February 19, 2023
Allow me some of the fascinating takeaways from Collin Morikawa’s mic’d up session on Saturday at the Genesis Invitational: It’s important to have a good short game if you play professional golf. Noted. Find an aiming point as you tee off. Noted.
One other takeaway: Sports journalists have to be the biggest mouth-breathing, “I like shiny things” morons that inhabit our planet. “All hail the mic’d up golfer as he rehashes information we’ve had network gasbags deliver to us for years,” the sports scribes bray. “Relish the ground-breaking revelation of Morikawa intoning that you’d like to be in the fairway on an upslope as you approach the green.”
Whew! Enough already! My brain simply can’t take it all in! But alas, this cadre of subject-verb disagreement experts, which considers re-tweets viable journalism, is mesmerized by the very thing that is plaguing all sports: too much talk and not enough action. Just as the NFL has become a miasma of huddles and officials reviewing plays with their heads under a blanket, all bookended by mush-mouthed morons like Bill Cowher and Shannon Sharpe butchering our fair language, golf television has, too, allowed itself to be taken over by everything except the game. Golf tv coverage has now morphed into a stream of players blithely strolling about the green for five minutes lining up 4-foot putts, or players and caddies alike poring over their yardage books before air-mailing the green. One wonders if PGA Tour players can take a dump without their yardage books. What is missing from golf telecasts is actual shots; no one in charge seems very concerned with that piffling aspect of the game.
So in an effort to enliven a slow game, let’s show less action and show more blathering. “Bring it on,” cry the Kyle Porters of the world, he a part of a subset of idiots that love having their hands held for everything, and that lack the imagination to intuit for themselves all the pedestrian nuggets Morikawa had to offer. And we won’t even consider the competitive advantage of the mic’d up golfer as he gets to discuss strategy and tactics with the two major winners sitting in the booth.
All in all, the mic’d up golfer adds nothing to the telecast, but for the ADHD viewers who love being spoon-fed the obvious. This is precisely the mentality that spawned LIV Golf, an artificial product germinated by people who hate golf in order to bring more “mashed potatoes”-screaming yahoos to the game they profess to love. And so goes our country, further circling the drain, catering always to the lowest common denominator.