Wednesday, October 12, 2016

The entire point of golf is to play as little golf as possible

Don't feel too bad if you don't know what the Ryder Cup is.  I thought it was a free coffee mug you got for renting a truck. 

And don't fret if you don't know the names Danny Willett, or P.J. Willett. These are not the guys who hand you a mug after you lease a big GMC truck to haul your belongings to your new house in Chrischristie, New Jersey.

Danny is a British golfer who won the Masters tournament, and P.J. is his brother who has a lot to say.  So he wrote on a site called NationalClubGolfer.com, a British website that seems to take golf quite seriously.  

The Ryder Cup is a golf competition between American and English golfers, held biennially, or every two years, whichever comes first.  This year, as if to prove that golf is not a sport on a level with NFL football or big-league baseball, a 30-year-old insurance salesman from America was heckling some golfers across the pond for missing a 12-foot putt, and, challenged to do better, sank it beautifully!  And he had to dodge around the windmill to hit it!

Anyhow, old P.J. is steamed because Americans fail to pay proper reverence to golf.  I always think of a baseball player, in a ballpark with 47,000 screaming fans and organ music and trumpets blaring and the scoreboards doing their psychedelic thing and a guy 60' 6" away throwing a ball at them at around 100 miles an hour. 

Compare that to golf, where a guy in funny pants takes 20 minutes to lean over a ball that isn't even moving and tap it into a hole 4 feet away.  And the crowd has to be silent, for crying out loud. Or not.  Woe unto he who sneezes while Rory McIlory is concentrating on his next bogey.

P.J. said that American fans are a "baying mob of imbeciles."  And he feels that something should be done to "silence the pudgy, basement-dwelling, irritants, stuffed on cookie dough and pissy beer, pausing between mouthfuls of hotdog so they can scream 'Baba booey' until their jelly faces turn red. They need to stun the angry, unwashed, Make America Great Again swarm, desperately gripping their concealed-carry compensators ...They need to smash the obnoxious dads, with their shiny teeth, Lego man hair, medicated ex-wives, and resentful children. Squeezed into their cargo shorts and boating shoes, they'll bellow 'get in the hole' whilst high-fiving all the other members of the Dentists' Big Game Hunt Society."

He said a lot, did he not?  I love the Baba Booey reference, along with the compensator.  But it really chafes my cargo shorts to hear the demands for people to be stock-still while watching people play golf. The reverence is so undeserved.  It's a free country!  Talk to the people around you while someone lines up his shot.

If Joe Flacco can get his business done with three or four beefy individuals all up in his grille, golfers can play with their putters on a noisy day.






European captain Darren Clarke called the piece "very disappointing ... that is not the way we view things."

No comments: