As IF Times

link To be a great, McIlroy must stay true to himself – USATODAY.com.

 At the just concluded 2011  US Open , 22 year old Rory McIlroy’s prodigious talent  burst  him onto the world stage in dramatic fashion.  Readers can refer to other sports sites for details of his on course exploits, but my discussion is the more compelling story of the kid himself. 

Just 22 years of age and he already has been placed at the top of the sporting world as much for his character as for his athletic accomplishment.  He is much of what most celebrity athletes these days are not.  He is not brusque, arrogant or distant.  He does not wear strange clothing, have tattoos or earrings.  He does not  hide behind aviator sunglasses and surround himself with surly bodyguards.  He speaks humbly of his accomplishments, does so in complete sentences and is a filial son.  Unlike many top name athletes today, his ego has yet to overwhelm him.

It’s almost too good to be true.  He is like a Stepford wife.  With an impossibly beautiful swing bordering on golf pornography and a disarmingly modest demeanor, it’s hard not to be drawn to this kid.   In the golfing world at least, guys like Nicklaus and Palmer have always tended to their good guy image and may in large part explain their revered positions in golf.  This is in contrast to Ben Hogan and recently Tiger Woods, both of whom were more prickly personalities but were tolerated because of their talents.  A guy like Rory comes along and once again, people can pull for a hero without reservation.  He has the same quality as did a young Phil Mickelson.  Granted, he’s still young and much may happen, but the talent has been there since an early age and the grounding influence of his parents will keep him as a like-able person for years to come.  It appears that a strong value system was instilled from the outset.  Undoubtedly, his family and friends back in his hometown of Holywood, Ireland wouldn’t have rioted even if Rory had lost.

How many 22 year old kids go off to Haiti on their own volition without commercial intent to assess the conditions of the earthquake victims? How many young kids can take the crushing collapse that he experienced during this year’s Masters and brush it off with equanimity and without bitterness or recrimination?  The kid has a maturity well beyond his years and this gushing fan hopes that he will be the new standard of celebrity athletes in the future.  The world can use some genuinely nice guys.

link AOL INSIDER: Here Are 12 Reasons Why The AOL-Huffington Post Merger Is Going Down In Flames AOL.

Future business and culture students will be dissecting this for years.  In the annals of business combinations, this isn’t exactly merging chocolate with peanut butter.  As we have commented earlier,  http://asiftimes.com/2011/04/12/i-thought-we-were-friends/  the idea that AOL had to hitch their  name brand wagon, albeit a fading one,  to that of a cult graffiti blog was ill conceived at best and epic in stupidity at worst.   As this article seems to show, the only ones who couldn’t see this disaster coming was the guy running AOL, CEO Tim Armstrong.

Absent a bailout from government, this exercise will be a clinical demonstration of the mechanics of capitalism.  Someone comes up with a ‘brilliant’ idea, spends money to forward it and then, when it turns out to have no basis in business sense at all, collapses, or will collapse and everyone loses money.  That’s the way it is.  Of course, someone’s going to make some money out of this; someone always does.  There will be two conspicuous losers.  Obviously, the investors in the failed enterprise lose and secondly, the architect of the fiasco, Armstrong, who will likely have trouble convincing people that he can run a lemonade stand in the future.  Even now, his old business school is scrambling to take down any pictures and evidence of his attendance there and working on a public denial.  

Assuming there was a business model to be acquired beyond the siren call of Arianna Huffington’s annoying personality, the spending of over $300 million dollars of other people’s money must have accomplished something.  Turns out the simple answer is NOT.  Upon closer inspection,  the juvenile and crass scratchings of the Post scribers were not just part of the package, they WERE the package. Having a byline on the Post was the equivalent of flashing your breasts during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  Discovering that the contributors to the Post had as much contempt and hatred for their fellow staffers as for sane people must have been a jolt however.   OH NO!!  Maybe Armstrong made the deal after the 4th martini during a 5 martini lunch when anything would have sounded reasonable.  I’m sure he now feels like the guy in the Vegas commercials who wakes up in the morning with tattoos and nipple rings on his body. 

Ironically, Arianna, despite her anti-capitalist and anti-American sensibilities has realized the quintessential American dream.  You can’t make this up.