U.S. Open Trophy (USGAMuseum.com)

Apparently the Chinese Government will go to no end to garner bargaining chips for their diplomatic conversations with the U.S. government.  It is not enough that we already send them the farm every month to settle our balance of trade deficit.  Now they are in to purloining our national treasures as well.

As you can read in an article done by Bernie McGuire for Golf, By Tour Miss, it seems that Rory McIlroy sent the U.S. Open Trophy that has been in his protective custody since June to Shanghai so it could be displayed at a number of the European Tour events as the Race To Dubai goes into it’s final laps.  Apparently there was no one on the other end to sign for the package when it arrived so the Chinese officials impounded it.

In spite of several diplomatic overtures, they have refused to release the trophy.  So we sent in our real junkyard dogs to negotiate, the USGA, who have apparently made little impression on their Chinese counterparts.  Rumor has it the Chinese are demanding a guaranteed 6% return on all long term treasuries they purchase and a relaxation of the Coefficient of Restitution regulations on drivers sold in China in 2012.  Guess the Maoists want to take it deep.

Lesson in this, don’t trust the welfare of your cherished heirlooms to foreigners.

(Click here to read McGuire’s account of Rory’s mishandling of our American treasure)

Bernie McGuire

December, 2011

How many times have you called your doctor’s office with a follow up question and wonder why it takes two days for him to get back to you with an answer?  Well, this article by Ian Frazier in The New Yorker Magazine may have the answer.

The clue is in a quote from the article.

“So, going over the results and the X-rays—and I kind of hate to tell you this straight out in a message on an answering machine, but—well, Mr. Singer, your condition appears to be very, very serious, possibly terminal. So that’s the bad news. The good news is, you would not believe the day I just had. I am playing the best golf of my life.”

I will let you read the rest on your own……prepare to giggle.

(Click here to enjoy Ian Frazier’s “Messages From Dr. Abravanel”)

Ian Frazier

New Yorker Magazine

November, 2011

An observation during the Nationwide Tour Championship about the narrow eighteenth hole on the Ralston Creek Course at Daniel Island.

“If I am a caddie at the 18th, I am not sure whether to hand my player a driver or a blindfold and a cigarette.”

Randall Mell

Golf Channel Writer

October, 2011

Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability to master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love of the game………It was pleasanter, they found, to play together, and go neck and neck round the eighteen holes, than to take on some lissom youngster who could spatter them all over the course with one old ball and a cut-down cleek stolen from his father; or some spavined elder who not only rubbed it into them, but was apt, between strokes, to bore them with personal reminiscences of the Crimean War.

.

P.G. Wodehouse

A Woman Is Only A Woman

The Golf Omnibus

As Geoff Shackelford relates in this post on his website this morning, just moments before President Obama was to reveal one of his most important economic initiatives of his presidency,  what are two of the most powerful public officials in the land talking about…..unemployment……jobs…….economic recovery…….?

No……….they are talking golf.

From the transcript of this exchange I think maybe Boehner is spinning a big fish story or he was playing a course with the 8 inch cups that Jack Nicklaus recently has been talking about.

(Click here to read the conversation between V.P. Biden and Speaker Boehner)

It is evident to me from the timing of this exchange, that the fate of our economy is in capable hands.

September, 2011

We had a little 5.9 denture rattler yesterday in the Washington area and the question was posed that if you happened to be standing over a four footer at the time the earthquake hit and your ball moved would you have to move it back and take the one stroke penalty.

I posit to you how the Brits dealt with “extraordinary circumstances” back in WWII for the answer to this question.

(Click here to see the Golf Rules During the Battle of Britain)

August, 2011

David Feherty always said that Steve Williams, when he was in Tiger’s employ, was one bad club selection away from slinging luggage at LaGuardia.

Mike Purkey

Global Golf Post

July 2011

What’s funny is that Ponky was a Ross Design, too-Ronald Ross.  The idiots that built Ponkaquogue thought that was the name of the famous architect and supposedly wrote away to the American Golf Architects Association, who sent them Ronald Ross……..Ponky became to golf architecture what the Exxon Valdez was to scallops.

Rick Reilly

Missing Links