I’ve never been a fan of drunk rowdy crowds, and especially not 16 at Scottsdale. Well Robert Allenby’s experience with a similar situation in Australia underscores exactly how ugly embracing this trend will get.
The dispute began like this:
AUSTRALIAN OPEN organisers are considering scrapping the controversial party hole, where the cruel comments of fans prompted Robert Allenby to declare he will not play the tournament – or anywhere in Australia – again.
Australian Open tournament director Trevor Herden said he spoke with Allenby about six weeks ago and the Victorian had expressed his disappointment about some of the taunts he received at the hole, where fans have been encouraged to drink and yell to create a party atmosphere. Allenby claims drunk spectators at Royal Sydney, who had seen him break down at the Australian Masters at the sight of his cancer-stricken mother two weeks earlier, yelled: “That’s all right mate, your mummy’s not here now. You don’t have to cry.”
Allenby is known as being prickly. At last year’s U.S. Open he whined petulantly about having to putt on bumpy greens, grousing rudely that he left, “at least four or five shots on the course,” because of the conditions.
Great story…except it wasn’t the fault of the course conditions. He was in the third to last group: of course the greens would be a little rougher than if he teed off early. But it evens out – he had the early time the next day. Maybe Allenby is over-reacting, but if there is something to curtail, it’s drunk, rowdy, rude crowds. A golf tournament is not a Jets game.
With the U.S. open coming to Bethpage, I guarantee you some lugnut scribbler will encourage new Yorkers to repeat their rude behavior from 2002. You know what I mean: heckling foreign players and players who don’t quake in their shoes when asked about Woods’s greatness, chanting rude things from the gallery, and generally making themselves known in an attempt to garner attention. They’ll apologize it away as “New York flavor.”
Well don’t buy into it. one journalist recommended people act that way at Winged Foot, and do you know what happened? Mamaroneck”s finest were htere to escort troublemakers to another hole or even off the premises in the case of one chump who somehow smuggled in an air horn and fired it off after Colin Montgomerie double bogeyed the 72d hole.
Resist the temptation. Think of others instead of yourself. A ticket to a PGA event is not a ticket to act like a clown. However, a ticket is a revokable license: revokable at any time, for any reason. So be part of the solution and not the problem. Go and have a good time, but don’t insert yourself into the game. You might not like how security responds…no matter how much fun you think it might be to see yourself vilified as a lunkhead on TV.
