Though I'm loath to admit this to my golf crazy family, I quite like the Masters. In fact, I quite like watching all the majors, mainly due to the insane amount of reading I've done about golf as someone who actually doesn't like golf very much. True story: One summer I took golf lessons and so on and so forth, and was playing a round with my mom at the country club. I presume I had a good hole, and in fact I think it was a bogey on a par 3 (a very short par 3 on the front nine, if I remember correctly), because she got very excited and said, "Aren't you so excited? That was so good!" to which I replied, "No, not really, because now I have to go and do it all again on the next hole." I'm pretty sure that's when my mom realized that I would never, ever be a golfer, something I'd been saying all along.
That story aside, it's pretty hard to ignore golf completely in a house that seemed to throb with golf passion all summer long. My sister and I used to joke we were golf orphans. Of course, by the time both of my parents were out golfing all weekend every weekend, we were old enough to drive ourselves around, so the claim was incredibly facetious. If my parents weren't playing golf, they were watching it, and my mom still has golf on all the time when I drop by her house. It'd be very hard to ingest none of that passion while living amongst it. So I've done a fair amount of golf reading in my life, and I'm not sure why. Probably because I've always known a good bit about it, so it seemed marginally interesting. (I actually just finished a golf book, though I think it was more of a travel book: Around the World in 80 Rounds. I wouldn't highly recommend it to anyone, except those people that have an interest in playing golf in odd places. Very interesting, as such.) Possibly my favorite golf book ever is called The Majors, and this is probably what stoked my interest in watching them. I probably won't watch much of them (I don't think Sam could bear it.), but I'd be lying if I told you I didn't have the automatically updating 2008 Masters leaderboard open in a tab in my browser at right this minute. (Current Leader: Luke Donald. But take that with a grain of salt, as all of the golfers haven't even gone off yet. The start of the tournament was delayed for 40 minutes due to fog.)
I don't know if I know 50% of the names on the board, and I'm not planning on counting, but I think 33% would be a good guess. I think that's more than a good number of the people in this country, and I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of my co-workers didn't even know what the Masters was. Sam is in a slightly different boat, as am I, being that he too has a golf-mad father. So you can't count him in that little tabulation. He certainly knows of the Masters, and probably could name a few golfers. But he isn't interested in watching it. Or reading about it. He probably doesn't even care who wins the Masters, just like he doesn't care who wins the Kentucky Derby (another thing I find intriguing and love to watch). I consider the two very interesting, because aren't both things better with the potential of a sweep? A Triple Crown winner, a Grand Slam winner. Much better that way. Much more exciting.
Maybe I'm just a nerd, however. A (slight) golf nerd, as it were. How could I avoid it?
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