When Golfers Lose Their Humility

By Colman McCarthy

Golf, the Scots warned, is a humbling game. But sometimes the humiliated who have either thin skins or thick heads that let pride take over. Instead of throwing their clubs into ponds, as Tommy (Thunder) Bolt did when the double bogeys mounted up, today’s touring pros throw tantrums.

At the recent U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, many of the world’s finest golfers became the sports world’s sorest losers. They whined about the fast greens, they groused about hard fairways, they bemoaned pin placements—all that dastardliness caused by the tournament’s co-host, the United States Golf Association. The other host? God, who dared let a gust or two of wind break the balm of Gilead.

Imagine! A truly challenging golf course for once. A grave injustice.

As the games of humbled but not humble Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh were cold cocked by Shinnecock—these demigods alone were 30 over par for the tournament—the public had a moment to note that among professional athletes, golfers are the most privileged and coddled. Both Els and Sergio Garcia shot final rounds 80s, and took home $225,000 between them. They didn’t take the money and run. They took it and stayed—to gripe to the press about the course.

Physically, the game is a walk—literally. Many touring pros are succored by personal trainers, psychologists and swing coaches. They travel from country club to country club, are doted on by companies that heave endorsement money at them for wearing logos on shirts and hats, they are self-employed, they are managed by marketing companies, they pick up easy money—and plenty of stock tips--on Mondays playing at corporate outings, and they get boxes of free golf balls before every tournament. No wonder they cheerily toss them to the crowd coming off the 18th green.

If that isn’t cushiony enough, the pros are allowed to hang glide high above another of life’s travails: noise. Total silence is expected from galleryites when a player is about to swing. Hush, hush, little children, the Great One is in deep thought, the train of it not be derailed by the click of a camera, the jingle of a cell phone or a sneeze, burp or hiccup. Why is it that in other sports crowd mayhem—from deafening roars to cowbells to Hollywood stars shouting from the sidelines—is allowed when a Shag O’Neal is on the foul line or Barry Bonds is up against Roger Clemens?

What’s so precious about swinging a golf club, or so rarefied about a golf course, that the paying public can’t sound off? Athletes in other sports can handle the rousings of the rabble. Why not golf? At a recent tournament in Ohio, the pros were unsettled by the noise of cicadas. At any moment, the marshalls could have been ordered into the woodlands to demand silence, a touring pro is about to swing.

Tiger Woods, as tightly wound as his Nike golf balls, is so touchy about noise that his caddy-manservant has taken crowd control to new depths: snatching or kicking cameras out of photographers’ hands, even long before Tiger is over the ball. Like U.S. foreign policy, preemptive strikes are in order.

Two weeks after the US Open, the lads on the PGA Tour are back in their comfort zone: in Chicago playing at Cog Hill, where birdies and eagles—the tamed fowl of pro golf—are routine. At last week’s tour stop in Potomac, Md., scores in the low and mid-60s were common. Yet players who shot seven or eight under par walked off the 18th green either glum or grim. Watch for it at Cog Hill, too.

The sight brings to mind the lines of P. G. Wodehouse, who lived and golfed not far from Shinnecock Hills: “I have sometimes wondered if we of the canaille don’t get more pleasure out of it than the top-notchers. For an untouchable like myself two perfect drives in a round would wipe out all memory of sliced approach shots and foozled putts, whereas if Jack Nicklaus does a sixty-four he goes home and thinks morosely that had he not missed that eagle on the seventh he would have had a sixty-three.”

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, is the author of “The Pleasures of the Game: the Theory Free Guide to Golf.” In college, he played in two PGA tournaments—and made the cut.