The Loop
This might be the best story about Miguel Angel Jimenez in his underpants you'll hear today
The reason people love Miguel Angel Jimenez is relatively simple: he knows who he is, and he owns it. He's unapologetically himself -- even if that means smoking cigars with chopsticks.
But it's not just his cigars, his hair -- which he keeps long because that's how it was when he was young -- or his offers to give Tiger Woods life advice that make him golf's most interesting man. According to Jaime Diaz's recent Golf World profile of Jimenez, which is full of juicy anecdotes, it's also his confidence, something Jiménez's close friend Jose Maria Olazabal loves to tell people about.
Here's a selection from the piece:
"I have never met anyone who loves every single moment of his life so much," says his friend Maria Acacia Lopez-Bachiller, the longtime Spanish player liaison to the European Tour. She says Jose Maria Olazábal -- who as an introverted ascetic from the north of Spain is outwardly Jiménez's opposite -- loves to tell the story of his close friend standing nearly naked in front of a locker-room mirror (the mind's eye can't avoid a vision of bikini briefs) and saying, "Vascorro [Spanish for Basque], I am such a beautiful man."
What a legend.