I must confess that each year beginning in April, and then once more each during June, July and August, I begin to grow in anticipatory blush as the major professional golf tournaments known colloquially as the "Grand Slam" re-set to play out once more across the elitist goat pastures of the US and the UK.
No, it's not that I like to play golf. Not at all. In fact I rather despise the game, actually. I can think of little that is more boringly useless in life than the waste of five-six good waking hours hacking up a perfect lawn when I could be doing something much more stimulating like sitting in front of the keybooard LMAO over Socrates's Twitter feed.
And puh-leeze. I also simply can't be bothered dahlink to watch TV in any of its debased, postmodernist forms, but most especially following those yuppiefied walking advert boards adorned in polyesther slacks and white belts as they rake in millions playing with their putter shafts.
Nay, what truly pickles my tiddler in a pint draught about the great
The 77th Masters Tournament owes us a little something today. Boil the bones down, and yesterday's third round was a thoroughly miserable affair, bookended by two experiences which crushed the soul in different ways. The day started with Tiger's Trauma, an undignified business all round, not least in the gleeful stampede to finger the greatest player of the modern era as nothing more than a two-bit cheat, when confusing the drop-at-same-spot rule with the drop-along-line-where-ball-entered-hazard option is an easy enough mistake to make at the best of times, never mind when your almost-perfect wedge has just twanged off the flag and into the blue vagueness in the heat of Masters action.The day ended with a Couples Catastrophe, the smoothest swinger in town keeping the fairytale alive through 13 holes, then capitulating over the final five to extinguish the dream. Butch Harmon's sullen reaction on Sky to seeing his erstwhile pupil suffer as he stumbled up the 18th in the wake of a triple-bogey on 17 - "Freddie's just run out of gas," he sighed wistfully - was laced with heartbreak, and the unconscious existential realisation that the 53-year-old's fate served as an allegory of all humankind's inexorable decay and inevitable return to dust.Better days: We've had them.
The once storied empire may long since have shrunk into the rather nasty, brutish little US protectorate we know and larf at today, a colony of Jim Fowlers to our Marlon Perkins, yes, ah, but that purely self-deprecating low wit lives on within descriptions of the always humbling often humiliating circumstances wrought on its participants by the quintessential
footnotes
1. Yes, this is a mailed-in entry.
2. G'night Mr. Thomas
