As IF Times

link Hyundai Tournament of Champions 2013: Sunday tee times delayed 4 hours due to high winds – SBNation.com.

People have always sneered that golf was not a real sport;  It was considered croquet with applause and the occasional water view.  As much as I’d push back and point out the physical accomplishments of hitting a small ball 300 yards, or the stamina required to regularly walk around for 4 to 5 hours, it was a hard sell to those who followed sports with ‘real’ athletic requirements.

Sadly, I think I’ve now moved into the camp of the naysayers.  Golf’s demise in my mind as anything other than watching lawn bowling with sticks came gradually, but was punctuated by the events at this year’s Hyundai Tournament of Champions.   The tournament had to be postponed numerous times by…high winds.  Can we imagine football being delayed because of high winds? Granted, the winds at the famous west side of Kapalua are legendary, but this is not new.  Over  the years all players have had to battle the winds as part of the charm of playing in Hawaii.  I don’t recall anyone characterizing the high winds at famous British Open courses such as Carnoustie or St. Andrews as anything other than challenging and part of the lore and experience of classic golf.  In Hawaii, it’s a show stopper.  It’s not as if they couldn’t play, it’s just that the scores would have been embarrassing to the elite PGA pros.  Nobody wanted to card an 89 or worse on their daily round.   I say too bad, that’s the rub of the green. Contrast this to the tournament in Palm Springs last week held under ideal manicured conditions and where the winning scores were minus 25 or so.  That was as exciting as watching re-runs of The Golden Girls in 3D.

Professional golf has made itself less and less of an interesting spectator sport and that’s borne out by the ratings.  With the exception of the four Majors, the average tournament is failing to attract viewers and therefore sponsors.  Compare the drama of an NFL quarterback scanning the defense for an opening while working against both a time clock and a half dozen large steroid stoked men imminently about to pound him into a grass stain versus the drama of a golfer having no time pressure agonizing over a 3 foot putt.  The worst thing is when the caddie and player both huddle and study the grass near the putt as if they were looking for spelling errors on the Magna Carta. Next thing you know, golf will be an feature on the Chess Channel.

The other main problem, which may may seem counter-intuitive, is that the players are all so good.  With the advances in technology, in teaching and in conditioning, very few players are able to stand out among the throngs of robotic look-alike players.  They all have the same swing and they all hit it 300 plus yards.   To make it worse, their attire is atrocious.  Unless you have someone sporting over the top eye-test outfits like John Daly or the getting tired soon monochrome of Ricky Fowler, most of the pros out there look as if they were dressed by their moms.  (Baby blue and beige?  Really?)  Unless you have Tiger or Phil back in the mix, all the players have the same dull demeanor. Beefeaters have more personality.  On the opposite side of the coin, when Tiger is in the field, the coverage excessively fawns over every and any aspect of his presence even if he was just eating a sandwich.   The obvious corporate man crush there is embarrassing.

The televised coverage has also deteriorated.  Since most players can put the golf ball straight down the middle, much of the broadcasts are essentially showing putting contests.  Watching someone agonizing over a 3 foot put like it was a math problem is not gripping TV no matter how Faldo spins it.   Combine that action with the somnolent drone of most broadcasters and you have a real recipe for dull.  We’d rather watch the guy 30 feet deep in the forest with one leg perched on a rock trying to hit his ball 45 degrees back onto the fairway like Bubba at the Masters.  Or Phil thread a ball through a grove of trees over water onto a green, also at the Masters.  And come on, do we really need absolute silence over every shot?   I suggest a new policy where people can not only cheer, but also jeer over shots so that there is some drama.  In fact, they should allow players to putt concurrently so the first one in gets to tack a stroke onto their opponent.  That’ll speed up the game.   And speaking of slow, there should be a time component attached to every turn at the ball just like the 25 second clock in football.  If you exceed it, a loud siren goes off.  Or you get a club removed from your set.  Let’s get some life back into the game.  People think it’s a geezer pursuit as it is.

link Chinese workers revolt over 2-minute toilet breaks – Yahoo! News.

Theoretically, as the most intelligent species on earth, we should enjoy some very basic freedoms available to all in the animal world.  Sure, sitting at the top of the life form pyramid has some drawbacks, such as dealing with lawyers, bureaucrats and other idiots trying to control our lives.   But overall, humans should be better off than wild animals and insects. The very notion that people should have a time limit on their bodily activities is not only dehumanizing, it’s unnatural.

We are accustomed to ongoing propaganda from ‘well meaning’ people on how to conduct our very existence as human beings.   The entire diet food business is predicated on the notion that people don’t know how to eat properly.  This, despite a million years of human existence as evidence to the contrary.   The food industry is in cahoots with the clothing and beauty industries as that prey upon the kernel of insecurity ingrained in most people, particularly women, but increasingly, gullible men.  In addition, excessive drinking is frowned upon and smokers are pariahs.

But all of this stuff is merely annoying and involves personal choices.  We can still choose to be fat, to be slobs, drink or eat too much or smoke excessively.  As we know, these liberties are being encroached upon increasingly as “people in authority” push for legal means to force people’s behavior.  Usually, this is packaged in the shiny wrapper of health benevolence and the collective good.  They want to implement laws on how and what people should eat because apparently people are too dumb to figure it out for themselves.  Is it really the purview of government to feed kids arugula and legumes instead of cheeseburgers and fries?  My take on it is that if cheeseburgers and fries are bad for you, why do they taste so good?

The line has to be drawn at putting a time limit on one’s bathroom activities.  This may be starting in China, but it would only be a matter of time before the idea spreads here.  The control freaks can brainwash us all they want about what kind of food  to ingest, the type of water to drink, but placing controls on the most fundamental of human activities is way out of bounds.  They may control what goes in, but what comes out and when, is OUR business.  For many people, ‘cleaning house’ is the very first thing they do at birth, leaving a meconium souvenir to the attendant doctors and nurses before ever taking a first nipple.  There has never been a time element to voiding.  There are no Guinness world records for bathroom prowess.   There has always been the universal acceptance that going to the bathroom is an activity everyone is allowed time for; even hostages are allowed bathroom breaks by their captors, untimed as far as I know.

For most of us, that time in the bathroom is welcome refuge, an almost torporific sanctuary from the every day buzz of activity that we endure, however brief it may be.   People may bug you on a smoke break or while you’re eating lunch, but nobody bugs you when you’re in the bathroom.  It’s usually a benignly pleasant time and it’s no coincidence that these sessions are usually punctuated by sighs and aahhs.   The Japanese, ever the civilized people,  have created elaborate toilets with mechanical and electrical accessories to enhance the whole experience.  Two minutes is not enough time with those devices.  Of course, this is to say nothing of the educational value of reading magazine articles or even books, depending on your constitution, while you’re in there.  And let’s face it, without long bathroom visits, women wouldn’t be able to go on dates.

There’s enough encroachment into our every day lives by all manner of idiotic dictates both political and cultural.  Why would we add the pressure of time on a biz break? To quote Moses from a few thousand years ago, “let my people go!”