LPGA, Arizona Cardinals, & St. Vincent

I watched the year’s final LPGA tournament, the CME Group Tour Championship, with $500,000 to the tournament winner and $1,000,000 to the final points winner. Lydia Ko, the amazing 17-year-old New Zealander, won the whole bundle with a four-hole playoff win over Julieta Granada and Carlota Ciganda. Seventeen. And she made it look nervelessly simple. Maybe when she gets a little older she’ll realize how tough it is to do what she did and her nerves will start talking to her, the cup start to shrink on those critical four and five footers. Or not. Maybe she’ll dominate the ladies’ tour for the next twenty or thirty years. I really enjoy watching the ladies because of their golf skills and because I’m a dirty old man and so many of them are very attractive. Granted, not all of them have beautiful golf games and not all of them are beautiful. But the overall skill level is so much higher now than it was thirty years ago. And the ladies are, for the most part, so much more physically fit. And attractive. One of the things I noticed, though, that I’d rather not have noticed is the way too short skirts and shorts some of them were wearing. Morgan Pressel wore really ugly, really short shorts, designed for her by Lilly Pulitzer. I’d have to ask Ms. Pulitzer why on earth she thought those floral and too short shorts were going to be attractive on the bottom of Ms. Pressel. They weren’t. Morgan Pressel was one of the most attractive young ladies on tour when she first appeared in 2006 and she still is, but not in those Pulitzer shorts. I hope when she sees herself in the taped coverage she’ll come to her senses.

After the golf, I suffered through an agonizingly bad game between the Arizona Cardinals and the Seattle Seahawks, with the Seahawks winning 19-3. I was pretty sure Arizona would lose this game, but I hoped they wouldn’t look as bad in the loss as they did. They’ll have to right their ship in a hurry if they plan to do any good in the playoffs.

And finally, a few words about the movie St. Vincent. Bill Murray did his Bill Murray thing and Melissa McCarthy did her Melissa McCarthy thing, and together they put out a semi-successful comedy about a slovenly smoker, drinker, gambler who, strictly for the money, agreed to baby-sit his new neighbor’s young son. Manchester is the neighbor and Oliver is the eight-year-old son (Jaeden Lieberher), who is probably the best actor in this movie and the one with the least experience. Murray teaches the boy all about the things most parents wouldn’t want their young son to learn—smoking, drinking, gambling on the horses, and ladies of the night. Predictably, the boy takes all the lessons to heart and then writes an essay about the one person who should be nominated for sainthood, Vincent de Van Nuys, Bill Murray, St. Vincent. Two and a half stars out of five. Good enough to see, easy enough to forget.