The Match

        

  I swore I wouldn’t do it, yet there I was, about to watch The Match between Tiger and Phil. The watching isn’t what I swore I wouldn’t do; it’s the paying of $19.95 to watch it. Something about pay-per-view television rubs me very wrong. Would it be worth twenty bucks to watch these two engage in a meaningless match? There won’t be any commercial breaks, so what will we be seeing and hearing between shots? Tiger and Phil walking to their balls; Tiger and Phil trying to trash talk; talking heads in the studio trying to say something interesting. None of it was very interesting or exciting. All I kept thinking about when they were striding to their balls was that Phil sounded like a panting dog, either from the pace of the striding or from the pressure he felt. The only pressure was from both of them wanting so bad to beat on the other. It certainly didn’t come from the $9,000,000 they were playing for since that amount would be chump change for either of them. This match caused me to come up with several new words: “i-con-ic” (in which the viewers were conned), “puttrid” (just add a “t” to “putrid” and that’s what their putting was), and “mediocre” (just go to a Webster’s, look under the “m” and find a picture of this dynamic duo right next to “mediocre”). And while you're at it, go to "match" and take a farmer's match to another picture of Tiger and Phil. Even Charles Barkley, late in the round, said he could beat either one of them. And if you’ve ever seen Charles swing a golf club, you may understand just how bad he thought they were playing. It was four hours of awful. Neither could hit irons anywhere close to pins; neither could make a putt. And the trash talk was more like kitty litter conversation. I believe this match did more harm to the game of golf than anything else in the last fifty years. Please, whoever came up with this idea, never ever try it again.