Reliving my Jamie Farr traditions
Written by Matt Sussman | | news@toledofreepress.comI’d be hard pressed to remember any other LPGA events outside of the Jamie Farr Owens Corning Classic presented by Kroger, and anyone else who wants to and the four majors.
I am aware that The Farr (shortened for brevity’s sake, otherwise I could just repeat the full tournament name five more times and fill my word quota for the week) is one of two tournaments sandwiched between two majors, which I suppose positions it well.
But when I think of the Jamie Farr, two customs come to mind. One is the stretch of Monroe Street in Sylvania being renamed in honor of whoever wins the previous year. For just a little bit longer, it will be “Paula Creamer Drive,” which greatly inconveniences the residents of that street, having to fill out yearly change of address forms.
The other tradition is the biennial bashing of the Jamie Farr Web site.
Two years ago, I pulled up the site www.jamiefarrowenscorning.com in search of the participant list. My conclusion was that I couldn’t find it, but my sleuthing lacked patience, and the list was just very poorly hidden. In 2009, the list was tucked away in the bottom right corner, standing out as the only nearby pink text.
All right, finally, a complete list of every single golfer who will be … what the heck? That’s a short list. The way tournament officials organized the player list is in groups of 10 women with a “more” button showing another set of 10. They’re alphabetized by first name, but at least there’s a search button, so I can look for my favorite player. It’s a good thing they didn’t just list all the players on a single page because then they wouldn’t get to show off all the new Web site code they learned.
In all fairness, it’s a clean layout that was a vast improvement over the old Web site, which I just had to revisit using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (http://www.
archive.org). Wow, whoever thought animated .gifs were a good design feature should probably be slapped around a little. But it looks like they just severely reprimanded him and/or sent him to design school. This year, they’ve concealed the tackiness with what appears to be a scrolling news bar in the top left corner, but it’s just an animated graphic that was well done.
The tournament organizers also have a link to a Facebook group, which means they’re hip, but they don’t have a Twitter, which means they’re not that cool.
But they are cool enough to stick around. As this is the 25th anniversary of the tournament, and not all stops on the tour were that lucky. The other Corning Classic no relation to OC in Corning, N.Y., had its 31st annual tournament back in May, but there will be no 32nd, as it was one of four LPGA tournaments sliced off the tour. So, organizers of the Jamie Farr, I mean this in the nicest way possible when I say you should hope that I get to keep poking fun at your Web site for years to come.
