The electronic mailbag overflowed in response to my Masters post asserting that man-made climate change has so thoroughly jumbled the seasons that spring golf is no longer possible. “You must have been smoking those cherry blossoms,” suggested a reader from St. Petersburg, Fla. “I just drove through two feet of snow to get to Walmart. Global warming is a proven hoax.” A reader from Peculiar, Mo., sent me a crude pencil drawing of blooming redbuds captioned, “Everything’s NORMAL in Peculiar.”
I certainly didn’t intend to wade into one of our era’s most contentious issues. In fact, I’ve purposely downplayed the subject. Last summer, for instance, I redacted a line in a course review that alluded to “crocodile sightings” at Nebraska’s Awarii Dunes. More recently, I rejected a developer’s ad for “Gulf-view lots on the Arkansas coastline.”
But not all the mail came from so-called “deniers.” Several Irish golfers pointed out that a month or so of the Celtic winter seems to have relocated to June-July, making September the most summery month. That followed an e-mail from Dubai insisting that the desert has swallowed up whole golf courses, including Al Ruwaya, a highly-touted Tiger Woods design.
Listen, folks, you’re barking up the wrong, climatically-distressed tree. The Top 50 blog is a politics-free zone, a refuge for golfers escaping the drudgery of the Drudge Report or the sluttishness of Slate.com. Rest assured, if I spot a hoodie-wearing penguin seeking the services of a cross-dressing abortion provider at a radical mosque in my predominately-white Kansas City neighborhood, I’ll keep it to myself.
That said, this is what 50th-ranked Glen Echo Country Club looked like when I played there last week:
Spring lingered last week at Glen Echo Country Club in Normandie, Mo. (John Garrity)
Top 50 on TV: Nothing this week, but the Valero Texas Open is at the TPC San Antonio, where John Novosel Jr. and I performed a Tour Tempo segment for a not-so-long-ago episode of “Champions Tour Learning Center.” (That’s your cue to break down the door of your favorite e-book store for a copy of Tour Tempo 2: The Short Game and Beyond, by yours truly and John Novosel Sr.)
John Garrity's Top 50 