Golf blogs crucify Phil Mickelson
In case you’ve been holed up in a mud hut in Namibia with Angelina and Shiloh for the last month, Phil Mickelson made it to the 72nd hole at Winged Foot last Sunday, slipped on a banana peel, fell sideways into the pond, and fell. He drowned. He only needed a par 18 to win the US Open. Only. The hole was a 450-yard windy par 4 in which the average hole score among the leaders on Sunday was 5.8. The charge against Phil is that he should have given up his new longer shaft Driver and gone with the 4-wood.
Why?
He had hit 2 fairways that day. Who says he couldn’t hit a third? Johnny Miller absolutely crucified him for this decision and Phil himself crucified himself as the biggest idiot since Roberto DeVicenzo signed his scorecard incorrectly at Augusta, costing him the tournament. Phil clipped his driver on the roof of the hospitality tent and the ball kicked back in bounds into the rough. Phil didn’t have a sickle and got caught up in a big mess. Earlier in the round, he had tried to hit a 4-wood from the rough from 140 yards and snorted. He may have felt that the 4-wood had cost him quite a few shots that day.
If Phil Mickelson had hit a good drive on 18, then today and for the next month every golf blogger in the world would have been cheering wildly for him for the next month as he headed to Liverpool for the Tiger Slam and then the real thing. slam. Phil Mickelson is the modern Bobby Jones, aka the guy who has brought unheard-of excitement to golf for the first time since Arnold Palmer walked to the first green at Cherry Hills, or somewhere else, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t alive , I didn’t
Who says Phil didn’t do it on purpose? The crucifixion did not harm the popularity of Jesus. Jesus did not have to go to the Temple in Jerusalem and tell all the Priests to take a walk, and threaten the rule of the puppet governor of the Romans, Pontius Pilate. He could have stayed silent, or moved to Egypt or India. He could have followed the advice of Paul and Let it Be. Would Michelle Pfieffer have dumped Don Johnson and slept with Kevin Costner if she slept on 18th at Tin Cup? I am you and you are me and we are all together, We are the walrus, coo coo coo choo. Speaking of Semolina Pilcher, golf is like life only on a larger scale. People of all countries get along like gold on the golf course, at the Olympics, and at the World Cup, but in real life, Geoff Ogilvie’s caddy, Kim Jong Il, plants a suicide bomb on himself and runs to the hospitality tent. Golf bloggers are screaming that Phil Mickelson is an evil megalomaniac because he smiles on the course. Phil Mickelson smiles to trick his body from total fear into relaxation because Bob Rotella told him it works and this trick nearly gave him his third straight major.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. If we had listened to global warming scientists like Stephen Hawking instead of the Exxon executives who run the US White House, Congress, and Supreme Court, then we wouldn’t all be facing an extinction-level event now: the melting of the Alaskan Siberian Arctic. Permafrost that will instantly release the carbon from the branches and bones in the Permafrost into the atmosphere, releasing 1000 times the amount of carbon dioxide that already exists and turning the Arctic into Phoenix in the summer. The Arctic and Antarctic ice will soon melt completely and the only ocean on earth will rise 50 feet and Denver will be prime beachfront property. One would think from reading the golf blogs that Phil Mickelson had caused 911, the war in Iraq, global warming AND betrayed Jesus Christ.
Let’s take a deeper look at the root of what’s really going on here. We all have a killer instinct. We needed to kill animals in the jungle for 5 million years to eat. We needed to kill other tribes for the land to survive. We are all racist too. People will admit he has a killer instinct, but not that he’s a racist. Whites haven’t had a heavyweight boxing champion in 75 years. They had to invent Rocky Balboa who won the title 5 times. Shaq and Michael took over basketball. Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron took over baseball. Tiger Woods took over golf and married a Swedish supermodel. The white male ego is so wounded now that Sigmund Freud, Bob Rotella and a case of Prozac couldn’t heal it. Then Phil Mickelson comes along and gives white men the feeling that maybe just maybe they’re not totally worthless. And then he blows it. He blows the chance at the slam. Then all our pent up fears and anxieties about Al Qaeda and Bin Laden and trillion dollar deficits and global warming and the Twin Towers imploding spill out like a tsunami sweeping Phil Mickelson into the Indian Ocean blogosphere.
The sick thing about golf is that no matter how successful we are in real life, we tie our sense of self-worth to our last score. Geoff Ogilvie is not white? Didn’t he make the best chip at 17 since Tom Watson? Yes, but he is not American. He was not ready to become the great legend of white hope. Do you look at Monty? The Americans hated him until only Britain joined them in Iraq. Now they love it. Monty stands at 18 tied for the lead down the middle of the fairway at 160 yards for 10 minutes with a 6-iron. At the last second, a thought that adrenaline will give him another 20 yards comes to mind, he switches at a 7-iron, he falls 20 yards short on the scrap and commits the same double bogey as Phil. If he had stayed with the 6-iron, he would have reached the usual limit of his and gone from being Tom Weiskopf to becoming another Phil Mickelson. What was Jim Furyk doing out there, the sauce? He moved away from his 5-footer 18 more times than Sergio Garcia used to re-grab his club and then smothered the 5-foot putt that would have put him in the tiebreaker. Is there a point in all this? Yeah. We did just fine without cars for 5 million years, we know if we keep driving we’ll do it by instinct, but we’re still driving SUVs that get 9 miles to the gallon. Human beings are the most intelligent and the least intelligent species on the planet. Would a Panda have hit Driver?
The Temple of Love – The World Peace Religion makes peace and unites Christianity, Islamic Judaism and all others and the countries they live in as the first step towards world peace. This is a good thing because as all nuclear scientists including Phil’s short game coach Dave Pelz know, Nuclear World War III and its aftermath, nuclear winter and ultraviolet summer will have exactly zero survivors and we are now engaged in a world war in case I hadn’t noticed because you were too busy blogging about what an idiot Phil Mickelson was.
The good news is that The Temple of Love is the first Religion in which golf occupies a prominent place. You don’t even need to believe in God. You just need to follow the rules of nature carved in stone by your own God, just as the golfers in the Bagger Vance legend do. You can’t break the rules of nature, but if you do, you’ll break your back. We are too technologically advanced for Nuclear World War III. Like Monty, we have made fun of ourselves. All we’re saying is give peace a chance. We call on the golfers of the world to lead the people of the world away from world war and into the safety of world peace.