Thursday, January 07, 2010

Leftist golf media taking their shots

The times they have changed. (My apologies to Bob Dylan) We have entered an electronic age in which experts on virtually every subject known to mankind are making their sentiments publicly known. Some are kind and gentle and some appear to be kind and gentle but have in reality escaped from the bowels of literary hell.

The world of golf is no exception. The blogosphere is filled with “golf experts” who are unafraid to present their opinions on a particular point of minutia. Golf is a multifaceted game. There are more story lines than stars in the sky. And the most dominate story line in the golf world, especially in the absence of tournaments, has been the Tiger Woods saga. Every writer has weighed in on Tiger’s situation.

Perhaps the most weight has been thrown around by author and golf blogger Geoff Shackelford on his website geoffshackelford.com. In general Shackelford’s website tracks the world of golf and directs patrons to articles of interest usually with a short, snarky comment of his own. In fairness, his website is one of the most popular in the world of golf. He is a pied piper of sorts.

Naturally he has been tracking the saga of Tiger since the day it began – almost all Tiger, almost all the time. Until three or four days ago he has been doing his usual thing. But on January 3 Shackelford decided to open a political can of worms on his blog when he stated, “… in yet another sign this story has hit rock bottom, windbag extraordinaire Brit Hume weighs in on how Tiger can rehab his life and image.” His commentary is emphatically political. Using descriptions “rock bottom” and “windbag extraordinaire” is a dead give away to his political leaning – left.
Talk about hitting rock bottom and being a windbag extraordinaire! Shackelford has duplicated the very faculty he is objecting to. But why should he care. His loyal following is heavily slanted to his opinion. You can check it our for yourself on his website which is living off of the Tiger mess and now the Hume slamming.

And, of course, there had to be more. Windbag extraordinaire Tom Shales, style columnist for the Washington Post, decided to take on Mr. Hume’s comments. The observations of Mr. Shales are, as you might expect, hardly fair and balanced. Of course, Shackelford references the comments of Shales on his website – birds of a feather, if you will.

We can only conclude that the new rock bottom has been hit by Shackelford and Shales.

3 comments:

GolfBlogger said...

Nice post and nice blog. I gave you a shout-out on my own site at http://www.golfblogger.com

Anonymous said...

Great post. We're finally getting sexual content mixed with golf news, so now lets bring in politics and religion. Golf discussion doesn't get any better than this.

Philip said...

Geoff had to fall back on something - his books on golf architecture have long hit the remainder bin.