Curious quote

A great point - on its startlingness. True true true. I just very much disagree that he was attempting some type of broad historical comparison between apartheid and the Holocaust. It seems very much that is talking about the experience of Lee Elder - and, even if he was talking specifically about the experience of Lee Elder in South Africa in '71, a week of awfulness, experienced by an American who spent four days admidst the awfulness playing in a professional golf tournament, is not at all comparable to the experience of European Jews during the war.

That's allllll I'm sayinnn'. I feel like this is something we can all agree on.

 

I think you're over-analyzing the quote, Sirvaliant. All Player was saying, I think, is that there was a similarity between Elder, making a living here in white, American society while people just like him were having horrible atrocities done to them by whites in another part of the world, and Jews in America during WWII who did the same thing. Maybe its not a perfect analogy, but it's not completely off-base, either.

 

Anyone who's been around Player knows he's blunt and perhaps a little unfeeling.

 

Just a thought, and I mention this because I've heard Gary Player speak in person and interviewed him once several years ago. Couldn't this have, at least a bit in part, been an error in syntax?

 

See, I think THAT's overanalysis.

He was comparing not Elder's experience in the U.S. to that of European Jews, not Elder's experience in South Africa to that of European Jews, but the experience of black Americans during apartheid to that of Jewish Americans during World War II?

Quite a stretch, in my opinion.

 

Actually, it's not impossible, but it is definitely not the first thing I think of upon reading the quote.

Somebody mentioned it above. The best course of action is just to avoid using the Holocaust or Jewish people during WWII in any analogy. It's just begging for trouble.

 

The publisher's mind?

 

Has the Thought of Gary Player ever been debated in such depth, with such fervor?

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