Golf column gone wrong

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

Not an Alan Shipnuck fan by any stretch, but I give him some respect for this column.
He got called out - face-to-face - for lazy, throwaway graph and came away a better person for it. I give him a lot of credit for the follow up.


A PGA champion and columnist lock horns over a harsh critique, then learn from it

I accepted Micheel's apology and offered my own. I had never even considered how my words might impact him personally. There were a lot of other ways I could have filled that paragraph but it was lazy and unkind to pile on him. I told him that I truly appreciated him reminding me of the human toll that can come with the barbs I type. Later that night, Micheel followed up with a long direct message on Twitter, graciously saying that our conversation had enlarged his perspective and vowing to not let any future criticism bother him so much.

 

[playthrough]

Shipnuck's been around the game long enough, I'd have thought he knew about Micheel burying both of his parents and his love/hate relationship with golf over the years since the win. That "worst player to win a major" story was clickbait crap. But yeah, it worked out in the end with that column.

 

[hondo]

Micheel was being drilled by golf writers such as Jenkins almost immediately for having the audacity to win a major that had Tiger and Phil in it. The guy never had a chance in some eyes. Of course this goes back to that sense of entitlement that career golf writers have in praying fervently that only stars win majors. This went back to Jack and Arnold and Hogan, and woe betide the Jack Fleck, Charles Coody or Wayne Grady who had the utter nerve to shoot the lowest 72-hole score in those events. In later years, whenever a Micheel, Beem, Weir, Curtis or Campbell won, these writers bitched to high heaven in media centers, if not actually in their articles/commentary, instead of doing their ****ing job and finding out about relative unknown guys, then writing stories to introduce them to their readers. Not to single out golf writers, because it's also true in NASCAR and tennis. Only in team sports are underdogs embraced at the biggest championships.