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As we balance the ledger for 2021, it seems assured that a handful of the year’s most memorable moments will have impact that extends far beyond the confines of the calendar.
Like Hideki Matsuyama’s Masters win, and its promise of inspiring a generation of Asian talent. Or Phil Mickelson’s improbable major championship victory at age 50, setting a new benchmark for elderly excellence. Or Tiger Woods’ car wreck, which cast in stark relief the impermanence of lives and careers, and which summoned a raw appreciation both for what he has gifted us and for whatever his battered body will permit henceforth.
But 2021 was also a year in which even the most stubborn of ostriches had to lift their heads and concede that golf doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that like every sport it is inextricably entwined with the wider world, and that reminders of this fact are often jarring. The painful lessons we learned in ’21 will not conclude with the demise of December.
First came a reckoning with language. The year was nine days old when Justin Thomas missed a short putt in Maui and berated himself with a homophobic slur. His response was swift—he owned it with an immediate and fulsome apology—but swifter still were the factions who rallied around the controversy, one too quick to declare it a capitol offense, the other contemptuously eager to dismiss any hurt as mere political correctness. The ugly episode served notice that the standards of speech and conduct demanded by today’s corporations and consumers (an entirely flexible measure) also apply to this most hidebound of sports.
A few weeks later, the PGA Tour faced a reckoning with its new reality, even if the organization shows no outward sign of having grasped the importance of what happened that Sunday afternoon at Torrey Pines. It was hardly shocking that Patrick Reed acted as his own rules official on the way to winning the Farmers Insurance Open, lifting a ball he claimed was embedded before an actual rules…
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Source : yahoo
