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 And It Stoned Me
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 May 2006 |
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These are tough times indeed for characters in the world of professional sports. By DAVID FEHERTY
Contributing Writer, GOLF MAGAZINE The whole issue of booze and
professional sport has become a
touchy one in these righteous
times, as Bode Miller found out.
Apparently, a person who dives headfirst
down an icy cliff wearing a spandex
jumpsuit is supposed to celebrate with a
nice glass of tea. We all know when one
drinks tea, one must extend one’s pinky
finger. Bode drank the Long Island
version and extended the wrong finger,
that’s all. Personally, I thought he was
refreshingly brisk, eccentric, and just
plain different. But these days a jock with
a tendency to celebrate needs to be doing
post-career laps on the media circuit
before he pulls the trigger of truth. That
way he’s not a bad person, just a colorful
character. Sorry, but that’s bollocks—and
this is one of those rare occasions when I
know what I’m talking about, trust me.
Why do many people believe that
today’s athletes have less character than
those of the past? Think Mickey Mantle,
Joe Namath, Wilt Chamberlain. Answer:
It’s not the jocks—it’s the journalists. In
those days writers traveled, stayed
and frequently got wrecked with the players.
They had a vested interest in each
other’s occupations. There was an unspoken
code: The pencil-squeezer didn’t rat
the player out, period. The scoop was
never worth the price of the relationship
with an athlete. I don’t know when it
started to change, but journalists today
face much greater pressure from editors,
who in turn answer to media moguls hellbent
on satiating our appetite for scandal.
Upside: Juiced ball players and ’roidally
enraged wife beaters are exposed.
Downside: We’ve traded in the chance to
know what the rest of the characters really
think, and who they really are.
Mind you, I was one
of your golfers with a
tendency to celebrate.
I never knew Jimmy
Demaret, but I bet I
would have loved him.
In 1962 he was playing
the Crosby at Pebble Beach when he
flung open the drapes to find a blanket of
snow on the ground, at which point
Demaret said, “I know I got loaded last
night, but how the hell did I end up in
Squaw Valley?” Imagine Ernie Els going
with that line today? One of my favorite
people, Tom Weiskop-with-a-lowercase-f,
is a founding member of the hangover
hall of fame. (The fact Tom isn’t in the real
one indicates the wrong people vote.)
Victor Juhasz
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In his waaay-heyday, Saint Tom of
Columbus would have a few (hundred)
drinks and go to bed feeling fine, but of
course he’d feel like a bag of crap when he
woke up. The big T concluded his
problem wasn’t the electric soup, it was
the sleep, so with beautifully simple logic
rivaled only by his swing, he chose to stop
sleeping. Bert Yancey once said that the
greatest rounds of golf he ever witnessed
were 71s and 72s from Tom Weiskopf.
But one year at the Tournament Players
Championship in the 1970s, Tom went
drinking with Edgar Sneed and the great
writer Dan Jenkins, both of who baled
out around two o’clock in the morning.
Tom forged on through the night. Early
next morning he blundered through the
first two holes with a pair of 6s. Before he
hit his tee shot on the third, he called for
a ruling. PGA Tour official Eddie Griffiths
was stunned when Tom claimed he
couldn’t go on unless Eddie brought him
an egg sandwich, a vanilla milkshake and
three aspirin. Eddie, stout man that he
was, had the remedy by the time Tom
reached the green, and Tom went on to
make nine birdies in the last 15 to shoot
66. When Dan and Ed went to the
scoreboard to see what Tom had shot,
Jenkins declared that it was “the greatest
round of golf ever played by a dead man.”
We’re talking about trying to get a ball
in a hole, or sliding down an icy hill on a
pair of planks—games. And people who
like games often like a drink afterward.
For Tom Weiskopf, the only life or death
involved was his own, and he hasn’t had
a drink since Jan. 2, 2000.
How many times has an innocent
man been sent down because Jack
Daniel’s was a witness that only a
hungover judge could hear? Call me oldfashioned,
but that judge is the real bad
example. If Bode Miller and Tom
Weiskopf, are bad influences too, then
I’m registering as an offender at the
nearest police station. Keep your kids
away from me, neighbor, because I was a
bad example to those guys you think are
bad examples today.
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