Posted 3:23 PM by Gene

Are CHIP BROWN and his "EDITORS" eligible for buyouts? We sure do hope so!

There’s a kind of spiritual covenant in all sports that binds spectators and players but which in golf takes on truly mystical proportions, if only because the terms of the game — an absurd struggle against nature and oneself — offer so many uncanny parallels with the terms of conscious life. The covenant holds that when an athlete prevails, we prevail; when he or she falls short, we’re diminished too. Not just any athlete is fit for this peculiar service. Professional golf coughs up a winner every week, players of consummate skill who possess every talent but the one that matters, which is the great champion’s capacity to carry us beyond ourselves. In golf, maybe in all of sports, such a figure comes along but once or twice in a lifetime. You follow a track of moonlight on the water, and maybe there, where it ends, is someone who has what it takes. . [SIC]

This will happen when the UNIVERSE'S GREATEST PAPER proves it isn't full of effete snobs. This makes EFFETE SNOBBERY look good.

P. S. Actually the accompanying squib says CHIP is (was) a "contributing writer" to the POR's rag. Take the buyout anyway!

P. P. S. Well, the John "Bad Sex Award" Updike of the Links did come up with an accidental insight -- and it was very accidental:

When Woods finally seemed ready to run, coming off a birdie at the par-5 eighth, a photographer tripped the shutter during his swing on the par-3 ninth and Woods yanked the shot into the rough left of the hole.

“Not on my swing! Don’t take a picture during my swing!” he said, glaring at the knot of cameramen. He turned away with a stream of curses. It was electrifying, like seeing one of those Tiger Woods replicas in the wax museums suddenly come to life.

He bogeyed the hole. On the next tee, in even more vivid language, he promised the photographers they were risking bodily harm if they ever disrupted him mid-swing again. The outburst raised the question of how much more effective Earl Woods’s focus training would have been if instead of trying to distract Tiger with pocket change and dropped golf balls he had been able to squeeze the trigger of, say, a Canon Mark III with a burst rate of 10 frames per second. Tiger might very well be alone in third place, ahead of Ben Hogan, on the PGA Tour career-victories list. And in fact someone asked Woods at the Masters why, given his focus training, camera shutters bother him so much. (Camera shutters bother all pros, but none have photographic entourages as large as Woods does.) He let the question pass without much of an answer.

Take the buyout regardless!

P. P. P. S. at 10:23 p. m. TGM and the verb "trash" are now linked inextricably.