Virginia Golfer Voices
by SCOTT MICHAUX
Acts of Anger-Filled Spontaneity Find
Occasional Partner in Maddening Game
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V IRGINIA G OLFER | M ARCH/A PRIL 2015
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Tommy Bolt was
known to dispatch an
uncooperative club.
For those like McIlroy who haven’t given it
up, some days it can push to the point of losing
your grip for a moment. So what?
“When you let one go and it’s just right, it’s
cathartic. It really is,” said PGA Tour player
Brian Harman.
Nobody should condone it as common
practice. And few can pull it off with the grace
of McIlroy.
“I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do it,
especially if there’s kids watching at home,”
McIlroy said.
His peers certainly weren’t condemning
him (especially Marcel Siem, who deposited
his own 3-iron in the same lake the next day).
“Takes one to know one,” said Henrik
Stenson, the first to walk up to McIlroy in
the fairway with a quip about figuring out
how to get on SportsCenter without hitting
quality shots. “It can be a frustrating place and,
as professionals, we have high expectations
of our game. When it doesn’t work out,
sometimes it can get the best of us. Be nice to
him. He’s a good guy.”
McIlroy is a good guy, and he handled his
outburst with aplomb. After Donald Trump
sent a frogman into the lagoon to retrieve the
offending club and returned it to McIlroy, he
feinted throwing it back to the fishes after
delivering another shot into the drink Sunday
on the 18th hole.
Instead he gave the club back to Trump,
who plans to display it prominently at Doral
as a reminder of how golf can bring out the
worst in even the best.
Author Scott Michaux is an award-winning
columnist for The Augusta Chronicle in
Augusta, Ga., and a regular contributor to
Virginia Golfer.
w w w. v s g a . o r g
3/18/15 10:25 AM
PHOTO CREDIT HERE
cathartic outburst once in a while?
Even the beloved Bob Jones said “sometimes
the game cannot be endured with a club in
one’s hand.”
Somehow in this modern era when
anonymous web denizens share the vilest
thoughts in comment sections, it has become
weirdly unacceptable to display anger and
frustration in the arena. It seems we are seeking
a sports world of homogenous drones who
all look and act in the same proper, sponsorvetted manner.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time
when athletes who wore emotions on their
sleeves were revered as colorful characters
in an otherwise muted landscape. Tennis
fans once embraced “bad boys” like Jimmy
Connors, John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase
while at the same time admiring the graceful
demeanors of Bjorn Borg and Arthur Ashe.
Golf once had its own wing of characters.
“Terrible-tempered, tempestuous Tommy
(Thunder) Bolt”—as fellow Hall of Fame
member Dan Jenkins referred to him—was
more regarded for his anger management
issues than his 1958 U.S. Open victory. Bolt
was a connoisseur of the club toss, offering
such advice as “never break your driver and
your putter in the same round.”
“Do people come out to watch me hit golf
shots, the way they do Ben Hogan and Sam
Snead? No,” said Bolt after his U.S. Open
win. “They come out for one reason, and one
reason only. They want to see me blow my
top. And I’m sorry to say I’ve obliged them.”
I once saw Craig Stadler oblige fans at the
1985 Kemper Open at Congressional Country
Club by reflexively launching his 3-wood up
the fairway—following Bolt’s recommendation
to “always throw a club ahead of you so that
you don’t have to walk any extra distance to
get it.” The fans around the green tittered with
more excitement than if he’d holed the shot.
“Why am I using a new putter?” Stadler
once said. “Because the last one didn’t float
too well.”
Golf is a game keenly suited to bringing
out that inner anger. P.G. Wodehouse once
wrote that he “enjoys that perfect peace, that
peace beyond all understanding, which comes
at its maximum only to the man who has given
up golf.”
TOP: FILE PHOTO; JOHN G. ZIMMERMAN/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GETTY IMAGES
R
ory McIlroy’s words echoed
those of countless sinners across
centuries who have addressed their
assorted moments of weakness.
“Felt good at the time,” said the world’s
No. 1 golfer with a sheepish grin regarding
his textbook aerial disposal of his 3-iron into
a pond on the eighth hole of Doral’s Blue
Monster.
The reuniting of McIlroy’s club with
the ball it had just delivered into the same
offending body of water was a relative work
of art—in the same way Lenny Bruce worked
in the medium of profanity. It would have
induced a hearty “pip pip” from the late great
golf scribe Henry Longhurst, best known as
the first British-accented voice of the Masters
Tournament.
“The most exquisitely satisfying act in the
world of golf is that of throwing a club,” wrote
Longhurst. “The full backswing, the delayed
wrist action, the flowing follow-through,
followed by that unique whirring sound,
reminiscent only of a passing flock of starlings,
are without parallel in sport.”
McIlroy’s form was a marvel indeed—fitting
of the worl