GOLF NEEDS A LITTLE NASCAR OCTANE!

I saw a headline on another blog “NASCAR” in the driver seat; PGA in the rear view mirror.” The subject was about how NASCAR is winning the race (excuse the pun) in the negotiations for television contracts, causing the PGA to fight for their sacred TV “tee times”. That got me to thinking. The PGA is really only exciting to extreme die hard golfers and then only if Tiger is not in the hunt. No offense meant to Tiger, but I just want to vomit at the media’s idolizing of Tiger. Hey, he is to golf what Mohammed Ali was to boxing. OK? Now get over it!

Watching a PGA event on TV anymore is about as exciting as watching your mother-in-law come through the front door with her luggage in tow; watching a NASCAR event on TV or at the track, on the other hand, is like seeing her butt disappear in the rear seat of a taxi heading out for the airport.

There is entirely too much talking during a televised golf event. Why in the world does every TV producer think that every nano-second of every minuet must be filled with some sort of verbal doodling? I say let’s have a CSPAN golf channel, it could be called G-SPAN, where all we could hear is balls being spanked (thanks Srixon), birds singing in the trees, the splash of turtles diving for cover following a sudden and painful thud on their shell from an unsuccessful attempt to skip a ball across #16 pond at Augusta, and the occasional passing of gas by the old farts on The Champion’s Tour. GSPAN, could be The Golf Channel of the future

Some folks think NASCAR is just a bunch of fancy painted cars going fast and making left turns. They’re right, except those fancy painted cars are traveling at 180+ miles an hour, door knob to door knob, bumper to bumper, gas cap, to gas cap while trying to avoid being slammed into a concrete wall head long at 180 mph and being catapulted into the air flipping, end over end down an asphalt race track, strewing expensive parts all over the place, while other very expensive cars swerve and scatter to avoid the same fate, as the driver of the car in flight clinches his teeth and hangs on for dear life. Now that is exciting!

If you are a race fan, you know one of the neatest things about attending a race is to have a scanner and listen to the conversations between the driver, his spotter, and his crew chief during the race. Even if you don’t attend a race in person, you can still, via the wonders of cyber-scanners, listen to Jr. cuss, Gordon whine, and Steward swear revenge on Johnson, right in the comfort of your worn-out, sweat- stained Lazy Boy.

Talking about that, why in the name of auditory senses do they put mic’s on the PGA players in a few events, then paint oratory graffiti over the very conversations the fans want to eaves drop on? Why don’t we wire up the golfers and their caddies, rent scanners at PGA events like NASCAR does with the drivers? Then we can listen to Fuzz ask Jim “why don’t you just tighten up your belt one more notch so you don’t have to keep hitching up your pants before every shot?” Yeah, that’s what we should do and then we could listen to the real thing instead of having to listen to the network crows sitting up in their deer stands squawking their oratory blabber all over our expensive Bose surround sound speakers.

We die hard golfers need to rise up and let our feeling be heard. Golf is not meant to be a spectator sport, it’s a participating sport for goodness sakes! So, quit watching golf on TV, give that old Lazy Boy to the church, wipe the cob webs off of your dried up golf bag, call your pals and get out there and play. Oh, by the way, don’t forget to stick a few extra sleeves of Scruffy & Pal golf balls in your bag

We can’t all be race car drivers, but we can swing at and curse a golf ball while having a few beers with our pals, as we pretend we can hit a eight iron 200 yards over a stand of trees onto a green the size of the trunk of a ’57 Cadillac. And, we can celebrate a 100 yard cart path bounce that gives us a career driving distance or the miss hit chip that goes scalding across the green, catches the pin dead center, jumps straight up in the air, and falls in the cup for a birdie.

If we must have it, spectator golf desperately needs some high octane infused into it, especially the TV coverage. How about a little more attention and respect to the fans, a whole lot less talk (i.e. G-Span), player/caddy wired with scanners for the fans, and a great big dose of get-over-yourself!

A very wise and thoughtful man once said: “If you don’t change your direction, you will end up where you are heading”.

Did you hear that Mr. TV producers?

That’s my word

Crash