hideki matsuyama – Eamon Lynch

There Are Many Criticisms Of Golf In The Olympics. None Are Medal-Worthy.

Ricky Gervais had a biting comedic commentary that summed up the naysaying and negativity fueling social media. He likened Twitter to a man walking through the town square and seeing a flyer offering guitar lessons. “But I don’t (expletive) want guitar lessons!” the man rages, before dialing the advertised phone number to profanely scream as much at the guitar teacher.

He perfectly captured the essence of social media’s many mediocrities: the narcissistic belief that if it doesn’t matter to them, then it doesn’t matter, period. Hence they respond to tweets or stories with “Who cares?”, demonstrating the degree to which irony escapes the obtuse.

Spieth and Ko Aside, Resurrections Are Rare, Even For The Greats.

Among the plentiful clichés permeating golf commentary, there is none more kindly yet bromidic than the assertion that a slumping star will win again simply because he or she is too good not to. It’s a polite fiction, peddled about almost every prominent professional who achieved early success only to plunge into, if not obscurity, then at least irrelevance. As analysis, it lies somewhere between sentimentality and sycophancy, but nowhere close to sound.

Golf’s recent run of resurrections began—appropriately enough, for those particular to the low-hanging fruit such narratives represent—on Easter Sunday, when Jordan Spieth won the Valero Texas Open for his first victory in almost four years. A week later, Hideki Matsuyama’s Masters triumph ended a drought of similar duration. And on Saturday, Lydia Ko completed the trifecta (or trinity) with a seven-stroke romp at the LPGA’s Lotte Championship after three years wandering the desert in search of a title.

No Doubting Thomas is Player of Year

When you’ve had a season like that of Justin Thomas, it can be difficult to determine the most important metric amid such heady success. Unless you’re his dad.

Mike Thomas can recite chapter and verse on the accomplishments that are expected to earn his son the PGA Tour Player of the Year award: the five wins, the first major victory at the PGA Championship, the FedEx Cup title, record-setting rounds (59 at the Sony Open, 63 at the U.S. Open), the Arnold Palmer Award for topping the money list, the 3½-1½ record in his first U.S. team appearance at the Presidents Cup.

The 2017 season has brought an avalanche of accolades for the 24-year-old, but none of those tops his old man’s list of what matters.

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