Augusta - Day Two

The weather has turned in Georgia and the boys are bundled up against the breezy chill. Should make for an interesting day. Early this morning Westwood in still leading at minus five, but Rory is making a charge and is minus four still playing the front nine. Although the course is beautiful, the flowers and ponds and magnolias pristine and hallowed, there is still that stench of Good-Old-Boyism that pervades the place. How, in this day and age of sexual equality, can the G-O-B.s in charge of Augusta National continue to deny membership to women? Some of the most powerful, most influential, most intelligent people in the world are women. I wouild hope that when they finally want a woman to join their porcine pack, she quietly says, “Thanks, but no thanks. You boys can continue to play with yourselves.”

I’m reading James Lee Burke’s Feast Day of Fools and am struck with the similarities between Sheriff Hackberry Holland, the Texas lawman, and Dave Robicheaux, the Louisiana lawman, both good men haunted by their past, both given to violent acts that seem so out of character with their inherent goodness. Holland is trying to find his deputy who has been abducted by Krill and Negrito, two really nasty men just south of the border. To find where R.C., the deputy, has been taken, Holland beats a cantina owner with a pool cue, threatening to ram the cue down the man’s throat if he doesn’t tell him where R.C. is being held. I can only imagine the damage the butt end of a pool cue could do if one swung it like a baseball bat into the someone’s face, but I’d guess it might be fatal.