Awards night: Tiger eats media's salad: Editors' Blog: Golf Digest

Awards night: Tiger eats media's salad

Thursday, April 8, 2010 Comments

Jack Benny once accepted an award by saying: “I don’t deserve this award, but I don’t deserve arthritis either, and I’ve got that.” With early Thursday results still to come, it’s a good time to bring you up to date on yesterday’s award-giving, by and to members of the media. Taken together, it may represent the greatest meeting of art and arthritis since Benny died. It would be too cruel to give you the awards hole-by-hole and the shot-by-shot, so let’s stick to highlights. First, Tiger showed to pick up the Player of the Year award last night. Second, he stayed afterward long enough to eat the salad, a new Golf Writers Dinner record. One colleague said: “I didn’t believe in rehabilitation, but now I do.” Third, Padraig Harrington all but retired the Jim Murray Award, the GWAA award given to the player who’s nicest to the media, which he won for the second year in a row because he’s nicest to the media and nobody’s second. Harrington honestly believes the press plays a significant role in his game and livelihood (a minority view). Harrington is so nice that if there’s any member of the media rooting for anyone else in this tournament this morning it’s because he’s from South Africa or something. After pointing out with alarm that the mantra of most young players is “Don’t talk to the media, just don’t talk to them,” Harrington urged writers to build relationships with young players, as the Irish press did with him, to earn that player’s trust. “We need you as much as you need us,” he says, to the sound of a couple hundred jaws dropping. Short jokes were popular all day. Wednesday afternoon radioman Dave Wright, who’s covered 45 Masters and received the club's Major Achievement Award , peeked over the high interview-room podium and said, “I’m taller than this, but it’s my day off.” Wednesday night, Korean Jiyai Shin, who accepted the LPGA Player of the Year Award with a charming speech began by saying, “On the golf course, I’m much taller.” But certainly not cuter. If Harrington ever turns on us, move Shin into the Murray-award spot. There were politics, but kind and gentle kind. Conservative Tom Watson, who shared the Ben Hogan comeback-from-injury award with Ken Green, began by saying, “I feel like President Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. He actually said, ‘I’m undeserving of this award.’ And I believed him.” (applause). We’ll I am undeserving too compared to what my fellow golfer Ken Green went through.” Green, his irascible self, looked down at the artificial leg he’s had since the car accident that took his girlfriend and his brother began, “I may have a metal thing down there, but I can still put it in my mouth.” Though he took Commissioner Tim Finchem to task for not athe tour's not affording him a special medical exemption to play the Champion's tour, his comments were both funny (“I’ll bet you’ve never put Ben Hogan, Tom Watson and Ken Green together!”) and moving. Referring to his accident and the subsequent loss of his son this year, Green said: “You have a choice. You can fall apart or you can re-group. They say God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle. I hope he got the right guy. You can be sure I’ve had some bad days. But I can honestly tell you that the one thing that kept me moving, kept me going was the dream of mine to get back playing professional golf.” Dan Jenkins received his latest writing award 53 years after his first. Referring to Woods, who did not stay for the main course: “I’m sorry Tiger left because I wanted to tell him what his major job this week is: Make the cut, so he won’t create mass suicides at CBS.” That was basically it. (As Jaime Diaz at our table said: “Jenkins Tweetered his speech.”) It competed for shortest speech with David Owen’s. Accepting a special-projects award for Golf Digest and our environmental coverage, Owen responded to a John de St. Jorre, who had just won the USGA’s Herbert Warren Wind Book Award. St. Jorre, a non-golfer, said that golf was nonetheless the greatest sport to write about. “If you get bored writing about golf, think about writing tennis. There are no jokes in tennis.” Owen came next. “There is a tennis joke,” said Owen, in what would be the whole of his acceptance speech. “A guy comes home from the golf course and his wife says, ‘You love golf more than you love me.’ ‘That’s true,’ replies the man. ‘But I love you more than I love tennis.’” In the evening's final presentation, Dave Kindred won the PGA’s Lifetime Achievement Award for an amazing career covering not only more than 40 Masters but dozens of Super Bowls, World Series and Heavyweight boxing championships as well. “I only missed one Masters,” said Kindred. “1986. My son got married. I came home from the wedding about eight o’clock, turned on the TV and heard these exact words: ‘Jack Nicklaus today shot 65,’ and I thought, ‘Oh shit.’ I told my son if you ever get married again, don’t do it in April. And he didn’t. He did it in December.” -

-Bob Carney