Tiger Woods, expelling bodily fluids in the wrong place again.

This time, it's spit.

"An armchair official tweeted in to get Camilo DQ’d... What is wrong with people? Have they got nothing better to do?"

Some guy watching the Tournament of Champions on TV got Camilo Villegas disqualified for "flick[ing] away some loose grass Thursday as his ball was rolling down a slope back toward his divot on the 15th hole at Kapalua."

Violating the rule normally incurs a two-shot penalty. But because Villegas had completed his round before his violation was confirmed Friday by the P.G.A., he was disqualified from the Tour’s season-opening event for signing an incorrect scorecard.

Ernie Els suggested the introduction of a deadline beyond which golfers could not be disqualified from a tournament.

“If it’s a rules violation, it should be dealt with,” the South African said. “Should there be a deadline? If you sign your card, it’s done and you can’t do anything about it. If somebody wants to call in, you’ve got to do it before we are done playing.”

Hey, don't violate the rules! I don't agree with Els's idea of a deadline. You're supposed to call the penalty on yourself, not try to get away with it. The disqualification is the incentive needed to protect the honest players.

"Defying President Obama, House Democrats vote not to bring up tax deal he negotiated with GOP in its current form."

CNN Breaking News.

Meade, immediately: "Oh, man! That's going to make bleeding-heart moderates like you like him even more."

Immediate Althouse: "Obama is being thrust into the arms of the onrushing GOP!"

Meade: "In the same way that H.W. befriended Bill Clinton, W is going to befriend Obama. You'll see them playing golf together. Maybe even mountain biking."

Is it unfair for tennis players to grunt?

Supposedly, this scientific study lends support to those who say it is:

Hundreds of video clips were shown of a player hitting a ball to either the left or right. The students had to determine the direction quickly, but on some shots were subjected to noises simulating grunting.

..."The findings were unequivocal. Basically, when the video clips did have a grunt, the participants were not only slower to react but they had lower accuracy levels. So they were basically slower and could actually be wrong-footed, if you could extend that to a real-world tennis court."

Is distracting a video-watcher similar enough to annoying someone who's actively playing the game under pressure? It's different... but which way is it different? Is the real-life player less or more affected by the noise?

Why is being noisy and annoying okay in some sports but not others? (I'm thinking of golf.)

Bill Clinton's in trouble for saying "I've dreamed of getting a lesson from Annika Sorenstam."

Now, is that fair?

"The aesthetics of Men in Shorts is a little different when it is carbon fiber and aluminum on display, don't you think?"

The Elder tweaks me on a subject I did not raise in my post about the MWAGA tournament. He also says:

Thank you, Ann, for your kind words and for the two of you spending the weekend at the tournament. 

Thanks for the kind words from other Commenters. By this age, we have all encountered some pain and loss in our lives. It's just more visible for some of us.

And more visible in shorts for "the leg guys." That term in quotes is used by The Elder, who presumably considers himself himself one of "the arm guys." (Yesterday, I heard the terms "amps" and "normies.")

My "Men in Shorts" opinion always contained exceptions. My original post made "a small exception for certain sports, or if you are staying at home or in your own yard." I've made some other exceptions over the years — such as "winter vigor" and "hot enough" (either in temperature — over 85° — or what this guy is). So, sure, an exception for "the leg guys." And an exception for "the arm guys" who golfed with them, who had great legs of the fleshly variety.

***

"By this age, we have all encountered some pain and loss in our lives. It's just more visible for some of us." Yes, there are those of us who've lost parts of our character, our honesty, our respect and love for others, and our joy in living. That shows too, but it is harder to see. And there's no skimpy garment that makes it any easier.

The last 2 days, we walked a golf course in northern Illinois as tournament spectators.

The PGA playoff event was at the Cog Hill Country Club in Lemont, Illinois, but we were 33 miles away at the Pheasant Run Golf Course in St. Charles, Illinois. As you may know, I don't play golf. I've never played, but I have a nephew on the PGA Tour, and I've blogged a few times about walking the course as a spectator following him. (Click the "golf" tag and scroll to find those old posts.)

But this weekend, we were following another family member, someone who occasionally comments here under the name "The Elder." It was the Midwestern Amputee Regional Championship. You can see The Elder teeing off in the top photo.





And he won the tournament. So, congratulations to The Elder.

It was a bit different from a PGA event. For one thing, I was able to take photographs (not that I took more than a handful). And the players had golf carts to ride. The Elder elected to walk the course, however, which is what the PGA tour players do. The PGA players have caddies who carry their bags, but The Elder not only walked the course, he carried his bag. Why? "Because I can."

ADDED: The Elder comments, and I make a new post about that.

"SO WITH TIGER WOODS’ GOLF GAME NOW SUCKING LIKE A BILGE PUMP..."

"... can we entertain the hypothesis that his prior slutting around was actually essential to his performance?"

Asks Glenn Reynolds.

Here's what I said back in February, when he made his big "apology":

Deep down, what does he really believe? If I were writing a fictionalized version of his story, I'd have him believe that he is the greatest golfer of all time and that this grand stature authorizes him to do what fits his fabulous mind and body. People get to see the manifestation of that mind and body on the golf course and in those idealized advertisements, but outside of that he must do what has worked, and that means having the anchor of a beautiful family and the whole range of intense sexuality that belongs to him — because he is what he is. Now, he's been called to account by conventional minds and all those people who make money through him — the PGA, the sports networks, advertisers — and they are dragging him down to their mundane morality with no concern for what it took to build the superior mind and body that is Tiger Woods. He is cornered and contemptuous, but he must abase himself for these little people and act as though he agrees. The outrage!

And I said, maybe he needs to throw of the image his father impressed on him and be openly the man he really is, someone more like Hugh Hefner.

What was most essential to Tiger's performance that he's missing now?
	Lots of dirty sex.
	The love of his wife and stability of his family.
	Being regarded as an icon of excellence, which he fed on since early boyhood.
	That big, seemingly endless flow of money, from advertisers feeding on his image of excellence.
pollcode.com free polls

"Today was a nuclear bomb. I don't know where it came from... the craziness just blurted out of me," said Paul Goydos, who shot a 59 today at the John Deere Classic.

AP Reports:

Goydos, with only two victories in his 18 years on the PGA Tour, became only the fourth player in tour history to shoot a 59 with a magical opening round at the John Deere Classic on Thursday.

His tee shots found the middle of the fairway. His approaches stuck on the green. And, most importantly, his putts found the middle of the cup over and over again.

And, by simple good fortune, I was there as a spectator, watching every shot for all 18 holes.

It was the first 59 on the tour since David Duval's memorable final round helped him win the 1999 Bob Hope Classic....

Goydos is the first to shoot 59 on a par 71. The others came on par 72s....

Goydos birdied every hole on the back nine except for No. 15, where he holed a 6-foot par putt to keep alive his hopes. He finished off with three birdies, the last one from 7 feet to join the most exclusive club in golf....

"It's almost a mythical number in our game," Goydos said. "I've gone from clubbing a ball in the backyard all the way to the moon, and missed all the steps in between."

Like pitching a no-hitter in baseball, right?

"Closer to a perfect game," said Cliff Kresge, one of Goydos' playing partners.

Cliff is my nephew, which is why I was there today (in Silvis, Illinois).

ADDED: Tee time for the threesome was 7:09 A.M. and Meade and I were 2 of 4 persons who were watching at that point. The crowd grew toward the end as word got around, but the 4 of us were the only spectators who saw every shot. That was pretty cool!

Obama diverts himself and tells us to quit diverting ourselves.

1. "With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," he said today.

2. He's golfing again. He knows how to do that. Is it empowering? Is it emancipating?

Hypocrisy?
	Yes. He'd like to lay down a lot of rules that only apply to other people.
	Yes. He thinks what he likes is worthwhile, but what he doesn't care about seems like a waste.
	No. Golf is outdoor exercise, quite unlike the various high tech screens people fiddle with.
	No. Unlike the people he's scolding,he doesn't need another "tool of empowerment."
pollcode.com free polls

"It is what it is. Whatever it was, it wasn't good enough.''

Tiger Woods misses the cut... by 8 shots.

Teed up for teasing. It's Tiger Woods.

In the new Nike promo:



Ha! Absurd. I know there are all sorts of instant parodies out there, and I haven't clicked on any yet. The original is already ridiculous. Shameless.

On the other hand: the leaderboard.

OR: You could say:

Without speaking a word, he humanizes himself. Tiger's close bond with his demanding father always felt like the one warm, relatable dimension of an otherwise cold and remote personality....  (By the way, is it me or is there something very Hamlet about the way a haggard Tiger gets interrogated by the ghost of his father on the misty ramparts of a golf course?)

Oh, please.

At the Masters, Tiger Woods will have 90 bodyguards to protect him from the women he screwed.

"None of these girls are allowed anywhere near him... If one photo comes out of a beautiful lady touching him, it would be a disaster."

So not just "these girls" — the ones he fucked — but any "beautiful lady"? Doesn't that make you — female readers only — want to doll yourself up and head down to Augusta, Georgia to see if you can sidle into a photo frame with Tiger?

Ordinary spectators are not allowed to have cameras at a golf tournament. They even search your bag. You'll be at the mercy of the authorized photographers inside the event. But won't they try to frame Tiger with pretty ladies in the background? (Don't they do that anyway, without even any sex scandal to for resonance.) What if a beautiful woman stands stands on the other side of the hole when Tiger is putting? She'd be framed in professional photographs. And she'd distract him with her feminine radiations. She'd be kicked out of the golf course, I bet.

"Ann questions the sincerity of Tiger’s apology/Bob thinks Tiger’s swinging may have hurt his swing/Has this scandal harmed impressionable young fans?/Ann and Bob catch Winter Olympics fever/Amy Bishop and the banality of crazy/Was the Austin kamikaze pilot a terrorist?"

It's the new Bloggingheads! With Bob Wright and me!



ADDED: Here's a missed opportunity:



I shoulda said "Yeah, I've heard about his 'large part.'"

Who was that woman sitting in front row center who would not look at Tiger Woods as he made his apology?

Oh! He hugged her. It was his mother!

I'm waiting for the full transcript, because I'm in the mood to pick it apart, especially the material about Buddhism, which, he said, is the religion he was raised in, which teaches not to pursue desire, and which he drifted away from. Indeed! So he wants to get back to Buddhism — he said, as his mother looked down into her folded hands in her lap and then off to the side. He wants to return to Buddhism, but he's going back to therapy. Why not to a Buddhist retreat, if Buddhism is the answer? Or was he just throwing things at us that he thought might work to make us love him again? Buddhism, therapy, leave my children alone...

Deep down, what does he really believe? If I were writing a fictionalized version of his story, I'd have him believe that he is the greatest golfer of all time and that this grand stature authorizes him to do what fits his fabulous mind and body. People get to see the manifestation of that mind and body on the golf course and in those idealized advertisements, but outside of that he must do what has worked, and that means having the anchor of a beautiful family and the whole range of intense sexuality that belongs to him — because he is what he is. Now, he's been called to account by conventional minds and all those people who make money through him — the PGA, the sports networks, advertisers — and they are dragging him down to their mundane morality with no concern for what it took to build the superior mind and body that is Tiger Woods. He is cornered and contemptuous, but he must abase himself for these little people and act as though he agrees. The outrage!

IN THE COMMENTS: dbp quotes the linked CNN article — "'I know I have bitterly disappointed all of you,' said the golfer, dressed in a blue button-down shirt and a blazer" — and says:

Can we take a closer look at his shirt? The resolution of the video was not high enough for me to detect button holes on Mr. Woods collar, but I could easily see that it wasn't buttoned down . What does this mean? He wears a button down shirt but leaves it flapping in the breeze — maybe his emotions are making him miss details. I think he should stay off the links for a while more.

Either that, or the reporter was mistaken about the type of shirt.

What does it mean? It means you can't trust CNN to report even the plain facts that are visible on screen to us here at home.

UPDATE: I go through the transcript here.

"Obama ... turned down high-paying jobs after graduating from Harvard Law School and became a community organizer," says The Washington Post.

This is in an article that struggles to show why "Despite his roots, Obama struggles to show he's connected to middle class."

And indeed, it is a struggle to figure this out when you are getting your facts so wrong. As John B. Judis writes in TNR:

He didn’t become a community organizer after graduating from Harvard Law School, but after graduating from Columbia. He left community organizing to attend Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school, he joined a prestigious Chicago law firm with offices just off Michigan Avenue. In 1991, he began teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He was chair of a Chicago branch of the Annenberg Foundation.

As Judis shows, Obama belongs squarely in the professional class:

Obama’s parents were professionals—his mother was an anthropology PhD and his father was a Harvard-trained economist. How much money they made was immaterial. His grandmother, who raised him in Hawaii, was a bank vice-president. He went to a fancy private school and to prestigious colleges (Occidental and Columbia) that turn out professionals and managers. He clearly was not obsessed with making money, but with performing a public service—yet that doesn’t distinguish him from other professionals or other Columbia graduates. It does distinguish him from a working- or middle-class American for whom being a civil rights lawyer or professor or politician is at best a passing fantasy.

It is admirable that Obama spent three years after graduating as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, but many graduates of elite colleges spend several years after college doing something unusual, before returning to graduate school or settling into a profession. Some travel around the world; some join the Peace Corps; some try to write novels.... Afterwards, they usually return to more sober and sedate occupations appropriate to their social background and education. That’s what Obama did....

Once out of law school, Obama lived and worked over the next decade in a grey area between the very upper reaches of professional America and the country’s managers, owners, and rulers. He didn’t just have access to more money and live differently from ordinary Americans; he possessed power and authority that they didn’t have.... 

Judis really embarrasses the WaPo here, but I've got to give credit to the WaPo for picking out some hilarious quotes that show Obama trying — tryin' — to sound like a working class guy:

"I just like gettin' out of the White House, and then I like tooling around companies that are actually making stuff."

Is he driving a car inside these factories? I think he was searching for the right word and rejected "puttering around" because it was too golf-y, and golf is not the sport of the working class.

Buzz Bissinger tries to write about Tiger Woods.

The Vanity Fair article has a fascinating Annie Liebowitz cover photograph of Tiger Woods's without a shirt — fascinating because the great athlete looks so different from those Men's Health-type torso models who work their muscles solely for the purpose of getting their muscles to look the way people these days want to see muscles looking and who squeeze out the excess fat so we can get the best look at those muscles. By contrast, Tiger looks slightly porky and squishy. That's not a criticism. That's a suggestion that, knowing the functionality of the torso we're gazing at — and I'm including the sexual functionality — we ought to adjust our taste in male beauty.

But on to Bissenger's silly writing. Here's a sentence — one sentence:

Tiger’s story has been driven by sex, tons of it, in allegedly all different varieties: threesomes in which he greatly enjoyed girl-on-girl, and mild S&M (featuring hair-pulling and spanking); $60,000 pay-for-sex escort dates; a quickie against the side of a car in a church parking lot; a preference for porn stars and nightclub waitresses, virtually all of them with lips almost as thick as their very full breasts; drug-bolstered encounters designed to make him even more of a conquistador (Ambien, of all things); immature sex-text messages (“Send me something naughty ... Go to the bathroom and take [a picture],” “I will wear you out ... When was the last time you got [laid]?”); soulful confessions that he got married only for image and was bored with his wife; regular payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 each month to keep his harem quiet.

Diagram that. The subject and verb are: story and has been driven. Yes, that sets up a list, and you can go very long, quite grammatically, with a list. But it purports to be a list of all different varieties of sex, and not everything on the list is a variety of sex. A confession about why you got married isn't a variety of sex. A payment of money is not a variety of sex. A preference for a type of woman isn't a variety of sex. And "lips almost as thick as their very full breasts" — I'm sorry... that's a hell of an "almost." The picture that put in my mind is just absurd. Lips as big as really tiny breasts would be scarily huge.

Then there's this insight into emptiness:

In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, travels nearly 330 days a year to fire people with a sympathetic look on his face.

Presumably, it's Bingham that has the sympathetic look on his face, not the people getting fired, as the sentence construction would have it.

... It now seems that when [Woods] returned home after a tournament and vanished back inside his gated community, the persona he left behind, the one he so obsessively presented to the public, was as empty as Bingham’s Omaha apartment, pieces of furniture without any meaning, a life without meaning.

This is the first mention in the article of Bingham’s Omaha apartment. We've been told about Bingham's emptiness, but suddenly the comparison is to Bingham's apartment, where there are — ooh, tragic! — pieces of furniture without any meaning. This is as silly as women with lips as big as their breasts... almost.

At the end of Up in the Air, Clooney realizes....

I'll spare you the spoiler.

But Woods, to the bitter end and with a kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance, still felt he could beat the tidal wave back.

What bitter end? Woods isn't a movie, and he's still alive. A kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance... These qualifiers are as meaningless as the furniture in Bingham's Omaha apartment. There's some particular kind of hubris involved? He's not just arrogant; he has fundamental arrogance? Bissinger fleshes out his point with nonevidence. Woods used a fake name at the hospital, like any celebrity who needed privacy. That's not arrogant. Woods avoided talking to the police. That's not arrogant. That's what your lawyer would tell you to do.

It was only when his paramours started pouring out of every cupboard like tenement cockroaches that Tiger expressed some sort of awareness that he was in deep shit....

The most sensible thing for him to do was to keep quiet and request privacy. That wasn't arrogant. And about that trite cockroaches simile — were their mandibles almost as big as their mesothoraxes?

With the number of alleged paramours reaching 14 as of mid-December (a figure bound to multiply), it is safe to say that behind the non-accessible accessibility and seemingly perfect marriage to a beautiful woman was a sex addict who could not get enough. There is nothing wrong with that, given that the opportunities for Tiger were endless.

Bissinger gives no reason for his pat assertion that having endless opportunities makes it completely right to be a sex addict. He just goes on to make the obvious point — bolstered, despite its obviousness, with the dubious concurrence of Hugh Hefner — that Tiger was cheating on his wife.

Things are only continuing to cascade downward for Woods.

Cascade downward? Does anything ever cascade upward?

... The swirling question is if, and when, he will return to golf.

Swirling, eh?  Is it swirling upward or downward?

... In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are.

Well, I don't know who you are, but life is not a movie, and satisfying narrative arcs are not inevitable. For example, Woods could have died when his SUV hit that tree. And then we wouldn't have witnessed the age-old clash you're pontificating about.

Michelle Cottle is really getting on Barack Obama's case about playing golf.

She writes:

Why would a leader vowing to shake up Washington--to alter the very nature of politics--sell his soul to a leisure activity that screams stodgy, hyperconventional Old Guard?

Sell his soul? Golf is not the devil. Isn't it possible that he golfs because he enjoys it? Unlike basketball, you get some leisurely strolling time. You can talk. You can smoke! And you're outdoors.

There are signs that Obama has been nursing a creeping golf addiction for some time now.

If there's an addiction involved, I bet it's smoking.

He took up the game a little more than a decade ago as a newbie state senator hoping to bond with more rural, conservative colleagues. Next thing you know, he was hooked....

So he actually has something genuine in common with the clinging-to-guns-and-religion crowd. That's horrible to Cottle, who'd like him to play basketball, like a good urban liberal.

Golf is a dying game--on the skids for nearly a decade, according to a 2008 report by the National Golf Foundation. The number of Americans who golf has fallen by some four million.... One observed problem: evolving family dynamics. Men once free to spend all weekend on the links are now expected to help shuttle the kids to soccer, walk the dog, and generally pull their weight on the home front. The first lady may be understanding about her man’s special recreational needs. But does President Obama really want to be associated with a game so antithetical to modern life?

Cottle is really hostile to golf.  She doesn't mention Tiger Woods, but I'm sensing a Nordegrenesque female rage — even though Obama is as uxorious a politician as I've ever seen. Though Cottle presents herself as the modern woman, she's mouthing ancient female complaints. (What is less hip than a "golf widow" cartoon?)

Let the poor man play golf if he's too tired to look cool playing basketball, needs a long walk, and loves his fresh air well-mixed with tobacco smoke. As long as the golf course is close to the White House — leave him alone!

Are we "still supposed to believe that his wife, Elin Nordegren, somehow turned one of Tiger's Nike SQ drivers into the Jaws of Life"?

"Woods was driving a Cadillac Escalade out of his own driveway, which is the same as driving a tank. He wasn't going fast enough to deploy his air bags. But we're supposed to believe that in a rescue worthy of the new series, 'Trauma,' his wife had to bust a back window to pull her husband to safety after he ran over a fire hydrant and into a tree."

Mike Lupica tells Tiger Woods to get his story out — whatever it is.

AND, from the comments of Fridays's Tiger Woods post: a poem, by David (with "deep apologies" to William Blake):

Tiger, Tiger, that wasn't too bright.
Grabbin' the Caddy and takin' flight.
Perhaps the very lovely Ellin
Some Tiger hanky-pank was smellin'?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what pussy fried thee thy brain?
What the putter? What the wood?
What, her lawyer? Gonna whup you good.

AND: From Inwood follows David with his own "Tiger, Tiger":

TIGER, tiger, not so bright
In the caddy late at night,
What immortal hand or eye
Have framed thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or drain
Burnt the fire of thy brain
What babe you been A-W-O-L-in?
What you think that do to Ellin?

When Ellin threw your clubs like spears
Did’st water heaven with thy tears?
Did she smile her work to see?
Will she who made this ruin ruin thee?

Tiger Woods seriously injured after crashing his car into a fire hydrant... and then into a tree.

This happened at 2:25 a.m. as he was pulling out of his own driveway. 

AND: The police say it was not alcohol related.

IN THE COMMENTS: save_the_rustbelt said:

The only thing that would make me leave my house at that time, without alcohol but out of control, would be a raging fight with my wife.