Just because I don’t play golf doesn’t mean I think people who do are shallow or have misplaced priorities or waste half their lives in a vapid, worthless, meaningless activity. And if I did think that I certainly wouldn’t say it out loud or write it in a column, because there are lots of perfectly normal people—Alice Cooper and Tiger Woods come to mind—who are devoted to golf, and most of them don’t even dance with pythons or commit adultery with more women than live in Lithuania. Most of them are just normal people, like Donald Trump.
So I don’t judge people who enjoy playing golf—they have every right to fritter away their lives however they want to. It’s just that I have approximately nine million things I want to do before I burn the time required to get proficient at herding a little ball into a hole with sticks. But that’s just me. It’s obviously a great game, judging by how many people watch it on TV and the huge cash prizes. The games are so tense (“terrifying approach,” “vicious greens,” “nightmarish meltdown”) and the stakes so high that advertisers pony up millions, which allows huge cash prizes and so on. And the great thing is that you can watch a round of golf in only five hours and don’t have to waste your whole day.
The action is literally non-stop, because there are dozens of guys playing on the same course, so they can cut from a guy wearing white pants standing and looking at his ball and then squatting and staring intently across the grass at the hole, to a guy wearing plaid pants standing and looking at his ball and then squatting and staring intently across the grass at the hole. And sometimes a golfer will raise his leg and pump his fist, and everybody with a camera clicks like crazy, because that’s the most explosive movement you’ll see on the course all day, and will be the two-second “teaser” the network shows so you’ll watch the highlights of the “action” on Sports Roundup later.
Oh, another great thing: during these televised tournaments they’ll have little segments called “Swing Fix” and such. This is where one of the top athletes in the sport—usually a gray-haired guy with a doughy mid-section—demonstrates something to help you swing a club better. You just don’t get that in other sports, because most guys watching at home have little need to hone their skills, for example, at kicking a guy in the throat, or blocking a 300-pound lineman, or fist-fighting while wearing ice skates.*
Of course, that’s still another great thing about the sport: you can play at any age (a Senior Tour in kickboxing or hockey would signal the end of our civilization even more certainly than, say, “Jersey Shore”). In fact, you don’t have to go through the agony of getting in top physical condition to play it, even on the professional level! You can eat cheeseburgers and drink beer and smoke cigarettes all day long, and then go to the course the next day and make half a million dollars if you can whack a ball straight and waddle to the next hole! Must make all those boxers and football players feel pretty silly training their butts off six hours a day and watching their diets when some of their fellow professional athletes can have chili fries and a beer halfway through a practice round. “Doh! I picked the wrong sport!”
The final great thing about golf: when I need to refresh myself with a good nap, nothing transports me to Sleepyland quicker than tuning in to a tournament, pressing the Mute button, and watching four or…fi…
Little-known fact about Mack: He once house-sat for David Lettermen in his Malibu house and fed his bone-head dogs. If you’d like to book him for your next event (Mack, not David), reach out to him via the CONTACT page.