If not drinking the Tiger Kool-Aid means I'm going to have my posts willfully misread and called "bullshit" (or worse), it seems an awful lot like people are insisting that I love Tiger (or keep quiet). I'm happy to swim against the tide regarding Tiger, but not against a tsunami. And the nature of the golf discussion at SoSH is that there's barely any discussion if Tiger isn't on the prowl. So what's the point?
I came of golfing age in the 1980s and early 1990s. I grew to love golf then not because I was an elitist, racist prick, but because it was a way to spend time with my (often absent) father, and because professional golf in the 1980s was full of mesmerizing characters. There was real parity between Ballesteros, Norman, Watson, Kite, Strange, Faldo, Lyle, the aging Nicklaus and Floyd, and many others back then, and the run of Masters tournaments from 1986 to 1991 may never be bettered by any six-year run at any major championship for dramatic finishes. 300-yard drives also meant something in the 1980s - that was a massive blow, not the PGA Tour average, and really short hitters like Corey Pavin and Mike Reid could not only survive but also thrive to some extent. (Which matters because of the many wonderful, old school golf courses that have to choose between becoming obsolete and buying up additional land at great expense to add additional length - the game is getting bigger and coarser all the time now.) I read about and thought about golf back then a lot, and I thought I was going to be a golf journalist for a living - and was one for a while. All of this was before Tiger turned pro. And Tiger's first Masters win was the exact opposite of the Masters I loved when I was a teenager between 1986 and 1991, at that age when sport matters most to most people in their lives. Tiger in 1997 was domination, not drama, and it's probably natural that I rebelled against Tiger to some extent. I'd hope, though, that Tiger's ardent fans might try a little harder to understand how someone can massively respect Tiger's career and his current comeback and still find reasons not to root for him.
I know I'm a dinosaur, and few if any SoSHers enjoy golf as I seem to enjoy it - which, again, is perfectly fine by me. So today, after my "Tiger Tiger Tiger" post wasn't received in the mostly jokey manner I'd intended it to be received, I tried to make my peace with that in a valedictory sort of way. But instead, the vitriol I got back...never mind that I disagree with it, it also seemed so un-SoSH-like. Previously, I took a chance and tried to start what I thought would be an interesting discussion about playing by the rules of golf, and that went in a completely different direction (mostly straight back into my face) than I thought it would go. And now my posts today have boomeranged as well. I used to get pretty good feedback about my golf writing, for the most part, but I'm certainly not getting much of that here. Maybe I do just suck at this now. Or maybe I'm just out of step with everyone, like a George HW Bush-era Republican in a room full of Trump supporters. Either way, I don't enjoy being a punching bag.
Quick postscript:
I couldn't stay away from the tournament because I'm a golf fan and watching major championships is what I do. But I mostly wish I hadn't bothered - the internet-only Eleven Sports broadcast here in the UK was truly horrendous, mixing randomly between the CBS commentary feed, the world feed (which I didn't know existed), and the UK commentator team (presenter Dominik Holyer and tour pro Jamie Donaldson, along with a man and a woman on the ground at Bellerive) in a very unsatisfactory way, and apparently the desktop feed crashed just before Koepka made the winning putt, so a lot of people missed the end of the tournament. And the new-look Bellerive wasn't terrible, but the standards I expect of major championship venues are way higher than "not terrible".