by Jesse J. Lewis, Sr.
At the present time, Tiger Woods’ future, as it relates to playing golf, has diminished over the past several years, and I seriously doubt whether he will continue as a professional golfer. In the event that he does, his chances of winning any tournament is less than 10 percent.
Tiger Woods has several problems:
1. his age – even though Tiger is younger than 40, he has been playing golf over three decades.
2. his health – he has had several operations on his knees and back.
3. his swing problem – he cannot decide which swing he would like to use on any given day or from
one hole to another.
4. his mental problem – in other words, he is not convinced he can execute every shot.
Most experts will tell you that over 50 percent of playing golf is mental. They will also tell you it is more difficult to fix a mental problem than any other phase of golf.
The golfing community had great growth because of Tiger Woods. There are only two Blacks on the golf circuit for men and women and both are named Woods.
When Tiger plays the spectators swell and the TV ratings soar. I truly pray that most of the things I have written in this article will not come true. My prediction would be that Tiger will play in the Masters. In the event he does not make the cut, he will never return to professional golf again.
Finally, There is a Discussion
I am not naive enough to believe that the articles I have written about golf and baseball, as its relates to the slowness of the games, have prompted a conversation on a national basis.
I’ve said this for 20 years about baseball. Here’s where I said the changes should be:
1. A tie should be a tie, in other words, you do not have to break a tied game. At the end of the season the scores could be Won 9, Lost 10, Tied 2. I have known on many occasions that one game of baseball has lasted over seven hours.
2. Baseball should be played in seven innings instead of nine. Now you are looking at a three hour game instead of four or five hours.
3. There should be a clock on the field. The purpose of the clock is to make sure that the pitcher has 10-15 seconds to release the ball. How many times have you seen the pitcher stand on the mound, rub the ball for two minutes, step off the mound, talk to the catcher, step back on the mound, rub the ball for another five minutes, step off again, and talk to the manager. In many instances it almost takes 10 minutes for one pitch. This is why fewer and fewer spectators go to the games.
I’m hoping I will not have to write this article for the next 20 years because no changes have been made. If some changes are made moving forward, I can truly say, in my own mind, that my articles were were responsible, even though I know better.
How Can You be so Stupid?
I’m not a psychiatrist, I think the reason people make unsubstantiated statements is that they want to be recognized for heroic deeds. When I think about Brian Williams, I think about the civil rights movements in the ’50s and ’60s that happened right here in Birmingham, Alabama. I have never heard so many lies told by people concerning their contribution to the Civil Rights Movement – everybody went to jail and everybody walked with Martin Luther King.
I’m one of the few people that I know who lived in Birmingham during the height of the Civil Rights Movement who did not make any contribution. The Birmingham Times newspaper was founded in 1963 and I wrote a lot of articles about right and wrong. The person who wrote the greatest articles was Emory O. Jackson, editor of the Birmingham World.
I received an award from the National Newspaper Publisher’s Association several years ago for Journalism. I explained to them I would accept in the name of Emory O. Jackson, one of the top five person who made contributions.
Brian Williams told the lie about his chopper in Iraq having been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Overwhelming public opinion is that he should not keep his job. Brian Williams didn’t kill anyone. He skewed a story about his experience in Iraq which made him sound a bit closer to the action and therefore more heroic than he actually was. It was untrue and wrong of him to do it, but why should it be terminally so? Can he be forgiven?
There are a lot of people who make outlandish statements. In particular, a friend of mind who stated on several occasions that he saw his daddy kill his mother with a hatchet; they were so poor they had to eat rats, and he was consistently sexually molested. Whether this is a lie or the truth – no one can verify it. During those years he was speaking of, they didn’t keep records of Black-on-Black crime. No one can definitively say he ate rats or was sexually molested. I happen to believe he was telling the truth for I can think of no one who can make up this big of a lie.
The Kanye West Grammy Story
By criticizing Beck, who won a Grammy for Album of the Year, and approaching the stage saying he should give his award to Beyoncé, there has been a rush to defend Beck, an artist most people didn’t even know. According to Billboard, radio is rallying around Beck. This attention has brought a 338 percent increase in streams of Beck’s music.
According to The Week’s Scott Meslow, West’s near-interruption of Album of the Year winner Beck hearkened back to the last time Kanye single-handedly made a music show culturally relevant, when he grabbed the microphone from Best Female Video winner Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards. Then, as now, Kanye proved himself to be America’s biggest Beyoncé fan by hijacking an entire awards ceremony to sing her praises.
At this year’s Grammys, Kanye came this close to grabbing the microphone before grinning and stepping away, and the whole thing was immediately written off as a self-aware gag on the Taylor Swift incident. But the only thing better than Kanye’s “joke” was the revelation that Kanye actually meant to have his say.
“I just know that the Grammys, if they want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us,” he said in a post-show interview with E!. “We ain’t gonna play with them no more. And Beck needs to respect artistry and he should’ve given his award to Beyoncé.”
This is, of course, a ludicrous thing for Kanye to demand, but it’s also a welcome departure from the massaged, pre-planned statements that pass for commentary in these kinds of situations.
