The positively insipid Hank Haney

Bile built for this screed based on prepping for an alternative piece, "The disappointing Tiger Woods". Researching that to-be-finished project however, the sight of Mr. Woods’ current momo-head teaching appendage, Hank Haney, on the Golf Channel demanded priority for this brief broadside before the extended Eldrick effort.

For those not familiar with such, double H runs a Juniors golf academy down Hilton Head way. As bubonic plague spread during the Dark Ages, the growth of reality-based TV has infected fully even a far-flung outpost like the Golf Channel. Mr. H-Squared has a show in which, laconically, he mouths platitudes with cliché chasers to panting pre-teens who, unfortunately, don’t actually genuflect reflexively [Maybe next season?] when a reference to El Tigre is worked-in for one time more per every 10 minutes than John Daly has had wives since winning the PGA. Nauseating as this is, the topper is Haney’s absolute blasé mien. The Parisian 1920’s ex-pat American literary crowd looks like friggin’ cheerleaders on double Espressos compared to the Hankster during most episodes. One only wonders when an EMT will appear from off-screen and whisper “Clear” while administering the paddles.

What spanked my wrath however was a 2005 "Golf Digest" ‘My Shot’ piece featuring a pair of truly vapid comments from H2. That they are inane isn't the point. Just because someone knows swing plane dynamics doesn’t mean, necessarily, they can expound upon failure of the Democratic Peace Thesis as the raison d’ etre for the Iraqi war. The disturbing thing is the mindset behind these comments, from someone so regrettably high-up in golfdom, vis-à-vis seemingly trivial concerns such as environmental sustainability, golf maintenance costs and – for good measure – the unimportance to keep historically-steeped courses viable for future major competition.

“Bit hard on the lanky lad?” you think. Well, your kind Magistrate, let me enter into evidence following from said '05 magazine opus:

I can't believe all this talk about how we need to scale back the golf ball and how far it's going. Are you hitting the ball too far? Has the game gotten too easy for you? To 99.9 percent of us, the answer is no. Golf is too darn difficult. Courses have gotten longer and more challenging. Fairways are irrigated so the ball doesn't roll, but they're mowed so tight it's like hitting off this table.

The man is literally from sun-stricken Texas and Hanky's carping that fairways today get too much water so “the ball doesn’t roll” to justify the orbs' recent technological improvement? Then, to make matters worse, he adds that the short stuff is cut – surely by non-emission hand mowers – “so tight it’s like hitting off (a) table”. Hey, Einstein, here’s a radical notion: save some water and the extra fuel from bikini wax-like sod-trimming by dialing down the ball to something less than the current nuclear pellet. Not only would it be environmentally clever, but your maintenance budget would stop ballooning at same annual clip as health care and/or private university tuition increases.

This tasty nugget though is a mere appetizer. To show not only his eco-side, double H decides to take-on squarely this poppycock about history having anything significant to do with golf. Feast - albeit increduously, I admit - on below bon mot from same article:

The concern that courses like Merion are becoming obsolete for the U.S. Open because they're too short is a little nuts. It might be obsolete for the very best players in the world, but Merion is more than almost anyone can handle. So Hogan hit a 1-iron into the 18th hole and today they're hitting an 8-iron? I have a great solution to that: Just hold the U.S. Open somewhere else and stop lengthening all these courses. The game is hard enough for the rest of the golfers who play it.

Absolutely! Let us, in fact, create a whole new rota of courses each decade and obsolete the remaining catalog for merely play by the length-challenged lumpen proletariat who might remember the links’ faded glory days. Maybe – like an Appalachian coal family – we could set up a hand-me-down schedule of tournament course distance deprecation that went something like PGA-to-Nationwide-to-Champions Tour–to-LPGA-to anybody not wearing a wife-beater shirt on the 1st tee? What a dipsh$%! Forget, also, the whole notion that golf’s oldest championship, played across the pond, has only a prescribed family of tracks on which it has been contested since just after that wee skirmish of ours stateside concerning the keeping of those with dark complexion in perpetual bondage.

That somebody could be this daft is frightening (and not just "a little nuts" as Hank is quoted as labelling his critics above) for our hallowed game considering this man's position plus present prominence. People actually probably listen to what he says, is the unfortunate truth.

That he has, as well, the ear of Tiger Woods no less, speaks to the considerably less than stellar decisions and examples set off the course by the greatest golfer of all-time. Discussion of such will be made at length in a subsequent post.