the present, which has decreased wasted computing consumption by over 50%. We propose a novel forecasting ensemble that includes residual, vector, historical, partial, adjusted, cubic and quadratic forecasters. In addition, we present several predictive models based on Multiple Regression as inputs into several of these forecasters. We conclude by empirically demonstrating that the predictive cloud technology is able to forecast the computing load on origin web servers for professional golf and tennis tournaments.

Technology Focus: Drilling and Completion Fluids (November 2012)

Technology Focus It has been a busy year for me; I definitely played less golf. I was appointed as the deputy chief of commercialization in the University of Malaya Center of Innovation and Commercialization (UMCIC) about a year ago. My tenure has just been extended for another year. UMCIC is a special unit within the university that spurs and elevates innovation and commercialization of academic research activities and output. This is echoed in most innovation and commercialization seminars and workshops. Everyone is talking about “the valley of death” and the challenges of getting universities and industry to be on the same page. In a recent oil and gas workshop I attended, a participant highlighted the limited (or lack of) real field-scale trials in the area of nano-technology application. It is an open secret that many industrial players tend to play it safe. As they say, “If it is working, don’t fix it.” However, things have changed over the years. The increases in energy demand and limited resources have driven the industry players to explore novel technologies, one of which is exploration and production nanotechnology. A tremendous amount of money has been invested in research laboratory and field trials in this area. In this feature, I highlighted four interesting papers that cover theoretical and experimental approaches and real field tests related to nanotechnology. The selected papers primarily discuss the applications of nanotechnology, specifically in drilling fluid technology. Two of the selected papers discuss field tests. One of the papers presents interesting preliminary test results of nano-based drilling fluids. It describes the formulation and test results of several nano-based fluids. The last paper presents the industry’s first field trial of a reservoir nanoagent. Here, the first industrially proven reservoir nanoagent template has been introduced and demonstrated through a push/pull field trial in an observation well. Another thing I learned, from a commercialization workshop, was the importance of commercializing an innovation. Innovation without commercialization is like watching a major golf tournament on Sunday without Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Phil Michelson, Sergio Garcia, Jim Furyk, Matt Kuchar, Nick Watney, Steve Stricker, Zack Johnson, Jason Dufner, or Lee Westwood making the cut. I hope you enjoy and benefit from the selected papers. Don’t forget to look at the other interesting papers on the recommended reading list. In addition, watch for other related papers in the OnePetro online library. Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. IPTC 14952 An Experimental Investigation on Use of Nanoparticles as Fluid Loss Additives in a Surfactant/Polymer-Based Drilling Fluid by Jayanth T. Srivatsa, Texas Tech University, et al. SPE 140816 A Biodegradable Chelating Agent Designed To Be an Environmentally Friendly Filter-Cake Breaker by Natalia Collins, Halliburton, et al. SPE 145840 Mitigating Lost Circulation and Differential Sticking Problems Using Silicon Nanoparticles by Saket M. Javeri, Maharashtra Institute of Technology, et al. SPE 153729 Wellbore Stability in Unconventional Shale—The Design of a Nanoparticle Fluid by Meghan Riley, M-I SWACO, et al.

A Case Study of Recreational Golfers' Interest in the 2008 Ryder Cup

The ryder Cup is the premier team competition in golf and is often described as the third biggest sports event in the world. Despite this, the match has received scant attention from scholars in event management and other associated disciplines. This case study examines recreational golfers' interest in the ryder Cup and attempts to discover what they perceive to be the defining characteristics of the match, in order to develop a better understanding of the positioning of the event. while there has been an increase in research focusing on major sporting events, little work has explored the ryder Cup and less still has looked at the views of recreational participants in a sport. The research identified that respondents generally identified positive characteristics with the match but also found that the ryder Cup was of less interest to them than a range of other major golf and sport events. The limitations of the case study and an outline of further research in this area is also discussed.

Bridging perceived destination image and market segmentation – an application to golf tourism

Motivations, perceptions and expectations are crucial in the build-up process of perceived destination image. This research aims at exploring the multidimensionality of golf destination image, and its heterogeneity among market segments. This research relies on a sample of 100 interviews to golfer tourists visiting six of major golf courses in Vilamoura, Algarve. The findings suggest that motivations, expectations and perceptions are inter-correlated. The findings also highlight three market segments of golf players, namely ‘tourist’, ‘social tourist’, and ‘player’. Grounded by expectancy value theory framework, we conclude on the heterogeneity of perceived image among segments. Indeed there is a gap between the real destination image and the image perceived by tourists. We argue for the explanatory capital of intrinsic motivations in understanding the idiosyncratic images. Finally this paper enumerates some implications research, management and planning policies.

Dominance, Intimidation, and 'Choking' on the PGA Tour

Extending the work of Connolly and Rendleman (2008), we document the dominance of Tiger Woods during the 1998-2001 PGA Tour seasons. We show that by playing 'average,' Woods could have won some tournaments and placed no worse than fourth in the tournaments in which he participated in the year 2000, his best on the PGA Tour. No other PGA Tour player in our sample could have come close to such a feat. We also are able to quantify the intimidation factor associated with playing with Woods. On average, players who were paired with Woods during the 1998-2001 period scored 0.462 strokes per round worse than normal. Although we find that Woods' presence in a tournament may have had a small, but statistically significant adverse impact on the entire field, this effect was swamped by the apparent intimidation factor associated with having to play with Tiger side-by-side.We also demonstrate that Phil Mickelson's performance in major golf championships over the 1998-2001 period was not nearly as bad as was frequently mentioned in the golf press. Although Mickelson won no majors during this period, he played sufficiently well to have won one or two majors under normal circumstances. Moreover, his overall performance in majors, relative to his estimated skill level, was comparable to that of Tiger Woods, who won five of 16 major golf championships during our four-year sample period. Thus, the general characterization of Woods as golf's dominant player over the 1998-2001 period was accurate, but the frequent characterization of Phil Mickelson choking in majors was not.

Prejudice, Patriarchy, and the PGA: Defensive Discourse Surrounding the Shoal Creek and Augusta National Controversies

This study examines the discourse associated with the membership policies at Shoal Creek and Augusta National Golf Clubs. Get-away havens for wealthy White males, these clubs became contested terrains when each was scheduled to host a major golf event: the 1990 PGA Championship at Shoal Creek and the 2003 Masters Tournament at Augusta National. At the time of the events in this study, Shoal Creek had a Whites-only membership policy and Augusta National a male-only policy, which it maintains today. Controversy ensued when the chairs of each club made disparaging comments to the press about these excluded groups. Two parallel areas were considered in our comparative analysis: how the commercial sponsors responded to the controversies, and how the club chairs and their supporters used the rhetorical strategy of apologia to defend themselves and restore the public image of golf. Our analysis reveals the differences in how the cultural constructs of race and gender were negotiated in each case.

Media Promotion of the Paradigm Citizen/Golfer: An Analysis of Golf Magazines’ Representations of Disability, Gender, and Age

Golf is described as elitist, racist, and sexist. Recently it has become clear that golf is also able-bodiest. Casey Martin, a young, upper class, white, male golfer with a physical disability, was featured in the media for challenging the Professional Golf Association (PGA) rules prohibiting use of a golf cart during tournament play. Drawing on Connell’s (1987) construct of hegemonic masculinity and Wendell’s (1996) notion of the “paradigm citizen” (p. 41), we examine if and how hegemonic masculinity and the paradigm citizen/golfer are reinforced, maintained, and challenged within four issues of major golf magazines and a special golfing issue of Sports Illustrated published around the time of the trial. We find that golfers with disabilities are absent from advertisements and photographs and given minimal attention in articles. Proportions of golfers who are older and women golfers, while generally consistent with subscriber proportions, were well under U.S. golfer population percentages. Data suggest that golf magazines continue to maintain and reinforce hegemonic masculinity and the paradigm citizen/golfer.

Modelling performance at international tennis and golf tournaments: is there a home advantage?

In the context of international sports events, home advantage suggests that competitors will perform above their expected level when competing in events held in their own country. The world rankings and tournament performances have been compiled for most competitors in the grand slam tennis tournaments and the major golf tournaments in 1993. Tournament performance was related to world ranking and home advantage by using both permutation and normal regression models. Logistic and polytomous regression models were used to examine progression through the tennis tournaments only. Although there was surprising consistency between the various approaches, there was little evidence of home advantage.