Golf

Monday

Gage Klipper

Grow a pair, Euro cry-bullies

After a weekend of bloodlust at Bethpage, the European team pulled off a stunning victory to take home the Ryder Cup. So why are they so sore about it?Golf is known as a gentleman’s game, with countless unwritten rules of etiquette. The Ryder Cup is a rare exception, where the 12 best golfers from Europe and America duke it out not for money, but for glory, and rowdy fans bring their national pride to bear. The American fury picked up as the Europeans sprinted ahead on Saturday, leading to an overall air of chaos. Forget the “golf clap” – heckling, shouting and four-letter cursing became the standard behavior as European players walked past the grandstands or lined up their shots.

Ryder Cup

Monday

Bill Kauffman

The controversy of Daylight Savings Time

Batavia, New York I bear no ill will against golfers — I triple-bogey easy holes and miss gimme putts with the worst of them — but President Trump’s demand that we eliminate Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a double eagle out of the blue, especially as Trump had earlier advocated a move to year-round DST. Although Benjamin Franklin is often credited as its progenitor, the real father of Daylight Saving Time, according to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward, was the golfing British architect William Willett, who deplored “the waste of daylight.” The British Royal Astronomer dismissed Willett’s idea with the counterproposal that “between the months of October and March the thermometer should be put up ten degrees.

daylight
GOAT
Kevin Cook

Which GOAT really is the greatest?

Shohei Ohtani had a baseball season for the ages. The Dodgers’ sensational designated hitter hit fifty-four home runs and stole fifty-nine bases to become the founding member of baseball’s 50/50 club. Even before his Dodgers won the World Series and Ohtani won the National League’s MVP award, sportswriters were calling him the best player in baseball history. His heroics bring a key question into play: is Ohtani’s 2024 season one of the greatest performances in sports history? It’s up there for sure, but there are other contenders. Jesse Owens won four gold medals under Adolf Hitler’s nose at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

Wednesday

Amy Rose Everett

A solo summer sojourn in the Algarve’s Pine Cliffs resort 

Strong, old pine tree branches cutting through a cloudless cerulean sky — a sight I find hard to beat. Throwing open the curtains at Pine Cliffs Resort in the Algarve, I wondered why I’d been away from Portugal so long.  Bleary-eyed, I reflexively photographed my first glimpse of the Atlantic from my Junior Ocean Suite’s balcony, seagulls cinematically swooping into the frame. Another vain attempt to capture the colors that always keep me coming back; the pictures somehow never as good as the real thing. I’d posted up from Tokyo gone dinnertime the previous night, just outfoxed by Japan’s famed pink sakura (2024’s late bloom meant I missed them by twenty-four hours). Waking up deathly early, I soaked away grizzly jet lag in my spacious room’s egg-shaped tub.

pine cliffs

Monday

Zack Christenson

Inside the April issue: What happened to America’s capital?

During lockdown, crime shot up around the country. Most cities have seen their numbers come down — most aside from our nation’s capital. Why? In our editorial, we ask what’s being done — it might not surprise you that the answer is “not much.” Matt McDonald, a resident of Navy Yard, one of the worst-hit areas, says that his neighborhood is a failed experiment in gentrification — and asks if help is on the way. And Tim Rice looks at why and how DC got to where it is right now. Elsewhere, Patrick Hauf does a ride-along with the Dallas Police Department, and finds an alternative approach to policing that could be a model for departments around the country.

dc safe

Tuesday

Michael Bachmann

What was the point of the PGA-LIV show trial?

The media buzz surrounding the PGA-LIV Golf merger just won’t stop — and the Senate’s investigation on Tuesday did little to help. The hearing came across as more a show trial of moral posturing on an issue that few outside of the golfing community have been following. After nearly three hours, one question still remained unanswered: why should anyone care?  Senator Richard Blumenthal, who announced the investigation last month, appeared to be the only one in the room invested in the hearing, which included testimony from PGA Tour chief operating officer Ron Price and board member Jimmy Dunne. The other committee members came with a few obligatory questions for PGA’s executives or outright supported them.

pga-liv

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Congress doesn’t like the PGA-LIV merger

Will the biggest merger in golf history fall apart because of politics? From the moment the PGA Tour and LIV Golf shocked the world of sports by announcing their years of negging would end in marriage, questions about the nature and structure of the secretive deal have been raised not just by players, reporters, and fans, but by politicians as well — particularly from a pair of Democratic senators from Connecticut, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, both longtime Saudi critics. Now, it seems Congress is prepared to get seriously involved in whether this deal goes through, and what it means to have this level of investment from a foreign power in what they viewed as an American sport. https://twitter.

pga tour liv golf

Wednesday

Kevin Cook

Is the PGA-LIV merger sports’ biggest betrayal?

What just happened to golf?  On Tuesday, PGA Tour commissioner Joseph William “Jay” Monahan IV announced that the PGA Tour will merge with LIV Golf, creating a new super tour along with Europe’s DP World Tour.  So much for the war between golf’s establishment and LIV, the upstart league backed by Saudi Arabia’s $620 billion sovereign wealth fund. Starting next year, Monahan will be the super tour’s CEO, answering to its chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan, a close ally of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.  So much for moral posturing. Just last year, with LIV critics citing the Saudi regime’s ugly human-rights record, its links to 9/11 and Saudi thugs’ murdering and dismembering columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Monahan claimed the high ground.

LIV PGA

Friday

Cockburn

Joe Manchin’s next move: West Virginia University?

Senator Joe Manchin is eyeing the presidency... of West Virginia University, multiple Mountain State sources tell Cockburn. While Manchin hasn’t publicly expressed interest in the job, the stars may be aligning perfectly for him. Charleston political circles have been abuzz with the rumors of his interest for weeks now.  Seventy-five-year-old Manchin will be weighing all options that don’t entail a near-certain defeat at the ballot box in West Virginia next year, meaning a near-certain defeat at the national ballot box with a quixotic third party presidential campaign is unlikely. The presidency of WVU, which Manchin attended on a football scholarship before an injury derailed his career, makes a lot of sense for both parties.

manchin

Tuesday

Cockburn

Sleepy Joe leads the work-from-home crusade

Rejoice, slackers of America! For there is a new figurehead leading your crusade for lunchtime naps, camera-off Zoom meetings and sea-level productivity. Yes, Joe Biden has, finally, excelled at something: he is the president that has spent most time at home. According to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who has been meticulously keeping tabs of Biden's days off, since taking the White House as his official residence, the president has traveled to his home in Delaware fifty-five times. Whether he’s practicing his cycling skills, injuring himself while playing with his dogs naked or lounging in his $2.

work

Sunday

Grayson Quay

How to save golf

I’m not very good at golf, but that’s OK. I no longer play enough to expect to be good. I’ve long since lost my touch with my woods, and since I lack the time and inclination to reacquire it, I just tee off with a four-iron. My short game is atrocious. If I can sink a par or two and come in below 110 for 18 holes, I’m happy. As the old joke goes, golf and sex are two things you don’t have to be good at to enjoy. If golf is like sex, it’s more like a marital coupling than a hookup. To play a course skillfully requires familiarity with its every curve that can only be gained by a years-long relationship as well as a certain degree of respect (interspersed with bouts of frustration).

golf

Saturday

Charles Lipson

Let the president play on the beach or the golf course

Every president is criticized, sooner or later, for taking too many days off, for lounging around when we’ve hired him to work. Since the media hates Republicans, that criticism is usually directed at them, but even some liberal publications have noticed that — shock! — Democratic presidents play golf, too. That criticism, most recently in Amber Athey’s article in The Spectator, is wrong. It misses the bigger, more important issues — and not just because our country would be well served if most presidents did less, not more. It’s fun to compare the President with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but there are three problems with criticizing presidents for escaping to their beach house in Delaware or their ranch in Texas or California.

president

Tuesday

Cockburn

Biden’s bogey

President Joe Biden hit the golf course for the second time since taking office on Sunday, continuing something of an American presidential tradition. Unlike his predecessors, however, Biden appears to be a duffer. It's possible that at one point in time Biden was a decent golfer. He's been a member of Wilmington Country Club in Delaware since 2014 and reportedly had as low as a 6 handicap. That's a bit hard to believe as former president Barack Obama said he had an 'honest 13' handicap after playing 300 rounds of golf. A video of Biden on the links this past weekend further confirms that his golf game has gone the same direction as his mental acuity. The clip shows Biden well to the left of the green behind a short stone wall.

golf

Friday

Scott McConnell

Why the Ryder Cup is great

I made no time for the Blasey Ford testimony, and never do for the NFL, but the TV will be on for Ryder Cup this weekend, the greatest show in golf. The bi-annual Europe v. America spectacle is being held at Le Golf National, a relatively new course outside of Paris this year, which seems odd because golf has few roots in France. But tens of thousands of French people will be going, and tens thousands more will journey from Britain and Ireland and the continent. Since 1979, when our Ryder Cup opponents became European (because postwar, the US was beating the British-Irish team too consistently) the Euro team has become one of the few well-regarded symbols of a united Europe, in counterpoint to the sovereignty threatening bureaucrats of Brussels.

tiger woods ryder cup 2018