Golf Is Stupid (Pat Perez/Holes-In-One)

I might love to play the game, but what can I really say about it? It’s stupid. This is part of an ongoing series about the game’s lesser qualities.

-I’ve been waiting for a golfer to genuinely hate. First it was Vijay Singh, but he seems like he does good charity work. Then it was Phil Mickelson, just because he’s an overrated doofus, but again, he seems like a good guy even if he isn’t a personal favorite. I’ve cycled through others, never totally being able to decide on anybody. Paul Azinger has been my current fallback position, because of his outrageous arrogance in John Feinstein’s Good Walk Spoiled, a book I won’t link to because it sucks.

Fortunately, Pat Perez just walked into my life. Perez is the sniveling jackass profiled in this column in which he says, apparently with all seriousness, that he doesn’t shoot 82. 82, I guess, is a score for the masses and since he is a professional PGA player, the possibility that he’d falter under intense conditions is nil.

…except he did shoot an 82 today, during the morning rounds at the greatest golf tournament in the world, The British Open. By all accounts, the conditions at Royal Birkdale were insane: wet (driving rain), windy (gales of up to 35 mph), and cold (the temperature didn’t top 50 degrees). Perez expected to be let off the hook, thinking that because the weather wasn’t cooperating, he’d get a break from the British Open. He was wrong, and forced to play, he came apart at the seems.

He whinged about the conditions, about how unfair they were, about how terrible they were, about how impossible they were. Meanwhile, Tom Watson, 26 years older than Perez, managed a 74, and then didn’t whine about it, because he was man enough to realize that if the conditions are rainy, wet, and nasty, then you figure out how to score well in them. There’s a reason Watson won 5 British Opens, and Perez has yet to win on the PGA Tour, anywhere, even in the most ideal conditions.

For people that get everything for free, for people who play the greatest courses in the world, for people who live a pampered life, for people who can win a million dollars a year by merely being the 99th best golfer in the world, golfers can sometimes be awfully whiny. Needless to say, Pat Perez is my new least favorite golfer.

-I hit my second hole-in-one last Saturday, on a 210-yard hole at my golf course. Although it is listed on the scorecard, by virtue of a typo, as a par 4, it is really a par 3. I used a 4 iron. I was very, very lucky, hitting a trapped four iron with a fade on a dry day. It bounced once before the green, rolled on and dropped in. I can’t even claim to have seen the ball drop in though; I only figured out that it was a hole-in-one when I got to the green and couldn’t find my ball before looking in the hole. Golf’s a funny game.