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June 17, 2002 9:00 a.m. Burnin’ brighter. Phony-baloney populism. Sniffing Gore’s undies. And more.

ou will indulge me in some U.S. Open comments? Thanks.

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.

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.

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.

“As is well known” (as the Communists used to say), I’m gaga for Tiger, too — but I don’t like one of his current commercials: where he sort of scowls into the camera bragging about all the majors he’s won (in behalf of Nike equipment). It seems to me kind of un-Tigeresque and ungentlemanly — a little embarrassing. A little wince-making. Wish he hadn’t done it.

The late Sam Snead — whom we just eulogized — had seven majors in his long and prolific career. He failed to win the U.S. Open. But he won as late into life as anyone ever has, and he garnered more PGA Tour victories than anyone else in history — 81.

Tiger just “carded” his eighth major, as against Sam’s seven. Tiger is 26.

Should we say that Tiger has won eleven? What I mean is this: For years and years, we said that Nicklaus had won 20 majors, counting his two U.S. Amateurs. We said “twenty” because we loved that awesome round number — so pleasurable to speak. But when Tiger came along, we — a lot of people — immediately lowered that number to 18, to encompass just the “professional majors.” Why? I think it’s because some were reluctant to give Tiger three majors right off the bat — his three U.S. Ams (in a row).

So, if we count the Nicklaus-20 way, Tiger’s now at eleven. How ’bout that, sports fans?

I thought the crowd stank. Absolutely stank. The NBC commentators spent the whole weekend kissing its rear-end — saying how great it all was for the game of golf — but I still think it stank: all that rowdyism, all that rudeness, all the un-golf-like-ness.

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 can’t have been the only one startled by Mark Rolfing’s other-worldly comment, toward the beginning of the final round (by the way, Mark Rolfing = Dan Quayle’s roommate and teammate, at DePauw University): “I know that [the late] Payne Stewart is watching, and I know that he’s rooting for Phil Mickelson.”

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.

I heard from many people, “It’s boring to see Tiger win like this. We need a little competition, a little excitement.” I might say, in counter-argument, “It’s exciting — as well as awe-inspiring — to see Tiger clean up. Give in to it. It’s exciting to see this totally unexpected, out-of-the-blue, can’t-be-happening dominance. It’s exciting to see a player go for the genuine Slam. Imagine that: a professional Slam! In our lifetimes!”

In my opinion, far too much was made — by the USGA, NBC, and the media generally — of this “first public course” business, referring to Bethpage (site of the just-completed Open). It was “the people’s championship,” everyone said. I say: Malarkey. It was no more the “people’s championship” than it always is. It is — wherever it’s played — our national open. We in the great public don’t give a hoot (Hootie? But that’s the Masters) whether the Open is played at Baltusrol or Bethpage. We just want to see and love the Open. So drop this neo-Marxian baloney, would you? I mean, the average American is no more likely to play Bethpage than he is Merion, for Pete’s sake.

More phony populism.

All right, enough of that — back to a little political fulminating (although part of that was a bit political, wasn’t it?). The Democrats have defeated the permanent repeal of the estate tax in the Senate. North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan spoke, as usual, for prairie socialism: “Strip it all away, [and] this is a tax relief for billionaires when we have a very big deficit and we have other priorities.” And Phil Gramm was at his logical and pugnacious best: “[The Democrats] believe it is worth forcing people at the death of their parents to sell off their life’s work to give half of it to the government.”

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.)

It’s bad enough that Mick Jagger is receiving a knighthood — sort of makes one not want to really sit at that round table. But far worse is that Harold Pinter is being celebrated as a Companion of Honour. Pinter hates America, hates Israel, hates much that is good and right — very definitely doesn’t hate himself, however. Others of us can take care of that.

I’m in love with a man named Mark Kram. Who’s he? A onetime writer for Sports Illustrated who just died — his obituary was in the New York Times over the weekend. He wrote a well-received book called Ghosts of Manila, about Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. (Boxing was his specialty.) He was at work on a book about Mike Tyson when he died.

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.

Look, I know how we all feel about Al Gore — we NRO types, that is: but any nation that insists on searching Gore at an airport — going through his bags, sniffing his shoes — is a nation that’s insane. A nation so affected by the wrong kind of egalitarianism that it is, simply, stark raving nuts.

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?”

I have a prize for Euphemistic Writing of the Month. It goes to the New York Post, for its words about one Peter Bacanovic, an investor to the stars, and to the Ladies That Lunch. He is knee-deep in this ImClone scandal, which has ensnared Martha Stewart, most prominently.

Said the Post,

A longtime fixture on New York’s social scene, bachelor Bacanovic is as likely to be spotted lunching with Nan Kempner [a much-photographed and -written about socialite] at Swifty’s as he is to be working out with his trainer at the Gold’s Gym on 54th Street.

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.

Just when Martha Stewart got into a little Wall Street trouble, the Democrats — Daschle, Hillary, and all the biggies — immediately canceled a fundraiser that she was to host. What loyalty! What gratitude!

Stick by your woman, you know?

In a previous Impromptus, I wrote about Britain and its relative lack of euphemisms. For example, on a recent trip, I saw a sign reading, “Loo for the Disabled.” A friend of my living there reported seeing a notice on a shop window: “School-Leaver Wanted To Learn Sign-Making Trade.”

Roughly a million readers wrote to say, “Don’t forget the Spastics Society!”

I certainly won’t.

You want one more reason to love Tiger Woods (and I warn soccer fans: Please stop reading now)? Asked about the World Cup, he shrugged, “You’ve got the wrong country.”

I have a reader who swears that, on Hollywood Squares, Whoopi Goldberg expressed the wish that attorney general John Ashcroft be struck by lightning. The reader called up King Features Syndicate the next day to ask why such a thing shouldn’t be considered “hate speech” (as it surely would be if Ashcroft expressed such a wish about Whoopi Goldberg). Good question.

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.)

Finally, James Taranto noted on his marvelous Best of the Web, found at www.opinionjournal.com, a Miami Herald story about an accused Florida drug dealer who won a new trial on the grounds that “the jury pool contained too many people whose last names start with the letter ‘G.’”

Of 38 potential jurors in the pool, 21 had surnames starting with “G” and 14 of those were of Hispanic origin: six Garcias, two Gomezes, two Gonzalezes, two Guerras, a Gutierrez and a Goldares. Quoting William Shakespeare and The White Pages, defense attorney David O. Markus persuaded a federal judge that the panel violated Roderick B. Carter’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury comprised of his peers. Carter is black.

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.