Originally posted by KBV
Women are inferior at golf? Victory, women.
Do you even play any sports?
What does golf have to do with sports?
Originally posted by KBV
What does golf have to do with sports?
shshshshshshshshhshsshsh
Golf is quality.
Fuck your new avatar, Roms.
Fuck it!
There is no escape for me!!!
Originally posted by Trot_to_Trotsky
[B]Fuck your new avatar, Roms.
Fuck it!
There is no escape for me!!! [/B]
<img src=“http://forums.psx-dude.net/avatar.php?userid=32&dateline=1053753655”> <img src=“http://forums.psx-dude.net/avatar.php?userid=32&dateline=1053753655”> <img src=“http://forums.psx-dude.net/avatar.php?userid=32&dateline=1053753655”>
<img src=“http://forums.psx-dude.net/avatar.php?userid=32&dateline=1053753655”> <img src=“http://forums.psx-dude.net/avatar.php?userid=32&dateline=1053753655”> <img src=“http://forums.psx-dude.net/avatar.php?userid=32&dateline=1053753655”>
Stop that! It’s draining my will to rape!
Sorry this is large and disastrous, but I thought it was good and, since it’s an AOL exclusive (curse AOL, I hate it so), I couldn’t link to it.
Annika’s Feat Shouldn’t
Be Compared to King-Riggs
Her Mission Was a Personal One
By JOHN FEINSTEIN
AOL Exclusive
OK, now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt: Annika Sorenstam is a superb striker of the golf ball; has tremendous guts; can handle herself under pressure – on and off the golf course – as well as any athlete out there and is a very ordinary putter.
We also know that there wasn’t any downside at all to her appearance at the Colonial Invitational. It was all good, some of it was great and, above all, it was memorable.
It was good for women’s golf, it was good for golf, it was good for sports. There were people watching golf Thursday and Friday who would normally rather watch a stock market ticker, the Home Shopping Network or Barney. There were people talking about golf who think a five-iron is something you use in the fireplace. By the time Sorenstam holed her final putt Friday, the number of soreheads still claiming she didn’t belong had been reduced to a handful.
Every kudo she got, she deserved. The ovation she received walking on to the 18th green was heartfelt and wonderful to see and her response was heartwarming. It was one of those neat moments when all of us (OK, almost all of us) can take a step back and remember why we decided to care about sports in the first place.
Now though, is a good time to take a step back from the emotion and the adrenaline and put the week into a little perspective.
What Sorenstam did was remarkable. It was NOT – as one dopey columnist from the nation’s newspaper tried to claim – some kind of cultural landmark in history.
It was NOT King-Riggs for a number of reasons, the simplest being that King-Riggs launched women’s tennis and women’s sports as a legitimate enterprise. If Billie Jean King doesn’t win that match in the Astrodome in 1973, it might have been another 10 years before women would have been taken seriously as professional athletes. Maybe longer.
(This same person tried to put the women’s soccer World Cup into the same sentence with King-Riggs, which is entirely ludicrous. That was nothing more than a triumph of marketing and political correctness. One hundred and 20 minutes of goal-less soccer decided by soccer’s equivalent of a home run derby does not exactly deserve a place in the sports pantheon, except perhaps next to the men’s World Cup played here in 1994 in which the exact same number of goals were scored (zip) in THAT final.)
Today, women are taken seriously as athletes by almost all reasonable people not named Vijay Singh or Fulton Allem.
Female golfers will be granted more respect because of what Sorenstam did but don’t expect the LPGA Tour to take off and become the equal or near-equal of the PGA Tour in interest or prize money or corporate support any time soon.
This will help, certainly, but it will not mark a new beginning for sports, the way King-Riggs did. Let’s remember, as superbly as Sorenstam played, she beat 11 guys (tied with four others) and missed the cut by four shots. That’s plenty respectable but she was the first one to say afterwards that she was out of her league.
That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t try again, maybe play once a year against the men. That doesn’t mean 13-year-old Michelle Wie shouldn’t try her hand against the men – although perhaps she should wait until she’s at or near the top of the world against other women before she does – in the near and distant future.
But it does mean that Sorenstam understands just how hard she had to work to shoot that 71-74 on a rain softened course, during a week when the scoring record was broken for the event and two golfers shot 61s on the weekend. The men are in a different league. Which is perfectly fine.
You see, what this was about was a great athlete stretching herself, trying to see how she would do at the next level. Having dominated at her own level – 13 victories in 25 tournaments last year – she wanted to find out what it would be like to move up in class.
Great athletes crave challenges and this was a huge challenge for Sorenstam, not just the golf, but everything that surrounded the golf. Some have claimed it was a publicity stunt – if so, what about it? Half of what goes on in sports today is a publicity stunt. What do you think the entire silly season in golf is? What do you think those awful primetime TV matches that Tiger Woods lowers himself to play in (once with Sorenstam as his partner) every summer are? What do you think a $90 million contract for an 18-year-old basketball player is?
Others have said this was about ego. Well OF COURSE it was about ego. There’s never been a great athlete born who didn’t have a huge ego, who didn’t want to find out what world they could conquer next, who didn’t want to prove to the world over and over again just how good they were.
Sorenstam wouldn’t be the dominant player that she is if she didn’t have an ego. Saying this was about ego is like saying golf balls have dimples on them. Of course it was about ego.
Sorenstam put her ego and her greatness on the line last week in a way few athletes do. She knew there was a chance she would fail and that if she did she would be remembered for that failure longer than she will be remembered for all her victories on the LPGA Tour combined.
That’s quite a risk. But she took the risk and, with the world watching, she came through like the champion that she is. She hit the ball as well Thursday as she ever has in her life. Her putting was, to be kind, mediocre, but she’s never been a great putter and even on rain-slowed greens she was still dealing with speeds she doesn’t see on her own tour.
Let’s also throw in a round of applause here for Dean Wilson and Aaron Barber, the two tour rookies she played with. If Singh and Allem and Scott Hoch gave the men a black eye with their silly comments, Wilson and Barber gave them a gold star with the way they handled the entire situation.
Remember, unlike Sorenstam, they didn’t ASK for this. They were simply thrown into the middle of it by luck of the draw. They had no choice. They could have whined about the pressure or all the media or about feeling invisible in front of thousands, as they no doubt did.
They did none of that. They were gracious and supportive and did their best to make Sorenstam feel welcome. Their behavior should be a lesson to anyone thrown into a difficult circumstance in sports or in life. If you want to talk about athletes as role models, here are two guys to point to: instead of telling kids to be like Mike (as in follow the money) we should be telling them to be like Aaron and Dean.
All of which brings us back to the beginning: this turned out to be a wonderful story. It wasn’t Brown v. Board of Education, Jackie Robinson or even Riggs-King. It was fabulous theater, a great athlete handling the spotlight about as well as it can be handled.
If you didn’t get a chill watching that scene late Friday afternoon on the 18th green then you don’t get what sports are about. At their best, sports are about athletes performing with great skill and grace under intense pressure. That’s what Sorenstam at the Colonial was about. Nothing more.
But it was more than enough.