If you divide each number of today’s date (8/4/21) by two, it equals the next number. That’s the kind of mind-blowing stuff you come to The Fried Egg for, right?

Women’s Olympic golf

Don’t be alarmed, but you’ve already missed some golf this week. The first round of the women’s portion of the Tokyo Olympics concluded earlier this morning. The good news is that you have plenty of time to catch the rest of the week’s action. Leaderboard

Four things to watch for

The past couple of months have been pretty good for Nasa Hataoka. She won in her most recent start on the LPGA Tour (the Marathon LPGA Classic) and was one playoff hole away from taking down the U.S. Women’s Open. A podium in Tokyo would really tie a bow on her season. Hataoka and Mone Inami—No. 7 and No. 28 in the Rolex Rankings, respectively—give Japan a good shot at medaling this week.

Steve Eubanks wrote a fun piece for the LPGA on the history of the Popov family and the Olympics. Sophia Popov, the 2020 AIG Women’s Open champion, is fulfilling a family dream by representing her home country of Germany this week. Her mother’s hopes to qualify for the 1980 Olympics were dashed because of the U.S. boycott of the Moscow games, and her brother nearly qualified for London in 2012 but came up just short at swim trials.

Speaking of family ties, Nelly and Jessica Korda are now the second and third members of the Korda family to participate in the Olympics. Regina Korda, mom to Nelly and Jessica, played tennis in the 1988 Olympics for Czechoslovakia.

Shanshan Feng, 10-time LPGA Tour winner and bronze medalist at the Rio games, plans to retire after the Tokyo Olympics. No. 20 in the Rolex Rankings, Feng has two top fives in major championships this season and has entertained fans with her hilariously frank interviews. If this truly is the end for Shanshan, we will miss her dearly!

A sign of things to come?

The PGA Tour wouldn’t go to the home of FedEx without a little fanfare, so the 2021-22 PGA Tour schedule was announced on Tuesday morning. While it remains largely the same, there are a few notable changes.

First, the Scottish Open will be a PGA Tour-European Tour co-sanctioned event in 2022. That means FedEx Cup points will be up for grabs, incentivizing even more U.S.-based players to make the trip ahead of the Open Championship at St. Andrews. Second, the number of WGCs will dwindle to just two: the WGC-HSBC Champions in China and the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play at Austin Country Club. Would it be too much to hope for a complete elimination of this moribund limited-field series? Third, Big Courier Service will sink its teeth deeper into the flesh of the PGA Tour, with the FedEx St. Jude Championship becoming a FedEx Cup playoff event. The BMW Championship and Tour Championship will round out the three-week closing stretch in 2022.

This new schedule is the first big public move by the “strategic alliance” between the PGA and European tours, which was announced last fall in an apparent effort to stave off the prospective threat of a Saudi-funded world tour.

“There has been considerable collaboration behind the scenes between our two tours since November’s alliance was unveiled,” European Tour CEO Keith Pelley said on Tuesday. “We are delighted to share these initial developments, which demonstrate our commitment to working together for the betterment of our sport globally. We will have more to announce in the coming months. This is most definitely just the beginning.”

Quick Hooks

Stroke play has concluded at the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Westchester Country Club. Wake Forest’s Rachel Kuehn finished as the medalist with rounds of 71 and 67. Emilia Migliaccio, Rachel Heck, Emma Spitz, and Rose Zhang all advanced to match play. Zhang, the reigning U.S. Women’s Am and U.S. Girls’ Junior Am champion, is vying for her third straight USGA title. Scoring

Get out your mops and squeegees! It’s time for the WGC Swampass WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational. Dustin Johnson, Collin Morikawa, and defending champion Justin Thomas headline the field. Tee Times

The European Tour heads to St. Andrews (not that one) for the Hero Open (not that one) this week! Players will take on the Torrance Course at the Fairmont St. Andrews in the Euro circuit’s first post-Olympics event. Tee Times

They aren’t taking a bath in free money at the WGC this week, but at least the players at the Barracuda Championship get a trip to Lake Tahoe. Tee Times

Marty Dou (and the rest of the Korn Ferry Tour) will contest the Utah Championship this week. Tee Times

The Latest from The Fried Egg

Lasting Impressions from the Western Amateur – Everyone who qualifies for match play at the Western Amateur is an elite player, but who will be the next big amateur star? Will Knights went to Glen View Club last weekend to find out.

Paulie’s Picks: WGC FedEx St. Jude Invitational – It’s going to be hot and humid in Memphis this week. Does Paulie factor that into his picks? Find out before you make your DraftKings and one-and-done league picks!

The Fried Egg Podcast: What to Know About Golf in Japan

With the golf competitions underway at the Tokyo Olympics, Garrett Morrison sits down with Michael Wolf (@bamabearcat) to learn more about Japan’s distinctive golf culture. Michael is a golf architecture and history nut who has traveled and played golf extensively in Japan. He and Garrett talk about the customs of Japanese golf clubs, Michael’s techniques for traveling within the country, and the top courses he has played there, including Olympic host Kasumigaseki Country Club. They also discuss the historical origins of golf in Japan and the flowering of Golden Age architecture in the country that resulted from Charles Hugh Alison’s visit in the early 1930s. Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Shotgun Start: Defending medalists, Schedule moves & playoffs tinkering, and Journeyman of the week

This Wednesday episode begins with a preview of the women’s golf competition at the Olympics, and a quick rebuttal to any notion that it’s unfortunate the course might play “harder” for the women one week later. There are three things to watch, including a theory about why we have all three medalists from 2016 playing this week when we had none last week. Then it’s on to the double dose of Tour golf, both at the WGC Swampass at TPC Initech and the opposite field boys trying their hand at stableford in Reno. This just leads immediately into reactions on the new PGA Tour schedule—the courier cup incursion into Euro Tour events, the remaking of the Playoffs for August stops in Memphis and Atlanta, and the omission of some major American markets, among other things. Continuing with the instant schedule for the week, there’s a return to the incredulity about the Euro Tour event at the fake St. Andrews and some praise for the U.S. Women’s Amateur. They close with a new segment, the Journeyman of the Week, brought to you by our old spirits-making friends in Michigan. This week’s subject is “the other Bassy,” who might be the greatest golfer ever at Arkansas. Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Pro Shop

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