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I have nothing to add, really, to my April 2001 piece on Tiger Woods — but I can deepen it a little. He should now be given credit for being a “U.S. Open-type” player. He is, indeed, every type of player. He can par you to death, hitting fairway after fairway, green after green; he can course-manage you to death; he can outlast you to death. This is what the classic U.S. Open player does.
But he can also shoot 30 under to beat you in the Pizza Hut Classic. He is Seve, Hogan, Jack, Arnie, Hagen, Lee, Faldo — every kind of golf champion there’s ever been. He is scarily complete. He is, of course, the best ever — the best golfer since the first Scottish shepherd picked up a stick and swung at some dung. This is “not a discussion item,” as we used to say in my family, so don’t even start.
A little walk down Memory Lane (which I do without my reference books, just the one in my occasionally-faltering head). Nicklaus won the first two legs in 1972. But then, at the British Open, Trevino chipped in on him on the 71st hole, and he lost. He went on to finish 6th in the PGA. Would he have sucked it up to win the PGA if he’d been going for the Slam? Would he have found a way to win — willed it? A lot of people think so — I do too. But then, my view of Jack borders on the idolatrous.
Tiger just “carded” his eighth major, as against Sam’s seven. Tiger is 26.
So, if we count the Nicklaus-20 way, Tiger’s now at eleven. How ’bout that, sports fans?
The commentators said, “Our game is becoming so much more popular, with fans coming over from football, basketball, and baseball — and they’re far more raucous than the traditional, staid golf fan. Ain’t it wonderful?” No: It stinks. The crowd’s behavior was deplorable and disgusting, and no one had the self-confidence, and the moral confidence, to say: No! This isn’t how we behave here! No one had the mental security and spine to stand up to the mob. Look, if they want to join our game, great — the more the merrier. But they ought to come up to us; we shouldn’t be forced to go down to them. They should learn the rules, the tradition, and the spirit, just like we all did — no one is born with it, for heaven’s sake. Golf is a game for gentlemen — and that has nothing to do with class; it has to do with character, and an outlook. To kiss the heinies of these hooligans is fake populism. I am not, blessedly, a fake populist, right-wing as I may be! And I am free to say — perhaps in Tiger Woods’s stead, because I know that he believes it — that the rise of the drunken, boisterous lout in the golf gallery is deplorable, and ought to be nipped in the bud, too. Join us, yes — but assimilate. Sort of like a country and immigration, you know?
I think they should have carted Rolfing off the show right there. Because I happen to have it directly from Payne that he’s rooting for Tiger to win the Slam and smash Nicklaus’s records.
More phony populism.
In an interview last summer, Gramm remarked to me that economic rights are the most important of all, because they’re the ones on which all others depend. These rights, however, get short shrift, in favor of cherished ones like speech and assembly (though not gun ownership, of course). (Hang on, speech isn’t all that cherished — is it? — given the press’s eager sponsorship of campaign-finance restrictions. Speech for oneself, let’s say, is cherished — but not for the slob nextdoor.) And did you get a load of E. J. Dionne’s column in the Washington Post? Under the headline “The Inherited Wealth Lobby,” Dionne said, “The good news is that 44 senators had the backbone to resist an intense lobbying campaign to repeal the inheritance tax. The bad news is that the issue is still there to be demagogued.” Yes, it takes oh-so-tremendous courage to stand up to a “handful of billionaires” (as the Democrats describe the beneficiaries of estate-tax repeal). We all know how daunting it is, politically, to oppose the rich, because the rich and their mouthpieces in the corporatist press are so horribly demagogic. No one is ever demagogic in being anti-rich. Pity the Democrats and socialists: at such a disadvantage in this debate! Oh, the “backbone” it takes to cry against the billionaires! (In a sarcastic mood today — sorry.)
In an interview last year, he said the following to the Times: “I saw a quote in a magazine that said Ali was second only to Martin Luther King in his social influence. I said, ‘What did he do?’ I tried to figure it out. And it was nothing. He was about the Muslims and he was about himself. But this image was so imbedded in the public consciousness that he’s some sort of saint that it’s hard to disabuse people of it.” Ah, ah: the relief.
And anyone who is made to feel better by this kind of egalitarianism is one shaky citizen. I do love what Bill Buckley says: that he goes somewhere and a guard or some kind of checker says, “Hello, Mr. Buckley. May I see your ID?”
Said the Post,
Uh-huh. The article goes on to refer to the “kiss-kiss social circle he moves in.” A piece in yesterday’s Times quoted someone as saying, “He’s a walker, but a working walker.” I adore that line.
Stick by your woman, you know?
Roughly a million readers wrote to say, “Don’t forget the Spastics Society!” I certainly won’t.
When it comes to Goldbergs, give me Jonah, give me Lucianne, give me Bernard — but don’t give me Whoopi. (Actually, I do enjoy her, which is why I’m a little disappointed to hear stuff like this.)
Okay, let me be the typical guy in the bowling alley, bawling to his buddies, or his bartender (enough B’s for you — as many as those G’s?): Can you imagine the national uproar that would follow a defendant’s claiming that there were too many black citizens on his jury? A weird country we live in, y’all — a weird country. But then, you knew that. |
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ou will indulge me
in some U.S. Open comments? Thanks.
In
years past, when someone won the Masters — the first of the season’s
four majors — we often picked that person for the U.S. Open, quipping,
“He’s going for the Slam!” We were just kidding, of course
— amusing ourselves with the impossibility of it all. But Tiger has,
of course, made that no joking matter. He has already won a type of Slam:
four majors in a row (the U.S. Open through the Masters, rather than the
Masters through the PGA — the genuine, same-season Slam). No one
else has done that in the modern era. It is a barely fathomable achievement.
