I fully expect that the "reverend" Al Sharpton, et al in the Civil Rights Industrial Complex will shortly be holding protests against professional golf because it is racist for using white balls. The object of the Professional Golfers' Association's factious racism is the down trodden Tiger Woods, who shot an 85 at the Jack Nicholas tournament over the past weekend. While I and my golfing buddies would consider an 85 to be a good score, professional golfers generally shoot in the high 60s to low 70s during 18 holes of golf.
Of course my above scenario is exaggeration for the purpose of making a point. Tiger's problems are firmly rooted in the result of his own behavior which lead him to back into a fire hydrant full speed in the course of an argument with his wife over his infidelity, thus resulting in what appears to be a career-mitigating back injury. Some have even suggested that his fall from the grace of the golfing gods was just desserts for his cheatin' ways.
How the mighty have fallen, and no one knows this better than Tiger Woods who won his first major PGA event by the time he was 22. For almost a decade he seem to be unstoppable in his quest to surpass the great Jack Nicholas, who stacked up 18 major tournament wins, a record, that at least for the time being, seems safe from being broken by Tiger Woods or anyone else. Every golfer has slumps and bad rounds, Jack Nicholas had 6 tournament rounds during his career when he scored in the 80s.
But I digress. Returning to my cartoonish scenario that has "reverend" Sharpton taking up the cause of Tiger's deteriorating golf game and blaming it on racism, I have just become accustom to accepting the completely irrational from members of the Left. From Hillary Clinton recently accusing Republicans of mass voter suppression on par with the Democrats' Jim Crow laws in the early to mid 20th century, to Sharpton, Obama, et al blaming the very predictable outcome to criminals who flaunt and attack the law, on law enforcement, the Left has officially gone off the deep end of reality.
I remember my father taking me and my two brothers to the PGA championship in the mid-1970s, which was held at Canterbury Golf Club near where we lived. I remember getting a dozen or so autographs, picking up a tee left behind by one of the pros (do not remember which one now), Arnold Palmer stepping on my foot with his spikes as he signed an autograph for me, and I remember something Lee Trevino said. He was signing programs in the scorers' tent and a young black kid asked, "Mr. Trevino, what kind of ball do you use?" Lee, without missing a beat said, "I use a white one son."
These days, Mr. Trevino would be drummed out of golf, and forced to live in shame for being "racially insensitive." I guess my point is (for those of you still reading and wondering) we have not become more racially sensitive as a society but less so. We have traded the evil of institutionalized racism for the evil of institutionalized silencing of any racial commentary. And the real tragedy is that there will come a day when professional golf may be forced to use a more chromatically diverse range of colored balls so as not to offend anyone who may base their fragile ethnic egos on the color of the ball a professional golfer chooses to use.
Excellent and true!
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