i am soooo pumped! check this out…my son, Weston, is a natural! i have said it before and will say it again. watch out Tiger, Phil, & World! look at this…
i promise you that he naturally put his hands in this position with NO help! now i have seen the pictures of Tiger Woods when he was this age and the grip he had at 10 months and let me tell ya, Dubya’s is just as good! i was hoping to post the pic of Tiger’s grip at 10 months but can’t find it. if you find it, send it to me so i can post it.
well i just had a brilliant thought. i declare may 1st, 2009 a day of HALVES! in case you didn’t get that, today is the day that you may find that it is ok for you to do everything HALF as much! indulge me…
looking at the calendar, today is HALF moon day. this is great b/c we are HALF way to a full moon which is my favorite in may. that is when the bream go on the beds and you can catch those one and a HALF pound shellcrackers/redears/stumpknockers/govment bream.
you also have my permission to make today a HALF day of work. it’s friday, the market is in the crapper, its spring, it’s a beautiful day, go ahead, work a HALF day and call it the weekend. you might have the opportunity to go eat a HALF sandwich/HALF soup at the atlanta bread company. you might go to CandS Oyster Bar and get some oysters on the HALF shell.
because it is a day of HALVES, spend the morning serious about work and the afternoon serious about family and or friends. go play 9 holes at the local munie instead of 18 because that’s HALF a round of golf. watch HALF the nba playoff game tonight b/c the first HALF is irrelevant in basketball.
all this HALF talk reminds me of a joke…
a man is walking down the beach when he comes across an old rusty/dirty bottle. he picks it up and starts dusting it off when out pops a genie. the genie says to him, “hello master, because you have summoned the great and most generous genie, i grant you three wishes but you must know that whatever you wish for, you get HALF and your wife gets the full amount”. the man says “fair enough!” he spends a few moments drawing in the sand and says, “ok, my first wish is for 20 million dollars to set me up for the rest of my life!” the genie replies, “wish granted, your wife gets twenty million and you get ten million!” then the man says, “for my second wish i would like a 2,000 acre estate so i can hunt, fish, grow gardens, and enjoy for the rest of my life!” again, the genie replies “granted, you get 1,000 acres and your wife gets 2,000. “and for my third and final wish…” the genie interrupts and say’s, “remember, this is your last wish! so make it a good one and don’t forget, your wife gets the full amount and you get HALF!” the man takes a deep breath and really studies the thoughts going through his head and says, “ok, for my third and final wish, i would really appreciate it if you would pick up that broken oar lying over there in the sand and beat me HALF to death!”
well the masters of ‘09 is over and i have the post masters blues. i’m not going to bore all 5 people that read my blog with the details of what happened but will bore you with what should have happened. that’s right! should have happened!
first of all, i should have been invited by someone to the masters! in today’s multi media/technology driven world where i can literally reach thousands of people in the matter of minutes (and believe me, i tried), not one person returned my request for a badge to the masters (they don’t call ‘em tickets at the masters. they call ‘em badges). i sent emails, i twittered, i facebooked, myspaced, myfaced, twifaced and mailfaced!!! get the point? and not one stinking invite! that hoovers!
next, the powers that be (masters committee and chairman billy payne) should let allow the world see the friggin tournament on tv, 24 hours a day! no one can get a badge anymore and no one can get in to see a practice round anymore. most of us have to work, so we can’t watch online coverage when the network is not on air. we have lives billy! we have jobs billy! we have kids and wives billy! we need 24 hour coverage! some of us can’t even afford cable anymore in this obama economy (another blog, another day)! soooooooo, show the doggone masters golf tournament on tv, 24 hours a day by gosh!
cbs. get us pumped up about the final round coverage of the masters! can you imagine the number of people that would throw “masters” parties and get interested in golf if the coverage of the masters was better? the yearly uga/fla football game has “the largest outdoor cocktail party” and “college game day“. the kentucky derby has “churchill downs and the pageantry of the kentucky derby“. for the super bowl you get 6 hours of hipe before the actual game is played. daytona 500, you get to hear darrell waltrip go on for an hour about restrictor plates, lug nuts, hydraulic lifts and whipped cream injectors. but no!!! for the masters, we get to watch how great seve ballesteros was in the 70’s and the 80’s? i mean don’t get me wrong, i feel for the guy and have compassion that he is battling his life with a brain tumor and cancer and i’m sorry. but i’m trying to get pumped up to see the best players on the planet play the greatest golf course on the planet! show seve’s story after the tournament is over when the 10’s of people that want to watch it, will watch it.
what about interviews? unless you camp out on your pc all night or have the golf channel, you don’t get to see what the players are saying! would it hurt you (cbs) to show the highlights of the press tent interviews during coverage at the beginning of the telecast? instead of seve’s story that ends with “he is at home in spain trying to win his greatest test ever, brain cancer”. i mean c’mon, is that going to get you fired up to watch the greatest major of the year? huh? you’ve got to be kidding me! create some drama! create some hype! create some controversy! be creative you bunch of suck ups!
gary player should have had his final tournament at the masters 7 years ago. period.
nick faldo should be playing. nick i don’t care how bad you think you are now. if the previous mentioned guy is playing and 71, you should be teeing it up at 51. nick, your fans want you. i would much rather see you hitting it in the heather and making biurrrrrdies than watching gary player hit his driver only 210 and stabbing at putts for quadruple bogeys!
greg norman should have drank from the fountain of youth and summoned up some 1980/90’s golf heroics. except this time, instead of choking like a ’72 dodge dart on the back nine at augusta, he wins in triumph over all, turns to the tall georgia pines as if calling out the golf gods and yells “you don’t exist you spawn of satan and demons of the deep! i beseech you!”. then as the camera zooms in closer, christine marie evert-lloyd-mills-norman runs out on the 18th green in her wimbledon tennis skirt and leaps into his arms. then, they kiss as the setting georgia sun sets in the west. if you listen closely you can hear the soft clap of bobby jones’ and his spirit lingering in the dusky air as a soft gentle breeze appears. as the credits begin to role and as if you were all caught up in emotion as if watching “an affair to remember”, you hear jim nantz capture the most perfect moment by saying, “the empire state building may be the closest thing to heaven in new york, but here in georgia, as we have witnessed today by the extraordinarily amazing golf and love story for the ages, augusta national and the masters tournament is as close to heaven as you can get. congratulations greg norman! we are so thankful that we get to see you again next year. good night everybody!”
well this is a happy week for many reasons but one in particular. the U.S.A. team won the ryder cup for the first time in nine years! yeay!!! happy days! we dusted those europeans like we were seasoning bacon! i mean, our guys out played them, out thunk ‘em, out gamed them, and out flaired them! how ’bout my boy boo weekley doing his best happy gilmore off the first tee box in the final round?
classic boo! haha! he deserves an emmy for that one! how ’bout anthony kim making sergio garcia look like a high school amateur hack and spanking him 5 & 4. (that means he was 5 holes up with 4 holes to play which mathmatically eliminates his opponent)
how ’bout paul azinger? he perhaps will go down as one of the greatest leaders in ryder cup history. paul exemplified how to lead a team of extremely different personalities and empower them to win! sound familiar? paul didn’t try and do it all himself either. he emplimented a strategy that was brilliant. he chose 3 sub leaders and gave them distint instructions. amazing! how did he come up with such? check this out. here is a cut from the press conference after the matches. try to read between the lines if you will…
Q. For Paul, listening to you this week, you’ve used a lot of language like team building strategy and staying on point. I’m wondering, did you get an MBA that we don’t know about? Where did your ideas for this, the way you organized the team, the strategies, come from? Is it some sort of organizational book you’ve read or does this come from your heart?
CAPTAIN PAUL AZINGER: No, actually about four or five years ago, I watched a documentary, it was kind of like…I won’t even tell you.
I’ve had this idea for about five years, if I was ever the captain, how I would try to approach the team. You know, we just decided to come together in small groups, that was it. Beyond that, I don’t know what else to tell you. I think you guys probably by now[have figured out], if you haven’t, I’m not as impressed with you as maybe I used to be. But we put four guys together [with a sub-captain]in practice rounds and they played together every day, and they were the four guys that stayed together the whole week and they were never going to come out of their little group. That’s the way I did it.
Beyond that, I think you already figured that out.
BOO WEEKLEY: And it worked.
KELLY ELBIN: What was the documentary, Paul?
CAPTAIN PAUL AZINGER: It was about how to take small groups and just to break them up.
wow! WOW! does that sound familiar? ok, maybe not if you are not familiar with how this church ministers. but if you are, then you probably got it. alright, maybe the documentary was not about small group churches at all, i have no idea, but the concept is the same. take a group of people, put them into smaller groups with a leader, and watch them conquer the world! well, at least europeans!
